Someone at the IH Dos Conference 2011 put forward the idea that EFL was ‘merely’ a trade and not the profession we all thought it was cracked up to be. Since that idea first wormed it’s way inside my head, I’ve found it explains neatly most of the frustrations I feel about my chosen vocation. Am I just a simple tradesman at the end of the day and therefore should I rein in my expectations about what I do?
I’ve just been arguing this toss with alastairjgrant on twitter and I suggested as a tradesman I would always win the argument on Twitter, since I can manage short 140 letter soundbitesbetter as a tradesman. So we’ve come to the more serious arena of the blog to give the subject a more professional airing.
Over to you Al – why is EFL a profession?
***
Al here! Taking up the gauntlet of Neil’s challenge…
Like mcneilmahon, I’ve had the same thought playing on my mind since I heard this idea myself. We’re doing a trade, not a profession… hmm. Going into the semantics seems circular – far more worthwhile to focus on the nuts and bolts of this.
A little while ago I found an article about how “ELT can help you with your career”. It bothered me. Why? For me, it IS a career, not a stop-gap. The problem (one of them…) is that it is not taken as seriosuly as it should be. Ok, and again, why? Well… WE (the ELT professionals ;)) don’t take it seriously enough.
This is a job, for which we need qualifications, delivering a service that changes people’s lives. That’s a profession for me.
But… as soon as you’ve your CELTA or similar teaching qualification, you get, if you’re lucky, some professional development. Without this on a regular basis, we can’t see ourselves as developing teachers.
All other professions are constantly developing their employees – so should we. If we take the job seriously then so does everybody else. If we don’t take ourselves seriously as professionals, how can we expect anyone else to?
We’d love to know what our fellow teachers think about this – how do you feel about the job you do? Are you a professional or do you see yourself as a “handyman” of ELT, helping here and there where you can…?
***
This is where I see the crux of the problem, Al – while those of us who stay in the profession long term and continue to develop as teachers, even becoming managers or trainers (although often without the relevant training to do so, which perpetuates the trade argument) might see ourselves as professionals, surely the silent (in terms of professionalism (and not just in terms of development, but also preparation, attitude, sharing, etc.) ) majority are not professionals, simply temporary members of the industry plying a trade which is easy to get into and easy to move on from once they’ve done enough moving around?
***
Greta Sandler has provided this insight:
“I can’t think of ELT as a Trade. I think ELT is about education and reaching out for our students (young learners, teens AND adults too) ELT is a passion to me. I strongly believe learning should never stop. PD is absolutely essential; trade or profession…”
Thanks Greta – my thoughts exactly!
***
Thanks for the comment Greta. My initial reply got mashed, so here’s an attempt to reconstruct it:
I completely agree with you too as far as your context is concerned. When I say ELT is a trade, I’m thinking more about those of use teaching English in a private institute context. You’ll have a profesorado and teach in mainstream education – this is definitely a profession, although perhaps at times there’s ironically more professional development available in the ‘trade’ context of institute english than there is in professional mainstream education?
***
Neil – I think that’s also my point – said “silent majority” are often only so because of the lack of development on offer and hence proof that this is indeed a profession.
If we develop our teachers, we can expect to have our profession recognised as such. And if we instill a sense of pride in the job and demonstrate how it educates, helps, inspires, and liberates people (by that I mean giving them opportunities for life), the teachers involved will surely take it as seriously as it deserves to be.
There will always be those who see it as “a means to an end” – it doesn’t mean we should ever stop trying to prove how invaluable a profession it is.
***
Many thanks to all of you who have contributed here to the discussion. There have been some excellent points made and new angles taken on the debate. I’m not best sure how to continue, but would like to agree with many of the points made in the comments and respond to them. I hope this helps take the debate forward:
we don’t (or shouldn’t) teach as teachers did in 1960′s, same as doctors don’t operate on patients the same way they did 50 years ago.
