New courses and creative teaching

The two volumes in the TESOL series introduce fresh insights to the teaching of English around the world. They give voice to practising teachers, which is highly commendable as there have not been many publications of this calibre describing courses at a professional level and including materials and on-the-spot evaluations. The variety of contexts represented in the contributions means that it is unlikely that individual practising teachers would want to read the books from cover to cover, although researchers, novice teachers, teaching students and teacher trainers might well be motivated to do so. Both books are suitable for teacher training courses, and would be important additions to the libraries of institutions running such courses.

The books exhibit remarkable similarities, with the main distinctions to be drawn between developing ‘new’ courses and developing courses within ‘required curricula’. The contributors to DNC describe the context in which they are situating their courses, with some discussion of learner needs, as a ‘new’ course must justify its existence. The editors provide a useful overview of frameworks for curriculum design in the first chapter (pp. 2–5).

In contrast, the contributors to PTC are more intent on explaining why they need to teach ‘creatively’. This adverb is perhaps best interpreted as stepping outside the box of a required curriculum for a variety of purposes, described by the editors in their introduction and ranging from ‘confront[ing] . . . ineffective curricula’ to avoiding ‘becoming bored teachers’ (p. 1). In fact Burns & de Silva Joyce make ‘curriculum’ the starting point for their collection and in their introduction, provide a lucid overview of the term, alongside a clearly-designed table of required curriculum models (p. 4).

In DNC, the emphasis on ‘new’ is extremely supportive to novice teachers. In fact anyone developing a new course for adult learners, regardless of the client profile, would find the various accounts in this collection of value, as the writers have covered a multiplicity of experiences, from a range of angles, whether focusing on the teacher's personal involvement, the needs of students, or the demands of stakeholders. The contributors describe their experiences in depth, from beginning to end, and the reader is drawn into each situation. Countries represented include Australia, Japan, Turkey, the USA, Navarre and Slovenia, showing, as in the PTC volume, that the same problems can be universally expressed, even when content has to be adapted to the context of countries where English is not the first language.

Another strong point of DNC lies in the fact that all contributors give clear and relevant justification for the innovations they bring to their respective frameworks. The book is highly appropriate for TESOL curriculum development courses, and Anne Swan who is currently teaching such a course is excited at the possibility of including some chapters as essential reading for her students. Of particular interest here are the detailed lesson plans and course descriptions included, sometimes as appendices and sometimes in the main text.

The appendices are useful records to back up course descriptions in most instances. Each chapter includes very detailed appendices which offer useful prompts to novice course developers, for whom the practical orientation is also valuable. The outlines of the stages of needs analysis, preparation, implementation and evaluation provide excellent models.

PTC also draws on teachers' experiences across the globe, from Australia to the USA, stopping over in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Japan and Peru. Many of the examples, while based in particular contexts, have wider applications. Novice teachers could learn a great deal from the experience described by Janet Higgins in ‘The transition from school to university: Learning new behaviour and skills’, set in Okinawa and detailing an approach developed to prepare high-school students for university. The context is Japan, but the situation is applicable to many countries where students have to make this transition. Readers are able to relate the curriculum described to a detailed timetable, and teachers lacking experience would benefit from this information, although it is debatable whether the tables showing evaluation of the course will be useful or, indeed, read at all by the majority of those interested in this article.

It is interesting that two of the contributions in this collection were inspired by the author Frank McCourt, best known for his novel Angela's ashes. One, a chapter by Abigail Brown & Jennifer Wharton entitled ‘Innovations in curriculum development: Crossing cultures, crossing generations’, involves students using their language skills to cross other bridges, creatively, culturally and across generations, through the production of an original children's story. The project gave participants a chance to see themselves ‘not primarily as second graders, or college students, or US students, or international students, but rather as writers creating a story’ (p. 97). This is the main message of this chapter and a valuable one, in that it can be applied to a variety of situations where teachers are looking to involve learners in their community and infuse language learning with a life outside the classroom and the peer student group.

