Chapters 6-7 - Mike Long 2015 Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching

Arthur: Hi, everyone. This Liberty, and I'm here with my colleague Arthur, and we're going to discuss Mike Long's ⁓ 2015 book, Second Acquisition ⁓ and Task-Based Language ⁓ And today we're to talk about chapters six and seven of the book. ⁓ So chapter six is about identifying target tasks. It's more than 50 pages long, and I was not expecting to find it so interesting. And I was expecting just to skim over it. it was actually ⁓ just because I think Long has such good insights, even into very specific areas of ESP, which I've never thought about. But the way he ties it to language teaching more broadly was really engaging. Some of it's quite difficult as well and that's nice. It's nice to read something that really challenges you. I learned about DNA and enzymes, which is not something I normally think about. And I learned about how to be a museum curator. So, you know, there's quite a lot going on in that chapter and I think it's really good that he goes into the level of detail that he does. Yes, yes. It's like being taken on a world tour of different professions and settings that you would never really hear about. otherwise. And linking that to language. making that strong link between professions and language use, which we've been thinking about training on the Delta because we've been talking about the difference between style and register. The fact that a ⁓ vicar is being formal when they say, we are gathered here today, and a doctor is being formal when they say what seems to be the problem. But a vicar would never say what seems to be the problem, and a doctor would never say we are gathered here today. So language is inherently tied to professions almost like a code. I thought there were ⁓ a lot of hints of that in the Right, like very terminology used in the army, in the US Army. That's right. And the interesting point about how you would need to do something a hundred, is it a hundred thousand times or a hundred million times for there to be a burden of, ⁓ for it to a certain burden of proofability in genetics. I thought ⁓ that was very as well. ⁓ That a number seem extremely high to a layman but if you were a geneticist the same number would be the bare minimum number of times that something would need to be observed for it to be... ⁓ for it to be worth theorizing about. ⁓ Was that about provability? I thought that was about the rate of mutation. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I found that really confusing. And I did not know what he meant by that. I think ⁓ because he described it as a type of hedging. which I did, I'm afraid that, maybe a sleep deprivation. Okay, page, wait, this is interesting. Mike Long's not for kids, everybody's. So page three, sorry, page 131. So it was about a ⁓ I he was talking about, looking at language teaching for students studying biology. Yes. ⁓ And analyzing science. scientific papers and so there was a passage from scientific article about DNA ⁓ it said ⁓ has been estimated for example that a bacterial gene may be duplicated over 100 million times before there is even a 50 % chance that it will have been altered. that's a hedge. But I don't know why it's a hedge or what it means or ⁓ Yeah, that very difficult to understand. ⁓ It's about slow rate of genetic mutation, think, ⁓ it was ⁓ extremely difficult understand. And why I reading the chapter, because it took me to zones that I'm not comfortable in. ⁓ And that's what all good books should do, I think. Absolutely, yes, yes. It's a challenging book. And one of the challenges of this book is that it contains a lot of abbreviations. So I've made a list of the abbreviations and I would like to, if Arthur, if you are feeling competitive, I would like to compete with you to remember the abbreviations. OK. So if you know the abbreviation, you get one point. And if you don't know, then I get one point. OK. Is that fair? Yes, that's fine. You're going to win. OK. So number one is N.A. needs analysis. Yes. ⁓ And I think this is the chapter where just for me the very concept of a needs analysis has really been unpacked really opened my eyes to ⁓ how is to... to the concept of needs analysis because I think coming from my context of in a school ⁓ general English, ⁓ just this thing we do, it's a page of questions that we go through with a student on the first day ⁓ ⁓ we sort of tailor the course a little bit to them but basically they do the same course from course book ⁓ but turns out that actually there is a huge ⁓ literature needs analysis, Long himself has or edited a ⁓ on needs analysis. quite nice also to, I mean the last time we talked about needs analysis you came up with some really excellent ideas that challenged me, that festered and I was thinking about the idea that, you know, it's very difficult to do needs analysis with young learners. The idea that students often don't want to do needs analysis because they think it's the teacher's job to know what they want and I away thinking, well that doesn't sound but then sure enough Mike Long said the same thing in this chapter, he said that often students do experience the teacher to just know ⁓ need and not have to articulate it and I thought that was interesting that he ⁓ agreed with you on that. ⁓ He agreed with me and he solved the problem because he pointed out that it's much more objective than just asking the learner what they want to do, just using the teacher's language knowledge. It's actually more about understanding the tasks that the learner is going to do. I love the way that he tied needs analysis in with things like detailed job descriptions. I thought that was excellent. think that, you know, generally speaking, we need much more of that in English language teaching. We do maybe undervalue the English for specific purposes. market and how many people there are who, whether they realise it or not, actually do have very specific language needs. Yes, yeah, and I think a lot of the objections that I brought up in our last conversation hold in today's world, but I think Long's ideas the future and I think there needs to be a cultural change ⁓ where people, where anyone learning a language does focus more on the tasks that they need to do and not on the list of grammar points that they want to learn or the list of words they want to learn. Yeah, yeah. I think... I mean, you might want to shut me down here because I might be veering off, but I've always felt uncomfortable with this as an IELTS examiner. I think it's a great test, actually. think that it's a really good speaking test and it's a really good writing test for general English, but what's it being used for? It's being used to see if people are ready to do a biology degree at York University or an accountancy degree at Lancaster University and if you could have seven or eight IELTS tests with a generic, sorry, more of a focus on less specific, less generic and more specific focus, it would be a very good thing. but it would also be a very expensive thing and IELTS is what we have. ⁓ lot Michael Long's ⁓ ideas excellent but they're ⁓ inconvenient