merry xmas and happy new year

2012 is at an end and 2013 is nearly upon us and we still don't really have a name for this  decade (the teens?). Lexical gaps aside it's time for a run down of the year. But before that I'd like to post a few thank yous.

I've managed to meet loads of interesting people on twitter. This blog, which I started in March, has become more successful than I could have ever imagined so thank you for reading it, thank you for retweeting and thank you for commenting. The blog didn't get off to a great start when one of the first people to read "is Korea the worst place to teach English" angrily ordered me to remove the post and then blocked me. Things slowly got better though and I had more views in the first week of October than I did for the whole of the first two months. Next, I had more views in the first week of November than the whole of October. A lot of these may have been bots (if the spam is anything to go by) but anyway, I'm grateful to anyone who bothered to read this stuff. The lovely things people have said have really made a difference to me and when I started I never thought it would get anywhere near as many hits as it has done. In this blog I'm going to tell you my dodgiest teaching practices, the most popular posts this year and then my own personal favourite posts. so here goes...

 

Thanks

Maybe writing a thank you post like this is a bit premature for such a small blog but I want to take this opportunity to say thanks to a few people. If you don't want to read this then skip to the next heading.

Ok,Firstly Dan, who followed me first and told me to "keep writing", Louise, Susie and Emma for the nice things you've said about various posts. Rich and the Ophelia for putting up with being forced to read almost every post before I publish them. Also some people who have given me feedback or ideas about what to write, including (in no order) Steve King, Alistar Logan, Jo (thanks for the mail), Glynis, Amos Paran, Michael Swan, among many others.  

 

I also really want to thank a few people on Twitter who have either encouraged me or given me some interesting things to think about. Specifically Michael Griffin who I think has contributed more to the success of this page than anyone and who seems lovely and is a very welcome  presence on twitter. Others include leo, Alex, laura, sophia,  kevchan, Tyson,  James, Patrick, Adam, Marisa, Anne (who seems lovely),  Dan, Rachel, John and others too numerous to mention (sorry if I missed you!) all of who have supported this blog in one way or another.

Dodgiest practice award

There have been so many great contenders this year but there can only be one winner.

In at number 3 is BrainGym. Yes exercise is good. No rubbing your temple won't stimulate your brain buttons. It's probably the wackiest of them all but only seems to have very limited usage among EFL teachers. also, should teachers actually use it, it probably won't do kids any harm, as long as they don't teach the bizarre science that goes with it.

At Number 2 is learning styles. Yes it's true we all learn in different ways and yes teachers should probably try to get a good mix of activities into lessons, but with no practical application, unproven and contradictory claims about what learning styles are and no proven value for students even if they are taught using their favourite method, -this one's a real stinker.

But the number 1 spot goes to the method that literally left me with my mouth hanging open. Yes, the 2012 winner is neuro linguistic programming! Practitioners are often a little coy about what NLP entails but when you dig down and find some of the incredible claims it makes, combined with the cost of courses and more importantly the prevalence of NLP in EFL literature (even getting it's own, sightly dodgy ELTJ article) there can be no doubt about its selection for the top spot.

This year's "worth a second look" prize goes to "mindfulness". Despite it's Buddhist background and the therapy upbringing there might be something to this. I'm not rushing out to buy the incense yet but having students think carefully about things or just having humans in general be more thoughtful is probably a good thing. More importantly for this blog, there seems to be evidence to support it's efficacy.

 

Top posts

The most read posts on this blog are not necessarily my favourites but here they are at number three is the piece I wrote on Learning styles (300 hits). Number two is the first in the three part "why we need evidence" (450 hits). However, the clear winner with 1,400 hits is a non evidence-based look at the difference between the DELTA and MA. I guess this topic probably has pretty wide appeal unlike a lot of the other stuff.

As to the posts I enjoyed writing the most well, the look at who Vs whom inspired by grammargirl was really enjoyable and I like to think it's quite a good read. I have a soft spot for the first post on the misuse(?) of the word "literally". There were others which were a lot of fun, like Dr. Fox, the impostor syndrome and the Pygmalion effect but the one I enjoyed the most was Teacher beliefs in EFL. It's a bit silly perhaps and doesn't say all that much but linking penis theft and fan death with EFL is something of an achievement, right?

 

 

2013

It's been a great year for EBEFL but it's time to start thinking about next year. I've been dealing with a lot of low-hanging fruit this year, like NLP, brain gym and learner styles. I'm hoping to write about guessing from context, stress timing, dogme, over-teaching, skimming and scanning, paraphrasing and academic dishonesty among others. What would you like to see featured in the 2013 posts of Evidence based EFL? Post your ideas below.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

MA TESOL /app ling or DELTA? Which to do?

