It started promisingly. Dora the teacher put us into pairs and asked us to talk about what we did at the weekend. I was sitting next to Kirsten, the Brazilian I mentioned last week, whose parents are German-speakers but who never learned German as a child.

‘Was hast du am Wochenende gemacht?’ I asked her.

Kirsten wasn’t completely up for the challenge and stumbled over her answers.

‘Ich bin mit mein Mann…’ she started.

‘Ich WAR mit meinEM Mann,’ I corrected her, a little too quickly.

Her eyes popped out on stalks. ‘You were with your man?’ she asked, in surprise.

‘No, I was correcting you. You said ‘ich bin’ and we’re talking about the past.’

‘Oh right,’ she said, sleepily. She looked around hopefully to see if anyone might want to change partners.

‘Und was hast du gemacht?’ I asked.

‘Wir essen … um …’ (We eat….)

‘Wir haben gegessen…’ (Note to self – stop correcting so quickly).

‘Ja.. wir haben gegessen … um…’

Now, those of you who know a little German will know that in a situation like this, you have to put the object between the auxiliary and the past participle. But one thing I’m very clear about in my own mind is that I don’t believe in using the language of grammar explanation when helping people correct themselves.

So to help Kirsten work out what to do, I said:

‘Wir haben – doof, doof, doof, – gegessen.’

Why I chose doof, doof, doof to indicate where the object should be I will never know. I have never done it in an ELT classroom as far as I can remember. Kirsten looked at me as if to say: ‘OK, you’re mad, can I go and sit somewhere else now?’

‘Wir haben – zum Beispiel – Pizza gegessen,” I said.

‘Zum Beispiel Pizza?’ asked Kirsten. I laughed quite loudly – Zum Beispiel means ‘for example’.

At this point, the normally mild-mannered Dora yelled ‘STOPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!’

Kirsten and I hadn’t got very far, but I would be able to cobble something together during feedback.

But there wasn’t any feedback. And that was a feature of the entire lesson. Get into pairs, talk, Dora yells STOPPPPP and we move on to something else. Poor Kirsten was stuck with me all lesson – but we were never asked to report back on what we’d been talking about.

After the first pairwork activity, Dora asked us to look at a photo of a tropical palm-fringed beach on the IWB.

Haben Sie einen Urlaub in einem deutschsprachigen Land verbracht?

‘Heute, das Thema ist Urlauben,’ she said. Today’s topic is holidays. ‘Wo ist das?’

There was silence in the room. I decided to liven things up.

‘Brighton?’ I suggested, wittily. There was a desultory chuckle from somewhere in the room.

Dora smiled winningly. “Brighton – ich glaube nicht.’

No one else offered a suggestion, so I suggested Hawaii. Dora agreed that it could be Hawaii.

‘Und haben Sie alles einen Urlaub in einem deutschsprachigen Land verbracht?’ Have you all had a holiday in a German-speaking country? Another sudden change of tack.

There were some affirmative murmurs, and she put us in pairs again.

‘Also, hast du einen Urlaub in einem deutschsprachigen Land verbracht?’ I asked.

Kirsten looked at me defensively. Now I know from last week that she’s better than this, but she was clearly having a bad day, so we chatted in English to sort things out.

‘Have you ever had a holiday in a German-speaking country?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have an uncle in Cologne.’

‘Have you been there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Und was hast du gemacht?’

‘Wir essen…. um… wir haben zum Beispiel Pizza gegessen.’

We both laughed at this. Kirsten then apologised for not being on the ball and thanked me for my help.

And you know what? I really enjoyed helping her.

The rest of the class was all book and/or grammar. And it was a bit dull and controlled. Once again I’m going to give Dora the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe she’s waiting until she knows us a little better before she takes the brakes off. But I’m not holding my breath.

I’ll report back after next Wednesday’s lesson. And I’ll sit next to someone else, because I think you know quite enough about Kirsten now.

The names have been changed.

I’m taking German classes for a very specific reason. My Spanish nephew is marrying his German fiancée in Bamberg in July, and I would like to make a speech in Spanish and German at the wedding. I can handle the Spanish, but I need to brush up on the German I studied a century or so ago at Salford Grammar School with the wonderful saxophone-playing Mr Simpson. I was good at German, but I always came second behind Meier Possenheimer who … well, I guess it’s clear from his name why he was numero uno … um…nummer eins!

I was later able to put some practical flesh on the academic German I learnt at school when I toured Germany, Austria and Switzerland with the English Teaching Theatre, back in the 1970s and 80s.

So, I can hear you say, Ken’s studying a language – big deal! Hundreds of thousands of people are starting 2012 with new language courses all over the world. Many millions more are required to study languages at state schools. What’s so special about YOUR situation?

Well, as someone who writes language teaching materials for a living, I have a professional interest in the materials that are being used, the way teachers interpret them and how students react to the learning experience.

I’m not going to name the institution where I’m studying and I’m going to give fictitious names to the teacher and any students I might mention.

I want to first of all commend the institution I’ve enrolled with. It’s one of the very few in London that offers courses in a whole range of languages. I was delighted to note that the people in front of me in the queue for registration were there to study Mandarin Chinese, Arabic and Modern Greek  – that’s the name of the course, I presume they must also have a Classical Greek option – how fantastic is THAT??

I had registered for the course online and the registration process was clear and easy to follow. I was told that the course would cover the contents of a book called Willkommen, and we would be starting at Unit 12.

So, the first thing I did was go out and buy the book.

Willkommen - almost all that stands between me and abject failure as a Hochzeitredener (?) this year...

The first thing to say about Willkommen is that it comes in a huge and rather unnecessary plastic box, about the size of a small piece of hand luggage. Once I’d taken the book, a couple of CDs and a little Helper book out, the box was redundant, and heading for a landfill somewhere. Or maybe I can work out how to turn it into a lunchbox for one of my grandchildren.

Anyway, I hope the next generation of language materials will avoid such unnecessary waste.

The second thing I discovered was that unit 12 is almost at the end of the book! In other words, the first 120 pages or so of the book would be no use to me on the course. My ancestral Scottish genes initially took great offence at this, thinking I’d been conned into buying a book that I didn’t really need.

When I calmed down, I realised that it would be in my best interests to study the book from the beginning before starting the course, to see what level I was supposed to be at – and this proved to be invaluable.

So – I take back my initial reaction, and am glad I bought the book (although I still think the packaging is a disgrace).

The book is good and has several features you don’t find in international ELT materials.

First of all, there are translations of words and phrases. Yes – translations! Something you don’t find in international ELT books. Why not? Because publishers have managed to persuade the world that EVERY WORD on the page of an English language coursebook HAS to be in English.

This is entirely because it makes it easier for them to produce a one-size-fits-all book. If it’s going to be used in lots of different countries, then you can’t have the learners’ L1 on the page.

For me, the translations in Willkommen are a blessing. As the book progresses, the reading texts and dialogues of course become more complex, and each one introduces 5-10 items of new vocabulary. The new items appear in a box in the corner of the page, with their English translations. I find this really helpful.

There are also pages and pages of language information, where grammar and vocabulary issues are explained in English. Also very helpful. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to read a grammar explanation of a language IN that language, which is what happens in most English course books and supplementary material.

There are also some cultural background notes in English, some of which I knew – for example that Germans like going for a Kur (cure) and to do that, they head off to places whose names begin with Bad, the most famous of which is Baden-Baden – and some which I didn’t know – for example, that there are more public holidays in German Länder (states) where there is a large Catholic population, because more religious days in those Länder are actual holidays.

