David Richardson

Yes, Dalibor, I think it's very important to fight for democracy … but that fight has to begin at home (that's the nature of democracy for me - and perhaps one of the reasons for its apparent weakness in the face of extremism). My point was that Germans in the Hitler era didn't all think that their reasons for going to war with France were about fighting an enemy - they were trying to export their dominant ideology, at least in part because they felt that this ideology would make the world better. You can argue that they were under an illusion, or that their leaders were cynical, but how is this different from the archetypal 'naive, optimistic American' or 'US cabinet minister waging war to get better contracts for Halliburton'? I'm sure that lots of people think that the US is in Iraq to fight for democracy - but the Iraqis don't seem to think that, and, if democracy is to mean "government by the people, for the people and of the people", then their opinions are the only ones that matter. There is another explanation of the US presence too - colonialism. It may not be that the Americans were seeking to be colonial masters of Iraq, but they have certainly at least had that role thrust upon them. I would say that the reason why so few of us are enthusiastic about what's going on in Iraq is because what we want to do is fight for democracy - not colonialism. The tragedy is that to support the Coalition's current activities in Iraq involves us in the latter, not the former.

Ja … och jag som arbetar på högskolan är också mycket medveten om vikten av betyget som mina studenter har tagit med sig från gymnasiet. Jag vet inte hur ofta jag har hört frågan "vilka sidor måste vi läsa för tentamen?" Ett problem är att det är väldigt svårt att konstruera bra prov, vilka verkligen testar det som de skulle testa. Jag hade varit i Sverige ett år, och kände att jag kunde nästan ingen svenska alls. Då bestämde jag mig att läsa grundskolesvenska på KOMVUX för att sätta mig i en situation där jag var tvungen att prata svenska minst två gånger om veckan. Alla mina klasskamrater var svenskar. Vid slutet på året var min lärare förtvivlad: du har aldrig skrivit ett dåligt prov … men jag kan inte ge en 5 i betyg till någon som inte kan svenska! (Hon gav mig en 3 till slut). Hur blev det så? Jo, om man hade läst boken, där det stod 'Skånska betecknas med tungrots r', så var frågan "Hur betecknas skånska" ganska lätt besvarat. Faktum att jag inte hade en aning om hur skånska lät (detta var i Västernorrland), hindrade mig inte från att få 'rätt'. I språkundervisiningsteori tycker många att det finns ett omvänt förfållande mellan 'reliabilitet' och 'validitet' (Det första är egenskapet att samma svar får samma antal poäng, oavsett vem skriver och vem rättar. Det andra är hur pass 'verklighetstroget' provet är. Mina tentamen i svenska hade en hög grad av reliabilitet och en mycket låg grad av validitet.) Det gör betygsättning särskilt svårt, om det är sant, eftersom reliabla provsystem är tämligen enkla att skapa. Eleverna tycker om dem, eftersom man kan läsa till provet och sedan glömma allting, och insändarskribenter i tidningar tycker att 'kunskapsskolan' har kommit tillbaka. System med hög validitet, däremot, är väldigt svårt att skapa … och bygger i slutändan på ett förtroende för lärarnas (eller testernas) professionnella kompetens, vilket är ganska sällsynt nuförtiden!

Would that post-invasion Iraq were like post-war Japan, though, Dalibor. The Japanese weren't shooting the US forces in 1946 in many different parts of the country, and they didn't have leaders who seemed to lack legitimacy, as seems to be the case in Iraq today. I have a feeling that an occupying power which turns its firepower on a city like Falluja, or a suburb like Sadr City, in the way the Americans have done in the last week or so has made its position in the country untenable under any circumstances. The WW2 parallel I see most clearly is between the Americans and the German forces occupying France during WW2. Just like the Americans, the Germans saw themselves as bringing enlightenment and a better way of life. Just like the Americans, the Germans characterised any opposition as terrorists who were out of step with the broad mass of the population. Just like the Americans, the Germans created an indigenous leadership (the Vichy government - which had more legitimacy than the Iraqi Governing Council, since Pétain did actually take over from the previous government under legal forms), which was swept aside when it became clear that it wasn't fulfilling the purposes of the German occupation authorities. There were plenty of idealistic and altruistic German soldiers in France during WW2, whose counterparts I see on TV and in the pages of (especially) US newspapers almost every day. I am sure that those Germans also found themselves being swept along by the tide of events, until shooting the inhabitants of a village to punish them for an attack by the French Resistance seemed like a reasonable and legitimate response - just as the actions of the US Marines in Falluja must seem reasonable and legitimate to many Americans. Analogies are often misleading, though. So, what's wrong with mine?

