The Stages of Change in ELT
Specific Areas to Compare
The local English teaching profession
Native speaker teachers and trainers
Examination systems
Textbooks
The status of methodology
Where they are coming from
Where we are coming from
In-service Training in Eastern Europe
Innovation in In-service Training
A British Council programme in Lithuania
Future Plans
Conclusion
References
This paper is about the particular conditions affecting in-service teacher training and development programmes in post-Soviet or ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe. What 1 say may apply in a general way to the whole region but I have taken examples from three places in particular - Albania, Hungary and Lithuania.
It is a familiar truth that cultural differences affect how we learn and teach. what I want to examine here is how cultural differences also affect teacher training and development, and require new learning on both sides.
I first propose a common framework for looking at change in ELT in Eastern Europe, suggesting specific areas of significance. This description of how ELT in the region is changing, mainly in reaction to Western influences, leads to an examination of the cultural differences on both sides which affect the nature of this reaction. The focus then narrows to INSETT in the region, with particular reference to Lithuania; and in this context a British Council initiative, the Professional Development Programme, is briefly introduced, showing its strengths but also its problems. Finally, I try to show how learning from these problems and an understanding of the cultural background can help towards the planning of a new Trainer Training course which will incorporate development for both tutors and participants.
Though very different, the countries in this region still have much
in common as regards the development of English language teaching in the
post-communist period, and thus it is possible to chart the stages in this
development on a common framework: they all go through the same stages
but are at different points along the line. Working in Poland, say, in
the seventies, you could see tendencies or attitudes which were operating
in Hungary in the eighties. Lithuania in many respects is still at an early
stage. The focal points in these series of changes, for my purposes, are
how the society interacts with Western influences in the field of English
language teaching and training.
2. Then comes a reaction, a feeling that the new methods are unworkable, inappropriate; then feelings of distrust of the imported ideas, and critical feelings about native speaker teachers, more particularly the young untrained ones.
3. This leads to confusion and uncertainty and there can be both self criticism and a rejection of the new at this stage.
4. The next stage is increased confidence and more discrimination about what is good and what is bad or unsuitable in new methodology, as more members of the profession widen their experience of other systems and are more able to make comparisons.
5. The last stage is a normalisation, an accommodation to some of the
new but also a return to traditional ideas.
In the early nineties Albania was at stage 1; in the mid-nineties Hungary
seems to be at stage 2-3, Poland is at stage 5, Lithuania between 1 and
2. Clearly, there are also differences within the countries in this respect,
between different regions and between the capital and smaller towns. Development
is not even, either, across different areas of ELT.
What aspects of English language teaching can be charted and compared in this way?
The local English teaching profession
Who are the local English teachers, how many are there in relation to demand, what is their background in terms of training and education, and who are the new entrants into the profession? In each country there is a hugely increased demand, but not the same supply. Thus the teaching profession may be augmented more by retrained teachers of other subjects and by teachers with scant English, than by students on pre-service courses, because speakers of English can get better paid jobs than teaching. On a training course I set up in Hungary to prepare teaching practice supervisors, most of the course participants were the very same people going through a requalifying programme from Russian to English. The result was a condition of 'training fatigue' - too few teachers receiving too much training. Greater economic stability should eventually improve this situation.
Native speaker teachers and trainers
Another factor is that native-speaker teachers and trainers have swollen in numbers: many of the teachers are in fact untrained new graduates, enthusiastic volunteers rather than professionals. Those that are trained and experienced may be under-used: attitudes range from ecstatic welcome to distrust and rejection, on the part of local teachers.
Changes here, or lack of change, interact with new teaching methods to create conflict or to force change. In some cases a reformed examination for English language has overtaken the pace of change within teaching (Lithuania): in others a traditional and inappropriate examination is impeding innovation in the classroom (Hungary).
These may be in chronically short supply, or there is conflicting mixture of the old official Ministry sanctioned book and new British or American glossy creations not easily adaptable to local needs.
The status of methodology, and applied linguistics, as subjects, is an index of how much Western influence there has been. Methodology as an academic subject has had a rough ride and there are continuing obstacles to its acceptance. If there are no people holding doctorates in this field (and this is the typical situation) to supervise those who wish to study it at postgraduate level, then no new people can climb that particular ladder, thus a vicious circle exists. In one department of pre-service training the teachers, many of them experts in phonetics, stylistics, grammar, claimed not to know the difference between Applied Linguistics and Methodology, and for that reason did not include the former in their syllabus. In Hungary, even in a Teacher Training College, methodology was not a favoured choice for the students' final year dissertation: they tended to choose literary or linguistic or 'British Studies' topics, and the system allowed them to do this.
These are some of the visible though complex background conditions for new training and development programmes to take into account, and they give an idea of the difficulties both teachers and trainers are working in.