Although there are German-speaking enclaves in, for example, some Latin American countries, the language is spoken mainly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so the background information about those countries is useful.

I don’t think such information is relevant or useful in English teaching materials, because English isn’t the property of any one group of speakers. Indeed, as people in the ELT business know well, English is used as a means of communication between non-native speakers communicating with other non-native speakers much more than between non-native speakers communicating with people who speak English as a first language.

Willkommen is a well-presented and manageable book. It needs a bit of a re-vamp, if only because there’s a lot of stuff about pen friends and nothing at all about email or other cyber-stuff, but all in all, I’m happy that my return to formalised language learning will be with the help of this book.

So what about the class itself? A word or two first about my classmates.

I was delighted to see such a variety of people of all ages in the class. About half of them had been in the class during the autumn term and were clearly pleased to see each other and the teacher after the end of year break.

The youngest students are in their twenties, and the oldest are two women who I reckon are in their seventies. They are neighbours in South London who also happen to have German-speaking ancestors. There’s a smattering of other nationalities, including a Brazilian woman whose parents speak German, and a Spanish woman whose work takes her to Germany a lot. When the teacher asked the Brazilian woman if her parents had spoken German with her as she was growing up, she replied: “They spoke German to each other only when they didn’t want me to understand.”

Like the Brazilian, most people’s reasons for being there are because of some family or relationship connection. There’s a South African woman whose father was born in Austria and who has an Austrian boyfriend. My first thought was – why isn’t HE teaching her German? There was also a young City type who said rather glumly – “Meine Freudin ist Deutsche, ich MUSS Deutsch lernen.” I could see from his face that he found speaking to her in German a bit of an ordeal.

My announcement that I was planning to make a wedding speech – a Hochzeitrede – seemed to cause interest amongst some people and a rather stony-faced suspicion among others.

I can already see who I’m going to get on with in this group.

And what about the teacher? Well, Dora (not her real name) was very welcoming and conducted the initial arrangements very well – all in English, though. I’m going to have another lesson before I comment on her teaching style.

I hope you don’t mind waiting to find out what I think.

Footnote

My wife Dede was resuming her Chinese classes on the same night, although in a different branch of the institute. As we walked through Covent Garden on the way to our classes, we bumped into Brita Haycraft, who with her husband John founded International House.

Brita was on her way home from giving a pronunciation class at International House. I thought this was very serendipitous – she and John trained Dede and me more than forty years ago, when IH was still in Shaftesbury Avenue and really she has hardly changed in that time.

IH is celebrating fifty years of teacher training this year, and Brita was there at the beginning. I hope reading her name and remembering John will jolt a few memories amongst any IH-trained teachers who are reading this.

We took Brita for a cup of coffee at Patisserie Valerie on Long Acre and we talked about the old days. I almost missed my class because of all the reminiscing.

But I went and … well, more about that next time.

Tara Benwell (at the front) in Brighton with new friends Shelly Terrell, Marisa Constantinides, me and Cecilia Lemos

I’m so pleased that Tara got her book published, and – if you understand what I mean – I’m pleased that I’m pleased. Tara’s young enough to be my daughter, but I fear that had we been same-age colleagues, my main emotion might have been envy. So I’m pleased that I’m beyond that and can enjoy what you might call the extracurricular successes of people who make a living in the same business as me.

But then I’ve never wanted to write a novel. If Tara had written a play that had been staged in London’s West End or on Broadway in New York, I may have been well fussed!

Tara isn’t the first EFL/ESOL teacher to be a published novelist. The twentieth century is littered with people who swanned around Europe teaching English to finance their desire to write.

Christopher Isherwood (left) with WH Auden at the start of a train journey to China

Christopher Isherwood was attracted to Berlin in the 1930s by the relaxed attitude to sexual orientation. He worked there as a private English tutor while writing the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. One of the central characters of the second book was the cabaret singer Sally Bowles, who of course reappeared much later in the stage show and film Cabaret.

Irish writer James Joyce was an English teacher in Trieste and other places. I doff my hat to my friend Mark Andrews as the expert on Joyce, and thoroughly recommend his blogpost about Joyce’s possible unplugged teaching experiences. – http://bit.ly/yPjuYe

The cover of The Magus by John Fowles

The 1966 novel The Magus by John Fowles was a dark and mysterious story whose central character was an English teacher on a small Greek island. Fowles based it on his experience of working on the island of Spetses, where he taught English for two years. I remember being a little surprised that in the middle of this tense psychological thriller, the narrator of the book suddenly started complaining about having to use the Candlin English course!

You may also have heard of someone called JK Rowling. In her pre-Harry Potter days, she was an English teacher in Porto, Portugal. Cyber-chum Andy Hockley knew Rowling during that time and wrote a very nice guest blog for me about the time they worked together, which you can read here – http://bit.ly/dkpAYo

I originally wrote that another cyber-chum Anna Pires was a colleague of Joanne Rowling’s. I’ve corrected this after Anna’s comment below.

The other EFL teacher-novelist who comes to mind is David Peace, author of The Damned United, the partly fictionalised true story of mercurial English soccer manager Brian Clough and the dramatic 44 days he was in charge of Leeds United in 1974. It was a richly textured story of success and failure, which was turned into an enjoyable but much less complex film, starring Michael Sheen.

Brian Clough (left), the best manager England never had, and Michael Sheen, who played him in the film of The Damned United

The Damned United is the best sporting novel I have ever read, and it’s a pity that John Giles, an Irishman who was one of the stars of that Leeds team, chose to sue the author for libel in 2008, successfully as it turned out. Gilesy was one of the best players who ever played the beautiful game here in England, but I do feel he was missing the point somewhat!

But then Peace is no stranger to controversy. He wrote another four novels, Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002), which are known collectively as The Red Riding Quartet. The books are set in the northern English county of Yorkshire at the time of some terrible crimes in the late 1970s, known the Yorkshire Ripper murders.  Peace wrote uncompromisingly about police corruption and the TV dramatization of the story caused a real stir when it was shown on Channel 4 in the UK.

Not content with stirring hornets’ nests in his home country, Peace also wrote three novels about the defeat of Japan in World War 2 and the subsequent American military occupation.

He seems like someone who enjoys causing trouble!

He taught English in Istanbul for a short time before moving to Tokyo, where he worked from 1994 until 2009. Does anyone remember meeting him during these years? I would love to hear what sort of teacher he was.

The cover of The Whistle at Siete Vientos by Jeremy Harmer

What about the current crop of ELT novelists? Apart from Tara, the only one I can think of is Jeremy Harmer, who self-published The Whistle at Siete Vientos, an atmospheric novel set in Mexico.

Jeremy Harmer and me, cutting a cake to celebrate the publication of Just Right Advanced, which we wrote with Carol Lethaby and Ana Acevedo

If you know of any other published ELT novelists – or indeed if you ARE one and want a little extra publicity – leave a note!

It was actually released on vinyl – how on EARTH did teachers use a vinyl disc in the classroom??? Later it was released on cassette and now some of the songs are available for free via box.net here on my blog.

This is what the cover looked like. 

Me, Dede, Gillian Bartlam and Michael Klein, 24th January 1971 - Dede. Gillian and Michael have hardly changed over the past 40 years...

I can’t believe I thought a moustache was a good idea. The best thing about that photo is that it was taken the day after Dede and I secretly got married. 

