To confer or to concur?

Image by @sandymillin
via eltpics on Flickr

For the first time since it was last held in Harrogate (2010), I didn’t go to the annual IATEFL conference this year and - like thousands of other English teachers who couldn’t afford to go to the largest EFL conference in the world - settled in comfortably in front of my computer to watch it online. All plenary talks and selected presentations are streamed live on the IATEFL online website thanks to the partnership between IATEFL and the British Council. I was particularly looking forward to the talks by Prof Michael Hoey on 4 April ("Old approaches, new perspectives" - click HERE to watch the recording) and Prof Sugata Mitra on 5 April ("The future of learning"- click HERE for the recording) and highly recommended them to all my students (teacher candidates).

With Prof M. Hoey at the Lexical Conference
in London, May 2013 (Photo by Ela Wassel)

Michael Hoey's theory of lexical priming, which grew out of his work with the renowned linguist John Sinclair, offers a compelling view of how language works, a view which stands in direct opposition to that of Chomsky but which, unlike that of Chomsky, never gained wide currency in ELT circles. Besides being a distinguished scholar, Hoey is also a brilliant speaker who delivered the plenary with his characteristic wit. According to posts on Twitter from those in the audience (my live feed cut out at that moment) he even mentioned the special edition of HLT Hania Kryszewska and I put out last year as one of the key works in the history of the Lexical Approach which made me very happy and proud. In his talk, Hoey used evidence from corpus linguistics to provide support for the claims made by Stephen Krashen and Michael Lewis whose Monitor Model and Lexical Approach respectively have attracted a number of adherents as well as a number of detractors. In other words, very controversial figures.

However, the real controversy was saved till the last day of the conference when Sugata Mitra took to the stage. Famous for his ‘hole-in-the-wall’ project (where children in an Indian slum were given access to a computer built into - literally – a hole in the wall and taught themselves how to use it and picked up English along the way), Sugata Mitra presented his vision of future learning known as minimally invasive education where children can learn without professional support or supervision. While reactions from those – like me - watching the plenary online were, in the main, positive, Twitter was awash with criticism and even fury. Here are some comments posted on Twitter by those in the audience:

I was shocked by the standing ovation for Mitra at the end of #IATEFL speech most people didn't see as controversial. I wonder WHY NOT?
— Jim Scrivener (@jimscriv) April 5, 2014

I honestly don't think I've ever felt angrier about a talk I've seen at #iatefl than I am now.
— hugh dellar (@hughdellar) April 5, 2014

@vale360 it's a vision that takes teachers out of society and schools out of the fabric of the built environment, his talk was a disgrace
— Luke Meddings (@LukeMeddings) April 5, 2014

After the plenary the debate spilled over onto Facebook where it is still raging to this day. Sugata Mitra has been called "a manipulative money grabber",  "snake-oil salesman", "a madman with a microphone and money" and his rhetoric described as over-ideaistic, neo-liberal and dangerous. (Clicking on these links will take you to various blog posts and comments written in response to Mitra's talk).

Should teachers be taken out of the equation?
Prof Sugata Mitra at the 48th IATEFL conference in Harrogate

Interestingly, these reactions come mainly from ELT methodologists, coursebook writers and well-known bloggers (or, in Paul Read’s terms “gods and demi-gods of TEFL”) rather than from the general public who gave Mitra a standing ovation. In fact, some have called into question the IATEFL’s decision to invite such a provocative speaker to the conference, seeing it as an affront to teachers, most of whom fund their own way to travel from four corners of the world to the most prestigious ELT event of the year.

A number of blog posts written in the past week in response to Mitra’s plenary, as one witty TEFL-er mentioned on Facebook, has probably exceeded the body of Mitra’s own academic work. And this brings me to the main point of this post (I wasn’t going to summarise the talks here - IATEFL's registered bloggers have already done it for me). Is it all worth the ink, as it were? The outrage in the blogosphere about Mitra's plenary surprises me.

Do we go to conferences to hear things that we like to hear? Or do we want speakers like Sugata Mitra (and Michael Hoey) to help us take stock of our teaching, re-evaluate what we do in the classroom and, generally, shake us up a little? After all, the word “conference” comes from the verb “confer” suggesting discussion and an exchange of opinions. Shouldn't, then, the annual IATEFL conference be a forum for exchanging and sharing ideas and opinions where speakers provoke thought and push the audience's buttons?

By this standard, Michael Hoey’s talk should have also provoked a backlash from coursebook writers and publishers. As a matter of fact, he shouldn’t have been invited at all to a conference which relies heavily on sponsorship from the publishers because the “holistic” view of language he advocates goes against the conventional (and outdated) grammar/vocabulary dichotomy enshrined in most textbooks published today.

Not less surprising is the conspicuous absence of blog posts about Michael Hoey’s talk. I couldn’t even find any summary reports from the official IATEFL bloggers. The only reaction – critical, by the way – was written by Geoff Jordan in his blog.

Perhaps it’s because Michael Hoey’s session was not about technology, learning styles or critical thinking but merely about… language. Yes, that's what the second letter in ELT or the fourth in TEFL stands for, that trivial thing that seems to have ceased to interest language teachers today.



Click HERE for Graham Stanley's balanced summary of Sugata Mitra's talk and a long list of other blog posts written in response to it in the Further Reading section at the bottom