DISCLAIMER: This is not a piece based on evidence but just personal experience.  If you feel there are any factual inaccuracies then please let me know and I'll change them.

 

I recently got an email asking which of these is a better option for an EFL teacher.  Although the person asking probably didn't expect such a long winded reply, it inspired me to put my thoughts down in this blog.  I've wanted to write about the DELTA for a while now but this is not that blog...hopefully it will push me to start writing that blog though...so I'm going to lay out some of the pros and cons of both here and let you make up your own mind depending on your needs and situation. 

Time

This is fairly straight forward.  The DELTA is a 2 month course (with 1 month to write the essay for module 3) and most UK based MAs take a year.  things get more complicated if you want to do part time, or distance learning.  A lot of people choose the DELTA because taking a whole year off work is quite tough for many EFL teachers -in terms of pay, EFL is hardly banking.    

Cost

Most DELTAs are being advertised for around the £2,000-£3,000 mark for a full time course including exam fees. Of course, if you do a full time course it is quite likely that you'll have to travel somewhere or live in another country so you can add the cost of flights, accommodation etc to that.  I did my DELTA by distance with BELL and I think it was around the £3,500 mark.  If you're lucky, your employer may be willing to pay for some/all of the fees.

In 2006 Masters programs cost about the same.   They have subsequently increased in price and I've heard they will shoot up in the near future to match BA courses, -though this could be a rumour.  I luckily did my masters in 2006 for about £3,600.  The same course now costs over £4,600.  On top of this you have the loss of earnings for one year, the accommodation and living costs.  This makes the number of people able to even think about doing an MA much smaller, I imagine.  The part time option for the same course comes in at about £7,000 over two and a half years.  There are, though, scholarships available it seems. 

There is a good chance that if you choose a fairly big university and have decent qualifications, there may be chances to work in the English Language centre on campus.  There are at least 4 people where I currently work who were in that position. 

Order of acquisition

There are a number of MA TESOL courses which offer exceptions for DELTA holders.  That is, if you have a DELTA you can receive credit for a portion of the MA without having to do it. The list ranges from nothing (Unis not on the list) all the way up to 60 credits.  Rather ironically, Cambridge, producers of the DELTA, offers nothing.  It thus makes sense to do the DELTA first IF you are planning on going to one of these universities.  I did the DELTA second and it worked out for me because, by that time I had a full time job in the UK and the institution paid some of the fees.  I did try to start the DELTA abroad but for module 2 you will need a trainer and it's pretty tough trying to find one in Asia. 

Although it's sensible to do the DELTA first, it might be easier (as it was in my case) to take a year off work when you are younger.  If you get a DELTA and then get a well paid job you might be more reluctant to leave it to start an MA with no promise of there being a job at the end of it.  However, the longer you wait to do the MA the more you'll probably get out of it.  That is, you'll probably have a better idea of teaching and more experience to give you a better idea of what it is you want to focus on. 

It's also perhaps worth adding that as module 1 and 3 are exams, you can enter by yourself without actually doing a DELTA course.  So, you don't have to take the course to apply for the exams and if you feel confident you might find this is a good way to save money.  I will add that the exam has some very odd expectations in terms of answers, so make sure you aware of these if you plan on doing this. 

What you will learn

The DELTA course is 3 modules.  The first is an exam in which you will have to define terms like "notional functional" and "unbounded morphemes"  and be able to say who started the "silent method" and what it involves.  Why this is important for a teacher to be able to do is anyone's guess.  The test, which is actually two 90 minutes exams,  does have a few useful sections.  The section in which you have to analyse and correct a student's work seems pretty authentic to me.  Also the section in which you must analyse a test and find its faults is quite useful...though you inevitably start to think about the flaws of the DELTA exam itself.

The second module is the practical part and this is the real meat of the DELTA.  you are assessed over two months and have to produce a huge amount of paper.  There are five lessons (including the experimental) four of which are observed and one of which is observed by a n external candidate.  If you fail that then you fail the whole thing.  you do have a chance to retake this though as I did.  One complaint about this module is that it doesn't explicitly tell you what good teaching is, rather it just seems to allow anything so long as you can justify why you did it.  Another problem is the huge amounts of writing you have to do.  5x 2,500 essays plus a detailed lesson plan each time 500 word post class reflection and a 800 word linking piece between the essay and and the lesson plan.  There is also a personal development essay of about 5000 words, which you cannot fail and which is full of the kind of meaningless pseudo-babble that I personally despise.  "I feel I have developed as a teacher and met my objectives" --ugh!  (edit: I might be being a little harsh here)