Of all the materials I’ve ever written, Mister Monday caused the most diverse reactions – huge criticism (mainly from native speaker teachers in the UK) and massive delight (mainly from non-native speaker teachers, and especially in Latin America). 

Under normal circumstances, I would let the album rest with its contemporary ELT materials on the dusty shelves of our memories, but this year, three comments were posted on my blog, all from people in Argentina, who remember either Mister Monday or a later collection of my ELT songs Spotlight. 

I hope you don’t mind me publishing them just before Christmas. 

…

Dear (because I owe you more than you can imagine) Mr. Wilson or should I call you Mr. Monday?

I am from Argentina. When I was in High School my English Teacher introduced me to the famous Mr. Monday record. I loved it. By that time, I was 17 years old (1973). Since I was the only one in my class that could converse in English, I could borrow the record!!!!. I kept forgetting on taking it back to school, so I still have it.

It opened my world to verbs and how to use them. Today I live in USA and I use your songs (correct tense of verbs) in every second of my life. I had learned to talk fluently by listening to songs in English, again and again and again (most of them were from the group The Carpenters).

I put a tape recorder in front of me, a copy book and a English/Spanish dictionary. I listened to them and went right away to the dictionary to find out which word belonged to that sound. So many songs…

Today I can understand anybody talking, anything, and I still cannot believe what I do! I learned in a different way than the normal: First the sound then the letters.

As you can see “MY ENGLISH TEACHERS” were and are “very famous”. Some times I think how much would cost to be privately taught by “these people”, hundreds and hundreds of dollars, I had it for free!!!!.

This is my “learning English story”. I did it every day for three hours during at least four or five years. I started with The Carpenters and you were the cherry of the dessert.

THANK SO MUCH FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART!!!!

Mirta Diana Martinez

Ken Wilson, I want to thank you for creating those beautiful songs of Mr. Monday that I listened to in Argentina when I was a child. I think that it would be great to have new copies of Mr. Monday. I have the old cassette but it is worn out now. I enjoyed it in the past. And I like them now: the lyrics and the music. To conclude, I strongly believe that it would be a good material for a class, because it’s high quality material and therefore timeless.

Thank you again.

María Esther Gil

Greetings from Argentina!

I remember having learnt English with Spotlight, Songs and Sketches for the Language Classroom, and luckily I have found the book, but the listenings are missing here!

Have you got any idea of how can I get them?

Thanks in advance!

Laura

Khartoum

I’ve just come back from a British Council visit to Khartoum Sudan, which was arranged at very short notice and which I kept telling myself I was mad to accept.

Quite apart from fears about safety and getting malaria (both of which are laughable to anyone who knows Khartoum, a safe and malaria-free zone), I had only just reached the end of an exhilarating series of author visits to various parts of the world and quite fancied putting my feet up a bit in December.

However, Council people Ben Gray and Ian Frankish were very persuasive, by email and on the phone, and I decided to do it. In my heart of hearts, I just knew that I would look back in ten years’ time and be really annoyed if I didn’t accept the gig.

So I did. I arranged to travel there on Wednesday 30^th November, with an early morning flight to Frankfurt, then on to Jeddah and Khartoum.

And then here in the UK, a general strike of government employees was announced. For Wednesday 30^th November. Amongst others, immigration officers were planning to strike, and there was a good chance that travellers into and out of Heathrow Airport would be affected. Brilliant! So I changed my ticket, and flew to Frankfurt on Tuesday evening.

Here’s what happened next.

Wednesday 30^th November

I flew from Frankfurt to Khartoum via Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A surprisingly short journey – flying time of less than five hours to Jeddah, and another 90 minutes on to Khartoum. By the time the big Airbus 340 reached Khartoum, there were only 26 passengers on it – no, I didn’t count them, my airport contact told me.

I had been told to look out for someone before passport control. He would have my name on a piece of paper, I would give him my passport and a hundred US dollars, and then wait for him to organise my visa.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not keen to give up my passport and some money to someone I don’t know in a country I’ve never visited before.

However, Mohammed (for it was he) was a friendly and totally reliable person, even though he actually had someone else’s name on his piece of paper and I walked right past him. When we eventually made contact, he took my passport and money and by-passed the regular queue and handed my documents to a man in a glass booth.

As I sat waiting for my passport, I was aware of a conversation amongst a group of people next to me. They were speaking Portuguese. I said something in my mix of Spanish and Portuguese and they all burst into broad smiles and started laughing. They were from Mozambique. When they discovered I was from London, one of them started speaking English.

“Where you from in London? – West, east, south?”

“West.”

“I’ve been there! I was in Victoria for four days. I love London! Oxford Circus!”

I would have liked to talk to this lovely crowd for longer, but my passport came back, and it WAS late and I DID have a talk at the  British Council the next day.

A twenty-minute taxi ride from the very centrally-located airport to my accommodation – the Tara Apartments, a serviced apartment block on a dirt road not far from the Council office.

Lovely place, shiny tiled floors, ceiling fans. I think it’s going to be OK here.

Thursday 1st December

For breakfast at the Tara Apartments, one takes the lift to the fifth floor and then walks up to the sixth (the lift doesn’t go that far). Bizarrely, there’s a sign halfway up the stairs which says CELTA, with an arrow pointing upwards. There’s a CELTA training course going on up here? Or does CELTA stand for something else in Sudan? Maybe breakfast?

On the sixth floor, one finds the breakfast room. On one side, there’s a pool table, and another long table with evidence that someone has recently dined, plates with bits of toast on, that kind of thing. There’s also a loaf of white bread, some butter, jam, a flask of hot water, instant coffee, tea bags, some sachets of La Vache Qui Rie cheese spread and a plate of distinctly old-looking olives.

On the right hand side of the room, there’s a gym treadmill and a couple of cycling machines, all bundled into a small space and clearly not in use. I find out later that they have been moved from another room on this floor to accommodate the CELTA training course that is indeed taking place here.

I sit down and contemplate the unappetizing fare on the breakfast table. My arrival has clearly stirred some upstairs staff, and eventually someone walks into the room and puts a plate in front of me. It has on it what appears to be a fried egg with no yolk. I taste it carefully.  It’s certainly egg-ish. I remind myself I didn’t come to Sudan for the food.

Eventually, my British Council minder Ben Gray comes to pick me up and we walk through the dusty streets to the British Council building. In the garden behind the compound wall, there are about 200 chairs in front of a screen.

The wall of the British Council compound in Khartoum

Is this where I’m doing my talk??? I thought there were only a dozen people coming to this one.

No, this is for a later screening of a film called I Am Slave, a controversial film about a Sudanese woman who finds herself enslaved in a North London home. At a previous screening, several Sudanese people had walked out. Tonight, the director of the film Gabriel Range will be at the Council and will answer questions after the film has been shown a second time.

Full marks to the Council for doing something quite this controversial. Range also directed Death of a President, about a fictional plot to assassinate George Bush. He clearly enjoys controversial subjects. I’m glad that I will have the chance to see I Am Slave later.

But first, a workshop for Council teachers, a mainly native speaker group. It goes OK, but it could have taken place anywhere in the world. I will have to wait another two days before I talk to 300 Sudanese state school teachers of English.

In the evening, I sit with about a hundred other people and watch I Am Slave. It’s a bit slow and ponderous. Despite the fact that it’s loosely based on a true story, I find the plot full of inconsistencies, and the performance of the main character Wunmi Mosaku a bit wooden and one-dimensional.

