Big Questions in ELT Quotes

“educational technology, in itself, is not ‘evil’. As”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“Finally, (and controversially) there might be a case – in monolingual classes – for allowing the learners to conduct some speaking activities, initially at least, in their mother tongue. Allowing learners to use their L1 in the interests of promoting talk and a sense of community may well be a necessary stage in the transition from a monolingual (L1) through a bilingual (L1 and L2) to finally a monolingual (L2) culture again. Certainly, if students are not used to having conversations in the classroom (in whatever language), they may become more disposed to the idea if there is an initial transition period of ‘L1 permissiveness’, or if tasks are first performed in the L1 (as a kind of rehearsal) before moving into the L2.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“as Nick Ellis (2007: 23) puts it, ‘language is not a collection of rules and target forms to be acquired, but rather a by-product of communicative processes’,”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“A more generous assessment of the learning styles movement is that, in attempting to address the inherent diversity of classrooms, it has broadened the range of pedagogical options available. As Jim Scrivener (2012: 106) argues, even if learning styles are simply unfounded hunches, ‘perhaps their main value is in offering us thought experiments along the lines of “what if this were true?” – making us think about the ideas and, in doing so, reflecting on our own default teaching styles and our own current understanding of learner differences and responses to them.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“as Dave Willis (1990: 128) puts it, ‘The creation of meaning is the first stage of learning. Refining the language used is a later stage.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“Skehan also reviews some case studies of exceptional language learners, and concludes: ‘To be exceptionally good at second or foreign language learning seems to require possession of unusual memory abilities, particularly the retention of verbal material. Exceptional L2 ability does not seem to rest upon unusual talent with rule-based aspects of the language, but rather on a capacity to absorb very large quantities of verbal material, in such a way that they become available for actual language use’ (1998: 221).”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“If anything, technology has liberated the classroom, restoring to it its original function as a communal space for guided, collaborative – and attentive – learning.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“As psycholinguists Nick Ellis and Peter Robinson (2008: 3) put it: ‘What is attended is learned, and so attention controls the acquisition of language itself.’ Likewise,”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“researchers have identified a number of objective measures of fluency, such as speech rate (e.g. syllables per minute), number and length of pauses, length of runs, and so on, and, while there is still disagreement as to which of these are the most reliable indicators of fluency, we are now much better equipped to test it. To test it, but not necessarily to teach it. These objective measures are, after all, only the surface features of fluency, and do not tell us a lot about the cognitive and social processes that underpin it. You can’t teach learners how not to pause, unless you know why they are pausing in the first place.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“As a term, fluency becomes difficult to disentangle from related concepts, such as intelligibility, coherence, communicative effectiveness, and so on. Moreover, the separation – even polarization – of accuracy and fluency may have misled us into thinking that they are mutually exclusive, each demanding different kinds of task design and teaching interventions, such as whether to correct errors or not. It is a dichotomy that has generated a great deal of debate on how best to sequence accuracy and fluency activities, and how to achieve the optimum balance between them. But what if accuracy and fluency cannot be so easily unravelled? What if they are interdependent? Where does that leave our methodology?”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“The move to introduce foreign languages earlier is partly propelled by the belief that there is a critical age for language acquisition – hypothesized to be around the age of puberty – beyond which learning second languages becomes increasingly hard. On the basis of your reading or experience, do you think the Critical Age Hypothesis holds water? 7.             Is English the victim of its own success, causing children to be pushed into learning it at younger and younger ages?”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“In the end, as Dörnyei (2009: 236) points out, ‘comprehensive discussion of the age issue is never purely about age but also concerns a number of other important areas – quite frankly, we would be hard pressed to find a potentially more complex theme in SLA than the issue of age effects’. Among these other ‘important areas’ that Dörnyei alludes to are: the amount and type of exposure; affective factors, including motivation and attitudes; children’s cognitive development; first language support versus multilingualism; socioeconomic inequalities; teaching methodology and teacher education; and the role and purpose of foreign language learning within the broader remit of education in general.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“Tragant (2006: 239) sums up the evidence: ‘When FL (foreign language) instruction starts early in primary school there seems to be a decline in the learners’ attitudes around the age of ten to eleven; when most students start a foreign language or enter immersion programmes in secondary school, their initial attitudes are positive but their interest soon wanes.’ This may, of course, have a lot to do with the kind of teaching the children are subject to. If teachers are untrained in foreign language instruction for young learners, it’s unlikely that even the small amount of time available will be used to best effect. This is especially the case if instruction mimics the kind of teacher-fronted, transmissive, grammar-focused instruction that characterizes language teaching at secondary and tertiary level. And a transmissive approach is typically the default choice in large classes of (potentially) unruly children.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“To demonstrate how this might be realized in practice, he traces, in minute detail, the interaction a Japanese schoolgirl has with her aunt, an English teacher, as they work through a homework exercise together: an intricate meshing of language, gesture, gaze, and laughter, inseparable from the experience of learning itself, and bringing to mind these lines of Yeats: O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? (from ‘Among School Children’, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, Macmillan, 1950)”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“Thus, Lindstromberg and Boers (2005), drawing on research into L1 vocabulary learning that shows that acting out word meanings helps children increase their vocabularies, demonstrated that learners remember verbs better not only when they enact them, but when they watch their classmates enact them. As Holme (ibid.) puts it: ‘The body can be rethought as the expressive instrument of the language that must be learned.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“More recently, scholars have used computers to model how the brain’s neural networks behave. These show that, when the condition of child bilingualism is modelled (where two languages are being acquired more or less simultaneously), the network is able to separate out the vocabularies of each language quite comfortably. However, where a second language is overlaid on top of an existing one, there is much less separation. It’s as if the first language ‘blocks’ or ‘overshadows’ the independent establishment of the second. Nick Ellis (2006: 185) sums up the findings: ‘Adult second language simulations show relatively little L1–L2 separation at a local level and maximal transfer and interference.’ This tends to confirm the view that, as one writer put it, ‘second language is looking into the windows cut out by the first language’ (Ushakova 1994: 154).”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“Nowadays, as ever, the pendulum has started to swing back to a more balanced view, where multiple causes of error are acknowledged. Lightbown and Spada (2006: 187), for example, accept that ‘the transfer of patterns from the native language is one of the major sources of errors in learner language’, but they qualify this position by adding that there are also errors that learners from different language backgrounds not only share but are surprisingly similar to the kinds of errors made by first language learners: In such cases, second language errors are evidence of the learners’ efforts to discover the structure of the target language itself rather than attempts to transfer patterns from the first language.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“In fact, the developmental view had been argued much earlier than the 1980s. In a book called Common Errors in English: Their Cause, Prevention and Cure, F.G. French (1949: 6) states his case thus: The argument here presented is that if errors are due … to cross-association, then the Japanese form of error should be one thing and the Bantu form quite another ... But that is not the case. ... The collection of ‘common errors’ … proves that the errors which exasperate teachers of English are indeed ‘common’.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“the more similar two languages are (as in the case of English and French, for example), the more likely the learner will be tempted to transfer from one to the other, while ‘speakers of unrelated languages such as Chinese or Arabic have fewer problems with transfer, and correspondingly more which arise from the intrinsic difficulty of the English structures themselves.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“A great deal remains to be done before TILT [Translation in Language Teaching] can be rehabilitated and developed in the way that it deserves. The insidious association of TILT with dull and authoritarian Grammar-Translation, combined with the insinuation that Grammar-Translation had nothing good in it at all, has lodged itself so deeply in the collective consciousness of the language teaching profession, that it is difficult to prise it out at all, and it has hardly moved for a hundred years. The result has been an arid period in the use and development of TILT, and serious detriment to language teaching as a whole.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“many learners’ expectations of language classes have been in large part conditioned by a ‘discourse of nativisim’ – the idea that the best way of learning a language is the way that we learned our mother tongue, i.e. by total immersion. This argument underpins the dissatisfaction expressed by my Catalan friend above. Many learners – and many teachers – feel intuitively that anything less than total immersion irrevocably weakens the ‘push’ to use – and therefore to learn – the target language.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“Ushakova (1994: 154) puts it more poetically: ‘Second language is looking into the windows cut out by the first language.’ Hence, ignoring or denying the positive influence of the L1 is seen as counterproductive. What is more, from a motivational point of view, referencing the learners’ L1 validates their linguistic and cultural identity, while proscribing it might be considered a form of linguistic imperialism.