I was walking past the HR manager’s office the other day, and I overheard what sounded like an interesting conversation. Luckily I had my digital recorder with me, so I dashed in, asked them to quickly sign a consent form, dashed out to minimize my observer’s paradox, and pressed record. Here is the transcript:
HR: Who was that?
Visitor: That was Evan Frendo. He’s the co-author of (hushed tones) Double Dealing!
HR: Ah. (pause, 0.75 seconds) What’s he doing here?
Visitor: He’s your English trainer.
HR: Ah, yes. I thought I recognised him. (pause, 0.85 seconds) Anyway, tell me more about your idea. Something to do with filming you said? And the learners are doing their own thing in the training room. What are they doing exactly?
Visitor: Well, that’s the thing you see. No-one really knows beforehand. The language emerges.
HR: Just like that?
Visitor: Yep!
HR: And you know this (pause 1 second) how?
Visitor: Oh, it's all in a book. (pause, 0,5 seconds) and the internet of course.
HR: I see. (pause, 0.85 seconds) Tell me about your teaching materials. Are they expensive?
Visitor: Well, there aren’t really any materials. So it’s not expensive.
HR: I see. Ok. Tell me about the teachers.
Visitor: Oh, don’t worry. Most of them have already done a four week introductory course on how to teach, so they know what they’re doing.
HR: But they’re in a hotel with their group for a week. That’s eight hours a day of training time, plus three meals. And a social programme in the evenings. What are they actually going to do?
Visitor: Again, no need to worry. Our teachers are very good at using the students as the main resource. They’ll find things to talk about. It works much better if the groups create the content themselves.
HR: But we want them to do email writing. And we’re paying for the course.
Visitor: Yes, well, talking is better for learning you see.
HR: I see. And exactly what are they going to be able to do at the end of the course?
Visitor: Well, speak English better, obviously! But not really sure what, exactly.
HR: So will they be able to negotiate with our overseas customers? All those specialist contract words?
Visitor: Yes, certainly. They will teach each other. And the teacher will help. We call this co-construction and scaffolding.
HR: Sounds like a building site. (pause, 0.5 seconds) But none of them have ever been overseas. And they’re all new in the company, so none of them know the contract words. And all those complicated clauses. Isn’t it the teacher’s job to teach them the appropriate thing to say?
Visitor: Well, yes, and no. Our teachers are trained to be helpful, so I don’t see any problems with contracts. And anyway, it's probably better to debate how contracts contribute to the ruination of society. Don't you think your employees should be encouraged to make up their own minds about these sorts of things?
HR: I see. Will there be a test at the end, or any sort of formal evaluation?
Visitor: No, no, of course not. That would create what we call backwash, which might be a bad influence. And since we don’t really have a syllabus, we wouldn’t know what to test anyway.
HR: I see. One moment. I need to speak to my secretary.
(buzzing noise, secretary enters the room, sound of heels clicking across the marble floor, pause of 1.25 seconds)
HR: Ah, secretary person. Please be so good as to douse this person in petrol, set fire to him, throw him out of the window, and then shoot at him with this pistol. Thank you.
Secretary: So, to clarify, you want me to shoot him down in flames?
HR: Yes, please. Immediately!
And then my battery ran out. Hmm, I wish I knew what they were talking about …
Follow-up post here.
perhaps you may like to actually catch up with how dogme really works rather than simply guessing... shocking what a little research could uncover.
ReplyDeleteI'd perhaps recommend starting here with the dogme blog challenge and then work through the many excellent posts of various teachers alongwith key resources from the Lords (re your conference for those who may not know to what I refer) as you never know what gems could turn up, really...
http://kalinago.blogspot.com/2010/10/dogme-challenge-introduction.html
And now to the point:
I've done this course 10 weeks long 20hrs a week dogme 2.0... rather shocking what you can actually do with the learners in the room... but I wouldn't want to scare anyone...
:-)
Thanks for your comment Karenne. There are also lots of people who don't agree with it in all contexts you know ...
ReplyDeleteIf this was a real conversation,Evan, the teacher definitely ought to be shot for being a misrepresentation of whatever approach he represented...