But the treatment she receives, first as a slave in a home in Khartoum and then in London, is shocking. Even more shocking is a statistic that scrolls up at the end of the film, which claims there are 5,000 women being kept in conditions of slavery in London. Could this be true?

The Sudanese in the audience are more concerned about the inaccuracies about their country in the film than about the slavery issue. There are no garbage trucks in Khartoum like the one in the film, one person complains. The actors clearly aren’t Sudanese, says another. Where did you film it?

Range admits that he filmed the African part of the film in Kenya, because he wasn’t allowed to film in Sudan. He seems to lose the audience when he owns up to this, as several small conversations break out around the garden. It must be disappointing for him that all the comments are about the authenticity of the scenes in Khartoum rather than the larger issue of modern day slavery.

You can find out more about the film here – http://imdb.to/qGRUx9

Afterwards, we go to the British Embassy for some food and drink.

Friday 2^nd December

My Council guide Bahar (left) and his brother at the brother's shop in the souk

Friday is the Muslim holy day, so it’s my day off. Bahar, the British Council driver, takes me and Claire Young, one of the CELTA trainers, to the souk (suq?), where he seems to know every other shopkeeper. We are given a free gift every time we buy something, and even when we don’t.

Greens v Reds at the Friday evening Nubian wresting match

In the evening, we visit a Nubian wrestling event. The Sudanese are the only ones who do this kind of wrestling. It takes place in the north of the city, in a dusty arena cordoned off by a series of carpets which are hung over wires. There’s a crowd of about two thousand people crammed into this small space, and Claire and I are just about the only non-Sudanese there, which makes it all very exciting.

There are some obscure rules about the sport – the referee stops the fight at one point to remonstrate with one wrestler for the way he touched the other fighter on the shoulder. This decision leads to howls of protest from the part of the crowd who are supporting that fighter. 

Like many sporting events, there is as much enjoyment to be had watching and listening to the crowd as there is watching the event itself.

Saturday 3^rd December

The Forum leaflet - I didn't choose the title, honest!

Today is the biggest of my three presentations, labelled a Forum by the British Council and given the hostage to fortune title Learning with Laughter. 

I wrote a Facebook up-date looking for a bit of support, and got lots…

A minor problem – the original venue in Khartoum became unavailable two weeks before the event and it was moved to Omdurman Islamic University – a perfectly nice venue, but way out of town. The hoped-for audience of 300 turns out to be nearer 200.

But WHAT a lovely group of people! A more or less equal number of men and women, all up for having a good time, and happy to do all the noisy and slightly out of control activities that I suggest. When I ask them if they would like to try the activities in class, there is only ONE dissenting voice – and a very noisy one as well, but you come to expect that in a group this big.

We celebrate the success of the venture with an Indian meal. I wish I could say I sampled lots of Sudanese food, but I didn’t.

Sunday 4^th December

Today I have my final presentation, after which I will be heading home. This talk ticked all the boxes marked ‘Disaster’. The room was tiny, noisy and not very well equipped. There were supposed to be seventy people turning up and there were only thirty chairs. The technology didn’t work. The air conditioning sounded like a jet engine.

About twenty people turned up, but half of them had been to my talk on the previous day. They walked in like old friends, the men shaking my hand and patting me on the left shoulder, a wonderful act of friendship. Two of them had already tried out some of my activities from the previous day, and their students had asked for more. Result!

As the projector didn’t work, I put my Mac on a chair on a table in front of the small group, and let them read my powerpoint directly from the screen. It was a bit ad hoc, but it worked. A lovely talk to a small but very enthusiastic group.

Back to the Tara, pack, airport. My flight to Jeddah left at midnight. I felt as if I’d hardly been in Sudan at all and really hoped that I would get another chance to visit.

Sudan is going through some testing times at the moment, not least because of the recent division of the country. The new nation of Southern Sudan may have a better chance of economic survival than the north, if only because that’s where all the oil reserves are.

And Khartoum doesn’t yet have any kind of acceptable infrastructure to make it a desirable tourist destination. But it’s wonderfully warm and sunny in December, and maybe one day it will be a suitable place for Saga Holidays. I know that sounds like a downward spiral, but really the country needs some hard currency.

Until then, I just hope the lives of these lovely people improve a little, because they deserve to enter a new phase, without the shadow of civil war and international sanctions.

If you get a chance to go, take it. Khartoum is safe – and you don’t need to waste your money on malaria tablets!

POSTSCRIPT

In the description of my second talk above, I referred to ‘one dissenting voice’. I just received the following comment from him. I offer it unedited. I’m so pleased that my talks can still generate such passionate responses.

Gorgeousely I would like to inform you that in academic community discussion is the back bone particularly in ELT, non the less, you presented a superb presentation in Sudan but my contrary idea is about to refute by using pedagogical evidence not by mocking and describing me as noisy voice. All in all, you propose ice breakers techniques as a method of teaching regarding lack of civic education coping the notion from the suuggestopedia method claiming that is a technique of teaching with laughter , What a hell!!!!!!!!!! I am not a noisy voice but I want to learn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I flew into Tokyo from London on Thursday and then on to Seoul. In the first 24 hours of this visit to Asia, I was reminded of the things I really like about being in this part of the world, things which in some cases are almost the exact opposite of how thing are where I live.

1         Japanese customs and immigration people

OK, maybe I was lucky.

After landing at Tokyo Narita Airport, I had to pick up my luggage and transfer to another terminal to catch my flight to Seoul. On the British Airways plane, they had said transit passengers didn’t need to fill in immigration or customs forms, but I knew I had to go through both before I could catch the other plane, so I did. I was a little bit anxious about getting through the system, as I can only speak a few words of Japanese. I didn’t think it would be much use saying ‘Hello, can I have a beer?’ to anyone I might have to talk to.

I showed my passport, immigration form and travel itinerary to the immigration man and his face lit up. He was really pleased to be able to practise his English. He explained in very good English what I had to do.

I then picked up my luggage and went through the Customs area. When I showed my travel itinerary to the customs man, he shouted a loud ‘Oh!’ and ran into an office.

I was half dreading that when he came back, he would say something like “Mister Wilson, will you do us the honour of allowing us to give you a full body search?” but no, he came back with a map of the airport, and showed me clearly where I had to go to catch the transit bus.

My introduction of Asia couldn’t have run more smoothly.

2    Fast trains

Japanese bullet trains - they just get sleeker and sleeker...

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m nuts about trains and the Japanese were the first people to research and produce really fast trains – the Shinkansen, bullet train. I remember the first time I travelled on one in 1979 – what a brilliant experience. And the service is so elegant – at first, I wasn’t sure about ticket inspectors and trolley people bowing when they left the carriage, but now I love it.

Korea, like many other countries in the region, also has excellent fast train services. The service is good and the trains are spotless.

In Britain…um…

3    Public cleanliness

I know there are other things that I should get more steamed up about – child poverty, greedy bankers, global warming – but the one thing that is guaranteed to get me really angry is the sight of someone dropping litter.

You simply don’t see people doing that in Japan and Korea. The 2002 soccer World Cup was staged in both these countries, and the local interest was massive – there was no way that all the people who wanted tickets were going to see some of the games live.

So television screens were set up in public places. It’s estimated that TWO MILLION people watched the game between South Korea and Spain in a big central square in Seoul. When the crowd dispersed, there wasn’t so much as a paper carton left in the square.

