Freda Mishan lectured on the TESOL Masters and PhD programmes at the University of Limerick, Ireland until 2019. Her research interests and publications are primarily in language learning materials development, including development of intercultural materials, as well as ESOL and blended learning. Her publications include Designing Authenticity into Language Learning Materials (2005), Materials Development for TESOL (co-authored with Timmis, 2015), and edited/co-edited books ESOL provision in the UK and Ireland: Challenges and Opportunities (2019)  Practice and Theory for Materials Development in L2 (co-edited with Masuhara  & Tomlinson, 2016). Contributions to recent volumes include chapters in Second Language Acquisition Research and Materials Development for Language Learning (Tomlinson, 2016), The Cambridge Guide to Blended Learning for Language Teaching (McCarthy, 2016) and The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching (Norton & Buchanan, 2022). She is editor of the Materials Development Association (MATSDA) journal, Folio.

 

Acknowledgement

The text was originally published at

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/developing-expertise-through-experience

 

Earliest experiences of language learning and education which have affected my current views and practices

When I was aged around eight, a French assistante came to our primary school and taught us some children’s songs. I can still sing Il était un petit navire to this day. I went on to read French at university and became fluent in the language during my undergraduate year abroad. Early experiences of second language learning like this extend our conceptual awareness at the initial stages of our cognitive development, opening us up to further language learning.

When we were children, my mother (whose first language was Yiddish) always referred to our backside as our tushi (the diminutive of the Yiddish tokhes), when our baby sister whinged she was referred to as a kvetch (a person who always complains) and when we sneezed my mother would say gesundheit (good health). I never questioned the use of these and other Yiddish words, they were just part of my ‘family lexicon’ and, most importantly, I understood that there were other, English words for them too.

Exposure to multiple languages early on is also fundamental to our life-long attitude to languages and to language learning. There are proficiency implications too: learners who start learning an L2 in childhood in ‘naturalistic’ (as distinct from instructed) settings, tend to become more proficient than those commencing learning later (Ellis, 2008; Singleton, 1989).

 

Influences arising from places/institutions in which I have lived and worked

I followed the well-trodden trajectory of many EFL teachers in the 1980s and 1990s; teaching EFL first in Italy, then in the UK for a short time, followed by some years in Israel, and once I had satisfied my wanderlust, finally settling in Ireland.

In my first experience teaching English in Italy, I would say I learnt far more about language learning than about teaching. Teaching via the notorious Inlingua method was mindless at best, but the classroom proved the starting point for my own acquisition of Italian, as I scribbled down the students’ whispered translations (‘table – tavola’, etc.). I followed this up by quickly eschewing the company of fellow ex-pats, making friends in the small Italian town in which I had landed, and discovering my ability as a cultural ‘chameleon’ that has been a characteristic ever since. Years later, reading about Dörnyei and Ushioda’s concept of the L2 self (2009), I was to realise that the experience of ‘metamorphising’ into a speaker of the L2 is quite a normal part of language learning. My self-imposed, ‘total immersion’ experience meant that at the end of my four years there, I had become almost ‘more Italian than the Italians’ linguistically and culturally.

Neither did I learn much, directly, about teaching English in Israel, where teaching English for Academic Purposes at Ben Gurion University was basically providing grinds for students to pass their English examinations (at the time, English was mandatory in order to gain an undergraduate degree). To say that the motivation for these students was ‘extrinsic’ is an understatement, their sole focus was to pass the English examinations by any means possible. It gave me, however, my first opportunity for materials writing, which was to prove the direction I would take in my research and teaching some years later. Intermediate Experimental Readings in English for Science and Technology (‘INTEREST’) was a compilation of practice examinations, comprehension questions on texts which were, furthermore, authentic – also presaging my passion for authenticity in my later research and teaching.

What I learned about teaching from my experience in Israel was, as in Italy, less from my actual teaching experience than from my learning of the language. Prior to getting the teaching job, I had taken an ‘Ulpan’, a Hebrew language course, which took place on a kibbutz, where students worked a half-day as payment for the course. It was not until some years later, when I studied English teaching formally, that I realised our Ulpan teacher had been very in touch with teaching approaches, using a Communicative approach that had us working in groups and creating projects, with a ‘focus on form’ only for the absolute fundamentals of the language, like learning the alphabet, as Hebrew uses a different writing system. Shoshana’s use of realia has remained the practice I offer to students to this day. One morning, she brought in a selection of spices which we named (and tasted!) - particularly memorable as the class started at 7am, hardly a time one’s palate is ready for turmeric, pepper or cumin.