for I think. ⁓ cost ⁓ And yeah, think one more objection, I think has been answered yet, ⁓ is someone who wants to learn a language ⁓ to improve general prospects, or because they find it fun to learn a language. ⁓ And I think this is an idea that's giving a lot of value to because English is certainly being sold that way. I remember attending Can Tso in Cambodia where... learning English was intrinsically tied in, in the narrative of that whole conference it was tied in with social mobility and economic mobility. The idea that learning English was something that was good for your social and economic mobility is very easy for to understand ⁓ ⁓ true. And if that's as far as you've got when you decide, I'm going to learn English, then maybe you don't have very well-defined needs. Maybe you're just like, yeah, as you say. ⁓ I just want to learn it to improve my luck in life. But then I think it's the responsibility of teachers to quickly say, OK, so what are the arenas in which you could use English in your country? You're going to be in a cramp pen for the next three or four years because it's where you're from, it's where you live. Where can you work where English will help you? So maybe it be the hotel industry. And that's where you start getting into the more specific needs analysis that might I know lots of learners say that they just want to learn English so that they can travel more easily and socialise more easily. area of ESP or that will go or that will be a niche area? To be honest I think that's what general English is because course books are so, I mean the themes in course books are so limited. There's only so far you can go in a course book without becoming inappropriate for a particular market. You can't say anything about religion, can't say much about politics, can't say much about gender or sexual orientation. So what have you got left? You've got travel, you've got the family, and you've got sports. so I think that... No parsnips. No parsnips. Yeah, that's right. No parsnips. So you've got food. travel, and family ⁓ And family is a bit... ⁓ Yeah so that's why there so many lessons about taking ⁓ holidays in modes transport. mean think... You think that everyone has awful lot of money if you read the in a general English course book. It very focused middle class people who go holiday quite lot. ⁓ people with really great jobs or who works in a lighthouse. But linking that back to task-based language teaching, I think there are quite a lot of tasks that... useful there. finding a suitable place on Airbnb is a task. ⁓ a very authentic task. Lots of our learners at the school have done it to study here ⁓ IH Bank Hope and ⁓ probably did it ⁓ in their own language. But I think learning how to do it in English also ⁓ because you might be travelling somewhere where there aren't many ⁓ who speak your language there so you don't have to. ⁓ access to the reviews or the reviews are poorly translated. I think it is useful to do these tasks in English. ⁓ it its own ESP area? ⁓ Possibly it become one. ⁓ next abbreviation. ⁓ and VESL. ⁓ ⁓ This is English for occupational purposes and vocational English as a second language. And I don't know if there's a difference between those two. They seem, they sound the same. Well, I'm interested in, suppose, is the difference between English for occupational purposes and English for specific purposes because I've always thought of them as being roughly the same thing. Yeah. So... because I've always used the term ESP. So I'm just wondering whether they are completely synonymous abbreviations, which wouldn't surprise me because we've got too many abbreviations TEFL. Right. Well, maybe it's to exclude academic English. ⁓ But yeah, I'm fairly sure the English by factory workers or pilots ⁓ or... ⁓ in the tourist industry as opposed to more academic? Yeah, I mean, Highland talks about English, EGAP and ESAP, English for general academic purposes and English for specific academic purposes and I've never really thought of English for academic purposes as part of ESP because I was in the EAP zone when I was working in universities and I've thought of... ESP is being more what my long hair is called EOP. so terminology is a bit of a minefield and I'm not very good at it. Anyway, pass. Fair enough. You win that one. Okay, fine. So it's one all now. So next one is DOT. My direction of travel is not good. I'm not going to win this one either. This is Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Dictionary of Occupational Titles, right. Right. So this is a reference work which describes, it's a reference work of professions and describes all of the tasks that each profession has to do. So he gives the example of a secretary and a list of all things a secretary. has to do, so it's a key source for people doing these analyses. Yeah, and that was really interesting to read. while I'm no good at remembering acronyms and abbreviations, it was really interesting to read about how breaking down a job description starts to look like a curriculum for a language class. I was reading those roles and responsibilities of someone who worked in the government department and just thinking, yeah, I could make a lesson out of that. Yeah, I could make a lesson out of that. Just from this list of responsibilities that someone had in their job. Yeah, that could quite easily just be a 20-week course. Yeah, I think it had its limitations because it doesn't always reflect exactly what someone will be doing in their particular role. yeah, interesting. I haven't thought of it like that. Okay, the next abbreviation, PSA and TSA. Okay listeners, you should remember this from the chapter five discussion. present situation analysis and target situation analysis. ⁓ target situation analysis would be the details about the job or the course or the setting that the learner is going to go ⁓ So pre-service or pre-education, whereas a present situation analysis would be done ⁓ a learner who's already doing the course or... ⁓ doing the job and they just want to get better at it. it comes up in this chapter, it comes up where is talking about ⁓ something a language audit, which seems similar to a needs analysis. ⁓ So the process of gathering information the language needs and existing linguistic resources an institution or people in an institution organization. ⁓ So ⁓ example was there was a language audit done ⁓ the New Zealand tourism industry, ⁓ revealed ⁓ between the importance that people in the industry attached to knowledge of foreign languages ⁓ and actual frequency with which foreign languages were used because it turned out that actually technical skills and knowledge of processes was more important than knowing a foreign language. Yeah, that's always interesting and I think one of the things Mike Long talks about is doing a needs analysis of people who are yet to start a course and doing a needs analysis of people who have already taken the course or who are in the middle of the course and that you need all of these people to feed into your needs analysis you're going to negotiate a curriculum. I the way people articulate their needs changes as they go through