Why can’t everyone behave like that?

4    Japanese soccer hairstyles

A J-League team - funny way to stand for a picture, eh?

The 2002 World Cup was also the time when the Japanese team decided to go hair crazy. Japanese people have … er … black hair, right? But during one game, every single one of the starting eleven had dyed their hair a different colour. It was a bit of a let-down in fact when a substitute came on and had regular black hair.

In the wider teenage community, hairstyles seem to matter a lot – maybe someone who lives or has lived in Japan could add a note about why they think this is the case.

Members of the Japanese national soccer team politely ordering breakfast at Gare du Nord, Paris

5    The way young people dress

The colour clashes, oh the colour clashes!

The way Tokyo young people, particularly girls, dress reminds me a bit of London. Absolutely anything is possible, people wear the most outrageous clashing colours. Somehow they seem to carry it off.

6         Tokyo by night

I only know certain areas of Tokyo, like Shinjuku. If you remember the scene in Lost In Translation where Bill Murray arrives in the city, you’ll know that the place is full of dazzlingly bright lights. But it also seems a very safe place to wander around, and there is always something amazing to see.

I’m sure Seoul is the same, but somehow I’ve never had the chance to wander round the night-life area of the city.

Maybe this time!

7         The attitude to work

When I checked in my luggage at the Asiana Airlines counter at Narita Airport, the woman check-in clerk printed out the tag for my suitcase. At that point, a mature gentleman stepped forward, took the tag from the woman and attached it to my case. He then bowed and stepped back. When I passed him, he smiled and wished me a pleasant journey in English.

I’ve noticed that there seem to be a lot of people who do quite menial tasks like this, but do them with grace and dignity. At the door to most educational establishments, there are men in uniform whose only job appears to be to wave a flag to indicate that you can proceed into the car park.

Mrs Thatcher made sure that most jobs like this disappeared in the UK. Even if they still existed, I doubt whether people would carry them out in such a professional way.

8         Sumo

Sumo wrestlers at work - for some reason, this picture reminds me of the Isle of Man three-legged flag...

I don’t really understand sumo, but I am hooked on watching it on TV. We all know that a sumo fight can last barely ten seconds. If it lasts thirty seconds, it’s an epic. But if you only see the fights themselves, you miss the best part.

You have to watch the live performances, not the highlights. That way, you see the amazing build-up, with one or other of the fighters crouching down to start and then deciding to shuffle around for a while until his head is right.

Then BAM!!!!!!!!! – the greatest collision of human flesh in the world.

And at the end, maximum respect shown to the opponent, win or lose. We have SO much to learn in the west!

9         Karaoke

A typical well-organised night down the karaoke bar...

OK, OK … karaoke is a bit naff in the UK, partly I think because there are still pubs where the karaoke section isn’t separate, so you have to put up with listening to a bunch of guys wearing ‘Len’s Stag Night 2011’ T-shirts.

Karaoke shouldn’t be like that – it should be you and your pals in a separate room, like it is here in Asia. And that’s what I’m hoping we’ll be doing on Sunday night at the JALT conference.

10   Mobile music

And, lest we forget, Japan produced the first truly mobile music machine – the Sony Walkman. The original played cassettes.

I first saw someone wearing headphones in public on a subway station in Tokyo in 1979 when I was there with the English Teaching Theatre and I thought – I HAVE to get one of those. 

I saved up my pennies and got one. A few years later,  Sony introduced the Discman, which played CDs. I got one of those too eventually – they were monumentally expensive, as I remember.

I was actually a bit disappointed with the Discman – you couldn’t wear it when you were jogging, because it jumped from track to track. Or at least mine did.

But we should never forget that the Walkman was a game-changer, and probably had the young Steve Jobs scratching his chin to come up with something that did the same thing, only better…

I just checked and 1979 was the year that the Walkman was launched so the guy I saw was a VERY early adopter.

The OUP Japan gang wearing their Smart Choice T-shirts - if you look carefully, you'll find some of the karaoke gang in there as well...

And finally, the reason I’m here. For the last four years, Korean and Japanese students have been using my book Smart Choice. Part of the reason I’m here is to promote the second edition. End of commercial!

With OUP Korea staff at the last OUP Day I attended, in 2007

You will see that I have accentuated the positive in the above notes. I’d be keen to hear from people who live and work – or have lived and worked – in this region. If you want to paint a different picture, please feel free. That’s what this forum is for!

And if you’re planning to come to the OUP Day in Seoul or the JALT conference in Tokyo, please come and say hello.

The Cavendish Sandspit, Prince Edward Island

Regular readers of this blog will know that in the summer, I usually spend some time here on Prince Edward Island, the smallest Canadian province, located off the coast of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

PEI can actually claim to be the birthplace of the nation that we now know as Canada. In September 1864, the Atlantic provinces – Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Newfoundland – organized a conference to discuss a union among themselves. There was already a British North American province called Canada, comprising Quebec, Ontario and other areas, and the Governor General asked for an invitation to the talks “to ascertain whether the proposed Union might not be made to embrace the whole of British North American Provinces.”

According to reports, Governor General Monck and the rest of Canada’s most prominent politicians journeyed down the Saint Lawrence River on a 191-ton steamer with $13,000-worth of champagne in its hold, to attend the conference in Charlottetown, PEI. No wonder they all look a bit ill in this painting of the event.

The fathers of Canadian confederation - some with the mother of all hangovers...

Even so, the island is probably more famous as the setting of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic children’s novel Anne of Green Gables.

Megan Follows in the film version of Anne of Green Gables

I’ve been coming to the island for a long time now, and I love listening to stories told by fishing folk, farmers and other great and possibly unreliable storytellers.

There are, for example, various stories about the ghost ships that are regularly seen off the shores. I particularly enjoyed a story about how two of the ghost ships collided. The raconteur was a slow-talking student, who used high-rise terminals (the pronunciation habit that makes every statement sounds like a question) at the end of each line of the story.

“So, like the two boats .. um… collided? And … they sank? And the ghost sailors … um … drowned? And they came back as … um … like ghosts of ghosts?”

“What are ghosts of ghosts like?” I asked.

‘Um … like ghosts? Only …um … paler?”

However, the story that I found MOST unlikely was about an actor named Charles Coghlan.

Charles Coghlan, PE Island's finest, a kind of Victorian Tom Selleck

Coghlan was born in Prince Edward Island in 1841 to one of the many Irish families who had migrated here. The family was poor but he was clearly a bright pupil at school and neighbours helped his parents pay for him to get a good education. His father was hoping that he would become a lawyer, but young Charles dismayed his family by announcing that he wanted to be an actor. His father disowned him and he left home. He and his father never spoke again.

He not only left the island, he left Canada and began his acting career in London. It seems that he made his first appearance on the London stage in 1860, when he would have been only 19. Reports suggest that he became one of the leading actors at the Prince of Wales Theatre.

In 1878, he went to seek fame and fortune in the USA, and worked there for the rest of his career. All the while, news of his theatrical success was relayed back to Prince Edward Island, where his exploits became front page news in the island’s press.

In his fifties, Coghlan put together a touring theatre company and travelled the United States performing classics of contemporary American theatre, with some Shakespeare thrown in for good measure for measure (sorry, shocking pun).

However, the workload became a little too much for him, and he died on stage in Galveston Texas on 27^th November 1899, at the age of 58.