ReplyDelete; )
Authentic participation in no way means no language input...thus the onus is on the teacher to read up, develop their knowledge as much as possible, and truly be an expert in the English that they're teaching...
Winging it isn't really an option...
; )
Chia Suan Chong
Hi Chia
ReplyDeleteYes, of course you're right. Nothing beats professional teachers. But very few teachers go much further than an introductory certificate, and then don't have the time or expertise to really analyse their learners needs and design a good ESP course. I don't blame them - that's just the way it is. And ESP courses are by definition focussed on needs. Winging it isn't really an option, but it happens all the time. And it's the client who pays the price.
Of course this conversation is tongue in cheek, but it is really a reaction to all the proselytizing we have been getting recently. But maybe that's just me ... :-)
Hi Evan
ReplyDeleteThe article may have been tongue in cheek, but it sums up very neatly the attitude of a massive body of HR people and, for that matter, course participants.
The simple truth of the matter is that business customers expect to get measurable results with a professionally planned course of action. Offering them anything else is begging for rejection. Frankly even bringing in such an approach by stealth will often result in a summons to a frank discussion. And at that point, telling your customer that you know what he wants is a very hard sell.
Using a dogme approach as a tool at certain points is undoubtedly a good idea, but my customers are intelligent and experienced enough to know what they want and providing what the customer wants in their chosen format is part of my job.
And the really strange thing is that, for the most part, my customers also meet or exceed the targets set by their bosses.
Thanks for an entertaining post.
Olaf
Thanks Olaf. Loved this point you made: "providing what the customer wants in their chosen format is part of my job." Very nicely put.
ReplyDeleteactually, I'm not going to let you get away with this sort of nonsense... :-) because even if it is tongue-in-cheek quite frankly there is no way that following coursebooks helps students to either uncover nor discover their own errors, nor for the most part do they actually really teach...
ReplyDeleteglossy paper is well, glossy.
First off, carrying in books for specialized business courses such as the one you list above, without a dogmeic approach, is lemmesee basically... what's that idiom: digging holes in water.
No course book has any true way of knowing what is really required by the students (which therefore debunks Olaf's suggestion that their bosses' targets are being met) and based on each individual's needs analysis, what their real requirements are.
Even the best of the books (actually the first I've met in a really long time and would love to emulate, English for Automotive Students) while it provides highly important ESP language in imaginative and non-formulaic ways still yet... even that doesn't deal with the fossilized errors our German learners repetitively make nor does it help undo spikey profiles of students who have had literally, at a minimum, 8 years of study by the time they get to us.
If a coursebook was the solution then it would have worked by now.
Let me repeat that for all the arrogant writers who would suggest in conferences that they bring their wealth of experience to the table and therefore their books should be automatically considered as bibles...
Nix.
And double-nix to those no longer teaching.
If a coursebook was the solution then it would have worked by now.
There is no magic pill.
There is no magic lottery ticket number. And it will not be written.
It is not the students' fault nor is it their laziness, nor is it the HRs poor choice of language trainer, nor is it the teachers' lack of work and effort.
It is high time for the ELT publishing industry to stop wingeing on about "bad teachers" and to face the music: for the most part their material is a waste of time.
For it to no longer be, it requires of its authors to learn more about communicative methodologies rather than sticking clever little paragraphs on the backs of books telling us that it's all about talking when it's all about getting from a to be via the past perfect and in fact, they need to read up on dogme et al. rather than walking around poking fun at it.
Basically until we/ELT face this very real language teaching gap and refuse to accept that the materials need a shake-up... and that goes further than what some companies business model is and how much can be spend on pretty pictures then we're sunk.
It is time to add the content to the gloss - and that content has to come from the learners themselves and it is only then may we begin finding solutions to the absolutely god-awful widespread materials which have plagued the industry post Headway-millions-everyone-wants-a-piece-of-that-pie and get us back to basics.
Oh, and by the way, I came back because right at this very moment I was typing up a list of emergent language from my class today and as I trawled through the list I laughed my head off at the idea of a course book with its formulaic structure somehow dealing with my students' multiple grammar issues, specific pronunciation problems and the new vocabulary that came out of "book context"...
it can't deal with this, it doesn't know my students...