My first two teaching situations abroad were therefore lessons in, on the downside, how not to teach language, but more positively, how to learn it. An interesting feature of my ‘total immersion’ language learning was experiencing what Barber (1980) and later Krashen called ‘the Din in the Head’ (1983), and as with Communicativeness, experienced long before I was able to put a name to it. ‘The Din in the Head’ describes the ‘involuntary mental rehearsal’ of a language being learned, which occurs after we have had extensive comprehensible input in it. Dins of Italian, and later Hebrew, in my head, became a normal, if sometimes disconcerting part of my language learning, in particular when these were internal ‘conversations’ that I didn’t fully understand!

Taken together, these experiences helped me realise that the experience of living and working in a different culture, learning and speaking a different language from one’s L1 is essential to become an effective and empathetic language teacher; it is one that needs to be lived and cannot be formally ‘taught’.

 

Key people who have left an enduring mark on my life, beliefs and practices

The first language practitioner/writer to really grab my attention was N. S. Prabhu, via his seminal work, Second Language Pedagogy (1987). This book charted the piloting of a prototype for task-based learning (TBL), later Task-Based Language Teaching, (TBLT).  The methodology was intrinsically communicative at a time when communicative language teaching was in its infancy and still hidebound by dogma and a fixed repertoire of techniques. Prabhu’s approach was broader and more far-sighted; ‘The development of competence in a second language requires […] the creation of conditions in which learners engage in an effort to cope with communication’ (1987:1) and further, ‘language ability develops in direct relation to communicational effort’ (ibid :5). The approach was innovative and rooted in ‘real life’, in stark contrast to the wooden characters and contrived situations found in ELT books of the time. This attraction to the ‘authentic’ set me on the route towards ‘authenticity’, which was to become a leitmotif of my subsequent research and teaching. 

My second ‘key influence’ was a result of attending my first MATSDA workshop in Dublin in the early 1990s; my introduction to Brian Tomlinson. It would be true to say that his has been the greatest influence on the last twenty-five years of my professional life. Tomlinson’s work helped me crystallize my intuitions about language learning and teaching; that language learning is about affective and intellectual engagement, creativity and fun, that it is one of the most natural, ‘authentic’ activities human beings can engage in.

 

Key ideas I have encountered which have helped form or change my beliefs and practices

I quickly realised from my earliest experience of teaching, that teaching and learning do not constitute a ‘cause and effect’ process. Learners might acquire a language item taught in class, they might learn it partially, incorrectly, temporarily, or not at all. Pienemann’s teachability hypothesis (1984), was the first ‘key idea’ I encountered after some years of teaching, and crystallized these intuitions and rationalized why this was so. Learning, it transpired, was to do with learner readiness. As I learned theories about motivation (see below), to these I added willingness and openness, and thanks to the likes of Tomlinson, ‘perceived need’. 

Another key idea that was the springboard for my teaching and research derives from a quote from Pit Corder, also focusing on motivation just referenced above; ‘Given motivation, it is inevitable that a human being will learn a second language if he is exposed to the language data’, (Pit Corder, 1974: 22). This quote encapsulates the two vital elements of language learning, motivation and input.  How to marry the two proved the catalyst for my research into language learning and teaching. Exploration of motivation ‘one of the most elusive concepts in the whole of the social sciences’ (Dörnyei, 2001: 2) reveals its complex, multi-faceted nature. In motivation, there is a complementary interplay between the affective and cognitive domains which translates as principles for language teaching and teaching materials – the importance of engaging both affect and cognition in language-learning activities and materials. But most crucially perhaps, motivation is identified as individual and internal.  Dörnyei (1998) characterizes it as a factor of such elements as personality, behaviour, thoughts, beliefs and emotions, inner-force/power and mental energy. Relating this to language learning, this suggests that, as it is an internal process, teachers cannot directly ‘motivate’ their students – as I tell my students, ‘motivate is not a transitive verb’! – they can only offer opportunities for motivation, in the form of experiences and interactions in the L2, as well, of course, as materials, inputted ‘language data’(the second part of Pit Corder’s quote), designed to best attract, interest, intrigue and engage.

