Interview- Jason West Dishes on Guardian Languages and Sets the TEFL World to Rights!

It's a great interview, stimulating, controversial, and full of TEFL insider tidbits. So many ideas did the CEO of English Out There have, in fact, that it takes a good 10 minutes to read. Please feel free to leave questions and comments even if you don't make it to the bottom (even though I highly recommend that you do)!

"Background
I started my first language business, Leicester Square School of English, in 1992 in one room in Wardour St, and the phone box in Gerrard St (Chinatown) was my first business phone. I had done a one week introduction to TEFL at the YWCA in Great Russell St, London. but don't hold any recognised TEFL qualification. Initially my business partner and I did all of the teaching, but then thought we'd better get some proper teachers in and hired a couple. After just over two years we had the whole building (and then the one next door) and were accredited by the British Council. My partner and I fell out and he bought me out in 2000. I then did some consultancy work for the British Council, who asked me to suggest how they could improve the profile of the accreditation scheme and increase the number of students coming to UK to study English. I set up English Out There in 2001 to try and create a better short study abroad course, which Linguaphone invested in and became Languages Out There when we started licensing other schools to use our name and ideas for teaching. We ran out of cash to sustain the growth of the licensing operation and Linguaphone were in financial trouble so I put the company into administration and bought the intellectual property from the administrator with the help of new investors. Then we met the Guardian and decided publishing online, rather than licensing, would be more interesting a get the message to more people...

Can you give us an incredibly short mini TEFL biog?

Guardian TEFL and you
Guardian Languages involved a) the sale of our teaching and learning materials and b) had a customised VoIP client (online phone system, like Skype) attached to it, learners could call fluent and native speakers of English to practise their English speaking and listening skills immediately after they had used our lesson plans which all lead up to a conversation using the target language. Users could also register as teachers and charge what they liked for their time for online teaching. We always tried to clearly differentiate between ‘practice' (i.e. having a chat with someone who has no prior knowledge of what the conversation will be about) and ‘teaching' (i.e. structured teaching provided by someone with some experience and qualifications, which we checked with two references).

We came across each other for what I imagine was the first time connected to an online English learning scheme that you organised in conjunction with The Guardian. Can you use the same skills of brevity to tell us how the system worked?

Can you give us some stats- how long it ran, members of staff involved, number of users, average income for teachers, usual qualifications of the teachers who were involved, how many hours and weeks people were usually involved, etc?
I probably still have a duty of confidentiality to the Guardian despite the site being taken down and without running the questions past them (it could take a while to get the answers okayed) I will have to apply the same level of brevity you asked for in the previous questions. It ran from November 2007 to September 2008. The people involved were myself and my colleague Jon from LOT, a small team at Guardian Professional (commercial arm of the Guardian News and Media) and a small team at the VoIP client providing company. About twelve in all but most of them had other things to do too. I think we got to almost one thousand users who wished to provide paid for practice for learners, most of them were teachers of varying degrees of experience and qualifications. We had some DELTAs, a lot of CELTAs, Trinity Certs and some not so well-known certificates. The age range was interesting in that it was split between newly qualified teachers and retirees, so the so-called ‘silver surfers' were out in force. The activity of those providing practice and teaching was fairly low as our main problem was recruiting learners (due to our mistakes), not practice partners and teachers, we had plenty of them. The people who got going with a partner managed on average about 4 hours per week of talk time, maybe a little more.

How did that joint venture come about? Did you approach The Guardian or did they approach you, etc?
We did some fun ‘survival' Spanish and German Out There for the Guardian's online travel section and the education editor at the time suggested we might like to talk to them about publishing our ELT materials online with them.

How was it different from things you had been doing before? How much input did the Guardian have in what went on?
It wasn't too different really. We had created and been using our ELT materials for a few years before then. We just hadn't published them professionally and put them online or out in print. I became interested in Skype as a tool for practising language skills online and then wanted to have my own Skype to play with. I found the software company with the VoIP system and asked them if they could make some important changes for me, they said ‘ok'. And as the publishing thing with the Guardian was taking root I introduced the two to each other. The site's concept and creation was a joint effort and we listened to the technical guys as they had the expertise in that area much more than we did.

In an email to me you made some statements suggesting that you see this kind of system as being a positive thing for teachers. Can you explain the thinking behind that?
Yes, I did. I think that education and language teaching is and will increasingly go online as bandwidth and processor speeds increase dramatically. I think it will be positive for teachers because it could offer them an alternative or second source of income whether through teaching online using free virtual classrooms or recruiting students and scheduling their own classes in free public spaces using sites like Meetup.com. It is also my hunch that because the teachers will always have the closest contact with the learners that when someone finally creates the online tools for teachers to become partly or fully self-employed in a sustainable and easy way they will leap at the chance. This is what we saw with Guardian Languages even though it failed, we had no shortage of qualified teachers willing to give it a go.