a course of ⁓ study. So made complete sense to me. I liked that idea that you would. ⁓ We would survey people at different stages through the learning process and try to amalgamate all that data in analysis. Is that triangulation of sources? ⁓ think so, yeah. One example. Okay, next is NSNNS. So that would ⁓ ⁓ native speaker and non-native speaker which are problematic terms but... ⁓ one, yes, ⁓ I ⁓ yeah, don't know whether that's a whole other ⁓ topic ⁓ almost become ⁓ ⁓ about N-E-S-T? ⁓ used that term earlier. Yeah, native English speaking teacher, non-native English speaking teacher. I mean, think ⁓ my problem is the word native. Yeah. ⁓ I talked about this in the chapter three ⁓ speaker doesn't describe ⁓ many real situations. ⁓ So I born in Malaysia, and I had a British dad, and I had an Indonesian mom. many people are, ⁓ I think many people defy that distinction. ⁓ And even if they don't, ⁓ like at point ⁓ when you an expert user, ⁓ The distinction is arbitrary. ⁓ Someone's got an ⁓ It has no effect their ability to communicate or the style of ⁓ what they say or that ⁓ your...? I think just The amount of time I've spent in Singapore has made me really think quite a lot and quite critically about what native speaking really means. So in Singapore, everybody has a native language. It's the language that they speak at home and everybody has a mother tongue, which confusingly in Singapore means the language you learn at school. You wrote an article about this. Yeah I did. I will link it in the description. It's IH journal. I think it's issue 45. It was just before Covid I wrote that and it was all about how Singapore is extremely problematic in terms of whether people are native or non-native speakers. People have a huge range of English ability in that country and also they're very plurilinguistic. They know when to use the language in a more precise way and exactly when to use the language and mix it in with Chinese grammar and mix it in with bit of Malay and Tamil vocabulary. It's a fascinating place to study what it actually means to be an English speaker. You can be quite a proficient English speaker without being a native speaker. And in Singapore you can be a native speaker who very rarely uses the full range ⁓ English that you know ⁓ so many of the other people that you speak to ⁓ using English more as a Creole. ⁓ it's a fascinating linguistic environment. What about ⁓ expert user versus non-expert user? I prefer that. I find that so much easier because actually has ⁓ indicators attached to it through the IELTS band descriptors. So ⁓ IELTS an expert user, it's a band nine and as a former IELTS examiner I know exactly what a band nine speaker and a band nine writer can do. ⁓ so I can look at someone's speaking and look at someone's writing and say yes they're an expert user or they're a proficient user or they're a good user and so I prefer I find it easier to make sense of someone's language proficiency using IELTS than I do with this term native non-native. Yeah, yeah, no that's correct. But so in the context of the chapter, it was just that many of the studies that Long talks about involved interviewing both, I'll put it in inverted commas, native speakers and non-native speakers. This is where he was talking about getting an understanding of language is used in different discourse communities, isn't it? How... ⁓ ⁓ In the field of scientific research our language is used by people involved in that scientific research so they interviewed non-native members of that community and native members of that community too. I think how they dealt with texts and one another reason for using native speakers was to control for those looking at ⁓ tasks people found difficult in their work ⁓ and on the non-expert users and then they also interviewed ⁓ native speakers control for So some tasks simply ⁓ difficult to do. Yes, and that's might not be ⁓ the focus for ⁓ for people who are still learning English. And then there was also, mentioned in chapter seven, there was a study. in a work environment in New Zealand it was ⁓ focused on new in New Zealand and it just revealed ⁓ their struggle to accepted by co-workers ⁓ because they struggled make casual conversation ⁓ knowing things like meaning of how are you, knowing that it's just a greeting and not ⁓ an inquiry into health, ⁓ which sports are popular and knowing what people mean when they say great match on Saturday. ⁓ Yeah. Okay, next is NIH. This is National Institute of Health, which is a... It's a major national center in Maryland, in Washington, DC, where Mike Long led a study collecting information from staff about their language needs. it was just an example. this book so much, he's Mike now. I like that. I think you've earned the rights. Freudian slip, yes. So he led a study collecting information from staff in this institute. he gives it as an example of different methods of collecting information beginning with semi-structured interviews and then narrowing it down into a questionnaire with closed questions. Okay, shall I move on? F.A. ⁓ This is flight attendant. Oh of course it is, yeah. I told you I was terrible with these. Absolutely terrible. They're very obscure. he mentioned flight... So he discusses a study about flight attendants from his book, I think it's from his 2005 book, On The Needs Analysis. And it's a great example of triangulation by sources and methods. So people think that they know what a flight attendant does. Because when you're on a flight, see the flight attendants all the time, you can hear everything they're saying. And so we think that we know what they need to say and what language they need to use. And so one of the things that Long did was he interviewed both flight attendants and applied linguists and compared what they said about what their jobs are. There was a... ah yes, okay, so he quoted one of the applied linguists in the study, one of the applied linguists he interviewed. This is from page 167. So the applied linguists described flight attendants as like waiters or waitresses in the air. Basically they give things to you and tell you what you need to do. They're kind of hands that come round and give you things. Servo droids. ⁓ And then when it came to interviewing the flight attendants themselves and looking at the paperwork from the airline ⁓ ⁓ surreptitiously recording them and just getting a much richer source of information, it turned out that ⁓ communication with passengers is actually a very small part of what flight attendants need to do and by no means the most important part. ⁓ So it was much more important to know the wording of safety precautions ⁓ knowing to ⁓ and describe the equipment. ⁓ yeah, great example of, ⁓ all think that we know what they need to say, but actually we don't. ⁓ ⁓ was very interesting to read. That was eye-opening, actually. The whole idea that ⁓ gain a full ⁓ ⁓ ⁓ something is, you have to, you know. ⁓ talk to multiple sources to work out what the job is because it's not just about what the job actually is, it's also about how the job is perceived. Because in communication those two things are going to interact with each other. What