Input, in fact, may have another role though: ‘input does not only input language, it releases it’, (Tomalin, 2000). One issue with the comprehensible-input hypothesis (more of which below) is that it conceives input narrowly as potential ‘intake’ (i.e. for acquisition), ignoring its potential for stimulating output - which is actually far greater. Minimal language input - a cartoon, a headline, a ‘meme’, a tweet, a chance remark from a famous personality, can promote enormous discussion (as we know from incessant social-media storms). Transferred to the language classroom, we can see that input carefully selected for its impact will stimulate response, manifested as language output, i.e. it will ‘release language’, and is thus potentially far more powerful for language learning.

The importance of capturing response to language input was another influence of Tomlinson’s; response has long been central to his frameworks for language learning tasks. Garnering the learner’s instantaneous response to (oral, written or visual) input is a one-off opportunity for the teacher to exploit the affective and/or intellectual punch of input, pushing him/her to express it via language (Prabhu’s ‘communicational effort’). The importance Tomlinson and others attached to response as a stimulus for language learning has been vindicated in the digital age, as response has become a key signifier in social media, often expressed via emoticons representing a range of emotions from love to anger, laughter to sorrow. The importance of response in language learning loops back to motivation, which, as discussed earlier, is a factor of interlinked affective and cognitive domains, so it would seem critical to stimulate response in order to ignite this motivational spark as early as possible in any given language learning situation. Once engaged thus, there is a higher disposition to learning (resisting the temptation to refer to one of the clichés of ELT – ‘the affective filter’ – more of which below). 

As noted above, encounters with the work of the likes of Prabhu and Tomlinson convinced me that the human, authentic, act of learning a language needed to be matched with authenticity in teaching it. Exploring this in my doctoral research, I found many allies, most unexpectedly perhaps, a nineteenth-century phonetician named Henry Sweet. Reading Sweet’s The Practical Study of Languages, first published in 1900, was like recognising a long-lost friend; ‘the great advantage of natural idiomatic texts […] is that they do justice to every feature of the language’ (p.178), ‘it is only in the connected texts that the language itself can be given with each word a natural and adequate context’ (p.164).

Establishing the credentials for authentic texts for language learning was not enough, of course, without a pedagogical framework for using them, namely, authenticity of task to endorse authenticity of text. Again, for this, I was able to look at inspiring theoretical precedents, most notably, perhaps, in the work of Henry Widdowson (1998) and Leo van Lier (1996), which helped me towards an understanding of authenticity as acts of ‘authentication’ by the task enactors. Other inspiration came from the work of Swales, in genre analysis, providing the concept of ‘communicative purpose’ which proved the spark for my ‘principles for task authenticity’, central to which is; ‘In order for tasks to be authentic, they should be designed to reflect the original communicative purpose of the text on which they are based’. Although I have tweaked them recently (Mishan, 2017), I stand by these principles nearly twenty years on and have been gratified to see students adopting them in their own materials-design to this day.

Taking into account that there are so many variables influencing learning (of which the above are just a few) has led me to a belief (or perhaps agnosticism) that has influenced my work as teacher trainer as well as language teacher: I don’t believe in teaching - only learning. 

 

Key publications in my personal and professional development

I have described above how N.S. Prabhu’s Second Language Pedagogy (1987) alerted me to the importance of authenticity in language learning and of task as a pedagogical paradigm.

Another book that ‘spoke to me’, in its unorthodox and down-to-earth approach to language learning, was Guy Cook’s Language Play, Language Learning (2000).  How could play, songs and games not be important for L2 learning when they were so intrinsic a part of L1 learning? 

Reading Henry Sweet’s The Practical Study of Languages (1899) just mentioned above, as well as confirming my intuitions about authentic language and learning, was also humbling. It helped me recognise the cyclical nature of approaches to language teaching; we are only ever reinventing the wheel when it comes to language teaching methodologies – as reading Michel de Montaigne’s description of his father’s communicative approach to teaching him Latin in 16^th-Century France brings home to us. 

