I've been fortunate enough to spend some time corresponding with the editor of one of the world's biggest TEFL websites and explained to him what we do and why we do it.

In light of our great review on TEFL.net I thought I would share some more details about our vision and struggle with you.

I've been sitting on this for sometime and figure that nothing is going to change unless it comes out into the open.  At a time of national mourning about MPs fiddling their expenses and the realisation that our most trusted public servants are self-serving, bent and on the take I thought it appropriate to cast some light on another part-publicly funded body that appears to be firmly 'in-bed' with big business and be doing a grave disservice to democracy and equality in the UK ELT sector. Bet you can't guess who it is?

Needless to say, my suggestion below that they promote our materials was not accepted after being discussed by a committee of unnamed people, a committee that by the organisation's own admission (see below) has a deal with the 'big four' publishers to promote their stuff free of charge on their ELT websites. This website is part-funded by public money and owned by an organisation with an equal opportunities policy that states,

"We reject unjustified discrimination and are committed to ensuring policies, strategies and processes that promote equality of opportunity are in place.  We are also committed to removing barriers to redressing imbalances".  

...and has a published list of its values,

Email conversation with editor of major English learning website who says he is a language learner but uses sites like mylanguageexchange.com and not language schools.

IMPORTANT: This is a totally unrelated image and was not created or published by the above organisation or myself, I found it on Google Images, it relates to another organisation but I thought it looked nice and could be instructive in some way, shape or form;

Editor: Hi again Jason
 
Thanks for all your ideas. I can well imagine how tough it is as a small company in your situation…

 J: I've been doing Out There for eight years now and it has been tough as...but what keeps me going is the feedback from the students and teachers who do it, and the research I do into SLA - I saw your tweet about your 'silent period' in Portuguese...I have a bit of an email friendship with old Prof Krashen and we discuss stuff all the time, he's a big advocate of reading and silence until ready to talk and introduced me to a program in Bangkok that is completely different to any other language course but gets amazing results.  I think, and he agrees with me, that there does need to be a silent period and lots of comprehensible input (as he would call it) and you should never force learners to speak, but once they get the urge they need structure and support, and that's what we try to do with the materials and in the way we teach.  Read Steve Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought, where he increasingly goes down the line of metaphor adding a whole new uncharted level of meaning to the acquisition of language, fascinating.

Editor: I like the suggestion of hosting some of your plans with a related article, though as I mentioned in the other mail it's a fairly complex process. It's complicated because we have a lot of requests to put materials/links on our site. We have agreements with the big 4 UK publishers which will be reviewed this year (hence their current coverage, which you noticed) and we have the monthly meetings I mentioned to consider other potential partners.
 

J: Good, I'd 'be more than happy to oblige with some plans.  I'm sure you do get a load of requests...must be inundated.  Saying 'sorry' can be a bit soul destroying if done all the time.  Do the big 4 pay you/support the overheads?  Seems to me, more and more, that the world of EL learners want to speak and practice and a lot of the big 4's stuff is same old same old.  They are shy of doing new stuff as many contacts of mine who are authors will bear witness, as projects and proposals get the nod then get shelved when the 'sales' people in territory say 'no thanks' as they would rather sell stuff that is easy to explain (i.e. sell).  Bit like the tail wagging the dog really and not a system that supports the development of the global population of teachers and learners, though most will not have been introduced to anything else because of the usual exposure/marketing budget issues.

Editor: As for language exchange… we're currently re-designing our xxxxxx English site and it may well be something which gets covered there eventually. I don't think they'll be looking to hook people up on the site though.
 

J: Good.  I guess it all depends on whether the XXXXXXX want to keep people on their sites so they can be chuffed with the stats (and promotional clout for those with products/brands on there) or whether they will provide the information and links to new and exciting stuff on other sites that are moving things forward, everyone knows big corps are **ap at innovation, they love the word itself and being associated with the concept, but they are politically and managerially incapable of actually doing it most of the time...

Editor: My language learning experiences are probably as complex as anybody else's, and mylanguageexhange has only played a bit-part role in that complexity, albeit I've preferred it to schools in the last 3 or 4 years. There are so many issues involved in language learning, I wish I had the time to go into a bit of detail here! It's probably enough to say for now that I like your approach and wish you luck with it.