I think this is a very interesting topic to debate, since I think it goes to the heart of IT in education, amongst many other things! I do a lot of IT-based distance education in Sweden, where the profile of the 'average' distance student is a woman, aged 34 with 2 children, a steady job, and a stable relationship. Course discussion fora are typically almost unused, and the most successful web site designs are the least flashy and technological. My strategy for designing interaction into distance courses is to set up lots of activities which involve people meeting in small groups outside of 'teacher-led' meetings, where the small groups have both group-related tasks to complete and class-related tasks. The latter involve the creation of an informal network between groups with reporting back at video conferences. It's very important for me as the teacher to make sure that there is always follow-up from anything reported back this way. This strategy has worked very well indeed, to the extent that the groups continue meeting even after the course has ended. There's a very successful book discussion club in one of the towns in southern Sweden which started on one of our courses. I'm not exactly sure *why* it's worked though! And I'm not exactly sure why text-based fora don't work. I suspect that the mode of discussion has a lot to do with it. Most of the women on our courses have no interest in making a splash in the larger group - they're studying part-time anyway, and they've got far more important things to do in their lives. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they don't tend to like discussing things with strangers, but they do enjoy discussions with people they know. There must have been some research done into this - anyone know of any?

We had a very interesting experience with Marratech last Friday. Last October we had a visit from Dr Chris Metress from Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, one of our partner universities. Chris is an expert on American Literature, and we have a book called 'In Country' by Bobbie Ann Mason on the English 1-10p course this spring. The course itself is being run at 14 different Study Centres over an area which is equivalent to Bristol - London - Nottingham - Manchester, and we connect up every second week via a bridge in Gothenburg (the other side of the country for me). I really wanted my students to have an input from Chris since he has some interesting insights into the book - and he speaks in a lovely Southern 'Sweet Home Alabama' accent! However, Chris' university doesn't have an ISDN studio, and Chris isn't very practised with computers for this kind of application. So … we tested Marratech between us, with him in a computer lab and me in my office, and on the big day we fed the Marratech input audio through the digital camera attached to the ISDN system, and broadcast the computer screen to all the centres. My students could all hear Chris perfectly, and they could see the shared whiteboard as he put up quotations and pictures. The only bit we haven't quite cracked yet is the students' audio in from their centres to Chris. We solved that by using me as an analogue interface … in other words, they asked me and I asked him (they could hear his answers directly). This opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for us … any time we want to use inputs from off our campus, we can set up a link and an outside expert can speak for just a short time, without being vastly inconvenienced. As a matter of principle, I've got our university to pay Chris 8 hours at 25 euros/hour, the same rate we use for our Internet tutors in places like Singapore and Australia. It's not only right - it's also a case of building something into the budget, so that we can do the same next time too. --------- I'm currently working on an arrangement with a local school to link up to a school in Manchester. The only requirement for the schools is to have an Internet connection + webcam and headset. Then pupils at both ends can see each other, speak to each other, draw things, show each other documents, etc. I've suggested that one exercise could be for pupils at each end to take pictures of things they do each day (eat breakfast, come to school, sit in the classroom, play in the playground, etc) and do a mini photo-documentary in real time for each other. The beauty of it is, there's no technical restriction on any of you using our Marratech server to link up anywhere with anywhere else … If you want to give it a try, just let me know.

Here's something that we're going to try in the next 6 months: We've just got hold of a desktop video conferencing system, which schools can use too without having to invest in anything more complicated than a webcam and a microphone. We're going to encourage some of our teaching practice schools to install the client software in a couple of classrooms (which have computers connected up to Internet). Then we're going to try to do some lesson observations from our campus, without having to visit the school. The aim is not to eliminate the school visit, but to give the trainees the chance to have more lesson observation (since we cut out the travelling time to the schools, which in our area could be 4 hours/school). Another effect which hope is beneficial is that we'll be able to make instant observations and comments when the trainee comes to the computer after the lesson. You can make notes on a whiteboard in this system, and bring up documents you've got on your hard disk. We won't be recording the session in any way - Swedish law forbids filming people without their express consent, but this won't be a problem. The main value we think we'll all get is that the trainee gets informed feedback from a teacher she knows as close as possible to the actual lesson. This won't get off the ground until the autumn … but we'll keep this forum posted.

