We’ve been wanting to interview Silvana Richardson ever since her fascinating webinar for Cambridge English Teacher on ‘Teaching with confidence as a non-native speaker’, and last month we caught up with her in Manchester during IATEFL, the day after her appearance on the panel for the Cambridge English language debate.
Can you sum up the aims of yesterday’s debate?
The overall aim was to put language back centre-stage. There’s been a concern with methodologies for quite a while, and I think the intention was to think more about which models of language teachers should be exposed to themselves, and what would be an appropriate model to be given to students. We also focused on the role of the first language in the teaching of English as a second or foreign language.
And this also tied in with the important role of non-native speaker teachers, didn’t it? Michael Carrier pointed out that 90-95% of language teachers are not native speakers, which is something that’s not really acknowledged by the mainstream, or by authority.
Yes, we’re not really thinking much about how to help those teachers. Many of the approaches, methods and techniques developed over the last few decades tend to assume multi-lingual classrooms and a teacher who can’t always speak their learners’ first languages. However, the so-called non-native speaker teachers are really much more likely to be based in monolingual classrooms and contexts.
I don’t think we have been giving a lot of thought as to what would be appropriate or more suitable methodologies for teachers in those contexts, particularly with reference to the use of a first language, for instance. We haven’t been thinking about the role that a student’s first language can play in helping rather than hindering language learning – the positive transfer rather than the negative transfer.
Yesterday, for example, Scott Thornbury was talking about the possibility of thinking along the lines of the Cambridge CPD framework – of adding the dimension of the teacher’s knowledge, the teacher’s understanding of the student’s first language, and the different degrees of that as you progress through the levels.
I guess that’s something that the traditional conception of the language teacher as being someone whose first language is English and who quite often doesn’t have any useful ability to speak other languages, really can’t contribute to?
Yes and no: for example, one of the things that Scott was saying yesterday was that, particularly in the context of a monolingual English speaker, working in a context of a multilingual class, you can’t possibly speak every single language that the students speak. But if, say, you have a Japanese student, you could be interested in finding out more about what the issues are that a Japanese student might have when learning English, from a point of view of language awareness materials, around language distance and what it means. It’s not difficult to do, and if you are interested and believe in addressing the real needs of the students in your class, I think it’s something we should be doing more.
Philip Kerr has been talking a lot recently about trying to remove the stigma of using L1 in the classroom – is that becoming less stigmatised?
I think it probably has been ever since Guy Cook wrote his book Translation in Language Teaching in 2009. It was such a lucid and well-thought-though argument that it was very attractive, and touched a nerve with many teachers whose first language isn’t English. And I think there has been increasing recognition of this issue with Philip’s book, Translation and Own-language Activities. I think Philip’s book is the practical side of Guy’s – how can we actually do this in the classroom?
So, hopefully, I would really like initial teacher trainer programmes to notice this and to start including content about how to use the students’ own language to learn English– even in the case of programmes like CELTA, or the trainee certificate, which have, I reckon, a majority of native speakers of English. A lot of those teachers go on to teach abroad in monolingual contexts, and we’re not always preparing them for that challenge.
For more information regarding this topic, read our next post in this series: You have to keep learning.