David Richardson

One of my more bizarre jobs was once to teach Swedish to Swedish people (despite me being English). In fact, they were unemployed adults doing a computer training course, and there were lots of terms in 'Swedish' that they just didn't understand, such as 'databas', 'formatera' and 'hård disk'. And I was once at a presentation in Swedish about computer systems where we counted up the number of 'real' Swedish words on the screens. It amounted to the Swedish equivalents of words like 'and' and 'the' ('monitorera' was my favourite). This presents problems to an Englishman in Sweden speaking Swedish. I'm never sure whether the word I'm using is now part of the language, or is one which I've just made up by putting a Swedish ending on an English word. One of the interesting aspects of this for me as a language teacher is the way English is being taken over by all the people around the world who use it with the result that English is slipping out of the grip of native speakers. 'xxxx' is an English word commonly used in schools here, both by teachers and pupils. The Swedish word, 'skit', just means dirt, but it's pronounced differently. The 'English' word is being used as it would be in the UK or the USA, but without any hint of 'swearing'. It's thus important for me to constantly point out to Swedish teachers that they mustn't use it in formal discussions with passing acquaintances in the UK. I wonder how long it will be before 'xxxx' and words like it are part of mainstream English … There's a concept called 'Majority English' which you'll find on a site in Sweden: http://www.bentarz.se. The newsletters are a good way of keeping up with developments in contemporary English.

How important were the freed slaves who fought on the British side during the War of Independence?

Here's one for you, Anders. Given the fact that the loss of Finland in 1809 was such a traumatic event for Sweden, why was there no real attempt to regain the country in 1814? Or, to put the question another way, why did Bernadotte attack Norway instead of Finland?

Without quoting facts and figures (which are widely available too), there's a relationship between abstinence/chastity programmes and a high level of sexually-transmitted diseases/teenage pregnancies, at least in the Western world. In Sweden there's a local authority-run system of 'Young People's Clinics' which help young people with contraception, relationship counselling and abortions under conditions of strict privacy (i.e. parents don't get told). The funding and opening hours of these clinics vary from place to place in the country, and research shows a strict correlation between the availability of contraception and low rates of both STDs and abortion. You'll find more information at the site of the Swedish National Association for Sex Information and Education (called RFSU in Swedish): http://www.rfsu.se You'll need to navigate your way to pages in English, but if anyone's got a burning interest, I can tell you what the pages in Swedish say.

These would still qualify as <language> for Specific Purposes …

It's interesting that your example comes from English for Specific Purposes. When it comes to language testing, I keep having confirmed for myself the suggested inverse relationship between reliability and validity. (These technical testing terms refer to the way the same answer to the same question will always be marked in the same way, which is 'reliability'. 'Validity' is the degree to which the test reflects the real world.) In other words, the greater the degree of validity, the smaller the degree of reliability, and vice versa. Vocational training tests should have, of course, a very high degree of validity. However, when you get away from banalities, and very specific types of pseudo-language, such as SeaSpeak (the very specific code which is used at sea, where you don't say "could you repeat that please", but you have to say "Say again"), tests with low degrees of reliability (i.e. which rely on the tester's professionalism to give meaningful results) seem to be the only ones worth doing. The problem for school systems is that tests with high degrees of validity seem to be very difficult to construct for any subject which doesn't resemble a vocational subject. This is what I meant when I referred to university teachers of Physics requiring students to 'unlearn' a lot of the false certainty they have picked from school. In other words, if there were the kind of specific outcomes airline pilot training requires in History, then the writing of History exams would be nice and straightforward. The fact that there aren't is what makes the whole business of examining so contentious. By the way, in my experience the 'basics' which the vocational students of English I teach have picked up at school are almost invariably wrong! I often find myself in the situation of my colleagues in Physics, getting students to 'unlearn' what the school system has rewarded them for.