Interesting post, David. I've already copied it to some of the people here at the university I work at in Sweden. The technology is called Information and Communication Technology. I think that part of the problem is that it's easy to test and set benchmarks for the quality of the Information bit - but amazingly difficult to do the same for the Communication bit, unless you count teachers and learners in as equal partners. Sure you can test the technical aspects of the Communication, but it's really hard to test the quality of the pedagogical contact unless you include the users. Then it depends on how you see teaching and learning. If you think that what we're all doing is purveying information, then outside experts in information technology become incredibly important. I don't remember how many times I've seen proposals for revolutionising teaching which boil down to employing a few graphic designers and programmers to jazz up teacher's lecture notes. If, on the other hand, you see teaching and learning as social activities which depend intimately on the quality of contacts between specific and real people, then the quality and ease of use of communications technology becomes really important. In the early days of Internet in Sweden, I spoke at quite a few teachers' conferences about the new technology. The first question was always about child pornography, and I always had a lot of explaining to do to show people that the Internet was more than a communications network for paedophiles! I used to say to teachers then: bad things happen, even without the Internet, so how have you always prepared your pupils to face such a world? If you think that it's just a matter of getting the right information to the right people at the right time, you're going to be replaced by computers tomorrow. But wasn't our job as teachers always to teach judgement, discrimination (in the neutral sense of the word) and the ability to weigh up arguments on their merits? I think that 'wired-up' teaching requires more of the traditional skills teachers have always had, rather than fewer!

I've read a couple of Alma's postings, and I find the view of what a teacher does/should do quite interesting. One of the first courses I studied at university was Formal Logic. It has virtually no direct connection with anything that I've subsequently taught … but at the same time it has probably had more influence on the way I approach intellectual tasks than anything else I ever studied. In other words, at university, I feel I was taught to think - not taught to be good at reproducing information in a specific subject area. Now, it's quite possible to claim that the philosophy of physics is an entirely different philosophy from the philosophy of history (or that the philosophy of English Literature is entirely different from the philosophy of Middle Eastern politics) - it's just that I've never seen that claim stand up to serious intellectual examination. In other words, a teacher of English Literature has just as much right to make statements and ask hard questions about Israel and Palestine as a 'certified' teacher of Middle Eastern politics. And, at the same time, the Literature specialist has to have her views and the information on which they are based questioned and examined. However, so does the 'certified' teacher of Middle Eastern politics. This is way the western scientific method has worked, since Socrates was standing in the Agora in Athens. Something else we were trained at university to be wary of is the "genetic fallacy": the idea that the truth or falsity of a proposition can be determined simply by looking at the identity of the person making it. Alma, are you sure you're not falling into the genetic fallacy yourself by focussing on the identity of the teacher at Birmingham University (i.e. her background in English Literature), rather than on the truth or falsity of what she says?

New technology gets us into a lot of intellectual impasses, doesn't it. The question of intellectual property rights comes up when educational institutions try to get teachers to put lessons on platforms (such as WebCT and Blackboard). I think this is a situation which is analogous to the question of who ultimately controls the content of teachers' websites: the teacher or the university. Institutions can use force (we'll close your site if we aren't allowed to control what is there and how it is further disseminated); or they can use blandishments (you only get support/development funds if you cede control); or they can engage in dialogue (let us discuss how right we are … but they fall back into one of the other categories as soon as they refuse to accept a conclusion which doesn't correspond with the one they first thought of). However, we teachers have a few tricks up our sleeves too. We often respond to force by sitting on our hands - ultimately resulting in stultification, since we're often the only really educationally creative employees the institution has. We often respond to blandishments by taking the money and then ultimately failing to deliver the goods (i.e. by producing something we want, rather than the product the institution wants), mostly because we have a lot more patience and interest in the end product than the institution does. And we often respond to dialogue by taking part, dutifully, at first, and then either dropping out (when it becomes clear that 'dialogue' doesn't really mean a conversation between two equal partners) or by participating enthusiastically whenever the dialogue is real. We can also do an 'end-run' by, say, starting our own websites - so that the interesting conversations happen on The Education Forum', rather than on The Virtual School. Or we boycott the 'official' channels. I occasionally have to remind my bosses that the instructions they've given me are to teach English well - not to use a particular technology, such as blue whiteboard pens rather than green ones, or the platform they've bought, rather than open web pages. If the institution gets heavy with me, I'll just go back to another form of information technology: envelopes and stamps.

