What is your main ESL activity now? What are your principal projects, and what is on the back burner?

I primarily do research on language learning, especially learning using the new computer-based technologies. I also teach postgraduate courses on language teaching, and on technology, language & society. I've also become very interested in management and leadership in language programs. At NCELTR we now have a Post Graduate Certificate in Managing Language programs. While I'm up to date on current theories and research in the area of management and literature, I find there is very little that's been research in education. What has been done has primarily been examining school principals. So, I'd really like to start on some research projects looking at managing/leading language programs, especially comparing different culture's ways of organizing/managing language programs. Another backburner item is to follow up on my early studies of the use of CMC in the workplace.

How did you start your ESL career? Who influenced your decision? What were some important formative experiences in the early stages of your development?

Like many people, I fell into ESL accidentally. It first began when I was teaching English at private girls' school in Sydney and we had the daughters of the Lebanese Consul at the school and I tutored them privately. When I then went to England in the late 1960s, I again taught at a private girls school and found myself teaching English privately to the daughters and wives of Japanese businessmen in England on assignment--even though I was actually a Math teacher at that school (I began my working life as a high school teacher, primarily of Math and English, although in the climate of the time, I also taught PE, history and French!). After a few years of private tutoring, I realized that teaching ESL was totally different from teaching English to high school English-speaking students.

So, I took a course at International House in London in the early 70s. The prevailing paradigm at the time was audiolingual, which I found rather stifling. But, I loved the experience of a classroom of language learners. During one summer, to consolidate my learning to be an ESL teacher, I taught at a summer school on the south coast of England. I fell in love with teaching ESL and decided to return to Australia and take up ESL as my career.

What are the four or five language/culture backgrounds with which you are most familiar as a teacher? Which ones are you familiar with from the perspective of a language learner yourself? What insights have you gained in how to meet the needs of English learners from these cultures and language backgrounds?

I spent a lot of my ESL/EFL career teaching students from Asia (Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia), then in my more than 20 years in the US I became very familiar with Hispanic learners as well. I'm most familiar with Thailand as I lived and worked there in the later 70s. I tried, rather unsuccessfully, to learn Thai. My Thai was totally without tones, lacked grammatical accuracy, but was reasonably fluent--in that I could order food, find my ways around, and hold minimalist conversations. The other culture I have most familiarity with is Greek, having moved in the Greek community in Sydney in the 1960s and spent quite a lot of time visiting Greece while I was living in England. At one stage I was quite fluent, although again, inaccurate, in Greek. Over my lifetime, I've attempted to learn, both formally and informally, other languages. I find that I'm a visual learner and so, look for the written language to reinforce my aural knowledge. Indeed, without being able to read signs, bill boards, and so on, I feel quite frustrated in my language learning. With Greek, I did master the written script well enough to read fairly quickly; with Thai, I never did. By the time I'd deciphered one word, I'd passed the sign. Without that written reinforcement, I find language learning quite difficult.

I've learned that paying attention to the individual learner's context is much more important than adherence to any particular methodology. I've also learned not to classify learners by culture, even though learning about different cultures' ways of believing and behaving are important. But, inevitably, the learner in front of me does not fit the stereotype. There is a myth that Asian students don't ask questions. Working with individual learners from Asian countries soon explodes this myth. It also explodes the myth of a uniform "Asian" culture.

If you had to give three pieces of advice to a new ESL teacher, what would they be?

Your enthusiasm and commitment to teaching and learning are great motivators for learners. Each learner is different; focus on learning (what students are or are not learning as a result of instruction), not on methods, activities and so on. Be reflective about your practice, examining your practice in the light of research and theory, informing the theories and research from your own experience and vice versa. That's probably more than three, but teaching is a complex activity, not easily captured in a few sound bites.

What do you see as the most important issues facing the ESL/EFL teaching profession today?

Teaching is a political activity, even though most teachers go into the profession for humanistic reasons. So, I consider some of our major issues to be ones of policy, not methodology.

Recognition of the profession is high on my priority list. Educators in general are not always respected in many countries, and English language teachers even less so. This situation is exacerbated by the way companies and organizations hire unqualified teachers. We need standards for language teachers, ones that have been developed by the profession, such as those TESOL, the international professional association, is involved in developing.

Being able to use our knowledge of language learning and teaching to influence policy. For example, many countries around the world are starting to teach children at younger and younger ages in order to gain economic advantage for their country; yet, we didn't have the research studies that show that children being taught by unqualified teachers, with minimal English proficiency, teaching a class of 40-60 children in a country where English is not a means of wider communication, will be successful language learners. We need more research and we need to find ways of making that knowledge accessible to policy makers, parents and the general public.

Interviewed by Robb Scott

2002 ESL MiniConference Online