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“Rather than pigeon-holing learners into aural, visual, verbal, etc. types, Pashler et al. ‘think the primary focus should be on identifying and introducing the experiences, activities, and challenges that enhance everybody’s learning (2008: 117). ‘Given the capacity of humans to learn, it seems especially important to keep all avenues, options, and aspirations open’ (ibid.). Besides, an approach that focuses on what learners have in common, rather than on what differentiates them, is ultimately more practicable. The alternative – small groups of like-minded learners getting individualized instruction – is a luxury few educational institutions or systems can afford, even if there were any psychological basis for it.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“Ironically, the impetus towards creating a more equitable learning environment may have resulted in the needless stereotyping of learners. This is a development that, in turn, echoes the discourse that perpetuates ethnic and cultural ‘essentializing’ of the kind: ‘Asians are collectivist (as opposed to individualist)’ and so on. The well-intentioned wish to respect individual identities in fact results in sweeping generalizations. Moreover, by tailoring instruction to fit such generalizations, there is a danger that they may become self-fulfilling prophecies. It may be that the individualization of learning, whether on the basis of ethnicity, aptitude, learning style or whatever, is a one-way, and possibly dead-end, street.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“Given this lack of evidence, why has the meshing hypothesis proved so tenacious? The authors of the paper suspect that learning style theories ‘may reflect the fact that people are concerned that they, and their children, be seen and treated by educators as unique individuals’ (2008: 107). Moreover, learning styles offer unsuccessful learners (and their parents) a stick to beat their teachers with: ‘If a person or a person’s child is not succeeding or excelling in school, it may be more comfortable for the person to think that the educational system … is responsible [and] that the fault lies with instruction being inadequately tailored to one’s learning style’ (ibid.). Learning styles, in other words, are a convenient untruth.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“With regard to the linguistic constraint on classroom speaking, the teacher’s role in preparing learners for speaking activities (rather than simply plunging them into them) and of supporting them during speaking activities is obviously extremely important. Allowing learners to script and rehearse their own dialogues in pairs or small groups before publicly performing them is one way of reducing some of the anxiety associated with speaking the L2 in public. Another is providing the words and phrases they might need in advance, and having these available on the board during the activity. You can always erase these progressively as the learners become more proficient at using them.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“Dick Allwright (1988) reports on a student in a class who said little or nothing during the course of a semester, but who scored highest in the end-of-course speaking test, leading Allwright to conclude that, for some learners, at least, language acquisition is ‘a spectator sport’.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“This, to me, raises the (painful) question as to whether it might not be better to have students practise speaking in the context of rather banal, game-type activities, in which they have no personal investment so they can at least have the experience of communicating (and perhaps even get better at it), but without the inhibitory threat to self-esteem involved in trying to be ‘one’s real self’.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“If students followed the advice given by those who promote ‘good learner strategies’, such as that learners should persist in attempting to communicate at all costs, they will likely come across as either ‘a pest or a simpleton’. ‘Most learners will probably, in deciding what to say (if anything) have a sort of cut-off point for the reduction [of personality] they will tolerate, below which silence is preferable. Instead of seeing silence as the extreme point on the scale of message reduction, it can also be seen as the alternative to it.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT

“The findings suggest that the teachers should relax their control and allow the students more freedom to choose their own topics so as to generate more opportunities for them to participate in classroom interaction. Doing so might foster a classroom culture that is more open to students’ desire to explore the language and topics that do not necessarily conform to the rigid bounds of the curriculum and limited personal perspectives of the teachers (2010: 19). At the same time, this assumes a common denominator of shared community, a community of practice in which the learners all feel themselves to be members, with the rights and duties that such membership entails. This means the teacher needs to work, initially, on creating – and then sustaining – a productive classroom dynamic. Managing groups – including understanding, registering and facilitating their internal workings – is probably one of the teacher’s most important functions. But, whatever the classroom dynamic, there will still be learners who feel an acute threat to ‘face’ at the thought of speaking in another language. It’s not just a question of making mistakes, it’s the ‘infantilization’ associated with speaking in a second language – the sense that one’s identity is threatened because of an inability to manage and fine-tune one’s communicative intentions. As Harder (1980) argues, ‘the learner is not free to define his [sic] place in the ongoing [L2] interaction as he would like; he has to accept a role which is less desirable than he could ordinarily achieve’. Or, as he more memorably puts it: ‘In order to be a wit in a foreign language you have to go through the stage of being a half-wit – there is no other way.”
― Scott Thornbury, Big Questions in ELT