Absolutely! And then you have the problem with the word 'understanding'. Do we 'understand' how to breathe? Well … in one sense we do, since we breathe all the time. And breathing is obviously essential to being able to stay alive. In another sense, most of us don't, because we have no idea of the physical and psychological processes which govern breathing. Do we all speak grammatically correctly? Well, again, obviously we do, since other native speakers understand what we say. And then again, we don't, since people's 'language' is always being criticised, usually on aesthetic grounds ("I don't like the way you speak"). And most native speakers couldn't explain how their native language 'works' any more than they could explain how they breathe. Do you have to have an explicit knowledge of anatomy in order to be able to breathe? And do you have to have an explicit knowledge of one of the various metaphors which describe how English is supposed to work in order to be able to speak it? Now you could argue, as does the National Highways Authority in Sweden, that the person who can't explain how a carburettor works does not have the knowledge necessary to become an authorised driver. Other people (like me, for example) say that this is a "category mistake". (Excuse a diversion into Philosophy) Professor Gilbert Ryle's classic category mistake was the Indian who was shown around the Oxford colleges, and finally asked to see the famous 'Oxford spirit'. The category mistake was thinking that the Oxford spirit was something that could be shown to a visitor, in the same way that King's College Chapel can be shown to a visitor. My position boils down to this: the National Literacy Strategy will only work if category mistakes stop being category mistakes. Since this has conceptual thinking against it, I'm not holding my breath!

Naming names … The system we're using is called Marratech, and you can download the client software to use it from: http://www.marratech.com We're in the early days of using the system right now - our university only bought the server software at the beginning of January. The things we've done with the system so far include: • running a technical English course between Kalmar, Oskarshamn and Västervik (a geographical range rather like Lincoln to Newcastle), where students have been using the system both to plan presentations independently and to participate in on-line lessons • individual tutoring of 'remote' students in places like Abu Dhabi and Stockholm • lots of planning conferences If the University of Aberystwyth's computer department are kind to us, we'll shortly be using the system to tutor Swedish students who're spending 10 weeks at Aberystwyth at the moment. At the same time they're writing a mini-thesis for teachers here in Sweden, and they need some 'hands-on' help. I spent a couple of hours yesterday on-line to Missouri, Oregon and California to plan an input at the TESOL Conference in Long Beach, California in April. We're going to be the remote end of an on-line teaching materials presentation at one of the conference workshops. Working from Sweden, I'm often struck by the relatively unsophisticated nature of US use of IT - strange to say. I realised last Autumn when we had an American visitor that the reason instant messaging is relatively unimportant here is that we've got a much better mobile phone network than they have. (The Swedish government refused to auction off 3G bandwidth, but instead granted 'free' licences only to those companies which demonstrated that they could actually build a 3G system that covered the whole country. 3G phones and subscriptions were this year's 'must have' Christmas presents.) One of the times the Americans really perked up was when I was describing the process of producing course material for Marratech and of integrating it in to the rest of the work on the course. My conclusion was that they'd been piloting it extensively, but hadn't managed to bring it in to their mainstream activities. It's too early to say whether Marratech is the answer to all our needs! The big problem is bandwidth - too many people linking up at the same time = loss of audio and video. The student in Abu Dhabi has particular problems in that respect since a) there's a big difference in the quality of the Swedish and Abu Dhabian connections; and we haven't read the manual yet (which is actually somewhat of an endorsement of the system's ease of use!). Sweden does have an extensive network of very well-connected Study Centres, though (at least one in each District Council area), so for most of our uses, bandwidth is not a problem. Most of the time, audio and video work excellently, even when we've got 6-10 computers connected to the network. A problem that is developing more and more is that it's getting harder and harder to find a time when the video conference studios are free. The marginal cost of building each extra video conference studio (and you need at least two at a time - one at each end) must be over 100,000 Swedish kronor (£8000 or so). The Marratech server software has cost us just under that amount on a one-off basis. Thereafter the marginal cost per connection is the price of a webcam (300 Swedish kronor), a headset (250 Swedish kronor) + perhaps an hour of someone's time downloading client software, setting it up and testing it (say, 400 Swedish kronor). You can get a lot of Marratech-equipped computers into the space used by a video conference studio, and you can use existing machines. On the other hand, the most important aspect of the introduction of new technology, in my opinion, is the development of the pedagogical, administrative and budgetary framework within which it can be used. Since we started using the system, for example, we've had a very constructive on-going debate within the English group here about what it is we're actually doing as teachers, whether on-line or face-to-face. So even if we were to stop using the system tomorrow, it has already 'paid for itself' in terms of the in-service training and discussion about teaching it sparked off (and it's important to add that the system has been bought centrally - our Departmental funds haven't been tapped for it). We're writing an application to the Swedish Council for the Renewal of Higher Education at the moment to fund development of the use of the system over a two-year period. Everyone in the English group has participated actively in the writing process, so far, which is nice. We probably won't get the money (Kalmar is not a very prestigious place!), but the university will probably fund us anyway. If we get the funding we'll start officially in January 2005 and create a website where we keep interested parties up to date with what we're doing. Even if we don't, we'll be using the system extensively in the Autumn Term for lots of different things, and I'll keep this forum informed whenever I have the time.