Beneath these, as in deeper geological strata, there are less visible but equally complex conditions: convictions and attitudes held by teachers, administrators, text book writers - the profession as a whole - formed partly by the teaching and training systems that were current in the earlier period. Some of these may be unconsciously held attitudes that for all of us form the basis of our approach to teaching (some writers about innovation often seem to be concerned only about local teachers' unconscious attitudes and not about their own) but some of the ideas we encounter, about learning for example, are perfectly respectable theories that just happen to come from a different intellectual tradition.
Thus innovations from external sources do not themselves necessarily represent a sudden flowering in previously barren ground: there were changes and developments before which we as outsiders know little about but which are still influential in the way teachers think and behave. As a Japanese teacher quoted by Pacek said, 'We learn about your culture but you do not know enough about ours. If you knew more about our schools and culture you could teach us better' (Pacek, 1966).
The success of newly introduced in-service schemes is dependent on how
these existing attitudes relate to new ideas and interact with them, and
how much understanding outside trainers have of the existing attitudes.
For this reason I want to explore some wide-ranging cultural differences
between Britain and Eastern Europe, by briefly describing what seem to
be the most salient in an educational context, as a background to discussing
specific in-service teacher training and development provision in the region.
|
|
|
| 1. High value placed on education, high standing of teacher | 1. Adults as learners/learners as adults. Adult education |
| 2. Teenagers non-existent as a social group | 2. the 'learner', learner-centred approaches Pupils as children |
| 3. Pluralism | 3. The one right way, dissent as deviation |
| 4. Individualism, different learning styles Influence of counselling on teaching. The 'trainer' | 4. Strength of family, religious or political groups Authoritarian, hierarchical structures |
| 5. Writing more central | 5. An oral not a written culture |
| 6. Coursebooks | |
| 7. The value of difficulty | |
| 8. Teacher development as a concept |
Table 1 is for ease of reference, and represents points in the left-hand column are equally true a highly schematised summary: of course not all the of everywhere in Eastern Europe; much in the right-hand column is true of America and other Western countries as well as Britain. Moreover, the different points overlap and inter-relate.
In Eastern Europe a high value is placed on education, hence the high
standing of the teacher:
thus to see teacher talking time in a negative light may be strange,
and teacher-centred classes seem natural and appropriate. Relationships
between the generations are also different: teenagers are a Western invention.
In Eastern Europe children stay children till they leave school, even in
a sense beyond. So it is harder for teachers to imagine using learner-centred
activities, thus to shift responsibility for learning to their pupils.
There is also a linguistic problem here: in Russian it is normal to address your audience, so teachers are likely to come out with the inappropriate 'And now, children...', 'Dear children...' even when the class is composed of hefty 17 and 18-year olds. There was one right way to achieve certain educational ends, probably because of the political system. Dissent was seen as deviation. Connected to this is the dependence on one book for teaching sanctioned by the Ministry. It was not and is only slowly becoming a pluralistic society, where teachers feel free to make their own choices.
There is also the question of the individual versus the group. It is, or has been until recently, a society where conformity or harmony with the group had more value than separating oneself from the group, whether the group is a family one, a religious or a political one. Sometimes a student group has an acknowledged leader, and other students are then content to let this one be their spokesperson, sabotaging the teachers attempts to get an answer or reaction from each class member.
Eastern Europe is an oral culture, in the sense that the primacy of the spoken word is evident in many areas, for example oral exams and the prepared monologues often heard in classrooms. This means perhaps that a lot of preparation, polishing and learning by heart goes into the performance of a speech or other piece of recitation, detracting from the skill of listening and responding in a spontaneous dialogue. There is consequently less concentration on the more private and thoughtful medium of the written word.
Some clear contrasts with the West are evident here, though they cannot be expressed by a simple set of oppositions. Taking the first two points, the role of the teacher and the distinction between children and adults, in Western education we see a tendency to shift a more responsible adult role onto learners, which involves them in taking decisions, making choices and learning actively. Indeed, the use of the word 'learner' itself blurs the distinction between children and adults in the classroom, revealing an emphasis on learning rather than teaching. This emphasis has been possible, perhaps, because most learners of EFL (as opposed to ESL) in Britain and America are adults, and the classroom experience of the majority of trainers is in private language school or tertiary education rather than in schools, whereas it is still the case that most local English teachers teach school children, and it is harder to make school children behave like adults.