Frank McCourt was also the inspiration for the chapter ‘When writing is murder’ by Todd Heyden, who chose to base his teaching on a murder mystery set in the area of New York in which his students were living, and containing characters who had been immigrants in a previous century. The students, themselves new arrivals to the country, found it motivating to read about places that were familiar to them in a fictional story. The experience was further enriched by visiting sites where events in the novel had taken place. Students also wrote interesting comparisons between their lives and those of their counterparts in a previous century. Although this is a unique example of ‘creative’ teaching, in that the same novel could not be used in any other location with the same effect, it does show how successful teachers find inspiration in unlikely places.

In both TESOL volumes, the teacher-contributors lead the reader into their particular situations so that it is possible to recognise familiar problems and see how others have dealt with them. Ample opportunities are offered to lecturers to enrich courses on curriculum design.

Needs analysis as research

The collection of research found in SLNA would be of most use to researchers and research students in the fields of Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Research students in particular would find the book useful because it provides sample studies for critically evaluating a variety of methodological approaches, and theorists would be interested to see how certain terms are used by the contributing researchers, especially ‘needs’ and ‘task’. Long advocates the widening of data sources to include a range of stakeholders rather than merely learner insights (pp. 19–22), and the use of ‘task’ as the unit of analysis (pp. 22–24).

Most of the chapters in this collection follow the model of Long's example of workplace language use in the aviation industry (‘Methodological issues in learner needs analysis’). A paramount characteristic is the use of ‘domain experts’ as a source of data, and some of the researchers go to ingenious length to obtain their cooperation. In the chapter on the US military by John Lett (‘Foreign language needs assessment in the US military’), collaboration is set up between job specialists and language assessors in order to identify relevant tasks for which the target language would be needed. The study by Rebecca Jasso-Aguilar (‘Sources, methods and triangulation in needs analysis: A critical perspective in a case study of Waikiki hotel maids’) involves some interesting participant observation on the part of the researcher. Michelle Winn makes use of a personal contact in the US Immigration and Naturalization Service in order to be able to conduct a study of the language of naturalization interviews (‘Collecting target discourse: The case of the US naturalization interview’). In all these studies of language use, the importance of gathering real-life data is highlighted, and this is an overall theme in the book.

This point is supported by an extensive literature review in the chapter by Nicola Downey Bartlett on the research pointing to the pragmatic inadequacies of scripted texts (pp. 306–308). The author adds to her findings on real-life transactions ordering coffee by critiquing a number of commercial texts that offer invented versions of the same task. Supported as it is by the other studies, this is a welcome contribution to the global debate on the use of authentic texts in language teaching, given the long-standing dissatisfaction with standard coursebooks among some teachers and theorists (Tudor Reference Tudor1996: 75).

One chapter that stands out as different from all the others is ‘Language needs analysis at the societal level’ by Richard Brecht & William Rivers, which utilizes economic theory in the investigation of needs for the teaching of different languages across the USA. Other chapters that are also striking for their points of difference are two set in Europe that deal with European languages; one looks at the use of German in a business context and the other on the need for language instruction among elite international footballers. The remainder of the studies follow more closely the principles set out at the beginning of the book.

Probably the most useful and revealing chapter is ‘A task-based needs analysis of a tertiary Korean as a foreign language program’ by Craig Chaudron, Catherine Doughty, Youngkyu Kim, Dong-kwan Kong, Jinhwa Lee, Young-geun Lee, Michael Long, Rachel Rivers & Ken Urano. This three-year, federally funded study was carried out by a team of researchers from the University of Hawaii. For readers interested in curriculum design, this is where to find the link with needs analysis, because the project covers the whole process from design, through implementation to evaluation. It is presented as a model for developing a task-based curriculum, and as such helps to develop one perspective on what that entails.

Cohesion

While it is useful to juxtapose a wide variety of studies to illustrate the diversity of practices and curricula, some common thread is needed to bind the collection and make a convincing impact. Michael Long's volume starts well with his passionate argument for more effective investigation of authentic discourse in real-life situations in order to provide learners with realistic samples of text. However, the lack of balance in the studies offered – several of them clearly from the same ‘stable’ of researchers – undermines his case because too many of them uncritically echo the points he himself makes, rather than developing a more nuanced picture of needs analysis in the context of curriculum development.