do you mean? Well, mean... communication is going to happen between the flight attendant and the applied linguist when the applied linguist takes a flight. Right. And when anyone else takes a flight. And that's what I find interesting is that we have... communication exists in a zone between what people actually are and what the other person thinks they are. I know we've been talking about ontology and how you think it's quite useless and I'm really fascinated by it but just the interplay between who someone is and who someone else thinks they are in a particular role has an effect on communication. can lead to breakdown of communication, can lead to successful communication. It's really interesting. I definitely think ⁓ the insider perspective is very important ⁓ if we're thinking about... ⁓ the language that a person in a particular job needs to use. You would never do a needs analysis for students who wanted to become flight attendants without consulting flight attendants on the language they actually use, or indeed recording them using that language, because we're not always aware of what we say. ⁓ So I think that's fascinating research and I think it's really helpful research. Yeah. Yeah, there was another example. how studies can reveal the discrepancy between the insider and outsider perspective. I don't know if you remember the, this is another abbreviation, CEDT, Center for Electronic Design Technology. And this was an example, it was an ethnographic study, so I think the researchers actually went into this, school, the centre, as ⁓ Yes, so they went into the centre and they did unstructured interviews then they evaluated existing syllabus on the basis of what they'd found out about the students' needs. And the observation stage, it turned out that the people doing the study had not understood the importance of the student seminar. because the staff at the centre thought it was really important that the distinction between using this seminar ⁓ a progress report for the student and using it as a public defence of technical decisions that they made during the design progress. And ⁓ the applied linguists ⁓ had not realized the importance of that distinction. And even as in an ⁓ ethnographic it still ⁓ didn't quite in. that's even if in the situation with the insiders, ⁓ you can still misunderstand situation. ⁓ So ⁓ yeah, I think he's implying that applied linguists tend to rely too much on their outsider intuitions about what's done in a given sector or profession. Yeah. And I think that also applies often, dare I say it, to a of linguists understanding of how languages are learned. think that... and I'm a bit skeptical just, I'm a bit skeptical working in a specific environment, reading research that was done in Quebec. whether how much that research applies to my learners in Bangkok. There seems to be in linguistics in general, there seems to be this yearning for universal truth where, I think Mike Long will definitely agree with this, that if you do research in a particular place, your research will tell you something specific about that place, but it might not tell you very much about this place over here. So I think generally there seems to be a will within the pipeline mystics to say this research shows us that something is true everywhere and it might not be. And I think that the point you make about a pipeline was misunderstanding something because they're not... they're not specifically inside that group. It relates just as much to what we do. They'd have to come to IH Bangkok and spend time here to test whether the things that they experimented on... in Quebec in the early 2000s are still true, wherever true over here, wherever true with this language group, wherever true for the students of this Socioeconomics status, blah blah blah. I I just think it's much more complicated than just I've done this experiment with this group of people and now I can apply that data to... English language learners globally. Yes, yes. And I think Long would agree with you. I think he would. He really prioritises the perspective of the learner. And also I just think that, I mean we can maybe talk about complexity theory in another podcast, but I'm a big fan of any thinker who embraces things being more complex rather than less complex. think that the idea that there's this will to sort of simplify everything and make it neater and it's not neat, it's messy, it's untidy, things are going on over here, things are going on differently over here. And I like the fact that Mike Long is always very analytical. about a specific group in a specific place and says things about that specific group in that specific place and doesn't then extrapolate that to a different group and say well that's true there as well. I like that I Yeah, I think he understood complexity. a lot to teach me about it. understanding language learning is hard and really understand that from reading this book, ⁓ think. ⁓ think the most important things would be ⁓ free will and the creativity of the person. I he really takes ⁓ seriously. Yes. ⁓ All of his exemplification of ideas seems to be very specific to particular groups of people and that's helpful for understanding their needs and how language learning works for them. I think he does that really well in this chapter delving deep into specific industries and ⁓ specific ⁓ discourse communities and ⁓ what needs and how they language to get there. ⁓ Yes, yeah. ⁓ it's really good examples ⁓ ways which. ⁓ things can go wrong in these analyses or the ways in which a certain research method can give you the information that you need but they're not overgeneralising it. Yes. I find it interesting also that he references task-based learning ⁓ alive well and possibly more robust outside of ELT than it is inside of ELT. And when he talks about the US military and their training programs and how task-based they are, well, of course they are. It's ridiculous to send a soldier into battle if they don't know how to fire a gun. So you have to teach them how to fire and reload a gun. You have to teach them how to operate communications devices. all of the codes that they need to use all of the abbreviations, forbid. So I think, you know, it's really interesting to hear him talking about training programs that are very task-based. we're operating within a profession that's grappling with task-based learning and thinking, can we do it, how do we do it? Other industries, other professions are already doing it quite successfully. Not with language, with skills. ⁓ all about good linguistic elements obviously because when you learn to be a soldier or a lawyer you learn the language of the profession but yeah it was just interesting to hear him talking about task-based training programs outside of ELT and how they worked. yeah. think that there is less of the ways which language is used in the completion of tasks. Because so the task as a unit of linguistic analysis, is not well understood compared to the tasks in the US military. That's very clear. I think needs analysis, understanding what people need to do ⁓ language to do a particular job ⁓ ⁓ important ⁓ ⁓ wanted to ⁓ about ⁓ Probably the most meaningful experience I've had of actually being involved in a program that does that for teachers. But I don't know whether that fits in now in the conversation or if you want to carry on talking about Chapter 6 and I'll come back to it later. ⁓ I could just have a concluding thought about Chapter 6. Yeah, so he's described how research can be used and how it's essential for needs analysis within English for specific purposes. And I think that this approach the right approach for students who know what job they're going to be doing. ⁓ course they're going to be doing and it does not serve people who are like I was saying before it doesn't serve people whose future is more open like a 22 year old they've got a few months free and they come to a language school and because they know it they think it would improve their prospects ⁓ or they're just learning for fun or social reasons. was a quote from chapter 6 which I found really interesting. it was that ⁓ he, ⁓ Mike Long found in his experience that the less specific you were. ⁓ effective the learning. It seemed to me like a, I can't remember exactly where it was, but it seemed to me this application of ESP and also inherently a criticism of general English. Generally speaking, found that the less specific you were in terms of the context that you were looking for. less effective needs analysis would be. ⁓ I think that has ⁓ for general English classes. When we do needs analysis in general English classes, we know that we can't, if someone is applying for a, if someone's applying to take a course, and they have quite specific goals or needs, we know that there's going to be a limit to how we can meet them. because there's going be other people in the class who have different needs and we have to... to kind of one size fits all really in that sense and we do the best we can. ⁓ But there are other benefits to general English group courses. So there's the social environment. creating that environment is really valuable. And there were many examples in this very chapter about the importance of learning social and communication for your job. And people often ⁓ don't think they need ⁓ it. ⁓ really glad that Mike Long said that students themselves are not always such a good indicator of what their needs are. We've had a week recently where I've been lucky, I've actually been able to teach some students rather than train teachers because it's nice to have variety. My colleague and I were teaching a Japanese learner who was quite high level, probably approaching C1. An IELTS guy. An IELTS. ⁓ A student who wasn't particularly interested in taking the IELTS test but thought that some IELTS courses actually had quite a lot of value so he thought he'd take an IELTS course and I liked that. I mean that showed quite a lot of savvy. because I think my IELTS courses are quite good. And he said to my colleague who was teaching him, ⁓ I don't want to do any reading. I can do it at home. I thought about Delta lessons recently and what we've been doing with reading skills development in the classroom and I thought, ⁓ how little you know, how little you know you actually do need reading in class. you've, this is probably the only chance you're gonna have a Delta tutor teaching you. So, ⁓ you know, cause John, my colleague was teaching that class. He said, he just told me he didn't want to do reading. So I switched to speaking. I thought that was a missed opportunity. considering how much reading skills development we've been doing recently. And John said, yeah, I know. because we've just been, our heads have been full of, you know, top-down processing, bottom-up processing. And it would have been very useful for that learner to take John's class on reading. But he said, no, I don't want do reading. I can read at home. yeah. So Mike Long's right. Learners don't always know what they need. They know what they, often they know what they want. Often they can articulate what they want. don't necessarily know what they mean. think needs analysis is much bigger, much more complicated than that. You've got to talk to so many different stakeholders to work it out. That's what I liked about this chapter, that it made needs analysis more complex. Yes, yes. Just much richer. Yes. Yeah, just infinitely more. Yeah, like... There's just so many ways of gathering information. And that it's not just something you do at the beginning, that it's an evolving process, that it's something that you come back to again and again through a course. Because on a CELTA course or a Delta course, you do your needs analysis at the beginning, and then you base everything you do on the course on that, apart from what you monitor and the, apart from what you observe in the classroom. informally that might feed into your practice but you do your needs analysis right at the beginning and then you use that data throughout the course but you don't necessarily add to it as much as you should. Sorry, did you say that was on... CELTA or Delta? The needs analysis tends to be done very early and then... I I say it sometimes ⁓ that the data from that needs analysis might be copied and into few assignments. So you do assignment one, you refer to your needs analysis and you ⁓ write few things and then you've got assignment three two weeks later and you go back to what you wrote in assignment one and ⁓ copy paste ⁓ what said about the learners over, ⁓ rather ⁓ thinking, their might be a bit different now, they might have moved on. ⁓ have a different understanding of what they need, know, based on... So you're saying trainees don't note new information about knowledge that comes up during the course? I think it would be unfair to say that, but I think they don't always appreciate that needs analysis should be an ongoing process. they do note down and respond to new information. monitor and they give feedback, which is doing that. And they talk about what their learners did the day before in class. So they're definitely aware of emergent need in that sense. But I think they think of needs analysis as something formalized that you do at the beginning. it doesn't. It doesn't evolve, it doesn't change, it's just sitting there and you refer to it when you need to to give a justification ⁓ sort of two weeks later, three weeks later when you're writing an essay about your learners. Whereas really you could be feeding into that original needs analysis more through more questioning, more surveys. ⁓ yeah, the thing that I wanted to ⁓ about was... A training course which Cambridge have canned actually called Icelt. That's I-C-E-L-T right? In-Service, I think it's In-Service Certificate of English Language Teaching. think it is. As I said, I'm terrible with abbreviations in acronyms. I'll give you one more point for that abbreviation. It was a course that was extremely popular in China. It was popular in Mexico and was very popular in Turkey. And it was a course for non-native English speakers who had to be around the B2C1 level. crucially, slightly lower level. than people who are allowed on a Celta. And a whole module, a whole module of ISAP with four 1000 word essays was