Evan, I would really suggest learning a little more about dogme... you really might like it. :-)
I'm guessing that Olaf's claim is never truer than when the customers'
ReplyDeleteperceived needs chime with his preferred teaching style. A friend of mine earns his living doing what most people would regard as Dogme classes in German businesses. He's doing exceptionally well because he does it
exceptionally well.
I suspect that the pooh-poohing of Dogme tends to come from those who aren't able to do it particularly convincingly. The problem with this
pastiche is that what it claims to represent is as far removed from
Dogme as the pre-planned, textbook based lessons that are more
commonly the staple trade of newly-qualified cert holders.
I think most dogmetics welcome criticism as formative. I'm sure that Evan could come up with a more rigourous critique. If he does, I'll look forward to reading it.
Diarmuid
Ha! This made me chuckle, Evan.
ReplyDeleteBut I take your point. As business English teachers, it’s easy to get focused on learners’ needs. But they are generally not the only stakeholders in a business English course and the organization that’s paying for the course can often have rather different needs.
Oh - the complex world of business English. Makes life interesting though, eh?
Hi Evan,
ReplyDeleteThanks for a very good post, and a very timeous one too. I like dogme as a method a lot, and use it with GE students, but I don't see how it can work with BE students who have specific needs that need to be met in a specific time. I have read the book and the blogs, I have listened to the talks, and no doubt I will watch the film, but I still can't square the circle.
Yipee! A good old fashioned roll-your-sleeves-up dogme squabble.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, in his defence, Evan knows dogme extremely well and is really in a position to critique it because he has - like most trainers working in ESP - done it himself, not just read the blogs and the books. So, he is definitely not writing from a position of ignorance.
Secondly (and this is I think where he differs from the pure dogmetists) Evan has been responsible (and I would like to stress the word RESPONSIBLE) for managing other trainers and big training programmes for large companies. And when you have to do this you need to introduce standardization to ensure quality. 50 trainers delivering training that will consistently get high feedback from trainees over years, not just weeks, need tools that will make that possible. Dogme can't do that for me or most other trainers.
Because say what you like, good course books go through a rigorous testing and trialing process with editors who have a lot of experience and who really care about language. And as for the BE authors that I know, we have a hell of a lot of experience in companies and this experience shows that (following the Pareto principle) you can predict about 80% of your trainees needs and that 80% is what a good course book covers. The remaining 20% is where the trainer’s own expertise at using the trainees as a resource comes into its own.
I’m so tired of the dogme divas and divos caviling against the evils of publishing. Publishers generally do a good job in providing useful material which helps the vast majority of trainees learn useful English and the vast majority of trainers to deliver it competently. Just what exactly is wrong with that?
And one final swipe: dogme has always struck me as a very ‘me, me, me’ approach to teaching, although it always claims to have the particular needs of the student at heart. But who are the teachers who proselytise it? It is the very gifted, charismatic and talented teachers who can handle the unexpected, who always have an answer (not always the right one, but still an answer of some kind) and who ultimately crave attention so much they can’t bear to allow a book to distract the students attention from themselves, even for a moment.
Most of us are plodders, I’m afraid. I want to go on doing a solid job for my trainees, so the only way you’ll get me to give up my copies of ‘Double Dealing’ ‘Success with BEC’, or ‘Tech Talk’ is to crowbar them free from my cold, dead hands.
Okay, now I came back for the link for tonight's post and here goes James doing, sorry, showing how both you and Evan actually do not understand dogme at all...
ReplyDeleteSorry, lads, let me see if I can make it simpler seeing as how you won't pop on over to read through the blog challenge (I know, it's a long way over to my side of the pond... LOL)
You can keep your coursebook, you can take it into the classroom with ya and you can still do dogme.
Radical, eh!
Sssshh...
K
Ah, I couldn’t see some of these comments when I wrote my last contribution. I think some folks might not be familiar with Evan’s background, and I'd also like to attest to the fact that he is familiar with the dogme approach.