Thanks for the links, Graham. They're great for finding out how video conferencing and teleconferencing work, if you've never done it before. The system we've started using is designed for desk-top conferencing, which adds 'synchronous' audio and video' (i.e. you can speak to the people on the other end and hear them at the same time that they can hear you and speak to you) on an individual basis. In our experience this is adding an extra dimension to the exchange. Fora, like this one, are a great way of carrying on a discussion, if you don't mind a slight time delay, but imagine what it would be like if we could talk to each other in real-time and put up our documents and links directly. We use ISDN video conferencing extensively, and will carry on doing so as long as we have access to the technology. That's a great way of bringing small groups of people together, and we're currently using around 25 centres spread out over a geographical area the equivalent of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Leeds. Of course, you need studios, technicians, an investment of around £50,000 per site, a booking system, the use of a bridge at around £12/hour/site, etc. This new technology works on an more individual basis (though I saw Dr Phil using Apple's iChatAV programme with a whole family on the other side of the country on TV yesterday!), and has one feature that ISDN video conferences don't have: the ability to show and then save (at both ends) documents and pictures from your hard disk. You can show documents at an ISDN video conference, but only as hard copies. Once someone has invested in the server software, it doesn't cost anything extra for the participants to join in. All they have to do is to download the client software, connect up a webcam (if they want us to see them), and go for it. SUNET (the Swedish University Computer Network) has set up trial versions of several of the available desktop systems. Their site (in English) can be found at: http://www.meetings.sunet.se/ They've put out a fairly extensive review of the various systems in English. The forum at that site is in Swedish, though. If anyone wants to try our server out, just get in touch and I'll send you the exact details of how to do it.

Inspired by the discussion, I tried to join the community of English Language teachers. That was two hours ago and I still haven't received my 'authorisation'. Maybe it was because I put my reason for wanting to join down as 'Curiosity'. No wonder the Virtual School is having problems getting people interested - the threshold at the front door is almost insurmountable. I just hope that what's inside is worth the wait! I think John's on to something here, though. In any technology-driven virtual community you can control people, or you can set them loose. The Education Forum has obviously decided on the latter, whilst the Virtual School seems to have settled on the former. When you've decided on your approach, you then want people to contribute their time, their opinions and their skills freely. Guess which approach works best! Mind you, my reaction is probably governed by the fact that I work in one of the countries which is most sceptical of all things EU (Sweden). I'd probably have a different attitude if I worked somewhere else.

We've just started using a programme for desk-top video conferencing. I'll refrain right now from saying which one, so that this topic doesn't look like a commercial endorsement! Basically you have the features available that the old CUSeeMe programme had: real-time audio and video, a shared whiteboard, shared chat and private chat + audio & video. You need the server software to be able to link up several people at once, and that seems to be priced at a level which requires it to be bought by an educational organisation, rather than a single department or school. The main difference from the old CUSeeMe programme is that it works! We've got the bandwidth now to be able to link up computers in real-time. One of the features that I see as a main strength is that it's multi-platform: Windows, Linux + Mac. We've only been using the system for about 2 months so far, but we've been very impressed. Here are some of the things our system has been used for so far: 1. Lessons at remote sites - involving both 'lectures' and group work, where students take over and make their own presentations. 2. Helping individual students who don't live anywhere near any of the Study Centres where we run ISDN-based video conferences … people who live in places like Abu Dhabi. 3. Tutorial help for students from Sweden, who're studying part of the term at the University of Aberystwyth - less work for us all to do when they come 'home'. 4. Students are using the system quite independently of us to prepare for lessons and group sessions. It saves them from having to drive 30 miles each way for a face-to-face session, and it's more functional than a telephone. Here are a couple of the extra things we're planning to do with it in the autumn: 1. Linking up a primary school in Sweden with an equivalent school in Manchester so that pupils in each place can talk to each other, and show each other pictures and text documents they have on their hard disks. The plan is to include a link between UK ESL pupils and Swedish pupils learning English. One idea is to send the Swedish students out with a digital camera to make a 'day in my life' presentation. 2. Using it to help teacher trainees out on school-based training. It'll certainly facilitate contact with teaches here at the college, but we want to set up student self-help groups too where they can swap teaching ideas and plan lessons together. Another idea is to set up a webcam in a classroom, so that we can observe more lessons, since we don't have to travel to the school. ---------- I'm sure that other people are using similar systems. Do you have any stories to tell?

