Rotten Parsnips: IATEFL Preamble Part 2

 At this year’s IATEFL conference I will be mostly ranting about how dominant practices in ELT are limiting the potential for English language programmes to have a beneficial impact on our learners and on wider society. This is the second in a short series of posts that briefly discuss some of the concepts I’ll be exploring in more detail in my IATEFL presentation.

Picture sourced from ataleoftwokitchens.com  

I expect that most people who have studied ELT materials design and/or development will be familiar with the PARSNIP acronym. It represents the topics that publishing companies avoid using when producing materials for a global market – Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex, Narcotics, Isms and Pork. The rationale for avoiding these topics is that they are likely to cause offence in certain cultures and that would be bad for business, so it’s best just not to talk about them at all. So if there’s a unit in a coursebook on the topic of, say, travel (and there usually is), it’s highly unlikely that it would include a text about Brits going on stag parties in Eastern Europe (alcohol), or sex tourism and child prostitution in South-East Asia (sex), or Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban (politics). Instead, you might get a text comparing city breaks with activity holidays, or a task asking people to say whether they prefer holidays in the city or the countryside, or a text prompting students to say how long it takes them to pack their suitcase.

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with students reading about different types of holiday, or expressing their preferences for different destinations, or even talking about their suitcase-packing skills. I also understand the sensitive nature of some topics in certain cultures. However, it’s also the case that these PARSNIP topics are potentially very important in the lives of most of our students. Yeah OK, Muslim cultures eschew alcohol and pork. But I teach a lot of Muslim students here in Scotland, and I would suggest that it’s really rather important for them to be able to tell a can of Tennents from a can of Irn Bru, or a smoked salmon bagel from a roll and bacon.

Other PARSNIPs play such a fundamental part in everyone’s lives that their removal from the curriculum seems a little odd, to say the least. If you think about the types of conversations that people have on a regular basis or the information that they are exposed to, it’s actually quite difficult to get through a day without engaging in some way with one or more of these topics.

So why do the global publishing companies make such an effort to avoid them? Well, ostensibly it’s to avoid causing offence, and also to avoid litigation in some countries. But this is not because of some concern for the sensibilities of English language learners; it’s purely a business decision. Publishers want to be able to sell the same thing to a global market, so they need a product that is equally marketable everywhere. It therefore needs to be inoffensive, universally appealing, nicely packaged, and in line with the existing expectations of the market. A bit like McDonald’s, when you think about it.

Scott Thornbury has used the analogy of McDonald’s in the past when talking about how coursebooks break down language into bite-sized chunks and serve them up in a pleasantly-packaged format – grammar Mcnuggets, he calls them. This atomistic approach against what is widely accepted about language and language acquisition, so it’s clearly a bad thing for that reason alone. But this McDonaldization thing goes beyond language acquisition theory. The way publishing companies go about materials production is a good example of what has been described as The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer 1993). This is where market forces start to control every aspect of our lives, leading to a process of over-rationalization in which we value practicality and convenience over actual benefit. McNuggets are cheap and tasty, you can get them anywhere in the world and they taste pretty much the same everywhere so you know what to expect. They are also made of the mankiest bits of chicken and have little or no nutritional value whatsoever. In the same way, the same coursebooks are used all over the world, and most coursebooks have very similar content anyway, so teachers know they can use them anywhere and deliver the same lessons, and students also have a pretty clear idea of what to expect in the EFL classroom – language presented within bland, inoffensive contexts that don’t upset anyone or make them think too much.

So what about the “nutritional value” of globally published materials? Maybe it’s OK that everyone across the world learns the same stuff from the same books. Chomsky’s universal grammar hypothesis tells us that we all have the same innate capacity for language so a standardised approach seems congruent with that. And standardised content means they can all talk about the same things, which also seems healthy enough. However, Littlejohn (2012) makes a very good point on the issue of standardisation in ELT materials:

‘One of the most worrying aspects of standardisation and centralisation is that by setting out what needs to be done, what should not be done is simultaneously dictated.’ (Littlejohn 2012: 294).

It may seem like a good idea to avoid sensitive topics in teaching materials; it certainly makes good business sense. But what it effectively means is that we are denying English language learners across the world the ability to use English to express their political opinions, discuss their religious values, engage with social problems that result from alcohol/drug abuse, and to address issues related to gender, race, sexuality and other –isms. This isn’t just about some students being denied the opportunity to learn how to order a pint; it’s about removing fundamental social issues from the English language classroom, specifically issues that must be discussed and critically analyzed if any kind of positive social change is to happen.

There’s a lot of talk these days about the world becoming more divisive, about people only listening to and reading about stories that reinforce their existing worldviews, rather than trying to learn about opposing views and engaging with the people who hold them. With English being the international language that it is, the ELT industry is currently serving up language learning products that perpetuate this divisiveness by making sure key social issues are never even raised. Instead of doing this, don’t we have a responsibility, as language teachers and as educators, to bring these issues into the classroom with a view to facilitating communication and cross-cultural understanding? Let’s get parsnips back on the menu. Big, fresh, tasty, nutritious parsnips. Even if you think they taste bitter, they’re good for you and we’ll all feel the benefit in the long run.

References:

Littlejohn, A. (2012), ‘Language Teaching Materials and the (very) Big Picture’, Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 9:1, pp. 283-297.

Ritzer, G. (1993), The McDonaldization of Society, Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

Thornbury, S. (2010), G is for Grammar McNuggets, available from: https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/g-is-for-grammar-mcnuggets/  [accessed 26/03/2017].