And plumbers don’t fit the same pipes in the same way they did 50 years ago either – this doesn’t make us a profession. In fact, in many parts of the world, we probably do teach much the same way we did 50 years ago…
I feel teachers of English –whether CELTA or DELTA background or teacher training college- should be concerned about becoming (information/ digital / multicultural/ critical/ intercultural/ visual) literacy agents. Now, how many real professional development opportunities do we get to achieve this? Do we still believe we are excellent teachers when our students add and ‘s’ to the third personal singular but they can’t account for their own reality?
These are very good questions and take the debate in a direction I think both Al and I had in mind in earlier comments about professional development. Whatever it means to be a teacher of English in your context, there are many different aspects to it and there is a danger that we end up being Jacks of all trades. Perhaps there needs to be more specialisation and there definitely needs to be more research in the ‘profession’ – but where is the money going to come in order to carry it out. I see my friends here in Argentina researching all sorts of things on the back of government grants, from new drugs to Brazilian cinema to voting patterns in indigenous populations. I have a plethora of ideas of areas in the classroom to research but have no idea where to get the money or time from in order to carry them out. Is that my fault or typical of teaching?
Al’s memories of CELTA suggest that there was zero training on the language analysis/presentation. It wasn’t about that – it was about providing you with a springboard to get into the classroom: the nuts and bolts of language awareness was up to the teacher to do in their own time.
That might just have been because your tutors weren’t clear about language analysis themselves? On the CELTA courses I teach we have introductory sessions to broad language areas such as modals, conditionals, the future, but even on such a well run course taught by excellently qualified and experienced tutors we each have our own take on language awareness.
This is a big weakness in the profession argument for me – if there’s no course book out there that teaches the language correctly, if the vast majority of teachers do not question grammars but just teach the rules they were taught, which students can see are wrong in their everyday use of language, if TEFL gods such as Scott Thornbury don’t know when to use –ing and when to use the infinitive, then we simply don’t deserve to consider ourselves professionals. Once we are all working from an agreed and definitive knowledge source (we could write it here, Al!) then we may be on the way to creating a profession out of EFL.
asks ‘whether they are doing something intrinsically valuable or just helping to perpetuate an elite.’
Any elite we are perpetuating is the elite of English language speakers. I do have the odd pang of guilt (as a learner of at least ten languages during my lifetime) that my vocation may actually be endangering other languages, but even when I was teaching the better of of Buenos Aires I reassured myself that it was valuable for me to have an influence on their outlook of life and be involved in their maturing and their ability to communicate their ideas, since they were likely to have quite an influence on how their country is to be run down the line.
Having said that, I do feel more comfortable in this respect now working as a teacher trainer and preparing a wide variety of people to teach in varied situations and contexts around the world (even if I am arming them with only a four-week pre-service training course).
Many teachers teach privately in order to make ends meet. Thus teachers meetings, in-service training etc are often regarded as an intrusion, cutting into valuable time.
This aspect was a huge frustration when I was working as a Director of Studies, Tim. We provided input sessions, encouraged peer observation, action research, reading groups, free training courses, teachers’ centres, etc,. etc. and the take up was always disappointingly slim. The main reasons being twofold – one a lack of interest in personal development within the field and the other the lack of time and energy since the need to make ends meet (and I mean make ends meet, not save for weekends away, let alone holidays) meant many private classes filling up any ‘spare’ time teachers may otherwise have devoted to professional development. The only way this part of the conundrum can be solved is by clients and providers insisting on quality provision. There has thankfully been a move in this direction in the UK, but elsewhere we are still in the Wild West with cowboys with well-marketed reputations winning out.