It's interesting seeing this question in a Swedish context too. Society is officially 'classless' here, which means that we don't talk about class at all … which means in turn that the people with the sharpest elbows (and deepest pockets) have a tendency to get to the front of the queue anyway. However, the absence of a national system of evaluation causes all sorts of problems for the elitists because they don't get any outward, visible signs of their 'virtue'! Before 1968 they used to have a horrendous system of testing 6th formers, which involved a viva voce before a committee of teachers and academics. If you passed, you were awarded a white peaked cap and went out of the front door, where your family and friends were waiting with flowers and champagne. If you failed, you were smuggled out of the back without your cap, and your family had to sneak off home. Needless to say, the higher reaches of the education system had very few working class people in them. I've been teaching and training people in the field of English as a Foreign Language for years, and the longer I do it, the more pointless most of the evaluation systems seem to be. One great advantage I have is that few of my students really need the certificates they get - most need the actual knowledge and skills. I wonder what schools would be like if they worked the same way.

I'm not so sure that the problem is connected with a specific way of teaching foreign languages, though. When Swedish pupils learn Swedish it's all parsing … leaving almost no time for anything else. A problem we encounter at university level is that many young Swedes are culturally virtually illiterate. They also lack confidence in their abilities in their native language, since at school they learned they were crap at that too. French and German (and English, come to that), however, are taught almost exclusively via grammar-translation, so you get the problem that 'successful' pupils, who've passed all the exams and can tell you all the metagrammatical terms (in Swedish) for every word in the language, can't actually read a French newspaper or order a cup of coffee in German. As for English "Swedish pupils learn English despite school, not because of it" (Eie Ericsson - one of Sweden's leading academics in the field of language didactics). What Swedes get taught is: you have to learn the grammar of Swedish (i.e. learn to parse it in an old-fashioned, pre-Chomskyian way, since native speakers do not, by definition, make grammatical mistakes) so that you can learn the grammar of foreign languages (a quote from a widely-used secondary school textbook in Swedish). So … the Past Simple in English is called the 'imperfekt' (e.g. I ate) … and when they learn French, they also learn that what we know as passé-composé is also called 'imperfekt' (e.g. j'ai mangé, I suppose). And the French 'imparfait' is called 'imperfekt - pågående form' (continuous … but the word 'pågående was invented by Swedish academics, since it doesn't really have a referent in everyday language). And, of course the English Past Continuous (I was eating) is called 'imperfekt - pågående form' too!). Swedes, like many other speakers of English as a second language, have particular difficulties distinguishing between Simple and Continuous Tenses. In other words, many of my poor Swedish students are completely confused about how both Swedish AND foreign languages actually work by the time they've finished 'learning' languages at school. As the expert once said: it's a good thing children don't learn to ride bicycles at school, or they'd still be walking. So … perhaps the fact that pupils in Britain don't learn to parse English is a blessing in disguise - at least it's only the foreign language they're confused about!

The situation Audrey describes is precisely what happened in Sweden when the previous government abolished the former programmes at 6th Form level, and introduced a system which gave much more weight to individual subject assessments. Since qualification for university was based on an average of all the subject assessments, 6th formers quite rationally opted for subjects where they could get high grades fairly easily. Modern languages (and science and technology) went into an immediate decline. Nowadays the numbers of students studying French and German at university level is catastrophically low … which means that soon there won't be anyone to teach those subjects at school either.