A lot of the negative coverage of the scheme came through the low hourly wage teachers could be paid. Any comments on that?
Teachers could charge what they liked and most opted to charge around £12 per hour. The users we called ‘practice partners' charged just over minimum wage for having a chat and answering some questions that the learners had pre-prepared from their use of our lesson plans. The practice partners were effectively just doing the same thing that we normally get for free on the streets of London and everyone, teachers and non-teaching practice partners seemed to understand the difference and had no issue with it. In fact, I think the negative coverage only served to prove the ‘no such thing as bad publicity...' concept. We even had one guy who contacted us and specifically mentioned the re-cycled article in Private Eye which was even further from the truth!

Can you tell me some positive and negative feedback you had from the teachers and students who got involved?
The positives were that learners and English speakers and English teachers could all make safe and unlimited contact and get what they wanted from it, in other words, focused use of target language. At the same time, it was relatively inexpensive for the learners and the practice partners and teachers got remunerated at the appropriate level. We didn't really get any negative feedback, honestly, it did what it said it did. There were a couple of technical difficulties at the start, for example users not being able to download sample lesson plans but all in all very few and none of any major consequence to the project's success or failure.

Did you ever try teaching through that system or similar ones yourself? How was the experience?
I personally tested the system many times with learners around the world, as did my colleagues. We tested it on the basis of learners using our materials and then calling us for a practice session. I also, a couple of times did what I would call ‘teach' and introduced other material to the session by way of further explanation, such as a URL I thought could help and it worked fine. If you are any good at talking to people on the phone, making allowance for the lack of visual communication (we had live video coming when we stopped), then it is not difficult to teach this way. It has been done for years in various formats using landlines. Our system was better than a landline because the calls could easily be recorded and stored on the user's PC and we could spell words with the chat box and insert links to URLs. But the main thing was that our materials helped to focus the practice of the learner and gave them some language that they wanted to feel more confident using. It was very sadly misreported that teachers had to buy our materials to use the VoIP system and get paid. They could use anything they liked by way of materials. We came to think that VoIP was a good way to take our materials online because our materials are all designed to lead up to a conversation, they fit VoIP/Skype and sites like www.mylanguageexchange.com and www.myngle.com really well. Myngle have tested our lesson plans with some teachers on their site and want to use them. They realised after a while that having a funky virtual classroom is fine, but if there is no sensible structure that fits the medium then teachers can find it tricky. They looked around and spoke to some publishers, but nothing ‘fitted' like our lesson plans.

Do you think there is any chance that that and similar schemes could have been good for some individual teachers but had the opposite result of bringing down wages, minimum standards, job security etc even further for teachers as a whole?
I think developments online will present the opportunity for teacher emancipation.

There is what I call a ‘land-grab' currently going on in terms of online teaching and learning spaces. You've got www.wiziq.com with a free to use virtual classroom for teachers to use, www.twiddla.com which is a free web conferencing tool that you can use to teach and a lot of other websites and virtual classrooms springing up. A lot of money is going into the virtual learning space race!

Every single one has no trouble recruiting teachers with what you and I would call proper qualifications. The one that gets the ‘Google Position' will offer teachers the opportunity to run their own profitable teaching businesses online and effortlessly connect them with paying learners. It hasn't happened yet but it soon will; I'm certain. Once it does there will be a full-blown market and then the market will set the price.

Live ratings for teachers from the students in their classes plus video recordings of online classes will showcase the teachers and graphically illustrate their abilities. Those whose classes are permanently full will be able to charge more, those whose aren't will be a bit cheaper. Or teachers will be able to set rates according to the learners global location/economic situation and maybe even sell ‘seats' based upon nationality/first language to get a good mix and create diverse and vibrant classroom dynamics.

I think that teachers will increasingly become self-employed both on and offline, the online helping to recruit, schedule and organise offline sessions. For example, visit www.meetup.com where meetings of any sort are easily organised anywhere i.e. free public spaces, halls, bars, parks, etc. and can be paid for by participants up-front online. Think about this...if a teacher uses a site like meetup.com to schedule an English class in the café of the British Museum (free to enter, warm, comfortable and fairly quiet) and takes worksheets and a disposable whiteboard with them (visit www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk ) they will have eradicated one of the two biggest overheads for a language school, premises. Anything they charge will go straight to them.

Yes, teachers have always done private one-to-one and small groups and even pinched students from their employers in violation of their employment contracts, but what they haven't had is a cheap and effective set of tools to organise, promote and run their service. That is changing fast.