ReplyDeleteEvan is also one of the best read people I know in business English and ESP. I point this out because when someone’s familiar with a lot of different approaches, they may see shades of grey in things that others may feel are pretty black and white. And if you work in many places, as Evan has done, you tend to encounter other teaching contexts that you never imagined existed. Plus, if you’ve also been responsible for managing other teachers for a large business English school or corporate training centre, you tend to become more aware of the concerns of other stakeholders in that process.
As I see it, Evan is raising a valid point here. If I understand him correctly, he is not saying that unplugged lessons won’t be successful for the student, but he is pointing out that they are not the only people whose needs we need to be thinking about.
Tell you what Evan, would you like a guest post?
As a professional devil's advocate and ardent empiricist (don't worry, I'll look all these words up later...), I'd like to ask the proponents of both approaches to present us with the evidence that their method works (better).
ReplyDeleteI can't see any other way of the debate getting beyond "my way is the right way". I'm not saying the evidence isn't there, I'm just asking to be pointed towards it.
Or can we organize a controlled experiment?
No....such a thing is impossible. And I think we all have different ideas about what 'better' is anyway.
ReplyDeleteI think this comments section is as revealing as the post itself.
Hi everyone
ReplyDeleteDogme really does it to us, doesn't it? And of course, I have to now put my oar in. I can only speak from experience and my experience has been only dogmetic - unwittingly.
Firstly I'd like to ask how, if we as professionals cannot measure the actual practical results of either a designed course book - dependent programme or an entirely dogmetic programme, how can the bosses of our clients measure? I'll tell you. We have students every week from a very well known oil company. They have to do a test on the last day of their stay with us. The test is online. It is multi-choice - both listening and reading based. We offer an oral course with the obvious listening component that is part of such an oral course. How, I ask, with tears in my eyes, can my students' scores on a multi-choice reading and listening online test reflect in any real way the extensive oral practice, massive increase in confidence, fluency and "finding their voice" that has taken place during their stay with us?
Secondly - I have four new students arriving today. I know nothing of them except their names and where they work - oh their ages too. How can I POSSIBLY know where they want to go and how they want to get there? I will find that out tomorrow - from them. And no, I'm not the wickediest teacher ever doing it all exceedingly well: I too am a plodder. But plodders can walk the dogme route - as well, if not better than the brilliant. Just listen to your client, talk to him, hlep him say what he wants to say and thereby find his voice. The rest will follow. Trust me....
The defence rests.
Candy
Ian,
ReplyDeletewould love to be involved in a controlled experiment and actually already considered doing one as you've suggested... in the end I figured that no matter what kind of experiment was done it would spiral off arguments for the next 10 years on who was studied, which textbook was used, what the teacher knew or didn't know...
yawn!
So instead, did a case study of dogme vs dogme 2.0... article coming up soon in the LTCALLJ.
However, to be honest, your comment is also a bit way-off, I don't think anyone is saying "my way is the right way" and this is a niggling, annoying complaint that has been around for over 10 years whenever Dogme is brought up.
My comments are merely pointing out, for permanent record, that Frendo simply does not know much about dogme and this is very clearly shown in his post above.
It's not helpful to diss something not known about.
But it's all too oft done.
Sorry, Vicki, I hear you and I very much appreciate your appreciation of Evan's knowledge (and upon Frendo, I am utterly respectful of the things he does know about) however the bottom line here is that there is petrol dousing... on...
-paying attention to the students' needs and making a course about the people in the room (and this is a problem because...)
-teaching students how to write emails using their emails (and this is a bad idea because it this is a very dumb idea???? better than um... handing students 50 useful phrases??? or worse a book entirely dedicated to studying everyone else's reasons for writing emails, yikes)
- suggests that dogme teachers are all just-off-the-boat (I personally am an ESP:IT teacher of 15+years and am, well, hardly "off-a-4wk-intro-course)
-that business skills such as meetings or negotiation need to be um, presented in a case-study format from a textbook because you know, like, the students haven't ever done any negotiations themselves in their own lives that you can simulate - um???
-co-construction and scaffolding are likea building site which should be made fun of? ARE YOU KIDDING? One of the major problems with coursebooks is that they cannot be bothered to repeat the new core vocabulary across different units. But somehow by, was it by magic or osmosis, the students are supposed to now know that vocabulary and reuse it.