A great deal of writing about classrooms in fact refers to and quotes adults as learners rather than children (eg. Willis, 1990; Thornbury, 1996). Learner-centred activities will thus be intrinsically harder for school teachers to adopt. Apart from the adult emphasis in the EFL world, in Britain adult and continuing education has a long and worthy history, so it is not surprising that research in teaching adults is well developed, whereas in the Socialist bloc this was an underdeveloped area, probably because of the myth of full employment. This would mean that teachers coming back into 'the classroom' for training would feel, and be treated like, children. (For a classic example of this, seethe description of the Albanian teachers' summer school below). Anglo-Saxon individualism has surely produced the recent emphasis on different learning styles in the classroom, which contrasts strongly with the more group-centred way of learning in Eastern Europe where the class of students has a strong corporate identity. Individualism and the validity of the private individual's experience must also be related to what could be called the 'psychologising' of language teaching, evident in the strong influence of person--centred counselling like CLL and therapies like NLP on recent Western approaches.
Like 'learner', 'trainer 'is another term which crystallises the differences: 'trainer' for all its faults is an egalitarian word that resists translation into Lithuanian and into Hungarian - in the former being rendered as Consultant or 'Teacher Expert'. This suggests the belief that if you get better and better at doing something you automatically become qualified to tell others how to do it, and the skills for doing that, to other adults and to your equals, are left out of consideration.
'Coursebook' rather than 'text-book' is another instructively different term: the former again implies adults on short courses, the latter is a book of texts reflecting a basically grammar translation approach.
Attitudes to difficulty diverge strongly. Teachers often claim that a piece of material or a technique is too difficult for their students. Arguments about difficulty are pointless as it is a relative concept, but from a Protestant and Existentialist point of view - both very Western positions - difficulty itself is a virtue (cf Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Kierkegaard 'It is not the way that is difficult, it is the difficulty that is the way').
These differences all suggest the possibility that the concept of teacher development itself with its emphasis on growth springing from personal investigation and reflection, peer observation, the value of classroom research, can be seen as combining Western egalitarianism, pragmatism and individualism. Is teacher development, then, a concept lacking in Eastern Europe, and if not what form does it take?
In an attempt to answer this question I look now at a small sample of INSETT programmes, in Albania, Hungary and Lithuania to explore what traditions and models they spring from, and to what extent they allow for teacher development.
In-service Training in Eastern Europe
a) Teachers' Summer course in Tirana, Albania: this was an annual 4-week event which each teacher was supposed to attend every four or five years in order to gain promotion and higher pay. Teachers from all over the country came back to their Alma Mater, the English Department at the University of Tirana. As this was the only centre for the training of English teachers, the summer course was an exact repetition of what they had studied while students there, usually taught by the same teachers. A transmission model was followed in which the opportunity for teachers to share experience and learn from each other was minimal.
b) In Hungary, organised in-service training was a new area in the early nineties. Retraining or requalification courses mainly for teachers of Russian started around this time or in the late eighties, and a common model was a three year course in which practising teachers came for classes one day a week. Course content and methods of assessment were modelled very much on what pre-service trainees were getting at the same institution. Although this was INSEIT, not PRESET, it was regarded both by providers and many participants as a temporary necessity to be suffered, rather than as an opportunity for professional development.
c) In some contrast to both these examples, the Lithuanians have had
a system of in-service teacher education, called teacher qualification,
which involves teachers from all over the country attending short courses
in the capital at a residential centre. These would be four or five intensive
weeks at different times throughout a year, at the end of which they present
a paper on a methodological subject of their choice. This is assessed by
a board of specialists, and enables the teacher to progress to the next
rung of the professional ladder. There are five of these in the Lithuanian
teaching profession:
Innovation in In-service Training
These are questions with which to analyse existing provision and point
towards ways of innovating:
2. Is it optional for teachers to attend?
3. Who is it sponsored by?
4. who are the course leaders, or tutors?
5. Does the course lead to certification?
6. Who chooses the course content?
7. What materials are used?
8. Is there any follow-up, in terms of further contact between participants and course tutors?
9. Is any of the work classroom-based, i.e. is there any peer or self observation? Asking these questions of
b) Though not exactly comparable, in that it is a preparation course for Russian teachers requalifying as English teachers, the answers about this course are in fact very similar to those for the Albanian example: it involved regular inputs over several years, led to certification, used a wide range of materials, the tutors were training college teachers, but otherwise the same answers apply.
c) The Lithuanian model produces these results: not one-off but regular in-puts, optional though with the incentive of promotion thus earning a certificate, taught by both full-time in-service trainers and by guest University lecturers, course content chosen by these tutors, a range of materials used, no follow up but a certain amount of classroom-based work in that the final papers could be based on actual research in the teacher's classroom.
2. It should be entirely optional, but with incentives not directly related to promotion.
3. This is a very difficult question to answer, as all possibilities
have their risks. For sustainability, it should be the
Ministry of Education, or perhaps local education authorities, but
not if this compromises the nature of the provision in any way.