Have you come across the idea of Majority English? You'll find a description of it on Joel Miller's site (http://www.bentarz.se). As a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, I have to confront what the question of what kind of English I'm going to teach. Shall I pick the English spoken by about 20 million people in the South-East of England, or the language spoken by around 230 million of the inhabitants of the USA, or the one spoken daily by around 300 million people on the Indian subcontinent? Or perhaps the one spoken by up to 1,000 million people worldwide? It's clear to me that if you're going to set your standard according to majority practice, then Indian English is really the standard to use! However, there are much more sensible standards to use, such as beauty and clarity of expression, fun or just plain functionality. I think that the 'problem' with standards like these is that they don't belong to any specific national grouping … but, so what?

Thanks for the parsing site. It'll definitely come in useful to our linguistics students. I didn't mean to imply that Thatcher's lot invented parsing! I was at school just as the parsing era was ending, but, fortunately, I missed having to sit an O Level which included it. The formal study of parts of speech is definitely something I'd recommend to teachers of foreign languages. My point is just that I question how useful the practice is for native speakers of a language. One exercise I use with teacher trainees to get them to analyse the language before they try to teach it is with the 'used to' construction. Calling this a 'defective verb' is a useful bit of shorthand for language teachers, but I wouldn't recommend using this terminology with learners. Learners need to develop an unconscious grasp of the fact that 'used to' doesn't have a present tense (which the Swedish equivalent does), but my aim as a teacher of beginners is precisely to divert them away from thinking too deeply about its defectiveness … otherwise they fall straight into the trap and produce utterances like "I usually played ice hockey, but I don't now" (a straight application of the Swedish construction).

My dad was a teacher of History in Sheffield during the time when performance-related pay was called 'payment by results'. One year he had to teach French, despite never having been trained, and he was to have an inspector come round. He coached the class in advance so that whenever the inspector asked a question, everyone put their hand up. However, if a pupil was sure that she knew the answer, she'd put her left hand up, and if she didn't know, or wasn't sure, she'd put her right hand up. Then my dad could pick the 'right' pupil to answer, and make sure that he picked a different one each time. The inspector gave my dad a ringing endorsement and a pay rise …

I've been wondering why I still get the feeling that Graham and jaywalker are barking up the wrong tree … and why the National Literacy Strategy seems stuck at around a 75-80% success rate. I have a strong feeling that the reason goes right back to the start of the National Curriculum and the (I hate to use the term) political situation which existed after 1979 - which I'm sure sounds like ancient history to most UK teachers now. I was a newly-qualified teacher of English in 1977 and worked as an English teacher until 1980 in north-west Kent (of all places). I trained at Goldsmiths', though, and did my TPs in places like Peckham - and Blackheath, so I had quite a rounded education during my PGCE year. I've been trying to square the picture of a 'qualified' teacher of English grammar with the kind of background most of my English-teaching colleagues came from. I was unusual, since my first degree is in Philosophy and Politics, which included some very rigorous courses in subjects like formal Logic. Most of my colleagues had degrees in English Literature, rather than Applied Linguistics, so they were often worse off than I was when it came to analysing how the language worked outside of a literary context. As I understand it, this is still the case. Lower school teachers don't fit this picture, of course, since in my days most of them followed B.Ed. courses on which they received an extremely good grounding in subjects such as the way that human beings learn to read. I remember well the immense amount of pressure Mrs Thatcher's government was under in the early 1980s. Nearly everything they had touched had turned to dust - the economy was in shambles, and in those days people could see very clearly how public services had deteriorated sharply (I feel that lots of people in the UK have become used to poor schools and clogged road, etc nowadays). Since lots of people have children, the deterioration in the state of schools was most marked, and subject to a lot of criticism. I remember how the cleaning regime in my classroom went down from 'floor swept every day - washed every week' to 'floor swept every week - washed every month', and how broken windows were replaced with plywood to save money. I also remember the strength of the government's alternative explanation: that the poor state of schools was due to the inadequacy of the teachers, rather than to the cuts. And the two subject areas first in the firing line were History teaching and English teaching. The attack on History was focussed on the need to teach children how marvellous the British Empire was. The attack on English was, I remember, much more visceral and atavistic - this was the subject that was bringing everything else down. At the same time, teachers of 'native-language studies' have one of the least well-defined subjects in the whole school to work with. At least with History you have dates vs. social and industrial trends to argue about, but what exactly is it that is the subject matter of English Language? When I was training at Goldsmiths' we spent a lot of time working out what our role was as English teachers. Nearly all the strategies that worked had a 'political' dimension - our job was to teach our pupils to think, and to express themselves in their mother tongue, both practically and creatively. This is my explanation for the virulence of the attack on English teaching - we had a government and, specifically, Ministers of Education who didn't particularly want pupils to learn to think, but rather to obey and to accept their place in society. It's very easy then to construct a new 'subject matter' (such as parsing) which has nice neat right and wrong answers (which unfortunately happen to be largely irrelevant to the whole subject of teaching pupils to think), and to put a lot of pressure on English teachers to avoid an exploratory approach to their subject in favour of a prescriptive one. And, as I've said in a previous post, I think that 77% represents about the limit of how far this approach can be pushed. At the same time, I'm full of admiration for the rearguard action many English teachers have fought over the years to preserve their subject - it's just such a shame they have to waste their time on diversions such as the National Literacy Strategy.