So far, so what? I hear you all say. But read on, and you’ll see why I was skeptical about this story…

Coghlan was buried in a Galveston cemetery. In 1900, nearly a year after his death, the city was struck by a terrible hurricane which killed six thousand people. It destroyed buildings, ripped up ancient trees as if they were matchsticks and uncovered graves.

Along with many others, Coghlan’s coffin was washed out into the Gulf of Mexico by the floods that followed the hurricane.

And now the unbelievable bit….

The story goes that the coffin drifted around the Florida Keys into the Atlantic Ocean, and then up the eastern seaboard of the United States, carried by one branch of the Gulf Stream. Eight years later, it was found by fishermen off the coast of Prince Edward Island.

This map of the Gulf Stream clearly shows how easy it would be to float from Texas to the Canadian Maritimes...

The fishermen first of all hauled the wooden box onto their boat, then realized it was a coffin. They scraped the barnacles off the plaque and saw the name of one of the island’s most famous sons.

One version of the story suggests that Coghlan had once visited a fortune teller who told him that he would become very famous but die in the prime of his career. His soul would never rest until it was buried in his homeland of Prince Edward Island.

So it proved. Coghlan had finally come home. His body was re-buried near the small church where he had been christened as a baby.

The fortune teller bit is probably hokum, of course. But the part of the story that always bothered me was the fact that the hurricane could have ‘uncovered graves’. Someone then told me that Coghlan had been interred in a mausoleum above ground, but I was still skeptical – it sounded a rather grand way to bury even a famous actor.

So in 2002, my wife Dede and I went to Galveston Texas to find out more.

Actually, that’s over-stating it a bit. We DID go to Galveston, but we didn’t just go to find out about the story.

Dede had spent six weeks working in a community college in Houston, after which we drove to New Orleans to meet some friends, listen to some music and generally hang out. On our way back, we stopped in Galveston.

It was Thanksgiving Day and the streets were almost deserted. We found a diner that was open and sat at a table by the window. We were the only customers and eventually a woman came to take our order. She was – how can I put this – a mature woman, with rather wild dyed blonde hair, held at the back by an extravagant clip with a huge artificial yellow flower. She was wearing a skimpy white Mexican blouse and brown suede hot pants. In November.

More to the point, she couldn’t understand a word I said. She hadn’t a clue what I wanted when I asked for ‘fizzy mineral water’, for example. She clearly thought we were a very suspicious couple indeed, travelling on Thanksgiving Day.

She became even more suspicious when I called her over and asked my next question:

“Do you know where the cemetery is?”

Her eyes narrowed as she looked at me. You could see she was toying with the idea of calling the cops.

“You want what?” she asked.

“The cemetery.”

“There are lots of cemeteries in Galveston.”

Dede tried to help.

“We’re looking for a really old one,” she said. “One that was built in Victorian times.”

Once we’d established that ‘Victorian times’ meant ‘a long time ago’, she became more helpful. We finished our meal and set off to find the cemetery that she indicated.

It was a beautiful and peaceful place with lots of trees, and there was a plaque at the entrance which referred back to the 1900 hurricane.

And as soon as you enter the place, you know that the Coghlan coffin story makes sense.

As we looked around, we saw that everyone who is buried there is actually interred in an above-ground mausoleum, some grand, but most of them quite modest. Why? Because large areas of the city have water just below the surface of the land. If you dig a metre into the soil, you reach water. No one gets buried underground in Galveston.

So the story finally made sense to me. And, as if by magic, the next time I went to the island, probably the following summer, I discovered that a museum in the tourist resort of Cavendish (home of Anne of Green Gables) had opened a special exhibit dedicated to the story of Charles Coghlan.

So all I have to do now is to track down some of those ghost sailors… 

Cleve Miller right), with me, Vicky Saumell, Shaun Wilden and Cecilia Lemos at the Southern Cone conference, Curitiba Brazil, July 2011

Last month, I was stuck at Guarulhos Airport São Paulo for six hours, waiting for a flight back to London. The wait was actually a very pleasant one, because I spent it in the company of Cleve Miller, one of the driving forces behind English 360. Cleve had missed his connection to New York and had even longer to wait than me.

A plate of sushi similar to the one we ate at Guarulhos

During a long and enjoyable sushi lunch, we shared information about various things to do with the wider world of ELT.

One of the things I told Cleve about was the Hornby Trust.

AS Hornby, with vintage BBC microphone (or possibly room heater)

AS Hornby wrote what was to become known as the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English a very long time ago. He then made the extremely generous decision to place a sizeable slice of his earnings from the project into a trust fund that would finance teacher training. More than half a century later, hundreds of English teachers worldwide have benefitted from his generosity and continue to do so.

Cleve, an American, thought it was very amusing when I told him that Hornby was ‘embarrassed’ by the amount of royalties he received. I hope this is true – it was how someone who knew Hornby once described to me his reaction to the riches which were suddenly thrust upon him. Cleve thought that this response was ‘SO British’.

Even though the Trust is well established and well known, I think it deserves a twenty-first century honourable mention, so that’s what I intend to do here. So – for those of you who don’t know much about it – a bit of background.

The Hornby Trust, in association with the British Council, funds an MA scholarship scheme for English language teachers and teacher trainers from countries in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. There are ten scholarships a year in total.

In addition, and possibly of greater importance because of the vast number of teachers who benefit from it, there are regional summer schools and workshops for teachers all over the world.

Hornby was born in 1898. He studied English at University College London, graduating in 1922. In 1923, he went to teach English Literature in a small provincial college in Japan. When he got there, he realized that what his students really needed was language training, and he threw himself enthusiastically into this work. News of the young teacher’s good work in language development spread.

Eventually, he was contacted by Harold Palmer, the director of the Tokyo Institute for Research into English Teaching (IRET). Palmer invited Hornby to work with him on a vocabulary research programme. They worked together at IRET for many years and Hornby took over the department when his mentor left. The work he did there led directly to the compilation of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.

What I love about the Hornby story is that it hinges on a chance meeting and subsequent collaboration. I think these things happen to lots of us in ELT and probably in other fields too. These meetings often cause massive changes in career and work options. It should make people rejoice that having a clear career plan from an early age and sticking to it isn’t the only – or even an advisable – way to go about your working life.

Even if he wasn’t actually embarrassed by the money he was making from the project, Hornby clearly felt that the teachers who bought the book deserved to benefit from his good fortune, so he set up the Trust.

By doing so, he set a standard of altruism that most of us who make a living out of writing ELT materials are unlikely ever to match. But I think that more of us should nevertheless try to follow his example and plough something back into the business that has made us a good living.

ELT conferences, both national and international, are a great place to meet and share ideas with people who do similar work but who come from different backgrounds. Contact with like-minded people from other countries can have a really profound effect on the work that teachers do. And teachers who don’t have the wherewithal to fund a visit themselves, should at least have the chance to apply or compete for grants to help them do it.

And let’s face it – conferences these days are a lot of fun. Attendees may write their reports about the talks and workshops that they attended, but their strongest memories are more likely to be the parties and other less formal social events that they were at. And quite right, too!

Some of the participants at my IATEFL Brighton talk - some life-long friendships were made there (at the conference, not at my talk)

IATEFL UK has a series of grants available to its members, so well done to that organization for making sure they continue. I was also very pleased to discover recently that there’s a Headway Scholarship Trust, funded by the Headway authors themselves. John and Liz Soars choose a different country every year, and the local OUP people there find four or five teachers who get the chance to come to the UK for a summer school.