As broadband penetration rises globally more teachers will earn money online and have the opportunity to teach without being hindered by geographic location. For example, currently there is a lack of good English teachers in India, (I spoke at the British Council's Dialogue-2 conference in November and the Indian local government officials and business owners were screaming for help and the Council are going to try and train 750,000 teachers in 5 years). As more Indians get online and can afford it, they will seek out and find teachers based in other countries via the internet. Demand will seek out supply, but they haven't been given the online platform to connect explosively, yet.

I think it is interesting that your question is couched slightly in the tone of a shop steward, understandably since I can empathise completely with teachers who get poorly paid and have crap working conditions the world over but I do think the human capital of the teacher will rise in value as we go. It will, like everything that gets touched by technological advances be based upon a growing meritocracy, again, once the platform exists that ticks all of the boxes.

What do you think The Guardian's motivations in getting involved were?
Money. It was their commercial division that we worked with. And they thought what we had created had considerable merit.

How and why did the collaboration end?
We had a few very long discussions and decided to let it lie. Like any innovative project it was risky, both financially and for our reputation. We did some things that, in hindsight, could have been done better, like not translating the site from day one to enable learners to actually understand it (I know, it seems pretty obvious doesn't it!) or to write a clearer marketing plan with much more clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and budgets. We learnt a lot J

What do you think about the Guardian's involvement with TEFL generally, e.g. most of its articles being rehashed PR releases or written by people who work for big TEFL course providers despite the cash they get for the job ads section etc? What do you think the reasons behind their lack of real journalism in this area is- lack of stories of general interest in the area of TEFL, lack of staff, lack of money, and/ or fear of being sued?
I have read your blog and I wanted to see if you had a run at the Guardian TEFL section before answering this question. You do have a pop, but you also put them in your top 10 sites to visit!

I met with the TEFL guys at the Guardian. I don't think it was a meeting of like minds, shall we say, they looked pretty miffed with what we told them we were going to do and after that I had very little to do with them. I thought it interesting that just before we launched Guardian Languages, and after I had met them, they launched some free classroom worksheets. I'm sure it was merely coincidence but I did find myself wondering what the hell was going on.

There is one guy doing TEFL for the whole of the Guardian and he is part-time. I don't know what else he does to keep the wolf from the door, but the answer to your question about lack of staff, lack of money and PR rehashes of big TEFL course provider press releases probably pretty much answers itself. I'm not so sure about the fear of being sued you suggest. They have deep pockets and would probably consider being sued by a TEFL based organisation as a slight inconvenience, but that is just my opinion, not something I have been told.

The thing is, TEFL, ELT, EFL, ESL...call it what you will, is an enormous money maker for the big publishers, a lot of schools, the big teacher training organisations and the British Council. I think if you took the revenues from ELT out of Pearson they would probably make a loss! If we believe Mr. Graddol's stats there are upwards of 2 billion people trying to learn English at the moment. English is the language of business and social and economic advancement. It is money.

Those mentioned above have hit on a ‘formula' that extracts maximum wedge from one major sector. That of the ‘academic/applied linguistics/communicative method/accredited' section of the global market. They all work together very closely and have very closely aligned commercial interests. The Guardian have a big paper with a big education section, a big website and some highly lucrative TEFL classifieds. I can understand how you and other teachers probably align your world view with the Guardian editorially and feel a bit let down, but the economic fact of life is that anything niche is very commercially viable and requires very little investment to produce good returns. Especially when the ‘currency' is so strong and the system has been fine tuned for decades, if not centuries. Despite its size TEFL is niche and to some extent still ‘cottage' in industry terms (lots of owner operators of accredited schools make very good money, trust me, I was one).

Then there are the so called ‘schonky' operators, the ‘unqualified teachers' and the chains of schools and ‘method' schools shipping in new ‘instant' TEFL cert teachers or even just native speaker graduates who get roundly reviled for their brazen commercialism but still survive and make money all the same.

Over the last twenty years I have thought long and hard about this industry and the issues being discussed here but I won't bang on now...I am going to try and get round to putting some of what I know on my website, maybe you'd like to serialise it ...J?

The new thing
How delicately put!

Sorry, being the ultimate technology ignoramus I can't remember the name of your company and products. Please remind me and any of my readers who are similarly electronically disabled.

My company is called Languages Out There (LOT) and we teach a course called English Out There in London and have published our own tried and tested and professionally written and edited English Out There (EOT) lesson plans for members of our site to download, print and use. They are dual purpose materials and can be used for both on and offline teaching and learning.

You have fifty words to sell students and teachers on your ideas- Go!
If Alex Ferguson sent Man U into the Cup Final with no real practice you'd think he was mad.

EOT, edited by Tim Bowen, TEFL guru, has been taught for seven years and takes learners out ‘onto the pitch' to practise.

EOT saves planning time, is brain-friendly, different and effective.