4 Course tutors should be practising local school teachers, who have gained a wider perspective on their work perhaps by attending courses themselves in the UK or in their country or region.
5. There is no need for the course to lead to certification, because that implies assessment.
6. Course content should be negotiated, and this negotiation should be prior to the course and on-going throughout it.
7. I think the answer here is, any materials the course leaders or participants want, but work should include a critical analysis of the books teachers are actually using and perhaps writing accounts of this for later discussion. There would thus be continual reference back to the actual classrooms of participants.
This is the point at which to briefly describe a professional development programme instigated by the British Council, in fact for all three Baltic countries; however since its inception four years ago it has probably taken rather different forms in the different countries, and I can only describe the Lithuanian version.
Many of the nine objectives hinted at above were in fact taken on board, implicitly or explicitly, in designing the programme. Starting with a small group of four or five, suitable teachers were selected by local education authorities liaising with the British Council and given a 3-month course at a language school in Britain. This initial course established the model of training through 'pack' preparation which has continued to influence the group's way of working, even though, after the first two years, the course was reduced to a month, later to two weeks, and did not specifically use pack preparation. This UK course was the initial input.
The group increased year by year to a membership of about 12, and members are known as PDP tutors or trainers, after the programme 5 name, The Professional Development Programme. Having returned from the UK course, they started working as trainers giving monthly sessions for teachers in their town or from the surrounding region. For continued support and development they also meet monthly as a group in the capital, and at these meetings they share successes and problems, try out new ideas on each other, use the library to research subject areas they wish to develop, and collaborate in preparing 'packs' of materials to be used in their sessions for teachers.
This is a programme that by making providers of INSETT colleagues rather than academics and specialists, clearly has the potential to fulfil most of the other nine objectives stated above. It has indeed successfully established itself and evaluations have shown that their work is valued.
However, at this particular point in the history of the PDP, I would
like to pose three, connected, questions:
And is this its strength or weakness?
In what respects did it innovate?
What are the current problems for the programme?
As regards materials in the form of training packs, the sheer quantity
now available to tutors, but not to teachers, creates a situation where
handouts whirl around like confetti at a wedding, and it is hard for both
tutors and teachers to discriminate or find time to relate all these heterogeneous
extracts to their actual classes. Kielpa's very searching article on the
use of packs in training shows further potential disadvantages in the 'materials
writing' approach to training, suggesting that there may be more value
for teacher trainers on these courses in the process of preparing these
packs than there is in their content for other trainers or for teachers
at the receiving end (Kiely, 1996).
And this raises the crucial question of how the development achieved
by the PDP tutors and built into the PDP programme can be passed on to
the teachers they work with other than in a random or fortuitous way, because
I would not like to deny that some tutors do in fact succeed in helping
many teachers develop.
A further difficulty exists as regards question 6 (who chooses the course content). PDP tutors regularly remark on how difficult it is to get teachers to say what they want. In practise the choice of subjects for the sessions is in fact negotiated between tutor and teachers, though usually with a strong bias towards the subjects of existing packs. If we extend the question to who chooses process or style of session, which after all can be as much the topic of a session as conventional subjects like the teaching of listening skills, then the answer is surely tutor rather than participant.
A new course to prepare a group of regional trainers is now being planned in Lithuania. It is partly an offshoot of the PDP programme but involves other institutions too. It will be planned taught and co-ordinated by Lithuanians, though British Council involvement includes some Co-ordination, influence on who is recruited to teach, advice on syllabus and materials and some funding. As a pilot course it will be an opportunity to build in some variations to the original PDP model.
These are some of the ideas so far:
* case studies of teaching and training situations;
An overall objective would be to work with participants from the very beginning in a way they will hopefully do with their trainees when they start their sessions.
It could be that the final stage in the development of English language teaching referred to above, (the normalisation stage, where there is both an accommodation of new and a return to traditional ideas) must be reached before some of the difficulties described here can be solved. I, for one, look forward to the time when native speaker teachers or trainers are neither excessively respected nor distrusted and rejected, but simply accepted on their own professional merits. The cultural differences will not disappear, but professionals on both sides will have a more effective understanding of how to bridge the gap.
Kiely, R. (1 996) 'Professional Development for Teacher Trainers:
a materials writing approach'. ELTJ, 5(1).
Pacek, D. (1996) 'Lessons to be learnt from negative evaluation',
ELTJ, 50(4).
Thornbury, S. (1996) 4Teachers Research Teacher Talk', ELTJ, 50(4).
Willis, D. (1990) The Lexical Syllabus. Collins.
Wright, T. (1990) 'Understanding classroom role relationships',
in J.C. Richards and D. Nunan (eds) Second Language Teacher Education.
CUP.