Reading through this post again, I could spend even longer ripping it part, it just gets me hopping because it is so completely wrong and ill-informed.
ARRRRGgg this response is getting too long, I'm going to have to blog on the subject again.
Before I go, though, in the dogme blog challenge I called for, very specifically, for disagreements and varying opininons because it is my belief that in an environment of critical thinking one must examine all sides of the coin.
Several great "anti-"posts have been written... (Darren Elliot, PatJack) and you know, the one which inspired 150+ comments...
The problem here is not one of disagreement or that it shows a dislike of dogme but that this particular post is filled with utterly misleading information - created mainly, probably, at a random guess, to make embittered authors feel "better" by "trashing" a growing movement towards student-centered materials.
Well, the tide is turning...
I think Evan Frendo makes a fair point in his ‘overheard conversation’ article, albeit in a provocative way designed to tweak dogme by the tail. But it’s true, if you’re teaching English to business people they want to see the value, they expect it, for them that means something they can measure. They are impatient to succeed. How can they increase their vocabulary, their range of useful phrase, their speaking skills, their pronunciation, in a short time? Business people are naturally competitive, they are status conscious, more than anything they want ‘English for Showing Off’. They would be disappointed in a language course that seemed (to them at least) more like an extended conversation class.
ReplyDeleteOk, now I'm mad.....A DOGME CLASS IS NOT AN EXTENDED CONVERSATION CLASS and it simply CANNOT be perceived as such by anyone who takes thw time to really find out about it.
ReplyDeleteMy students - and I use the word advisedly in that these students have elected to come to our centre precisely because we DON'T address their needs by cherry-picking from the range of course books available.
Now here's what we DO do. We tackle the BE Trinity of Meetings, Negotiations and Presentations; we do people management; conflict management; problem-solving; change management; interviweing and recruiting; sales and marketing; finacial planning and forecats; leadership skills; team-building and networking etc. et al - WITHOUT BOOKS. Why? Because the student's experiences are more valid and authentic FOR HIM; because there's no point in re-inventing the wheel when the student brings a perfectly usable wheel with him; because my students don't have the time to practise stuff they don't need or stuff that isn't relevant or stuff that might look and sound the same but comes out of a different context.
This is NOT idle chit-chat, this is NOT touchy-feely share-y stuff. This is damn hard work precisely because it DOESN'T use books - every single student gets exactly what they want and that takes WORK - both from them and from the teacher - fully engaged, eye-to-eye, bloody hard work.
Just want to say thanks to everyone for their comments - some great perspectives. Seems to me that being provocative on a blog post is a good way to get people excited :-)
ReplyDeleteDiarmuid suggested I come up with a more rigorous critique, which is what I have just tried to do in a new post called "Business English, ESP and Dogme". I hope you can find time to comment on that one too ...
Sorry, I still think there is too much avoiding of the issue going on.
ReplyDeleteWe still need to define precisely what the points of dispute are between the various protagonists here (or we need to agree that there is NO dispute in which case we can discuss something else). So, I'd still be interested in seeing the protagonists saying exactly what they don't agree with in each others' approaches,saying why they think that whatever they are proposing is more effective for learners and then proving that in some way.
This may be boringly scientific, but if we reject such an approach - ie hypotheses that can, at least in principle, be falsified (a la Popper), we are in the area of religious belief (on all sides).
I suspect, however, that the two "sides" - if that is what they are - are actually not that far apart, except perhaps in the dogme belief that course books are not (in most cases) of use. But even statement should be testable IMHO.
Hi Ian
ReplyDeleteI think there is already quite a lot of discussion around on the various pros and cons of the Dogme approach - see for example Meddings, L., & Thornbury, S. (2009). Teaching Unplugged. Peaslake: Delta Publishing, as well as countless websites and blogs (eg Teaching Unplugged, The trouble with teaching unplugged, and No Dogma for EFL – away from a pedagogy of essential bareness). In this post and its follow-up I have tried to add to the discussion by looking at Dogme from a corporate training perspective.