John asked for reaction from abroad, so here's a quick, highly personal, view of the Swedish system. In Sweden there are no exams of the sort that would be recognised as such in the UK. There are some 'central tests' in the core subjects of Swedish, English and Maths which are set centrally, but these are only used for advisory purposes. The grades which govern which programme you're going to study in the 6th Form, and the ones which represent a final 'judgement' on you when you finish your 6th Form programme, are set by the teachers in your school. There is a certain amount of co-ordination between local schools, but this doesn't happen within any kind of legal framework. How schools examine their pupils is up to them, but the commonest system is a mix of coursework + tests which are set and marked by the class teacher herself. There are no marks or grades in any subject until the 8th class (compulsory secondary education finishes with the 9th class, so 8th class pupils are 14-15). Entrance to university takes place according to a complex series of quotas, with some students entering on the strength of their 6th Form grades, some entering as a result of a national entrance exam, which is set and marked centrally, and some entering as a result of other weighted criteria, which are designed to ensure wide representation in higher education. One of the main problems with this system for me as a university teacher is the relative arbitrary nature of grading in schools. The construction and running of a system of testing is incredibly complex, if you're going to do it right, and I don't feel that many Swedish teachers are up to the job. This is no criticism of them - more a reflection of the fact that teaching and testing require different skills. One result is that younger students who start with the same apparent grade can be widely different in terms of what they can actually understand and do. Another result is, of course, that if you have 'no system', a whole set of unspoken assumptions about what knowledge is come to the fore. One common complaint from university teachers of Physics, for example, is that the schools have taught students certainties (which are often tested by multiple-choice questions), certainties which happen to wrong, and have to be 'unlearned' before the students can start studying real Physics. As usual, it is the writers of the textbooks who determine what actually goes on in the majority of classrooms, and in my subject of English the textbook writers are still firmly stuck in grammar-translation, which, in my view, results in a situation where "Swedish pupils learn English despite school, not because of it" (to quote one of Sweden's leading academics in the field of language learning). I often tell teachers that that's OK by me, because it means that I'll always have a job, putting right the misconceptions that the school system has produced. However, my final conclusion is that each society gets the education system (and testing system) it wants. One of the discussion topics that my tutor, Glyn Bradbury, set us at Goldsmiths' when I was doing my PGCE in 1976 was "why do we have exams in schools?". We students came up with all sorts of good reasons like "to see what pupils know", then Glyn asked to consider the fact that society can't afford to send everyone to Oxford to receive the kind of treatment John described from his research degree. We need therefore some way of reducing the number of pupils who are able to use those specialist resources … which is what exam systems are for.

… you mean talking to myself? Well, it has been known! However, as a language teacher, I often need to 'sound out' ideas and phrases too - as I'm sure you know, our audio 'crap detector' is much more highly attuned than our visual one. So, yes, sometimes I wonder aloud, even when I'm on my own!

I was writing without thinking seriously, of course, Andrew, but I'm sure that some of my deep prejudices have come through! However, although the IT world has definitely changed, the original teams which set up most of the metaphors we use today were male-dominated, and, in my view, reflected a male-dominated world at the time. If nerd is a pejorative term, then I think badly of myself, since I must be one of them too. However, I try hard all the time to escape from a fascination with the 'mechanics' of the technology so that I can see a little more objectively how it can be used, and what some of the consequences of using it are. I don't think that there is a specific 'male' and 'female' way of looking at the technology … but when I do my wondering aloud, I'm often doing it with groups of my predominantly female students to try to get them to be less put off by the fact that they're going to have to use machines during their English courses. Often, they haven't separated what they think about what the machines look like (and what machine-enthusiasts usually say about them) from the way they can be used, and how they'll fit into the lives of the students themselves and their study groups. Incidentally, our IT unit here in Kalmar is still predominantly male, but we've managed to arrange it so that one of the few women who works there is the one who fields all the issues connected with our department. It's lovely to have someone you can talk to at last.

I often wonder aloud what would have happened if women with children had dominated the early computer industry, instead of single men working out of garages. Imagine if a 'menu' (used by nerds who didn't know how to cook) had been called a shopping list, for example. Perhaps 'catalogs' would have become boxes, with some of them on the shelf and some of them under the bed or in the attic. 'Disk utilities' might have been a sewing kit, and 'miscellaneous' might have been leftovers ("Are you going to make these leftovers into a meal, or do they go in the rubbish?".) I can't help thinking that we'd have saved a huge amount of time and money that we spend trying to make IT more accessible to real people.

Yes, and Ataturk also compelled everyone to adopt Western-style first names and surnames to replace their old Arabic-style name, father's name and grandfather's name. However, people were allowed to pick their own. Kahveci who plays for the Turkey football team means 'coffee-maker', whilst a poor teacher I knew in Istanbul had obviously had a great-grandfather with a sense of humour. He was called Aslan Geceksever (Lion Great-Lover!).

… but regularity doesn't necessarily mean that a language is easy! Turkish is a transparent language (i.e. one phoneme - one letter/one letter - one phoneme), so outside the airport you take the Taksi. It's got a letter for schwa (i without a dot on it) which also has a capital (I with a dot is the equivalent of the English i). All the verbs are regular except for the verb 'to be' and all the nouns are regular, except for the noun for water … and Turkish is another of those really difficult languages to learn, if you come from a North-West European background! I tell my Swedish students who roll their eyes at English spelling that we human beings find irregularities easier to remember!