related to language for teachers and... Task one was to give a presentation about an article that you've read in English and to talk about how it affects your work. ⁓ Task was looking at learner language and errors thinking about to do about the error and how to correct it. ⁓ Task three was looking at written language talking about how correction codes and other tools could be used help learners with their written language. And task four was looking at teacher language function, recording their own use of language in the classroom and finding... positive use and less effective use of English, because their instructions were unclear or because their language wasn't graded effectively. ⁓ ⁓ whole course, ⁓ whole module one ⁓ iCelt ⁓ helped ⁓ ⁓ lower language ability. ⁓ to improve their language for the job. And I found it very, I found the whole curriculum very descriptive of what teachers actually need to do with language to be a good teacher. So it was fascinating to be involved for so many years with that course to watch ⁓ it helped. It definitely helped teachers ⁓ progress BT. to see one level the workplace. Whether did the same in other areas of their English, I'm not so sure, but specifically in their English for the classroom, they made tremendous progress. Was that specifically in the fourth task that you mentioned? Teacher language? I think it was all of it. think ⁓ it all of it. think the whole thing, ⁓ just teachers to really think about their own language. ⁓ to make sure it's effective for doing the job is such a good teacher training module. We do a little bit of on CELTA, we do a little bit of it on Delta, but there was a whole module dedicated to it on the iCELT. I think Mike Long would have approved it. But I was thinking, when I was reading chapter six, was thinking specifically about of ICEL and how it helps ⁓ teachers of sort of intermediate, upper intermediate level ⁓ to improve own language for the classroom, which very motivated to because it can lead to better job opportunities for them and it also helps them and it helps their students. just a real shame that we don't have that course anymore. These were teachers of, these were ⁓ teachers? ⁓ they were school teachers and the ones I was training were in the Chinese system. were, the contract was organised for... Pudong Education Bureau in Shanghai. We trained, I think, about 500 teachers over four or five years. So it was big courses. We had four groups of 24 or five groups of 24, five groups of 30, those kinds of numbers. Yeah, I just think that getting teachers to really think what English do I need to use and how do I need to speak English to do my job is a really useful question when you're doing teacher training. I really like the kind of ESP for teachers that I've been involved with. The TKT test and the ICEL module 1, they've had a very positive effect on the teachers that have studied how to use English as a teacher. Yeah, it's a shame that, so that was discontinued. That was discontinued in ⁓ was the final ⁓ in the coffin ⁓ iCelt. was, were there. Cambridge were talking for a long time before that about getting rid of it. ⁓ weren't high enough. mean, ⁓ and Delta are very popular globally. ⁓ still going, because that's one of the most popular Cambridge ⁓ for teachers. ⁓ iCelt was, you know, while it was huge in Shanghai, was huge in Mexico City as well. wasn't so big globally, there wasn't much ⁓ going on in other markets, ⁓ I think they just thought it's too small ⁓ us to ⁓ with. ⁓ it had a tremendous effect ⁓ teachers and their language awareness and their language ability. How experienced were these teachers? ⁓ varied. Some of them you had to be on an I-Cell. How many hours did you have to have taught? think it was a it might have been a thousand dollars, 500 or a thousand dollars, you had to talk for a thousand dollars. So yeah, our teachers do somewhere between 20 and 25 hours a week. they get to 100 a month. so I think teachers that, you have to have basically a year's experience, but some of the teachers had 10 years experience or 20 years experience. So it was very diverse in that sense. yeah, just really delving into... Okay, what language do I speak when I do my job? Mike Long's chapter made me think about that because it pinpointed the way language is used in specific communities how that feeds into needs analysis ⁓ and it made me think, wow, know, ⁓ ISEL module was a really good course for teachers because it really got them thinking about what English do I speak when I teach English? ⁓ know? ⁓ Yes, although, so that think goes beyond ⁓ teaching because that's training course, right, ⁓ with some of language teaching. ⁓ So, and it occurred to me while reading chapter six that what Long is advocating is ⁓ work, there was another example of, ⁓ I it was medical professionals ⁓ looking another, I think it was another ethnographic study ⁓ following professionals around ⁓ their ⁓ and the conclusion one of these studies was ⁓ actually more important for non-native speakers going into working in healthcare actually an understanding health and medicine, understanding, better understanding how diseases are spread. ⁓ so that would be taught in their first language. this is why the, ⁓ ⁓ talking about goes, ⁓ fits in with that idea I think pretty well because when teaching a teacher how to improve their language, ⁓ you're teaching them how to do so with ⁓ some with some understanding of what makes a good instruction, what makes a good response to a learner error, so you're training them and you're working on their language at the same time. And I think that the Module 1 and the Module 2 were taken at the same time and they were very symbiotic because the Module 1 was all about how do I speak language well to do my job and the Module 2 was much more about how do do my job well, you know, what do need to know about. What do I need to know about correcting errors? What do I need to know about setting up tasks? So the two things fed into each other really well. Yeah. So I think that you... It's not language teaching. that's not you can give to a language teacher. ⁓ A teacher trainer to do that. ⁓ And ⁓ the goes the medical profession. ⁓ An English teacher help that person. needs to be someone who is an expert in that domain. ⁓ Ooh, that's a big area. That's a really big area. I'm gonna have to think more about that. I can't agree yet. Tell me more, tell me more. ⁓ What is a teacher? ⁓ It can't just be teaching the language the language doesn't mean anything its own. it doesn't mean anything, for me it doesn't mean much in force books, they're too divorced from reality for me to have much respect for them. ⁓ on the job language training, language ⁓ or language teaching within something much more specific and contextualised, I think that there's a lot of value to that. I think there's an opportunity for the teacher to really embed. help learners with specific needs I think that our teachers can do that and I think that ⁓ a negotiation between the student and the teacher. The teacher learns about what the students have to do ⁓ their job and the teacher ⁓ them the language that they need ⁓ do it and