Jordan, Scriverhill and Guru-bashing

Not for the first time, I’ve been sucked into an online discussion with Geoff Jordan. If you’re not familiar with Geoff’s work you should check out his blog here. As well as being able to write with considerable authority and clarity on ELT and SLA-related topics, Geoff has a bit of a reputation for being very forthright in expressing his views. If he thinks that an idea is crap, he’ll say so. If he thinks that an individual’s work is overrated, he’ll cut them down to size. As a result, Geoff has attracted negative comments from some of the many nice people in our profession who think his criticisms are personal attacks, and that he’s being unfair. And most of us are nice people. I bet Geoff’s a nice person too. Certainly, he is always keen to point out that his criticisms are about people’s ideas and not about them as individuals. Anyway, I’ve found myself being quoted on his blog, in a post that could be interpreted as a bit of ELT-celebrity-bashing. Although I don’t retract the comments he has quoted, I do feel a bit uncomfortable about being complicit in an attack on Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill’s Demand High meme. I’ll try to explain why.

Geoff originally wrote a critique of Demand High, with one of his main criticisms being that it is merely a vehicle for Scrivener and Underhill to promote themselves. They are exploiting their position as ELT celebrities to gain publicity for a product that they can be paid to take round the conference circuit and write books and articles about. In my comment on this post I agreed with Geoff that when you look at what Demand High offers us – a series of small tweaks and low-level techniques – it doesn’t really amount to very much at all, which is very disappointing. I believed the hype to begin with, hoping that Demand High was going to lead to the “discussion about re-inventing our profession” that it boldly claims to be on the website. So when I see that all Underhill and Scrivener have to offer us are some checking questions and drilling techniques, it’s a bit of an anti-climax.

However, I’m reluctant to be as cynical as Geoff and accuse Scrivener and Underhill of deliberately selling us a dud product. Instead, I think they realise that if they were to start promoting ideas that really did prompt us to reinvent our profession, everyone would accuse them of hypocrisy. After all, they have both been very influential over the last 20 years and are therefore partly responsible for our profession being what it is. Geoff thinks that Scrivener and Underhill actually believe that the stuff they are selling us through Demand High is good stuff. I think that they know it’s all a bit half-baked, and they are secretly wishing for someone to take it further and come up with something that actually is new. But it can’t be them, as they are part of the establishment that needs to be overthrown in order for this to happen.

My mentioning of the establishment and the need for wholesale change in Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) prompted (I think) Geoff to write a second post about Demand High, this time quoting a lot of my comments and then reflecting back on how things used to be, earlier in his career. Reading Geoff’s latest post makes me want to raise two issues which are related to the whole Scriverhill-Demand-High thing. First of all, there’s the concept of the ELT Guru, which seems to have existed in language teaching for at least 100 years. You get one guy (it’s usually a man) who comes up with a “method” of teaching that is, in some way, distinct from anything that existed before. There was Cattegno’s Silent Way, Lozanov’s Suggestopedia, Asher’s TPR – all of these “communicative” methods from the 1970s were, in effect, commercial products that were being peddled by individuals who were able to make a lot of money. You can go back further to Berlitz and his carefully packaged language teaching method that is based on behaviourism. What Scrivener and Underhill are doing with Demand High, therefore, is nothing new, and demonstrates how the cult of the ELT celebrity is still alive and well today. Except for the fact that the product they are peddling lacks substance, which infuriates Geoff and disappoints me. Geoff’s point though is that the Demand High product needs to be critically examined, in the same way that Cattegno, Lozanov and everyone else back in the day received a lot of criticism and had to debate and justify their ideas. If the product doesn’t stand up to scrutiny then this must be pointed out – Geoff and I agree on this.