The influence of Tomlinson’s work on my professional development has been such that it is hard to single out one of his many publications. Nevertheless, I think that his Materials Development in Language Teaching (1998) is seminal, as the book that in many ways ‘launched’ materials development as a field in its own right, and included much-cited chapters by some of the field’s key actors including Rod Bolitho, Andrew Littlewood, Roger Gower, Rod Ellis and Alan Maley.

My personal ‘go to’ list would not be complete without reference to the work of David Crystal. The linguist who made linguistics palatable is one of the most prolific writers in the field; he has remained up-to-date and relevant and his positive disposition towards language change is refreshing. His Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language (2019, third edition) is never far from hand when I am researching, but I have also enjoyed his more ‘lay’ publications, his autobiography Just a Phrase I am Going Through (2009) and ones exploring technological impacts on language change such as Language and the Internet (2002, 2006), Txting the gr8 db8 (2009).

 

Critical incidents/ epiphanies in life and work which have given me new insights

As mentioned earlier, my first language teaching experience came in Italy, where I taught at an Inlingua School using the Inlingua Method in which I had received training. This method used a distinctly linear approach - tenses were taught in sequence, the present tense, the future, the past, the present perfect and so on, with a sprinkling of other grammar items thrown in (such as ‘some’ and ‘any’). Fairly early on, I remember coming into a class on a Monday morning and, as is quite natural, asking the students ‘did you have a nice weekend?’ As I said this, I realized, too late, that we had not studied the past tense!! I think I expected, at the very least, for smoke to come out of their ears as they went into overdrive trying to comprehend this as-yet un-encountered language. But instead, of course, they just replied variously with ‘Yes, I went to the cinema’ or ‘Yes, I go to the house of my grandmother’ and the like. A lucky escape indeed! It was my first inkling that language learners are not a tabula rasa, and that ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ are not a cause-and-effect process (probably just as well given my early inexperience!).

 

Themes emerging from my chapter 

The overarching theme which best captures the ideas around teaching in this chapter is a critical approach to ELT orthodoxy.

One characteristic of our profession is its addiction to acronyms – from TEFL to TESOL, ESOL to ELF, not to mention those spawned by technology CALL, TELL, MALL and so on, in an endless proliferation. As an aside, I wonder what this says about our profession – perhaps, that, as purveyors of language, we are permitted to ‘invent’ it?  On top of this, we have the irresistible siren call of the ELT jargon soundbite; affective filter, comprehensible input, i+1, teachable moment, communicative which (novice) teachers latch onto like lifelines, while the research underpinning them gets progressively oversimplified/misinterpreted in a sort of Chinese Whispers effect.

Then we have the tyranny of ‘the four skills’. The question ‘why four?’ has often been asked and indeed, as far back as the 1990s, Claire Kramsch argued for the addition of a fifth – ‘culture’ (Kramsch, 1993). The skills, particularly listening and reading, overlap with the senses of course, which begs the question, so what about other senses, smell, taste..? Once again, this question has already been asked, and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP, developed by Bandler and Grinder, 1979) brought these into play in language learning, although NLP has remained side-lined as a quirky ‘alternative’ approach. Teacher education, meanwhile, adheres to the concept of the original four skills which teachers are instructed to focus on in turn and feature equally in their lessons. In my opinion this perception acts as a constraint, a delimiting factor that belies how people ‘use’ skills in real-world communication.  