Scott Thornbury in 'How to Teach Grammar' (Longman) has a very clear discussion of the issues involved. He describes what he calls the 'A' Factor and the 'E' Factor as useful tools for deciding when and how to teach grammar. The A Factor is 'appropriacy' and the E Factor is 'efficiency'. Thus, to go back to the 'might of' example, an assumption that a native-speaker pupil producing that form didn't understand the way perfect tenses are used would definitely not be appropriate, unless the same pupil produced utterances like "I of read that book". Seeing the use of 'of' as a 'spelling' problem is perhaps more appropriate, whilst giving them root and branch instruction about perfect tenses would probably only confuse them more. You could teach your pupils the phonetic script and then take them through the patterns of assimilation and reduction in English … but that wouldn't be very efficient, since they basically 'know' their own language. Besides which, an understanding of the principles underlying this problem is something which takes place in the conscious mind, whilst the production of the 'wrong' form is an unconscious process.

I understand exactly what you're saying - this is a key issue for teachers of foreign languages. My point, however, is that there is a difference between the way you look at a first language and the way you look at a second language. Native speakers already 'know' the grammar of their native language - it's just that they don't express it in metagrammatical terms. And the problem is that the metagrammatical terms used are usually not quite adequate to describe the way a language really works. Let's imagine you work for a company which has just changed its corporate image. You come to work one day and find that you have to wear a shirt and socks which are a hideous shade of lime-green. The company cars are all to be resprayed in the same colour. Using conventional metagrammatical terms, these are a shirt, socks and a car which are green. I.e. 'shirt' is the noun and 'green' is the adjective describing the noun. However, to take the example from John Holt's 'How Children Fail', isn't it just as likely that we real human beings think in terms of a 'green' (noun) that is 'shirt', 'socks' or 'cars' (adjective)? In other words, even a metagrammatical concept as basic as 'adjective' doesn't have a fixed meaning. We just happen to have decided that certain words are going to be called adjectives, whether or not the definition fits each particular case. ('Adjective' as a metagrammatical concept came on the scene quite late, by the way - for the Romans they were 'adverbs'.) I'm not surprised that teachers, pupils and educational administrators prefer the false certainties of the National Literacy Strategy - it's a lot easier than dealing with reality. My reading of the 77% 'success rate' is that you can get most people to give whatever answer you have decided is 'right' if you hammer away at it enough … and the 23% 'failure rate' would represent where the limits of the irrationality of the National Literacy Strategy run. I know that UK teachers are stuck with this system, as most Swedish teachers are with a system which describes English grammar in wondrous ways for Swedish pupils (although that situation is rooted in praxis in Swedish schools, rather than government directives). What I often say on in-service training courses is "that's OK - it just means that there'll always be a job for someone like me putting your pupils' English right, once they've left school!"