Thanks for the interesting comments so far … Some graduate students here did a small survey among local 16 year-olds about text colours and background colours on web pages. They interviewed them about 1) which page designs they thought were 'coolest'; and 2) which ones they enjoyed actually reading and otherwise using. The answers to 1) were just these combinations Graham and John have warned about. As for 2), the best design seemed to be a white background with text which is preponderantly black, but which uses primary colours for headings and highlighting. Our university has very recently ploughed loads of money into redesigning its main website. They went for a site which is full of scripts (making it very difficult to print out the bit you want to print out), and with very poor hypertext links. The predominant colours are grey, olive green and beige, which happened to be trendy in the term they did most of the work. Little black letters on a grey background doesn't work too well for me - it's just as well that very few people get their main information about us from our official website!

One feature of Swedish is that a doubled consonant usually makes the preceding vowel sound short, whilst a single one makes it long. I needed a new hose for my vacuum cleaner, and whilst I didn't know the word for a hose (now I know it's 'slang'), I did know the word for a vacuum cleaner: dammsugare, or 'dust sucker'. The problem was that I pronounced the first 'a' as a long sound, resulting in 'damsugare'. 'Dam' is the Swedish word for 'lady'. So there I was in the local shop trying with words and gestures to indicate that I needed a long, cylindrical thing to make my 'damsugare' work. I think that most of the people there didn't realise that you needed a machine for it! Certainly taught me something about Swedish pronunciation though …

EAL is a new one on me, though it does seem to have a website: http://www.eal.org.uk I'm an EFL teacher, and I've often felt what seems to be the antagonism ESL and ESOL teachers display towards us! It's the same kind of antagonism we often get here from teachers of Swedish as a Second Language. My explanation for the root of this lies in the concept of language EFL teachers tend to use, compared with the one ESL teachers often use. It's a bit like the contrast between communicative teachers and grammar-translation teachers. It's a bit of shame, really, because the kind of 'commercial' pressure EFL teachers are usually under - to teach people the English they need as efficiently as possible - has been generally good for the development of EFL teaching, in my opinion, and I'm sure there's lots ESL teachers could learn from us!!

Another aspect which I'm interested in hearing feedback about, Dan, is the picture I've used on the portal. I was looking for something that said "Britain", and also 'pointed' to the two options you have on the Portal Page. An old-fashioned signpost was what I chose … Now, this fits in fairly well with the Swedish prejudice about Britain as being a quaint, old-fashioned and fairly traditional place, but what image would young British people pick to identify Britain, and also be adaptable as a 'pointer'? I thought long and hard about making a multi-ethnic version, with Australia, the USA, Africa, etc, but I gave up in the end, as all my attempts looked like a mess of images.

I've just glanced through the BECTA document. No wonder you poor teachers in the UK are going cross-eyed having to wade through this kind of stuff! Here's what I thought was a significant passage: "We note,however,that some requirements are not amenable.These are listed below.In particular,4b,– which requires pupils to ‘be taught about different countries and cultures by communicating with native speakers’– is considered non-amenable in the context of speaking and listening,though amenable in the context of reading and writing.It is possible that developments in technology will alter this position,and this outcome may be reviewed at some point in the future." It strikes me that, once again, the writers have got caught up on the 'I' element of ICT (information) and missed the 'C' (communication), with the hidden assumption that learning a modern foreign language is just a matter of getting the bits of information in the right order. We have the technology now to 'alter this position'. Should any of you out there wish to link up a class in France with a class in Germany (learning French, for example) with a class in the UK (learning French, for example) in order to speak French and ask questions, all you'd need is a cheap webcam, a headset with a microphone and a broadband connection, and I'm sure we can make our Marratech server available. Imagine if you lent each class a digital camera and asked them to take pictures of their day (breakfast table, trip to school, typical lesson, break, lunch, after-school activity, evening meal, typical evening at home). You'd have enough material for a term's lessons, and listening and speaking would be just about all they'd do. Years ago (1995) the place I worked at ran a French course (university level) where the teachers were both in Sweden and Tours and communication took place with another ICT, namely ISDN-based video conferencing. I remember one session in particular when they brought into the studio in France an Algerian doctor who'd married the daughter of a Frenchman who was thrown out of Algeria at independence, losing his possessions and a comfortable lifestyle. The doctor was also a Muslim and his wife's family were firm Catholics, so the Swedish class had lots and lots to ask about, both on a 'historical' level and personally (such as, which religion have you brought your children up in?).