(50 words exactly, m'lud)

How does what you are doing now differ from the Guardian thing and from other similar things on the market?
What we are doing now is what we did with the Guardian, publishing our teaching and learning materials online. But we don't have the VoIP system or the practice partners and teachers earning on our own branded system. Part of the break-up of the Guardian project also involved the parting of ways with the VoIP company, Voice Commerce Group, run by Nick Ogden, the guy who created WorldPay the world's first online multi-currency payment system. Again, we, or should I say ‘I' learnt a lot.

The difference now is that the lesson plans are much more affordable and the site is a lot more user friendly, in my opinion anyway.

As for the VoIP thing. Well, technology moves at such a pace now that you don't actually need your own bit of kit. I mentioned some interesting sites earlier and more will be springing up I'm sure. Our materials ‘fit' the online environment better than any other published materials; Elisa Delaini, the education manager at Myngle.com, told me that when they were looking for materials for their teachers to use in their virtual classroom. I still think what we have created is very different from virtually everything else available to teachers and learners and in some ways is a bit scary (I will explain in a later answer).

In my talk at the conference in India I tried to explain why I thought that the development of technology would take care of itself and to some extent we already had the tools to teach online fairly well but that there was something missing. What I think is missing is appropriate content i.e. materials.

To the best of my knowledge, virtually all materials that have been created for teaching English to date have been designed for use in finite spaces, i.e. classrooms. They are all about using that space as effectively as possible and work around its limitations. Our materials work as great preparation for online language exchange, one-to-one online teaching or even groups in virtual classrooms using VoIP or language exchange sites to practice because they were designed with a very different set of parameters in mind.

When you write for the classroom you are always aware of the four walls; that the teacher is in total control: that students will be practising with people they already know and feel comfy with; that they are all non-fluent or non-native speakers with different first languages who will all be making different mistakes.

When you start thinking about going outside of the classroom to get real practice with strangers and the fact that you can go anywhere, meet anyone and, in theory, anything could happen you realise that you have to approach the need for some control from a totally different perspective.

There's no point trying to control the real world, it is impossible, that's what these Korean ‘English towns' and their like are about; controlling an ‘as close to real' environment as possible. But there is a much cheaper and better way (which has some amazingly beneficial side-effects). The only thing you can control is the learner's experience of studying and using the target language, so I think you have to look at managing the core learner experience and look at the possibilities presented by infinite space, i.e. the real world and cyber space (for example Second Life or a Skype language exchange forum, they are both vast and contain the potential to communicate with complete strangers using the target language).

Is there anything similar on the market? I don't think so. I always keep my eye out and I think some of the ideas behind recent course books like Natural English, Get Real! and Inside Out are similar but stop short of what we do. More and more times I see the words ‘natural' and ‘real' being used to describe courses. I think the world of publishing is cottoning on but is still constrained by the space for which it feels it must produce materials i.e. the classroom.

Also, how many course books or lesson plans you find on the web have been taught hundreds of times before, by many different teachers, constantly tweaked and then spruced up by experienced TEFL writers and re-edited before publication? The development process for our materials really has been seven years and thousands of hours of testing with paying students. Do you know of any other materials that have been through a similar process? Our challenge now is to get teachers comfortable with the idea of using them and leaving the classroom or going online. To do that we have created detailed instructions that cover every aspect of using them and also a manual which tells them how they can plan their own Out There lessons and the thinking behind what we do.

So to summarise, what we are doing involves the same materials as the Guardian project but only our name is on them this time. The Guardian did a great job with the graphics and we use some of their articles in the plans, such as some very fruity Charlie Brooker in the advanced plans, but the ideas, methodology, writing, testing and editing is all ours.

A similar question to the one asked in the section above- do you think a scheme like that can be good for the whole profession as well as good for the people who get involved in it?
Yes I really do. I think the profession, any profession, can benefit from new ideas and ways of tackling old problems. I also think that those who get involved in Out There and teach it will realise that, with the advances in technology and sites like Meetup.com they can now branch out and promote themselves as expert teachers without having to rely on employers and organisations finding the students and providing the teaching spaces for them.

The current status quo obviously doesn't work very well for you and other commentators who have teachers' interests at heart, but no one seems willing to try and materially change things. This is not a criticism because beneficial change is a devil of a thing to achieve when the powers that be are happy to continue as they are; but would it not be better to actually start doing things that are outside of the current system than merely write about how bad it is inside the system. See, the old Marxist in me is still alive and well!

The TEFL "profession"
Ha. I looked it up and checked with my punctuation expert exactly what quotation marks mean (I tend to use them for emphasis sometimes and that's probably a big no-no in Lynne Truss's world). I also looked to see what you thought about the profession on your blog.

Do you agree with my quotation marks above?

My answer, and don't berate me for this please, is ‘yes' and ‘no'.

