Teacher's rant.

Textbook fail.

The module we have to cover at my next ESL classes is based on the Friends TV Series. Lucky me. Friends are virtually unknown here. I did try to watch a few episodes, but couldn't sit them to the end; all I can remember it's about a bunch of people from NY who for reasons unknown spend their lifetimes sitting on a sofa and talking to each other.

Maybe two or three students will be able to carry on the initial speaking exercises, but the rest are going to go "Erm... the who?". I've got to figure out a way to get around that.

And that's going to be a demonstration lesson, of all times!

There are two reasons why I hate "authentic" ESL textbooks, and that's the second.

Unexpected observation.

The stylistic qualities and hidden messages of a text are never more obvious and easily described as when the description is in another language.

I ought to write an article about that.

Languages, Linguistics and Plans.

The more language systems you have installed in your mind - a.k.a., the more languages you know well - and the more diverse these languages are, the deeper is your understanding of language. I've got native-speaker competence in Russian and English, along with some leftovers of German and rudiments of Latin; that's better than nothing, but still only good enough to begin to understand what General Linguistics is all about. I wish I knew French, too, but the real breakthrough means stepping outside the Indo-European family. My long-term plans are to learn a language from every major family: Chinese or Japanese, Hebrew or Arabic, an American Indian language, Hungarian, Swahili – in no particular order. And, when I’ve got four or five language families covered, I want to learn Ancient Greek – to read Iliad in the original, that's why - or maybe another dead language, like Sanskrit. And some really primitive language, of the ones that require travelling to exotic places and learning by talking to native speakers. People in my family die in their 80’s or later, so I think I have a good chance to complete the plans and still have time left to put this knowlenge to use J

The Wrong Kind of Chocolate Factory.

The tragedy of general linguistics is that the object of your study – the language – is right there, readily available for research, in your own head. You can feel the working of the Langue, sense the relations between sounds and meanings, you can observe the Parole, the process of using these relations for retrieving and sharing information, you can see how texts are perceived and composed. Inside your head, without any laboratories, equipment, personnel, you can do anything. The only thing you can’t do is take it out. As soon as you put it down, it turns into text, and, in a way, it’s dead. The relations that make the Langue are broken, the processes that make the Parole no longer run, the only thing that is left is the set of symbols, which might or might not be interpreted or misinterpreted by another person. But in the process of interpretation it’s going to be the reader’s Langue and Parole, not yours, the reader doesn’t have a chance to connect to your mind, and thus cannot repeat the experiment, cannot really verify the results, and, you know, if results can’t be verified, it’s not a science. It’s like working at a chocolate factory, where you can eat all chocolate you want, but you can’t take it home to the kids. 

The emotional impact of anti-tobacco ads.

That was the topic of the graduate research project I mentored this year. It didn’t work out as well as I expected, but I had to go though a pretty large corpus of anti-tobacco ads collected by the student, and what struck me was how bad they were as compared with commercial advertising that I usually study. Aside from the experience in persuasive communication research, I am a former smoker who spent many years openly defending the addiction and secretly trying to quit, so I think I ought to know what is going to work and what isn’t. None of those would. 

As a matter of fact, there wasn’t a single ad that would have made me as much as consider quitting back when. Some of them were beautiful. Works of visual art that sort of made me nostalgic about the time I spent hours admiring the smoke floating in the air. There were a handful of ads that were targeted against exposing children to second-hand smoke, and those were good. I would have probably stopped smoking in the same room with the kids… oh wait; I never ever did that anyway. There were some good old scare-you-with-the-terrible-tumor-pictures stuff… and these had the most potential effect of all, only we know from experience that they don’t work, and the last person that could be scared enough by a cross-section of a smoker quit in the 1960’s.

By the way, the student who did the research is a smoker, and, having spent two semesters head over heels in these texts, still remains a smoker.   

I can’t really say why it is so, but my guess is, the absence of His Majesty the Client has a pretty negative effect on quality. As usual. Oh, of course there is the client, the non-profit organizations that pay the money to the ad agencies to develop the ads. But, admit it, the financial well-being of the NPO doesn’t hang on the success of the ads. If the ads fail, it’s nothing but another reason to ask for more money for better ads. My own humble copywriting experience suggests that a lot of anti-tobacco and anti-drug copy is made for portfolio, by beginners who haven’t enough real orders but are willing to make something that would demonstrate their potential – and in this case, obviously, there’s no client at all. No client – at least, no seriously motivated client – means no, or little, critical approach to the texts, and that, in turn, means low quality. 

No wonder nobody quits because of the ads.

For lack of anything better - another joke.

Gorbachev and Reagan were once asked to do a charity run, just the two of them.
Reagan won.
Next morning, Soviet newspapers reported:
"In a lengthy international race filled with hard sporting competition the CPSU Secretary General took an honorable second place, while the US President could hardly avoid being the last at the finish line".

Teaching philosophy - I didn't even know I had one! 8-)

Recently I faced the need to put down my teaching philosophy. Here is an abstract from one of the rough drafts; I don't think it will make it to the final version, but it looks just about right for the blog.

Good teaching is when the bell rings, then another bell rings, and you can’t believe it’s been an hour and a half, you’d swear it was just a couple of minutes. I’ve had it happen to me as a student (thank you Mrs. Gulnara Dudnikova, the best EFL instructor I know), and I’ve experienced it as a teacher, too.

It isn't about entertainment. Strangely enough, students aren't going to really enjoy the classes if they're only having fun but don't learn anything. The real wow! factor is Hey, I thought I couldn’t do it, but I can! – and this means hard work. Language learning is a lot like sport, like I always say, because it's about the perfection of skills - and it's impossible to achieve any results in sports if you don't push yourself over the limits of what you can do now. A teacher can push students over their limits by means of command and discipline, the drill-sergeant mode as I call it, but such classes are hateful. The key for a perfect class is making labor fun.

It is not easy to achieve – in fact, I couldn't tell you how to do it, I only know that I can do it. It takes a lot of time for preparation, and you'll have to squeeze youself out dry in the classroom. But these investments bring back invaluable returns. A perfectly run class, mysteriously, leaves you with a sense of elation that seems to instantly refill your batteries with more energy than you spent. And it's fun for the teacher too! When I hear my friends who have office jobs complain about sitting at their desks counting minutes to 5 PM (like Jack Nicholson in the opening scene of “About Schmidt”), I recall my best classes, and remember that the best thing about my occupation is that if I do my part, I'll never have a dull moment at work.

That's why I teach.