I don't mind at all, Dan. Our site is running on the university computer system, so the capacity is very good, and they've got the usual controls to monitor over-use. I'm prepared for plenty of criticism too (they'll need to bear in mind that these course web sites are only part of the total course materials - there's quite a lot of stuff that we don't put on the web) - hearing other people's honest reactions is one of the best ways I know to make things better. I've dipped into Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" (sample chapter at http://www.sensible.com/chapter.html), but the mistakes are still all mine! Your students are welcome to take as critical a look as they want!

I'm supposed to be an 'expert' on the ICT Ask an Expert forum, but I'd still be very grateful for feedback, help and constructive criticism. I've just been playing around with our English Distance Portal, trying to make it do what we want it do (which includes both giving information to prospective students and providing active websites for current students). I've been trying to make it less text-heavy and more visual … but I'm not at all sure I've succeeded. So … if you feel like helping, just click on the Distance Courses link at the top of the page, or go to http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/index.htm and try to navigate the site. I'm sure that your reactions will be of use to other teachers who're constructing websites too, so this relatively open forum seems like a good place to post them.

One of the exercises I get Swedish teacher trainees to do is to put this list up on the board: Pronunciation Grammar Vocabulary and then ask them to rank them according to: 1. How difficult are they for learners? 2. How important are they for learners? 3. How difficult are they to teach? 4. How important are they to teach? 5. How important are they to academics, text-book writers and drafters of national curricula? The results always put pronunciation last (of course), as being both difficult to teach and less important than grammar or vocabulary. In fact, most teacher trainees (who are amateur language teachers by definition) think that what they'll be doing as language teachers is teaching grammar. Then I ask them to think about foreigners like me speaking Swedish, and to try to identify what it is about our Swedish which makes it difficult to understand. The answer, of course, is our pronunciation. My conclusion from this highly-unscientific survey is that one of the most important developments which needs to take place if more pupils are to become interested in foreign languages is for language teachers to change their attitude to what a language really is, and how people learn them.

Making the language more relevant is probably the key - and it's amazing how difficult many teachers/textbooks find this. To give one concrete example … I was visiting a local secondary school last week with an Erasmus scholar, and the lesson we had to watch was about the passive. A very enthusiastic teacher, who had great rapport with the class, took a group of 16 year-olds through a pre-Chomskyian grammar-translation exercise based around a twee drawing of a mouse being caught by a Heath Robinson contraption ("the mouse is lifted up by the crane"). One of the exercises I use starts with 'passive cards' where each part of speech is printed in a different colour. The students first have to just make sentences (without using the same colour twice). Then they have to turn the cards over … and they discover the subject becoming the agent and moving to the end of the sentence when they read the counterparts on the backs of the cards. (E.g. "Edison invented the lightbulb/The lightbulb was invented by Edison"). Then they go on to an exercise where they work at a workshop that was burgled last night. They have to turn their friend's spoken sentences ("They broke down the door and opened the safe") into what they would write on the insurance claim form (The door was broken down and the safe was opened). Now, I don't claim that this is a fantastic way of doing it, but at least there's a storyline behind it that more grown-up students can relate to. There's also a point in doing the exercise. We language teachers often get all excited about features of language which aren't actually very interesting or relevant. Gender is one of these areas, in my opinion. Apart from demonstrating that you're a foreigner, what's the problem with saying 'le femme' instead of 'la femme'? Sooner or later you have to get it right, of course, but it surely isn't one of the areas that beginners should be spending such a lot of time on. To give you an English example, what's the difference between the verbs in the following sentences? a. He took his clock-in card from the rack. b. He took a look at the clock. Did you notice that sentence b contains a delexical verb? And so what if it does? I don't think I've ever had a learner who's even noticed that until I've pointed it out.

It wasn't really reported in the Swedish papers - but the US papers had a lot to say about it!