But, regardless of whether ELT is a profession or a trade, if it were considered to require skills on a par with what many trades people are capable of then I would be very happy with that. (I’d be even happier if it paid as well as many of the trades )
I completely agree with you here Carol and think Al and others (see Maria Emma on Facebook) have got the wrong end of the stick when considering EFL as a trade. In no way do I mean to downgrade the industry and the jobs done by extremely well-qualified and experienced people, or by newly-qualified and talented Celtees, when I ask if EFL is a trade, I am merely wondering about the reasons why there is so little academic research done in the field, why there are so few (if any) definitive works on any of the subjects the industry entails, why the vast majority of teachers I come across teach things wrongly, how people like the Soars could have had such a successful course book series while describing the language so inaccurately…I see a lack of rigour in the industry and I equate that much more with trades than professions. When I call a plumber or an electrician or a decorator I feel like I’m taking my life in my own hands, I may get a brilliant professional (and then I’m glad to pay them over the odds and desperately hang on to their phone number) or I might get a cowboy; but when I go the doctor’s or were I ever to need a lawyer I feel more confident putting my life in someone else’s hands. Is that just my perception, or one commonly shared? And I think it is indisputably the case that when you go looking for second language provision you are very much taking your language learning life in your own hands…
The COMMODITISATION of ELT … is a very important issue as English shifts and spreads throughout the world. I believe you have raised an issue ALL teachers need to become aware of and quick!
Susan this is the first time I have heard the expression the Commoditisation of ELT and we would love to hear more from you about it. Please do take us in this direction. I imagine your MA discusses ELT as the provision of the commodity of the ability to communicate in English? If so, how does viewing language and the ability to speak it as a commodity affect the ELT industry and the customer client relationship? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Neil, I think, is very unhappy about these backpackers rather than the ‘silent majority’ of ELT practitioners like Greta, Al, Neil (himself) and a whole lot of other professional ELT people (many of whose lives themselves simply bear testimony to the fact that ELT is indeed a Profession and NOT a trade)
Many thanks for taking such effort to take part in the debate from Myanmar, Cherry! I’d just like to say I’m not unhappy with EFL backpackers per se, especially since many of my most ‘professionalised’ colleagues (including Al) entered EFL with a rucksack on their backs and once they realised what a great job ELT was and how good they were at doing it took off the rucksack and hit the books…
What I am frustrated by is the lack of discernment on the part of consumers and the lack of engagement with the profession of many of these temporary teachers, but the blame lies in many areas, not least with the institutes themselves, publishers and us professional teachers who put up with being exploited on a daily basis and often go out of our way in order to be so (he says, blogging in a professional development kind of way on a Bank Holiday Monday morning).
Where I would like to take this debate now is on to new pastures, where perhaps we seek steps to take to convert our professionalism into an industry wide profession, or at the very least, look to develop ways in which we can engender better conditions for our colleagues and perhaps start to earn as much as plumbers and train drivers. Over to you, Al…
***
Well, Al hasn’t appeared yet, but Anthony and Brad have:
“Trade vs. Profession” is only relevant when trying to leverage more pay and reputation which, while I can understand the need/desire for, does not inherently make the work we do more valuable or effective.
I understand where you’re coming from Anthony, but still feel that there are areas of the industry that could be improved, although I know not where to begin. There seems to be a singular lack of rigorous research going on in ELT (as opposed to SLA) which I see as being the root cause of no one being able to agree on the guiding principles or in fact on what language to teach (Not as well-made as Yeats would hope?). Yes, research is linked to pay and reputation, but it goes beyond them too.
If we give our best to our personal community, as well as learn and share with the teachers surrounding us, then it’ll improve the industry. It’s that simple for me, and again I have no doubt that anyone taking time to be on twitter, to blog, to share and grow with others care about their community and is making it “better”. That’s important and that’s feasible.
Hopefully Al will agree with me when I say this comment is probably the best way to finish off our debate. In my response to Andrew I ask how we can improve aspects of the industry that could be improved and here Brad gives me a very convincing answer. So where to from here.? Well hopefully debating with Al and the rest of you here at ELTMythtakes is one way of bettering the industry through developing community.
So what do you want to argue about next, Al?
ELTMythtakes 