For example, ‘yes' - I have no professional qualifications but have founded and run an accredited school, employed people with Dips, MAs and even sacked Oxbridge graduates from teaching jobs. So I wouldn't consider myself a professional despite my years of involvement. In fact, I'm naturally a bit wary of people claiming to be professionals.

However, ‘no' - I do respect people who are involved and have a great deal more experience and knowledge than myself or simply have open and enquiring minds but, and here's the caveat, aren't institutionalised and paid up members of the system who are more interested with maintaining the status quo than actually doing anything new.

It is a strange old game isn't it. I love helping people to communicate and learn. I love people, full stop. I think most teachers I have worked with and have known have been really decent people who do what they do for admirable and humanistic reasons. They certainly don't do it for the cash or the job security.

Way back in the mid-nineties I remember the head of the British Council accreditation unit explaining to me that they wanted to try and push through a change to make it obligatory for fifty per cent of a school's teachers to have Dips. Quite admirably, they wanted to add credibility to the scheme and the UK industry as a whole, i.e. professionalise it further, but I just had a gut feeling the owners of schools wouldn't buy it. Why? Because it would have pushed up wages and INSET training budgets and directly reduced profits.

Unfortunately, I think the TEFL business is fairly soiled. People at parties in London (when I still got invited to parties) used to ask me if I owned ‘one of those schools' that handed out leaflets on Oxford Street. It was the first question, every single time. The public's impression of the industry we work in is pretty poor.

I never liked the existence of the ‘visa shops' in London and thought that paying teachers £6 an hour was a scandal, but there were and still are lots of teachers being banged out to go travelling who return and flood schools with applications. The employers can take their pick and it serves their commercial interest to keep teachers pay and conditions as they are.

Not many people know this, but a few years ago I was having a beer in a pub near Cambridge Circus in London with a journo mate called Steve Boggan. Boggs is an investigative reporter of some repute. He asked me if there were any stories in my business. I felt mischievous and a little powerful, so I told him about the ‘visa shop' story, last done by The Times in about 1994 but now out of control. So his double page spread in the London Evening Standard nailing six schools with an undercover Czech reporter hastily recruited from the journalism course at City University caused a bit of a stir, all the way to Whitehall. My good friends at English UK were understandably well chuffed and the result, which I think that piece really kicked off, is the legislation coming into place this spring in the UK where visa applications are tied to ‘sponsor' schools and to get a visa you have to apply to a properly accredited school and the Home Office have beefed up the number of officers on guard. All well and good I hear the profession say.

But I'm not so sure now. I think selling visas is dodgy and that teachers should get a better deal, for sure, but I do think that UK ELT has damaged itself by being so prescriptive about methodology in the form of the current British Council/English UK accreditation scheme.

For example, in 2004 the British Council asked me (I knew them well) if I was going to put English Out There through accreditation. I thought about it, and asked them to tell me if they thought that something that was so obviously very different from what everyone else did would be suitable for accreditation. They said it would and that they would get some very open minded inspectors. I got the two chief inspectors. They passed us on everything except teaching and learning, which you must pass to become accredited. After they had spent an hour and a half with ten randomly selected students I asked them what the students had said. They told me that the students had said they were learning a lot and that they loved the course. The inspectors told us that they felt that the students didn't actually know what it was they were experiencing and that it was the view of the inspectors that there was no learning taking place in our classes. We were all utterly gob-smacked (I kept all of my colleagues in the room for feedback). I appealed, it went to the main committee, I provided stats (how many schools keep stats on students' expectation and experience of learning? See ) but to no avail.

From a sample of 726 students 63.50% of our students gave us either 4 or 5 out of 5 for ‘learning'. And that on average, across all course lengths, 26.45% of our students gave us 5 out of 5 for ‘learning'. The inspectors gave the impression that they had been heartily slapped with wet fish when they saw how we taught, despite me having sent our manual to the accreditation unit months before for them to read. They hadn't read it and admitted as much under questioning. It was obvious they had made their minds up before they arrived.

Everyone I tell this story to who knows anything about teaching English in the UK and the people involved is not surprised. I even told the then deputy Director General of the British Council. He asked me if I had paid the inspection invoice. When I told him I hadn't he told me to ‘keep going'. I still haven't paid it and they never sued.

At the very same time we had been short-listed for a British Council innovation award (ELTON). We were the only taught course on the list. We didn't win and I knew we wouldn't before the event... because no one, not one judge, actually came to see what we did.

How are these things; the visa shop article and subsequent government clamp-down; the bizarrely prescriptive accreditation scheme inspectors and the innovation awards connected?

They are connected and directly relate to your question above because they show that there are people and organisations in our industry who tout the concept of ‘professionalism' but wouldn't know it if it kicked them in the gusset and would rather keep things just the way they are. And that includes keeping teachers earning crap wages, having no job security and teaching course books that pay the co-writers an equal share of 5% in royalties.