J: Thanks a lot!  True, many many issues. Everyone, at a micro level, is different, we all have our own systems, learning styles etc. Language is part of everyone, we've all learnt at least one language and that can contain the seeds of knowledge for how we learn another. The program in Bangkok I mentioned (http://www.algworld.com/programs.php - I have no connection, nor does Krashen but i have recorded an interview with an English bloke who learned fluent Thai in under two years and will publish it soon on my site)  asks people to effectively regress (without hypnosis, don't worry!), throw off the self-referential image and appearance concerns and relax and not worry, just listen and try to understand the meanings.  If the meanings are vivid and interesting enough they stick. Pinker's metaphor stuff is amazing because as he explains it you realise that a lot of language we know and use in our first language is rooted in a deeper understanding of the complex situational and physical meanings of words and phrases that, to a non-native speaker, are easily misunderstood or seem to have the same meanings.  The connection between tangible or physical experience of the language in a memorable way and deeper learning or acquisition is really beginning to take shape I think.  That's why the academic director of a global chain of schools told someone I know who worked there in confidence that he was always embarrased come certificate time, as those who had studiously attended every classroom based lesson of their super intensive course were much less able to communicate effectively than the ones who had done a less intensive course and some work experience.  That must be one major reason why work experience took off. The learners realised it worked much better.  The key word being 'experience'.  Our stuff makes every lesson an experience based around the language studied but publishing, being what it is at its core, about selling paper and being run by businessmen who pay academics and commission them to give them their legitimacy and some cash to live on, is not terribly interested in promoting something that takes the learner out of the space they control, the classroom, even if it doesn't actually work as well as other techniques.  Oh god, I've done it again, bored for England and St George..sorry, you seem like a really nice switched on bloke with the best of intentions and here I am giving you a lecture.... :-)  I don't expect things to change much soon, but I think it is coming, like it has for the music biz, and the tools and the technology to inform are getting much more powerful, as you know.
 

Editor: Will be in touch with any news from the meeting in Feb.
 

J: Hope it goes well, give everyone my love and respect! Looking forward to hearing from you.
 
All the best
 
Jason

Excerpts of my further email comments: The vendor economics of teaching using our materials are explained to my editor friend below.

Potted history of what I do: since 2001 I have been teaching people English by teaching them some language and then taking them out of the classroom to use that language as soon as possible with strangers in interesting and contextually relevant locations. Over the last seven years we have taught the same short courses over and over again, honing and editing with numerous different teachers. We then set out to publish our materials and employed some experienced professional TEFL writers under the wing of Tim Bowen who is a well known author, teacher trainer and examiner.  The result (after a couple of false starts with corporate partners, lots of time, money and effort) is a four week course at six different levels with detailed ready to teach lesson plans and attached student worksheets.

Our 'crime': To approach the teaching of language from a more constructivist and psycholinguistic perspective than current published offerings, in so far as with every lesson we seek to help each individual learner to construct their own multi-sensory and meaningfully successful interaction in the real world with the target language. In other words we are in the business of helping people to store and recall information and sounds (i.e. language) more efficiently through the use of natural logical processes that are what some people would refer to as 'brain-friendly'.

Some revelations: Our lesson plans for teachers were originally only meant to be used in English speaking countries because to do the real practice element you had to leave the classroom and go and speak to some strangers (don't worry about that bit by the way, there are some magic words that help the interaction flow). However, because of our intended goals and the use of the real world we had to look at how we could exercise control over the learners' experiences and keep up the quality and relevancy of them to the tasks and language.  This meant we had to plan from a different perspective than normal.  The result is that because our lesson plans are all based around controlling dialogue that contains the target language, they are ideal for use in online language exchange which is a massive and growing area of the online language learning world.  For example, www.mylanguageexchange.com claims to have 1m users.  www.italki.com has 400,000 users.  Most of them are people looking for free or inexpensive language exchange with fluent or native speakers. 

What our lesson plans do, that no others we have found, or the people at some of the top online language learning websites have found either, is effectively ice-break the conversations between learner and partner and provide a pre-taught focus to the conversation that requires use of the just studied target language and when understood by the partner, a feeling of success which motivates the learner and boosts their confidence.  There's a lot more going on than that but I think I have biffed on long enough here, you've probably lost the will to live by now....

Anyway, our materials are now on our new website for paid for download (fifty quid per annum for over 600 hours, so about 20p each).  We are a publisher of a different kind, purely electronic.  We would love to give them away as most people do with lesson plans online but we need to make some money and we think ours are a bit special and better than most web based stuff out there and unique in the pedagogic sense.