I’d like to raise another issue though by telling a story of my own. While Geoff enjoyed a wonderfully creative and exciting spell in the 1980s at ESADE Idiomas, I had a similar experience in the late 1990s at IH Budapest. The issues were different, but the buzz and the enthusiasm among teachers was very similar to what Geoff describes. Of course, by the 1990s methods like the Silent Way and Suggestopedia were seen as curiosities, period pieces. Their legacy was there for all to see in the classroom – people used cuisinaire rods and guided visualisation activities, for example – but they were used within the now established, all-encompassing paradigm known as Communicative Language Teaching. Other ideas like the Lexical Approach and Task-Based Learning were also emerging and causing plenty of debate and discussion, though these ideas were also known as “communicative” approaches rather than heralding any kind of potential paradigm shift.

The key thing here is that, in between Geoff’s glory days in Spain and mine in Hungary, something very important had happened. The commercial potential of ELT as a truly global industry had been recognised by publishing companies, and also by the qualification awarding bodies at Cambridge and Trinity. If ELT could be packaged as a single entity, and if they could convince us all that the same methods, approaches and (get this) materials could be used all over the world, these corporations could make an absolute fortune. The McDonaldisation of education.

So, by the time I got properly into ELT, the coursebook was king and pretty much dictated syllabus content. John and Liz Soars were living on an island in the Carribean (probably), metaphorically sipping cocktails with Phil Collins and Richard Branson. Their Headway series of coursebooks followed a grammatical syllabus, presenting language in order of structural complexity. The fact that it prioritised structures over communicative purpose meant that it contradicted the most fundamental principle underlying CLT, but by this stage most people had forgotten the true meaning of Communicative Language Teaching and the term had come to mean any approach that involves students talking to each other. Besides, the structural syllabus was familiar and non-threatening, and Headway and subsequent global coursebooks were user-friendly and inoffensive. You could come straight off the CELTA, follow a coursebook and pretty much get away with it.

Like Geoff and his colleagues, we would still try out some whacky stuff in the classroom, but it was always as a kind of one-off digression. I would use a TPR activity here, a Silent Way lesson there, or maybe follow a task-based model, but this would only happen within the confines of a course that followed a coursebook. Then the management at IH Budapest decided to do something a bit different. They developed a new, multi-level course that was modular rather than sequential. It still used coursebooks, but it used them as materials rather than as the organising principle of the course. A number of different coursebooks were chopped up (not literally), re-ordered, and mixed in with bits of supplementary materials to create several modules at each level. Learners would complete as many modules as they needed to before “bubbling up” to the next level.

It didn’t seem like much – after all, we were still using the same materials – but taking ownership of which bits of books to use and the order in which to use them liberated us from the confines of the structural syllabus. This taught me to be a lot less respectful of coursebooks, and to realise that linguistic complexity is only one way of sequencing a syllabus. Not only that, but from a point of view of language acquisition, ordering language in this way is as random as any other way. It was this revelation at IH Budapest that has allowed me to (I hope) become a far more autonomous and communicative teacher. I feel I can (and should) base my courses on content selected by me and my students, not by some distant, unseeing but all-knowing coursebook writer.

The reason I’m telling this story is because the Director of Education at IH Budapest at the time, the person who devised and led the development of this modular syllabus, was Jim Scrivener. He sometimes came across as a bit too nice, but Jim had good ideas and knew how to convey them. He got the best out of teachers by helping them to focus less on what they were teaching and, instead, to prioritise who they were teaching.

Maybe this is why I’m so frustrated by Demand High, but I don’t want to dismiss it. My reluctance to be as critical as Geoff Jordan isn’t to do with the fact that I know Jim personally. It’s because I think I understand what he and Adrian Underhill would like to change in ELT. In fact, I think they want what Geoff wants. But what they are offering falls way short of achieving this, and I find it hard to accept that it’s because they don’t have any better ideas. They have ideas but are not in a position to express them because it would undermine their own reputations. Or maybe they just think it’s someone else’s turn to be the next ELT guru. Or, maybe, they have sown the seeds of a bottom-up paradigm shift that will ultimately destabilise and disempower the ELT establishment. Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit. Who’s going to ask them?