Just recently I have had long chats with two published and experienced educators in the TEFL industry, one a professor of education at a British university. Both have had slightly ‘different' book projects suddenly and mysteriously shelved by publishers. Why? In their words, and they were unconnected conversations, because ‘if it isn't the same old same old they won't do it'. I have since found out, and I might sound naïve here, that ELT publishers put book concepts out to their distributors and if they don't think they will sell in their market they get shelved. So it sounds like sales people, who most often like something easy to sell, pushing similar bits of paper, control the creative and pedagogic direction of our ‘profession'. The rest is just lip-stick and fancy tights.

What changes good and bad have you seen in TEFL teaching since you first got involved?
I suppose I should refer you to the answer above re: the bad. Good changes....hmmm...that's a tough one, I think we all have to take a step back and say what is it that we are trying to do. What is it that we want to be involved in so much that we will actually put up with the status quo and do we need to prop up the current regime or can we just do it for ourselves and at the same time be truer to our core motivation, which has to be to make the world a better place through communication and understanding?

Somewhere along the way the good intentions of so many people got caught up in institutionalised greed and conformity. The English language is probably one of the most emotive subjects there is. Everyone has an opinion and feels passionate about it. Unfortunately corporate money saw the opportunity and weaved its way into the fabric of the promotion and teaching of the English language. When I was paid by the British Council to research and write that report I mentioned earlier I interviewed the guy in charge of all of their teaching centres around the world. I asked him how he went about setting course prices when he opened up a new centre. ‘That's easy', he said, ‘we just find out who is the most expensive, and double it'. The idea being that the top half a percent of a country's population who wish to learn English will pay for the British Council brand and that, anyway, they are the future policy makers with whom we should be cosying up and finding expensive places at British universities for. Who was it who said the sun never set on the British Empire?

What can be done to tackle the problems we face? Will technology help or hinder that?
I think technology will help, hugely. It has already started to help. We have got a black man with a foreign sounding name about to become president of the most powerful country on the planet. Technology played a massive part in that happening, the Democrats used email and Meetup.com to set up ‘change' meetings and to get people who wanted change together face to face and then gave them the numbers of swing voters and organised ‘phone parties' where they used their mobiles to call the waverers and talk to them about change. These are people like you and me who would never normally become so active for a political cause. They did it because they had had enough and because the technology made it easier and because together they felt that they had a chance of changing the status quo.

Comparing the powers that control global TEFL to the Bush administration is going to baffle maybe even annoy a few people who read this. But the English language empowers those people who master it, it gives them a leg up in life.

What kind of example is it to studiously ignore advances in the psychology of learning? To act as if greater scientific understanding of how the memory actually works hasn't happened and to actively inhibit the creation and sale of teaching and learning materials that might use this new information and might actually improve on the current mainstream methodology? And for what? For corporate profits and the ‘good' of the nation.

What does your crystal ball tell you about the future of ELT?
My crystal ball tells me that the majority of people engaged in TEFL will one day, very soon, realise that what they currently do doesn't work as well for them as it could if only they embraced the future themselves and started taking matters into their own hands. That they will realise that they are in fact still part of an old imperial machine that almost unwittingly (because it is entrenched as the norm) exploits their boundless energy and willingness to help others less fortunate than themselves for very little financial reward. A machine that last year, by the most conservative estimate, turned over in the multiples of billions. And in 2007 earned £2,600 million of education sales that went to make up 68% of Pearson's entire turnover with their market leading international ELT share contributing handsomely and extremely profitably and also earned the British Council £202 million from their English teaching and testing operations.

What companies do you think are doing a good job being innovative with the use of technology? What about ELT publishers, TEFL training providers and chains of schools in general?
I think there are quite a few companies innovating with technology and its uses, just look at Nick Peachey's blog to find out

I've mentioned a few, the virtual classroom developers, the web based facilitators of mass movement such as Meetup and I think mobile phones as they get better video and 3G gets cheaper will come into their own as learning tools.

The publishers are beginning to get in on the act but still their websites push paper mainly and the methodologies used are not terribly innovative or intuitive. Again, no one is thinking outside of the classroom, examining the psychology of learning and creating materials for those purposes.

We seem to have got ourselves into a ‘one size fits all' situation. The publishers publish variations of the same old same old because their market tells them to do so, even if they know there are new ideas out there. The training providers have to train people to use the main corpus of materials and the methodology employed and the chain schools find it a lot more economical to buy books and employ teachers trained to use them. It means they don't have to think very much or spend much money as there is a cheap and plentiful supply of both. In my opinion this situation is perpetuating the lifetime of an out of date pedagogy...simply because it has formed, over time, a very, very virtuous circle of profit for the main players.