A third area of language teaching orthodoxy I would like to challenge is the obsession with ‘input’. The importance of ‘language data’, i.e. input, for language learning is unquestionable (the phenomena of so-called ‘wolf children’ brought up in isolation from other humans, described throughout history, are proof of that). But while language learning requires exposure to language, it does not require protection from it. Yet it could be said that with its populist appeal, Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis (‘i +1’) (1985) implies doing just that - and has consequently been single-handedly responsible for stultifying learner input for a generation. In more recent times, the concept has been rationalized in the shape of taxonomies, such as word-lists at different Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) levels, intended to buffer learners from language beyond their level. In an era in which the Internet - a digital environment inhabited by the majority of our learners - gives unfettered access to information and thus to language, it seems almost ludicrous to have the equivalent of a ‘parental lock’ on the language material they are presented in the classroom. Today’s learners have a high tolerance for non- comprehension;  faced with swathes of information online, they do what we all do (whether working in our first or other languages), they develop strategies for dealing with this information-overload by skimming, scanning for desired information, and most importantly, getting used to ignoring a high percentage of it. If we must resort to theorising level of input suitable for our learners, then it should be notated as (i + 1, i + 2, i + 3, i + 4 à i + infinity…). The final ‘nail in the coffin’ of ‘comprehensible input’ for me, is Gilmore’s challenging of the ‘causal link’ between comprehension and language acquisition (Gilmore, 2007). For all these years, then, the comprehensible input concept may have been sending us down the wrong track; striving for comprehension at all costs has us diverted from, and obscured its underlying rationale; language acquisition.

 

A brief statement of my beliefs/values about language and about learning languages which have emerged from the experiential pathway I have described

Learning:

• As with any learning: motivation and/or incentive are crucial: ‘you can take a horse to water’, etc.
• Openness – language and culture are inseparably intertwined – learning the language means absorbing something of the culture of the place/s in which it is spoken – so an openness to new concepts, values and behaviours is essential.
• Good language learners are good mimics – learning a language is a form of ‘acting’, so a ‘good ear’ is important.
• Good language learners are chameleons, morphing into ‘L2 selves’ in the L2 environment.
• Good language learners are confident - getting one’s tongue around another language can be difficult and even embarrassing at times, so it’s important to be prepared to make a fool of ourselves sometimes. 
• Language cannot be taught: it can only be learned.

 

Teaching:

• Effective language teaching is rooted in the experience of language learning.
• ELT orthodoxy has to be approached critically, by resisting established teaching formats and thinking outside the box.
• Language learning is the most natural, authentic act for human beings: classroom activities should reflect this.
• Response, both affective and cognitive, is a key trigger for the language- learning process.

 

References

Bandler, R. and J. Grinder. (1979) Frogs into Princes. Moab: Real People Press.

Barber, E. (1980) Language acquisition and applied linguistics, ADFL Bulletin, 12(1), 26-32.

Cook, G. (2000) Language Play, Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Corder, S.P. (1974) Error analysis. The Edinburgh course in applied linguistics 3, 122-131.

Crystal, D. (2006) Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Crystal, D. (2009) Just a Phrase I am Going Through. Abingdon: Routledge.

Crystal, D. (2009) Txting the gr8 db8. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crystal, D. (2019) Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, 3^rd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dörnyei, Z. (1998) Motivation in second and foreign language learning. Language teaching, 31(3), 117-135.

Dörnyei, Z and E. Ushioda. (eds.) (2009) Motivation, Language Identity and the L2 Self. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Ellis, R. (2008) The Study of Second Language Acquisition, 2^nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gilmore, A. (2007) Authentic materials and authenticity in foreign language learning. Language Teaching, 40(2), 97-118.

Kramsch, C. (1993) Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford University Press.
Krashen, S. (1985) The Input Hypothesis: Issues and implications. Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd.

Krashen, S. (1983) The din in the head, input, and the language acquisition device. 

Foreign Language  Annals 16, 41­44. 

Mishan, F. (2017) Authenticity 2.0: Reconceptualising authenticity in the digital era, In A. Maley and B. Tomlinson (eds.). Authenticity in Materials Development for Language Learning. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

Prabhu, S.N. (1987) Second Language Pedagogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pienemann, M. (1984). The psychological constraints on the teachability of languages, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 6/2, 186-214.

Singleton, D. (1989) Language Acquisition: The age factor. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Sweet. H. (1900) The Practical Study of Languages. New York: Henry Holt and Co.

Tomalin, B. (2000) Using films in ELT. Paper presented at IATEFL conference, Dublin, Ireland.

Tomlinson, B. (ed.) (1998) Materials Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van Lier, L. (1996) Interaction in the language curriculum: Awareness, autonomy and authenticity. Harlow, Essex: Longman.
Widdowson, H. G. (1998) Context, community and authentic language. TESOL Quarterly, 32 (4), 705–716.