There are many millions of English teachers in the world – more than eleven million in China alone – so these might seem like very small gestures. But they are important gestures nonetheless, and more are needed.

I look forward to a time when I feel I’m making enough money to start the Smart Choice Fund. I would love to be able to sponsor future generations of teachers to attend conferences and help them have a memorable time at karaoke nights at talks and workshops well into the 2020s and 2030s. :)

You can find out more about Hornby here – http://bit.ly/iORfrK

I haven’t been very productive recently in terms of blogs, or indeed in terms of anything relating to writing – and as I make a living as a writer, this is something I have to put right, and sooner rather than later.

I have two current ELT writing projects – and another one on the back burner – and I’m trying to meet a deadline on one of them before I head off to Prince Edward Island, Canada on 10th August.

Once I’m ensconced on the north shore of the island, blogs will come pouring out. 

In the meantime, here’s a photo taken during one of my conference visits earlier this year. Can anyone identify the location? And when you’ve done that, how many ELT international conference-hoppers (ie people NOT from the country where the picture was taken) can you identify?

The usual prize of dinner when you’re passing through London to the most original answers!

Where is it? And who are all the people?

The Language Teacher Interview

by Steve Cornwell

SC: Ken, we are thrilled to have you come back to JALT this year! And to speak on the topic of motivation, (Note: Ken will be speaking on Motivating the unmotivated – do teachers have to do ALL the work? at the conference.) As many of our members know, you have had a busy career as a performer, director, author, teacher trainer, plenary/keynote speaker, and much more. You have had a busy travel schedule this year. I know you have been to Turkey, China, not to mention IATEFL UK. Where will you be conducting workshops/speaking between now (July) and the conference? And what are you working on currently as far as material goes?

KW: Since the start of the year, my itinerary has taken in a week of training in Belgrade, Serbia, a British Council roadshow in China (subject: Motivating Young Learners), talks at two conferences in Istanbul Turkey and another one at IATEFL UK in Brighton, which I had to leave early in order to do an author visit to Taiwan. My wife Dede and I also managed a two-week vacation in Cuba in January.

In July, I’ll be in Brazil, then in August I’ll take a short break on Prince Edward Island, Canada (where Dede’s family live). In September, I’ll be at the ETAS conference in Zug, Switzerland and in October, I’ll be in Mexico for MexTESOL. Finally, before I come to JALT in November, I’ll be doing some work in Korea for Oxford University Press.

To be honest, I sometimes worry about the amount of flying that I do for work–my family and I are trying to reduce our collective carbon footprint and we’re doing OK at home–but all this flying puts me up there with the worst offenders.

Having said that, I realize how incredibly lucky I am to get these opportunities, and I really enjoy speaking to teachers all over the world. It’s the conversations with people that I meet at conferences that give me a lot of my research information about what’s going on in classrooms and how to make the materials I write provide what teachers and students need in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Regarding what I’m working on now, my writing partner Mary Tomalin and I are coming to the end of a series of elementary-level books for Indonesian schools. The project has taken us three years so far and we’re currently writing Level 6, the last level.

It’s going to be published by an Indonesian publisher called Dass Sebastian, a Malaysian, who publishes school books in Indonesia and Australia. What attracted us to the idea was Dass Sebastian’s integrity as a publisher and his great track record of locally-produced materials.

But the real plus was his enormous enthusiasm for this work and the vision of the project he had in mind. Dass wanted to produce a series of books locally in Jakarta, with western writers who had an understanding of local conditions, which he described to us in clear detail before we started.

I’m very interested in producing materials which are relevant to local needs, rather than ones which merely follow a series of international norms. Although my book Smart Choice is sold in other countries as well as in Japan, it was the Japanese college freshman compulsory year of English requirement that gave us our student model when we were writing it.

SC: Your plenary topic Motivating the Unmotivated is one that will be of great interest to those of us teaching in Japan. At my school in meetings sometimes people say, “we need to motivate the students more!” But, I wonder how much we can really do (or can we really do anything?) Without giving away your entire plenary, can you give us your thoughts on this? Or tell us what we might be thinking about in the months building up to your plenary?

KW: I think the key is that you can’t separate student motivation and teacher motivation and you won’t get one without the other. Motivated teachers exhibit enthusiasm for their work, and research by, amongst others, Zoltán Dörnyei, a Hungarian Professor of Psycholinguistics who works at the University of Nottingham in the UK, suggests that teacher enthusiasm is the single biggest factor in student motivation.

But telling teachers that their enthusiasm could be the difference between success and failure in their students just heaps more stuff onto the shoulders of people who are already overworked and stressed out.

My solution is that our students have to take more responsibility for their own learning, but again, we can’t achieve this just by shouting, “Will you please DO something?” at them. We need to use classroom activities and techniques which bring out their latent skills, and which also give them more responsibility for what goes on in the classroom.

By giving students more responsibility for classroom events, you create a sense of purpose, engagement, and motivation. It’s important that they can, if they wish, also contribute their world knowledge to the proceedings. There are lots of ways they can do this, and I will describe some of them in my talk.

It is also healthy to occasionally reduce your reliance on the books and other prepared materials that you bring into the classroom. Your students need the chance to see beyond the contents of the book – or at least find their own personal take on those contents. In other words, don’t let the book dictate everything that happens in the classroom.

Scott Thornbury advocates less reliance on using materials in class, and I have some sympathy for what he says. His dogme approach to teaching is designed to allow language to ‘emerge’ from the natural exchanges you have with your students, and should relate to whatever is going on in their lives or what they are thinking about at any given time.

But at the end of the day, most teachers would be at a loss how to conduct an entire course based on starting the day desperately hoping for emergent language from their students. Imagine trying to do that on a slow Monday morning! And it is simply impractical to imagine doing this with beginners or elementary students.

However, at the same time, teachers should ‘allow the class to breathe’, with student input impacting on what goes in the classroom. This approach reduces reliance on the book itself and can lead to some amazingly inventive stuff happening in the classroom.

All this should also lead to a positive and fulfilling atmosphere in the classroom, which makes teaching a more pleasant occupation. So, if you show a little enthusiasm, you get it back in bucket loads.

I will give examples of what I mean in my talk!

SC: In an email you mentioned you know Nicky Hockly who was one of our plenary speakers at JALT2010. Nicky has shared with us how early in her career she just did not use technology; now she is one of the leading proponents of using technology to teach English! And she has a blog, which is what I want to ask you about. What led you to keep a blog and how do you feel it has changed your work? Also, if readers want to keep up with you and your travels, how can they do so?

KW: My original idea was to have a website where I could make available for free some of the sketch and song material that I have produced over the years, which is now out of print. I have been a published author since I was 23 – a very long time ago! – so it’s no surprise that some of the stuff has long been out of print.

My first publication was a collection of teaching songs called Mister Monday, which was a somewhat surprising success. In all, I’ve written about 150 songs with some kind of language teaching purpose. In the early days, they were grammar-oriented or lexis-oriented, and some were written simply with the intention of getting a conversation started.

Photo of me at the time I was writing the songs for Mister Monday

Anyway, the point was that I wanted to put the audio files of the songs on some kind of site where teachers could download them for free. I also wanted to upload some of the sketches (skits) I wrote for the English Teaching Theatre, also to be downloadable for free.