Teachers around the world can use them in these various ways:

1. In English speaking countries - as we do, teach in a quiet place (not necessarily a classroom) and then go out there with their students and monitor their interactions before the feedback and consolidation session at the end.

2. In non-English speaking countries - teach the first half in the classroom and give the task as homework to be done on a school PC with VoIP, a home PC or in an Internet cafe.  Students record their conversations and send the best one to their teacher by email for assessment. The next class can involve listening to various students conversations and going over new vocab, what went right, what went wrong and general learning consolidation. They could use the materials and do the speaking task amongst the class but that would remove a lot of the point in doing it with non-classmates.

3. One to one or group teaching online in virtual learning spaces/classrooms - We have a set of self-study lesson plans, the lowest levels have their instructions translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish, students can print them, do the exercises and then go online to their favourite language exchange website for the practice task.

Right, better stop now or your colleagues won't be able to find a pulse.

I'm totally open to any suggestions you might have about how we can raise awareness, provide samples and even distribute the materials to teachers around the world.  I really do want as many teachers as possible to have access to them. An experienced Canadian teacher once told me I had to find a way to get the course out to more teachers as he said it was 'the most powerful progam' he had ever taught. But as I said, I can't give them away.

It is great that you yourself use mylanguageexchange.  I think we must be the only company (or one of just a very few) that has created some materials specifically with online language exchange in mind. What are the good and bad things you've experienced using mylanguageexchange?  I just searched your site for 'language exchange' and nothing came up, so maybe there's a new category idea there?

This 'free' thing keeps coming up all of the time :-)  The thing is we have one innovative product and are very small but the big publishers who put free stuff online use it to grab attention for their brand and the books, materials etc. that they sell (see http://www.8888888888888888888888888.com) the free plan even says at the top that it is designed to get students to read the book, is the book free?  Maybe not.)  So, they can afford to give some stuff away as a 'loss-leader'. 

It makes it very tough for small innovative companies to earn a living because the consumers (teachers) are into 'free' and think they will get what they need for free if they wait or scour the web long enough. 

Enough of my moaning!

An idea/suggestion:  How about if you host/publish some free sample lesson plans of ours with a piece about language exchange online (its size, growth, attractions, effectiveness etc.)? As you know, anyone anywhere can access mylanguageexchange from an internet cafe for just the cost of the time online.  In Kampala it costs a dollar an hour, in Ho Chi Minh about 50 cents an hour. Internet cafes, with the right materials that enable the students to get the most out of their time online, can become the highly effective language labs of the 21st century and a lot more learners who have had no access to real practice will be able to, they just need to know where to go and what to do.

If a teacher/school/library bought access to our materials they could use them with all of their students, give them printouts or copies, teach the first part of the lesson in class with the worksheets and then let the students do the real practice using mylanguageexchange.com.

An English centre with 200 students, by giving them the right information and buying  membership to our site, will be able to use as many lesson plans as they like with impunity. 

So a £48 annual subscription with the amount of our materials online at the moment, means each plan costs £0.20p to download.  If they download it and print it they can copy it as much as they like.  So a plan in total would cost approx. £0.20 + £0.50 (to print) + £0.05 to copy per student, so for 200 students to use one of our plans it would cost a centre or teacher £10.70 a year. 

Then they could go online and do the real practice with fluent or native speakers for £0.55 per hour (the mean of the Kampala and Ho Chi Minh internet cafe prices).  Most focused practice in our plans lasts about 20-30 minutes, so the cost would be about £0.18-0.30 per session. Or they could use the centre/university/college computers if they had some available and that could be free/included.

To finish the maths - £10.70 + 200 x £0.55 = £120.70 or just £0.60 per student to use each lesson plan and for which they get focused self-study or teaching of new language followed by real practice with fluent and native speakers and some feedback/recordings they can listen to or email in as homework.  It works out at just £0.20 per hour (excluding teaching costs) and think how many students would grow in confidence and become more motivated students if they actually got to talk to some fluent and native speakers in a focused way and made friends with their regular practice partners.

The BC in India are trying to train 750,000 new teachers over the next five years (I learned at the Dialogue 2 conference) and many of those teachers can't speak English very well and just teach to the tests.  Maybe we can help them?

Nothing ever came of any of this...naturally.

Cheers

Jason