it's a negotiation. ⁓ I like that kind of business English ⁓ class where the student doesn't come to the school, the teacher goes to the company. Because the teacher becomes part the just for that time that they're there. ⁓ I to love going to companies in Shanghai and ⁓ thinking, this is where you work. ⁓ you've got... ⁓ got this poster on your wall telling you this, oh these are your company values written here, alright, and it all feeds into what you're doing. It makes your teaching more contextualised. Okay, okay, so at least in some contexts it's not too much to ask that a language teacher learns about the environment of the learners. They don't have to be a domain expert. Yes, okay, that's a good point. And I think that... I mean also if you think about Clil, the whole of it is the teachers know about the subject as well as... ⁓ It's all integrated. is extremely fashionable a teaching methodology at the moment. When you're trying to sell teacher training products in China, ⁓ everybody's asking CLIL. Is that in secondary schools? ⁓ Secondary, primary, asking for CLIL. Adults? ⁓ I wasn't involved in adulting. I was involved in training teachers who were adults but none of them had adult students. So I don't know about that. K to 12, K to 13 in China. Yeah, Clil was incredibly popular. And I think that's because language is contextualized in Clil, you know, and in general English. in My Nyang's chapter 6 and that's what I liked about it, how specific it was to particular. particular jobs, contexts. Because meaning only comes from context. yeah, he's really taking that idea as far as it can go. ⁓ yeah, it's extreme. These ideas are extreme extremely difficult to implement. ⁓ cool, ⁓ ⁓ Okay, I'm conscious of the time and would you... it alright if I say a few things about chapter seven? of course. I'll just listen and if I think of anything interesting to add I will, otherwise I'll just back channel. Okay, okay. Well, okay. Anyway, yeah, in chapter seven, long makes a distinction between discourse analysis and analysis of discourse. I think he does this a lot and it foxes me. Have you heard of focus on form, focus on forms and focus on the form? You took the words out of my mouth. Yes. he loves, he loves it when there are two terms with distinct but related meanings and almost identical wording. Anyway, so discourse analysis. just read a quote from page 180. Discourse analysis sets out to provide an exhaustive account of the grammar of language use in a given speech event or other domain. and to meet similar requirements to those observed in syntactic or semantic analyses of sentences. So in other words, it's a complete description of language use in a given setting. For example, the set of the language of classroom lessons and looking for patterns in the structure of interactions. So, respond, react. So the teacher asks a question, student answers and the teacher says, and it would be always that order and not ⁓ response reacts elicit. And then on the other hand, analysis of discourse is a bit narrower and more specific. So it's analyzing language use ⁓ a given domain, but it's focused on a particular phenomenon ⁓ a particular task that's being done. So there was an example. of study about a speaker of Aboriginal English who had been accused of a crime he had confessed to the crime ⁓ and there a forensic linguist who analyzed the confession interview, ⁓ noticed anomalies in language that the person used and essentially argued that he was saying a speaker of Aboriginal English would say. ⁓ So it was things like, I ⁓ answering with auxiliaries. ⁓ Yes, I did and a speaker of Aboriginal English would never say that and then answering too precisely ⁓ so she used that information to build an argument that there had been a false confession. ⁓ wow. And I think that person was then exonerated. ⁓ that's so interesting. ⁓ So not globally how works within a particular discourse setting. It's very to, ⁓ it's more case by case ⁓ analysis of discourse. ⁓ Yes, but you're focused on a particular question as opposed to a complete account ⁓ of the grammar and the vocabulary in a given setting. And then that's also related ⁓ the of the static or the dynamic features of a text. ⁓ So looking at the text as a static example of a language would be just looking at the frequency of different vocabulary items or grammatical structures, whereas focusing on the dynamic features, would be focused on how the language contributes to the completion of a task. ⁓ which I guess is that similar to functional language and the idea of a speech act. So if you're looking service encounters, then you're not simply counting up all the modal verbs and saying how frequently they occur. You're looking at how modal verbs contribute to politeness to help a request be met or to, yeah, to. so I functional language has a key role ⁓ in the view of things. ⁓ Yeah, yeah I would. I mean it's old now isn't it, Wilkins functional notional But always thought looking at that that it was kind of a brave first attempt at making a curriculum more task based. So that idea was from the 1970s, I think it was Wilkins, the functional notional syllabus that you could create a language course that essentially divided English into the things we do with it. So functional language has always been a huge part of TBO. also I think when I teach task-based learning lessons, both for students and as demonstration if my lesson ⁓ up having a language focus, language focus often will be functional. I also think that functional language ties in extremely nicely with the lexical approach. what Michael Lewis says about language as being formed of lexical chunks that you can fit together to meaning rather than ⁓ grammar think that when I'm working with language reactively, I think I often have frames and slots rather than ⁓ a structure that I'm highlighting. think that functional language is essentially frames and slots. Would you mind doing, being, you know. ⁓ wonder if you'd ⁓ ⁓ say, do, you know. it's, ⁓ functional language I think plays a huge role in ⁓ ⁓ in the lexical approach. ⁓ You know that on delta functions is not its own area, it's just a branch of letters. Yeah. Semi-fixed and fixed expressions, they call it. Do you think that's a mistake? No, absolutely agree with it. I absolutely agree with it. think John disagrees with you. John is a dear friend and we disagree on most things. we do so normally quite politely. ⁓ Yeah. ⁓ I ⁓ just think if we think English language learning task-based, that collocates with ⁓ task? We, ⁓ a ⁓ Do? ⁓ Yeah. and functional language is about doing things with language rather than saying things with language. So of course they're going to be linked. So my question would be, because Long argues that task is the unit of analysis, is that the same as saying a function is a unit of analysis or is that different? No, because... I think that would be confusing for a lot of people. the great thing about the task being the unit of analysis, and we talked about this before when we did our talk about the first chapter, the great thing about... using a task as the unit of analysis is that it doesn't require you to know