I asked my daughter Rowan, who was working in publishing at the time, to help me set something up, and she suggested a blog rather than a website. This was the summer of 2009. I was already on Twitter by this time, so I tweeted something like – ‘I’m thinking of starting a blog – does anyone think this is a good idea?’

Within about half an hour, I’d had about twenty replies, basically saying, “Go for it!”

So I started blogging about my own personal journey through the world of ELT, and lo and behold–I was suddenly getting between 500 and 1,000 hits a day! I found a free way to make the songs and sketches available for download via box.net, and that worked out well, too.

I then started reading blogs by other people and I found some amazing ones, often written by non-NEST teachers of English in various parts of the world. I was really surprised that some of these perceptive thinkers only seemed to get a handful of visits. So I began to ask the bloggers if they would like to guest blog for me. And the guest blogs are quite an important feature now.

Most of my guest bloggers (GBs) are non-NESTs. This wasn’t a plan or a policy, it just happened. The first GB was Agata Zgarda, a Polish teacher in Brazil, who wrote a very funny piece about how complicated it is for a European to host a dinner party for Brazilians. That was

in December 2009. Almost exactly a year later, GB number 25 was another Polish teacher, Ania Musielak, who wrote about using drama techniques to teach English to Polish soldiers.

During 2010, there were also posts by another two Poles, two Romanians, two Brazilians, a Turk, two Hungarians, a Slovak, an Argentinian, and a Sri Lankan. The native speaker GBs were an American in Paris, a Mexican-American in Germany, a Greek-Canadian in Switzerland, a South African in Korea, and six Brits, including an English guy in Romania, a Welsh woman in Vietnam, and an English woman in Japan (Joanne Sato). And I’ve published a lot more GBs in 2011, too.

Regarding my whereabouts at any particular time, there’s a page on the blog devoted to that. It’s called Talks and Visits 2011.

SC: You mentioned the songs you have written. Can we go back there for a moment? Do you actually think specially-written song material is useful for learners? Aren’t authentic songs better?

KW: Native-speaker teachers are often quite dismissive about specially-written ELT songs, but a lot of non-NESTs love them. I’ve had emails from non-NEST teachers who remember THEIR English teachers using the songs in class, which shows how long some of them have been around. I even got an email recently from a teacher in Brazil who said that her mother, also an English teacher, had played them to her as a child, and she wondered if they were still available.

I completely understand NESTs who prefer to use authentic songs with their students. And, if you can find a way to use them with beginners, so much the better. But the reason I started writing them all those years ago was that I had a class of beginners for the first time and I really wanted to use songs in class, but I couldn’t find any that they could understand.

SC: Early in your career you were heavily involved in the performing arts. You have written English lessons/materials for television and radio, you were the director of the English Teaching Theatre that performed around the world. And you’ve already talked about the songs you have composed and recorded for English Language Teaching. (Can we interest you in a visit to sing karaoke while you are here in Japan?)

Seriously, I have met many teachers who have a background in the performing arts. What is it that draws people from drama into teaching ESL/EFL? And what is it about drama and song that appeals to many learners around the world?

KW: That’s a very good question and one that I have to be a bit careful about answering. You often hear people say things like, ‘A good teacher is like an actor’ or other claims that suggest all teachers should have acting skills.

My personal take is that acting skills are quite useful to teachers, but so are drawing skills, mime skills, and the ability to sing. Being good at mental arithmetic is useful, too. But none of these skills are essential in teaching. You can be a good teacher even if you can’t do any of these things.

I only make this point to make sure I’m NEVER quoted as saying that teachers should always be actors.

But you’re right. You do meet a lot of people with some kind of background in theater who are now working as teachers. I’ve worked with lots of professional actors and I think they are amazing people, who work very hard at an interesting but desperately unstable job. I guess teaching is a more stable and long-term prospect for some of them.

My own personal journey into theatre was completely accidental. Because of my presumed expertise as a guitarist, based on the fact I’d written and recorded the songs, I was asked to join the English Teaching Theatre as a teacher- guitarist. I picked up any acting skills I have from the actors I worked with. And I stayed long enough to float to the top and become the director of the company.

As to why drama and music appeal to students, I think the answer is something to do with the classroom need of most learners to take a break, change focus, and not be so tied down to sitting at desks and using books. There are some students who prefer to do just that–spend the whole lesson at their desk, working through the book. They see drama, music or any other ‘fun’ activities as a waste of time. Some teachers agree with them. I think students like this are in a minority and I hope teachers like this are, too!

I love karaoke, so I’ll take your invitation seriously.

SC: Our field seems to be changing rapidly. What advice would you give to teachers just starting off? And while you are offering advice, what would you suggest that old, or should I say experienced teachers, think about to keep their teaching current and fresh?

KW: I think the answer is the same for both – embrace the great things that technology has to offer. Young teachers will know the technology and just have to work out how to make it help them with their teaching. More experienced teachers may be alarmed by it (many are not, of course), but I recommend that they just dip their toe in and see how the water is.

Just taking your computer into the classroom and using it to project images onto the screen is a huge time-saver when it comes to preparing lessons. From there, I suggest checking out what iTools and Learning Management Systems are available to supplement the course material you’re using. Once you understand how to use them, they will make your life easier.

It’s funny when teachers say they are no good at technology. These same people have a computer, a smart phone, they routinely use social media sites and if you suggested they should try to do without email or Google for a day, they would look at you as if you were mad. No good at technology? Most teachers use more powerful technology every day than the guys who went to the moon in the 1960s.

I describe myself as a techno-klutz, even though I blog, tweet, have a Facebook account, and use Skype and other social media services. And I would be lost without my Macbook Pro, my iPhone, and my iPod. I don’t have an iPad yet, only because I can’t justify the expense of some- thing that I probably wouldn’t use for work.

But when I see all the cool things you can do with technology, I really wish I was starting out as a new teacher.

SC: Here in Japan it is approaching the end of the semester. Any advice to our readers on how we might spice up our classes on Monday?

KW: Having eulogized the use of technology in the last answer, I will now risk sounding like an advocate of dogme. If it’s the end of term, and all thoughts of exams, end of term assessments, etc. are over, I would recommend concentrating on what the dogmetists call emergent language. In other words, go into class expecting the students to be the driving force of what happens.

It can be difficult to do this without looking as if you haven’t prepared for class, so the way to do this (if your students aren’t used to this approach) is to come into class with a clear and visible lesson plan, but tell the students that you can go for the planned lesson, or do something unplanned and improvised.

The key is NOT to then ask students to tell you something obvious, like what they did last night. You need something different and thought- provoking to create an atmosphere.

I recently took a class of students I didn’t know. I knew that I would only have about 20 minutes with them, and I also knew that they knew each other very well. I didn’t want to spend the whole time finding out their names, so I started the class by putting this image on the screen.

Rather than ask them the obvious questions like ‘What do you think he might be looking at?’ (the kind of complex question that students of any level find really complicated!), I simply asked them to put themselves into the man’s position and write down how they felt, what was happening, etc.

They then shared their written thoughts with other members of the class. Eventually, we talked about fear, its causes, its effects, and how to deal with it. I didn’t teach any new words at all, but I provided new contexts for the words they had come up with.

Just one idea for using emergent language.

SC: Ken, thank you for taking time to answer my questions and share some thoughts with our readers. We look forward to continuing this conversation at JALT2011 in November!

You can see the original interview here – http://t.co/PfGRDEv

… and you can find out more about the JALT conference here – http://jalt.org/conference