"When British kids write "I might of known" and "Your the one", it's obvious that they don't understand the grammar of their own language. Is the National Literacy Strategy doing anything to improve things? TV and radio presenters don't help. They are always making mistakes. "I must admit that I learned more about English grammar from my German teacher at school than from my English teacher. My German teacher was the local Delphic Oracle concerning all aspects of grammar in German and in English." I don't read it this way. British kids writing 'I might of known' are reproducing a sound they've heard. I think you'd need a lot more evidence to draw the conclusion that they don't understand the Perfect nature of the construction 'might have'. In other words, this could well be a spelling problem rather than a grammar problem. In Sweden, Swedish pupils still spend a lot of their time parsing Swedish. Swedish teachers will still tell you that "you have to know the [metagrammar] of Swedish in order to be able to learn foreign languages" - a highly debatable proposition that's easy to refute, that is, if you can get it to make sense at all. The metagrammatical term in Swedish for the tense used in the phrase "I ate" is 'imperfekt'. The Swenglish confusion is between the phrases "I ate" and "I was eating". The French equivalent of "I ate" has part of the verb "to have" in it, and is called "passé composé" or "parfait" in French, whilst the equivalent of "I was eating" is called "imparfait" in French. Hm … looks like an (imperfect) 'knowledge' of Swedish grammar is more of a hindrance than a help. The problem, in my opinion, is in the idea that you only 'know' your own language if you can parse it. When I first arrived in Sweden (and hardly knew any Swedish) I enrolled in a secondary-level Swedish class for Swedes. We had grammar tests all the time, and I (not speaking Swedish) would typically get 100%, whilst my Swedish colleagues averaged around 30%. The tasks were all of the form "underline the 'bisats'". As soon as I'd worked out that a 'bisats' is a subordinate clause, as a language teacher I didn't need to understand the words in order to be able to identify a subordinate clause. It's a pretty strange test of knowledge which 'passes' the person who can't speak the language and fails the people who've been speaking it ever since they could speak. After a school year of this, it was very interesting seeing what the effect of being taught Swedish was on my Swedish classmates. Their self-esteem got lower and lower for one thing, as you might expect. As an English teacher in the UK, I learned how dangerous it is to imply that a native speaker is making 'mistakes' in the way they speak or write. It's almost impossible to separate "you said that wrongly" from "you are wrong as a person". In those situations, you were nearly always talking about sociolects, and I saw my job as expanding my pupils' command of the various sociolects in the UK, rather than as criticising the particular sociolect they used most of the time. You can probably imply from my comments here that I think that teaching the metagrammar of English to native speakers of English is pretty ill-advised. You might be able to get your pupils to see the exercises as increasing their understanding of the structure of their language - if you're lucky. This is all very nice and fine … but I fail to understand what it's got to do with something you could call a national literacy strategy. The most likely outcome, however, is yet another attack on their self-esteem.

Glad you liked the site. I was tipped off about it by Keith Bryant who works at the National Centre for Flexible Learning in Sweden. Here's another site you might like: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/poll98.htm It's the results of Professor John Wells' work on current pronunciation practices in British English. I first read about this in the IATEFL News (the article can be downloaded from the link I've just put in). One of the results which surprised me was that certain 'Northern' sounds are being taken up in the south of England. Professor Wells highlights the way that the word 'chance' is being pronounced more and more with the vowel sound in the word 'pat', rather than the one in the word 'part'. As a teacher of EFL, I am made constantly aware of the fact that English changes all the time, and that the changes are brought about by the people who speak the language, rather than by any prescriptive body. This doesn't mean that you can be sloppy, but that, in my opinion, you need to accept change and to be a bit careful about universal prescriptions about how the language works. The 'Mission Statement' on the GMU site (the one I posted earlier) makes interesting reading for me, at least …

Here's a link which can quickly become addictive: http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/ If you click on the English link, you'll come across 20 or so native speakers from all around the world … but the non-native speakers are also fantastic.

It's amazing how often I hear that coming from UK-based teachers (my sister has recently broken out of a College of Education for many of the same reasons). When I taught in the UK at the end of the 1970s/beginning of the 1980s, I always thought that the powers-that-be ought to be a lot more concerned about the adverts in the TES from the 'teachers' escape committee', etc! Imagine if a modern industrial concern was faced with that phenomenon - they'd be a bit daft to just ignore it. I suppose that line manager could have felt "good, another bit of dead wood cut away". It strikes me, though, that the teachers with the kind of experience that Graham and John seem to have are precisely the kind the systems should be trying to retain … I'm turning 50 this year, so I suppose I'm in the same category. In general, when I work with younger teachers on IT-based course design, I'm struck by their relative lack of confidence in their abilities, and their fear of innovation. They're usually really at home with the machines … but they're a bit frightened of using them to set other people free. (I realise that this generalisation is a bit too sweeping - I'm not tarring *all* younger teachers with the same brush. I've met some exceptions to this experience too.) It's almost as if they've learned which keys to hit, but they have very little idea why you would want to hit them. I remember debates about the increasing amount of central control of teachers' lives at the end of the 1970s where people claimed that an increase in central control would ultimately stifle the profession. Were they right?

Sweden is also suffering from a rise in the incidence of obesity, although the situation here is much more like Finland than the UK. School lunches are free in Sweden, and there are very careful checks on the nutritional value of the food. I'm a vegetarian, and I've had several conversations with school catering managers about vegetarian food for my daughter, for example. Children learn about nutrition at school, right from pre-school classes, and there's a lot of physical activity at school. Sometimes this is organised sport, but there are other activities too, such as hikes, open-air lessons, etc. I remember my daughter working with a couple of friends building a shelter, making a fire and cooking a meal (under the supervision of a teacher) outdoors … when she was 8. Of course, there's a lot more open countryside here and it's a lot easier to get to.