whether your lesson is going to be a skills lesson or a language lesson. It doesn't require you to know whether your lesson is going to be a receptive skills lesson or a productive skills lesson. It doesn't require you to know whether you're going to focus on grammar, vocab, pronunciation or discourse primarily. Starting with the task as the unit of analysis allows more freedom in terms of your reaction to student need. Whereas if you start with a function and you say, today we're going to talk about all the language that we need to use to plan a party, that's very different from saying today we're going to plan a party. If you say today we're going to plan a party, you might end up talking about turn-taking. You might end up talking about reading adverts for balloons. You could go anywhere. ⁓ So TBL is much freer than functional language lessons, think. Does that answer your question? Absolutely, yes. And it students into language and it's more reactive ⁓ more open. ⁓ and more, we talked about learning opportunities in the very first episode. when we talked about Dekuvae? Yes, yes, and it's much more in keeping with that idea taking all of the opportunities for learning in a lesson, as opposed to, we're going to tell you what to say and then you're going to say it, which, at its worst, that's what... a function as lunatic analysis would be. Yeah. ⁓ of the things ⁓ I don't think I'd go as far as to say I disagree with Mike Long. I'm not brave enough to disagree with Mike Long, but I, ⁓ also I... ⁓ don't want to. I like what he has to say. But one of the things that does make me little bit uneasy about so specific about what people need he does chapter 6 is ⁓ that... don't have that level of hyperfocus. ⁓ if you're in a where someone to pretty consistently perform very specific tasks, ⁓ don't think hyperfocus on those tasks as much as maybe ⁓ he thinks should. ⁓ Yeah, that's what I meant about advocating ⁓ just for a change in what teachers do but for a change in the culture of learning and in very of learning a ⁓ because I think the average student or many students just think they need to learn the words of the language, learn the translations and there isn't a good understanding of tasks and language being about doing tasks. I think that that is just because of the existing understanding of language. We understand grammar very well. So Chomsky ⁓ sees language as a formal system and he doesn't see communication as fundamental. so I think that's had a very bad influence. So yeah, it's interesting to think about the future. ⁓ Maybe the future that will be, maybe the task will be, ⁓ like idea of a task will replace ⁓ grammar. Wouldn't that be cool? I is interesting ⁓ and are places that already do it. I can't the name of the centre that does it. I don't think they want me to. But there is a CELTA centre, ⁓ or a that provides CELTA ⁓ and Delta our organisation. ⁓ has a language analysis sheet that is not a language analysis sheet, it's a task analysis sheet. So it says what task will the learners perform in this lesson? What language will they need to complete the task? What skills will they need to complete the task? And so the analysis, the unit of analysis on their language analysis sheet is the task. And I think that's very brave in the context of CELTA. I really look up to the person who started doing that. His name I'll probably mention. But I really look up to them and ⁓ that was a really brave decision. It really rocks the boat ⁓ Celta's very staid, know, it's very traditional. It wants to just ⁓ on doing what it's been doing ⁓ for so long. ⁓ to rock the boat that way is ⁓ in the most positive possible sense ⁓ have a task analysis rather than a language analysis or a skills analysis. ⁓ gives you more freedom, gives the learners more freedom to produce language, gives the teachers more freedom to teach it. Very interesting. And did you have any final words of the chapter? Just that I think, one of the the greatest value of this book is that it makes everything more complicated, it doesn't try to make everything more simple. reading this chapter was difficult for me because it talked about language use in specific domains that I don't understand very well. But the majority of learners that pass through our doors going go away and use English in environments that we don't understand as well as they do. ⁓ And I we always need to remember that. ⁓ Because General English. environment is so crystallized in these course books. It's crystallized as we learn the past simple, then we learn irregular verbs, then we learn the present perfect, how it interacts with the past simple, then we do the past continuous versus the past simple and it's nonsense. Compared to, oh, here are you, where are you going, what job are you going to do, are you going to learn, are you going to use English in that job, oh right, how are you going to need to use English in that job? what do I need to teach you? I think he's brilliant at that in this chapter. think he really, he refocuses us on that need of learners and that's what I took from it. Is that something that resonates with how you read it? Very much so. That's a huge contrast between any other major texts in ELT which talk about teaching and the language in much more general terms. And yeah, so that's a really good point, that he's not just giving us simple answers that we can implement tomorrow, but he is challenging us to think differently about what we're doing. And to understand that as teachers, we always need to respect our relationship with the individual language user. Yeah. And that's hard when you're in a language school, because we are. We are a bit paint by number, are a bit one size fits all, we have to be, it's what we have. But we still have a relationship with individual language learners. Yes, definitely. And I think that this is a problem in education in general, not taking the individual's perspective seriously enough. So with standardised exams and compulsory education and... Every child will study these subjects, regardless of what they might be interested in. same thing with an adult on a general English course. You are going to study these things, and we're not going to change it. We're just going to do this. So yeah, it's refreshing. It really Yeah, but. That's all I wanted to say. Thank you for inviting me. It's always nice to lock horns. You always say something that festers with me. The last time it was what you said about needs analysis and not wanting us to get them to do it, that really festered. so I'm so glad that Mike Long came back and addressed that in this chapter, because I think that's moved my understanding forward quite a lot. And today it was what he said about... Going beyond... Yeah, a language teacher can't do what you're doing with the eyes out because you're training them in knowledge and skills, you're not training them in language. I think that's something that's going to really fester. So the next time we talk we'll have to revisit that idea. You make me think. Cool, awesome. Well likewise. So thank you for the discussion. Yeah, thank you. And thank you for listening. And see you next time.