Another amazing thing is that national education policies also dictate what people consider to be valid as tools and means of learning. Back in the early nineties when Russian students started turning up at English schools in London the early arrivals often got a bit tetchy when the teacher asked them what they thought the right answer was. I counselled numerous students who told me that it was not for the teacher to ask the students for the answer but to tell them. In India rote learning is still everywhere, as it is in China. Whole countries still ‘teach to the test' but with language learning, where effortless empathetic communication is required for high level interaction that is a big problem. What it does, and what the teachers, administrators and businessmen told me at the conference in India, is limit the ability to have a natural conversation, i.e. fill in the gaps around the essential functional language and make it a pleasant experience that people wish to repeat.

Teaching to tests plays nicely into the hands of those controlling the industry, so the methodology ‘fits' the business model, not the other way around. Think about it. It is all connected seamlessly and very profitably. But does it help people to improve their English language skills as much as they could if they did something a bit different?

Which leads us nicely onto the old ‘learning' versus ‘acquisition' debate. Here's a question for you:

Are TEFL teachers afraid of the concept of acquisition and does it have a place in the classroom? I would also ask, can it even happen in the classroom?

In 2001, when we started seeing our EOT students improving their speaking and listening skills rapidly, much quicker than those we had taught conventionally at my first school I thought I'd try and investigate a bit. I found a book called ‘A Cognitive Approach to Language Teaching' by a Professor Peter Skehan. In it he advocates a more psycholinguistic approach to teaching i.e. feeding the brain information in a way that is much more geared to the way the memory actually stores, recalls and uses information. I emailed him and he told me that from what I had told him he thought there were very good reasons why we were getting the results we were. He told me that no one had done anything like it outside of the laboratory. In other words no materials had been published. They still haven't. That's eight years ago.

This got me thinking. I read his book from cover to cover, not easy and not many gags included. But it made perfect sense in the context of what we were seeing with our students. Since then I have continued to read about language teaching and learning and SLA in particular. I even have a very cordial and enjoyable email correspondence with Stephen Krashen, the first academic to separate the concepts of learning and acquisition.

I have lost count of the number of times that people, non-TEFL people, but multi-linguists, when I tell them what we do say ‘oh, that's how people naturally learn a language' or mention children learning languages or living in a country and having to regress and not worry about mistakes in order to practise and thus grow in confidence when using the language.

What I am trying to say, rather badly, is that people seem to know innately how they learn, pick up, acquire, call it what you will, a second language. Everyone is slightly different and will know how best they themselves learn, if they are given room and guidance on how to develop their own cognitive plan for picking up a language.

So it strikes me that we should be teaching learning strategies to language learners or at best providing them with structure and support within which their own brains can work it out for themselves and latch onto the cognitive clues that enable them as individuals to store and produce new language again, effortlessly.

If you teach a structure and some basic information, and then put it into context and make it real or ‘memorable' in as many ways as are humanly possible (distinct meanings, smells, sounds, sights, textures, tastes, and emotions all linked to the language and topic) then, potentially, you have many more ways to retrieve the information, i.e. the language and crucially its sound when it is required again in the future.

Memorable happenings are where it is at, in my opinion J But the TEFL establishment, or more accurately the market, as tested by their sales people on their behalf in overseas educational systems that are still hooked on rote learning, can't yet see the money and really probably don't want to because the people making decisions about what book is published are executives not TEFLers, whose main priority as any good business English book will tell you, is the ‘bottom line'.

If TEFL teachers are afraid that acquisition will disenfranchise them, they should fear not. There are very few materials that support acquisition because no one has invested any time or money in them. It doesn't mean they don't work and it doesn't mean that CELTA or Trinity trained teachers can't use them, they can, we have proven that with EOT. And they actually free up teachers to teach and support through the learning process, at crucial and stressful times, because the teacher becomes more like a guide during the task in the real world.

Finally, and to underline my point, the ivory towers of academe already know that memorable happenings are where it is at, they knew in August 2002, had a seminar and wrote a paper on it. Only no one really realised what they had all actually agreed upon. It makes for fascinating reading and can be found here on our website and I incorporated the juicy bits into my presentation at the conference in India

Basically, in the course of trying to describe their ideal piece of technology to help them learn a language, they described a really clever humanoid robot that walked around with them, in country, helping them to understand and practice new language. Anyone who saw Danny Wallace's TV programme about the robots over Christmas will know we are a very long way from realising such a thing. However, that is pretty much what a teacher teaching Out There does.

Sorry for biffing on....you asked.

What would your advice be for people just starting in TEFL or thinking about it?
Oh hell. I'm not the guy to ask this, I have done my own thing and rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. If pushed I'd say do a CELTA or Trinity cert but only to get the rudiments of teaching and for some practice but don't think that their ‘church' is the only one or even the right one. Being a good teacher is a very personal thing, work on your people skills and guide your flock with humour and an open mind.