The third module is quite interesting.  It is a long essay which is divided into sections and staged quite cleverly so that if you mess up the start you're pretty much done for.  You have to firstly do a needs analysis with a class.  Using the needs analysis you devise an exam for the students to test their abilities and then finally you create a syllabus/15 lesson course around your findings.  It's quite a neat intellectual challenge though I did have some issues with it as well.  The literature on needs analysis is a bit fluffy and lacking any real scientific basis.  It just seems likes opinions dressed up with academic language.  It also seems a bit questionable to me to take time out of lessons to test students for a course that, in many cases, they will not actually ever do.  I wonder how ethical this is?

The DELTA has also recently introduced a 3rd module for managers and those wanting to be a DOS which seems like an interesting move.

Though the DELTA curriculum is standardised,  MA courses are much less so.  It is also worth remembering that two holders of an MA TESOL could have studied completely different things.  For example:

[course A] Methodology/ Second language acquisition/ Intercultural studies/ sociolinguistics /phonology/

[course B] Syllabus design/ testing/ psycholinguistics/ corpus studies/ grammar

Therefore it's probably worth thinking about what you want to study and trying to find a Uni which offers something along those lines.

Difficulty

in short, people can and often do fail or give up the DELTA.  It is very time consuming and I wasn't always convinced I was doing anything other than busy work.  It would take some spectacular skill to manage to fail a master's degree.  Universities are not very good at failing people and short of not submitting work or plagiarising it's a good bet that you will pass.   

 

Opportunities

It's a bit of a risk doing either one or the other because there are some jobs which prefer the DELTA and others, the MA.   There isn't really one choice that will satisfy everyone and as the job market gets more competitive, the number of places asking for, and getting candidates with both is increasing.  The place I work used to require a DELTA or equivalent qualification.  Now they state DELTA essential despite it being essentially an academic department. 

Generally speaking the DELTA will get you further.  The DELTA is the British council's baby and hence they will look favourably on people with it.  The DELTA is also more respected as a 'practical qualification'.  Jobs in EFL in Europe will more often require the DELTA than an Master's.  If your goal is university work in Asia, (particularly Japan where the British council doesn't have a great presence) the DELTA is quite often unheard of.  A search of Gaijin pot (Japan) brought up about 3 jobs which asked for a DELTA (an then they were just listed as 'desirable') and 1 on the TEALIT (Taiwan) site.  A search for Master's degree's brought up slightly more but this time they were listed as essential. 

It is worth noting that a master's degree is not the guarantee of lucrative university work in Asia that it once was.  Almost always the departments will want people with a MA TESOL or applied linguistics and almost always they will require some published papers.  Taiwan is also quite fussy about what kind of master's degree you got and they will want it to be officially stamped by your university notary and then by their 'embassy' in whichever country you are from.  they will also not accept MAs that were done part-time or those which are over 3 years old.  This legislation is apparently an attempt to avoid fake degree certificates. 

 Pro/cons

The DELTA gives you a chance to examine your teaching.  Unfortunately as there is so little actual solid theory in EFL teaching you can't be convinced that what you're being sold is actually worth anything.  OK, so now I know what a notional functional syllabus is, but I'm not sure if I should be teaching one or not.  The module three essay at least gives you the ability to try to set up a course doing a needs analysis and designing a course around the results.  It might not be great but it's perhaps the best we've got a this moment.  For those with an MA though, the theory side of the DELTA might seem a bit superficial.  Getting a DELTA though has some kind of magic aura associated with it.  For English teacher's it's like being a war veteran or a karate black-belt.  You just exude confidence and authority (whether or not you have any is another question...)

I personally preferred the MA, so I'm probably quite biased but the MA allows you to investigate whatever it is you want to investigate. The DELTA essays do allow this as well, to some extent.  In short the DELTA seems to say "this is how is it" whereas the MA says "why is it like this?" I felt I got a lot more out of the MA and though I can't say I became a better teacher by doing it (after all there is no practical element on most courses) it (cheesy cliche) enhanced my world view. 

 Notes

Any questions or correction please comment.  I would love to make this article more general as at the moment I can only go on my own experience. 

some interesting criticisms of the DELTA and a blog from a DELTA tutor, Marisa Constantinides

Here are a few threads discussing the topic in more detail. 

http://www.esl-jobs-forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=8841

http://www.englishforums.com/English/MaInEslOrACeltaTesolDelta/jlgc/post.htm

http://www.eslcafe.com/discussion/dz1/index.cgi?read=1408953984