What has been the best thing about being involved in TEFL for you personally?
The people, places and good times I have had.

Also, the chances to think, read, try things out and take huge risks in a way few people ever do. The downside...I note you didn't ask...is that it can be lonely, thankless and terribly expensive to try and innovate in an industry that is so conservative and smug.

Can I ask a question of your readers? This seems like an ideal opportunity to do some market research and to directly interact with the very audience I want to use our materials.

As I have said, I want as many teachers as possible to use our materials and I think that if teachers used them, got used to them and used Meetup.com they could, just possibly, if we get enough people doing it, create the biggest language organisation in the world, bar none, in just a few months or even a year. It would be amazing and it is there to do now and will cost relatively little for each of us to pull it off together.

So, what would your readers, TEFL teachers around the world, think is a price they would be prepared to pay for membership to our site and access to our materials? We can't give it away because we have historical development costs but if we get the price right so that it is as inclusive as possible and enables teachers to get their money back fast we will all be onto a good thing.

Currently to become a member of our site it costs £48.49 per year, that's just £4.04 per month.

However, everyone who becomes a member of our site can request we email them their own affiliate link. If they use it to recruit just four more members their membership would be free. We will pay them 25% per member via Paypal. Any more than four members recruited via the link and they are making money.

To sign up and use Meetup.com it costs $72 for six months, so £96 per year. However, if groups of teachers get together, one can sign up and make the others assistant organisers, therefore the cost can be reduced dramatically.

The total, with no groups working together to reduce costs, for one year is currently = £144.49.

If that was split between 5 teachers forming a little ‘school' collective it would come to £28 each for the year or £2.40 per month. If they all recruited a few other members they would be able to do it for free.

On Meetup there are already thousands of people all around the world looking for inexpensive face-to-face English language exchange and lessons. You can undercut the schools because you will have very low overheads and use public or very inexpensive rented space to teach. Students can use internet cafes in non-English speaking countries to get real practice during homework on Skype or sites like www.mylanguageexchange.com which is free.

If I reduced the cost of our membership to make it attractive for teachers to sign up and sign up to Meetup and organise language exchanges and lessons using our materials we could, in a very short space of time:

1) Create huge PR if a lot of teachers signed up in a short space of time. The PR would tell the students where to find us and start a massive snowball.
2) Create a huge global network of part or even fully self-employed teachers all teaching using materials that work both on and offline, are brain-friendly and are not linked to the powers in the industry that have exploited teachers for so many years.
3) Make it all pay for itself. Using Meetup the students can pay teachers directly, once you have paid for our membership and membership of Meetup you get to keep all of the course fees and you'd get your investment back in just a few sessions or through the affiliate link.
4) Become a new kind of global TEFL organisation in which the teachers retain all of the course income themselves and are full autonomous.

I know it sounds insane. But Alex has asked me how we can tackle the problems that we face. Well the only way is to unite and take our ‘ball' i.e. ourselves and our skills, somewhere else to play! You know the students, you know your towns and cities, and you know Skype and how to use the web. It is all there.

I know some of you will be thinking why should we do it with his materials and his brand and give him all the glory. I'll tell you...no one else has any tried and tested materials that can work outside of the conventional classroom, no one else can distribute them for a little as I can and once we get going and people start paying attention teachers and writers will start creating their own materials for the organisation and improve upon and adjust and amend our materials. I will put editable versions of our materials on a wiki for everyone to easily adapt, collaborate and develop any way they like.

So, give me a price that Alex and I can agree on from your feedback and I will set a special promotional rate for Alex and TEFL.net and let's try to make history, take back the English language, and reward ourselves for our dedication and skills."

Okay guys, you've been challenged, let's be ‘aving you!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 9:13 pmand is filed under Alternative teaching techniques, British Council, British Council accredited schools, CALL, Distance learning, EFL exams, ELT publishing, Guardian Languages, Guardian TEFL, Job security, Linguistics, applied linguistics and SLA, Materials, TEFL, TEFL career planning, TEFL celebs/ TEFL heroes and villains, TEFL chains, TEFL in the UK, TEFL scams, TEFL villains- Krashen, Teaching, Teaching English Abroad, Teaching methods and methodologies, Technology, Working conditions, links, self employed TEFL teachers, teaching online, textbooks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to "Interview- Jason West Dishes on Guardian Languages and Sets the TEFL World to Rights!"

 

1. David V. Says:
   January 5th, 2009 at 8:37 am

   I'm knackered after readişng that.

   Anyone questioning the professionalism of TEFL should check out this methodological breakthrough:,

   http://www.eltworld.net/blog/2009/01/i-cant-compete-with-this/