In all these books it would be valuable to add a closing chapter by the editors providing insights into the commonalities exhibited. In the absence of such in-depth analysis, the reader is left to formulate their own opinion, a difficult task for time-strapped teachers but possibly a useful exercise for researchers. For the sake of the teacher audience, in DNC the articles could be grouped according to the themes they represent. Such themes could be, for example, ‘Using literature and the creative arts’, ‘Moving outside the classroom’, and ‘Teaching immigrants’. As with PTC, many chapters include tables showing weekly outlines and lesson plans, but sometimes included in the body of the text rather than in an appendix. Readers will find it useful to look through appendices for detailed information about course content and feedback.

The unifying concept of PTC is the idea of ‘creativity’, and in their chapter, ‘Chifa: Freewriting within a required curriculum for adults’, the authors, Spencer Salas & Kyra Garson, do make this connection in their introduction. Having described chifa, the Chinese food Peruvians have adapted to their own tastes, they go on to say:

This elegantly simple paper is not matched in its relevance to the topic by the other writers, each of whom interprets the central concept differently.

The concept of needs analysis

Our understanding of needs analysis is that it goes beyond the identification of target language forms and intended uses, and the analysis of learners' language proficiency at the beginning of a course. In a learner-centred methodology it involves an ongoing cycle of identifying and responding to needs as they unfold. Such an approach places the teacher–student relationship at the centre of a needs analysis process that is integrated into course design (Tudor Reference Tudor1996).

This is altogether different from the concept of needs analysis that emerges from SLNA. The concern here is primarily with the selection and design of courses and teaching materials, and focuses on needs analysis as a form of research. In his ‘Overview’, Long argues persuasively the importance of developing more effective research processes, indeed of ‘research on the methodology of needs analysis itself’ (p. 5). He claims that few published needs analyses are based on multiple methods and triangulation, a point that is taken up by several of the other contributors.

This assertion is surprising to Lyn Bray, whose experience in curriculum development in workplace language and literacy education has involved implementation of a complex methodology of multiple methods and sources, which has been embedded in workplace education in Australia for more than a decade (Gilding et al. Reference Gilding, Le Duff, Persson and Zimmerman1993). It is unlikely therefore that Australian course designers in this field will learn much that is new from Long's volume.

Multiple methods and sources in needs analysis are prominently addressed in many of the chapters in DNC. The range of possibilities can be shown by looking at two chapters that are at the extreme opposite to each other on the use of needs analysis. On the one hand we have the case in the chapter ‘American English as cultural expression: Designing a new course in linguistic analysis of culture for EFL undergraduates in Japan’ by Patrick Rosenkjar, where the teacher, an American in Japan, does not formalise a needs analysis process but merely pays attention to motivational factors in his choice of materials. On the other hand, we see that the course at Macquarie University described in ‘Seizing the opportunity for change: The Business Preparation Program, a new pathway to gain direct entry into Macquarie University’ by Cintia Ines Agosti, draws on input from a variety of ‘stakeholders’: learners, teachers, overseas agents, the international office, and Business faculty (‘domain experts’ in this instance). Methods include discussion with faculty, student assignments, course notes and readings. Crucially, this course also formalises a cyclic component: weekly self-assessment questionnaires, and class meetings held without the teacher, leading to the students taking more responsibility for their own learning.

While it is not the purpose of PTC to describe a formal needs analysis procedure, it is noticeable that here, too, the needs of learners are still the focus of each creative approach. In most of the chapters, the author has had to justify their innovation to their educational institution, without whose support the proposal would simply collapse.

Needs analysis as a basis for curriculum development

In Long's volume, needs analysis as a construct shifts enormously from chapter to chapter. In ‘Language needs analysis at the societal level’, the contributors offer a market-based approach to the question of what languages need to be taught in the USA. Making effective use of interdisciplinary collaboration, Brecht & Rivers apply economic analysis to assess the need to offer languages for a variety of purposes at a macro level. Such an approach would be useful for policy analysts in government, but for most researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition this ‘needs analysis’ would be hardly relevant, serving perhaps as background to their more linguistic and psychological concerns.

While several SLNA chapters address the question of what kind of language do the learners need, two of them (‘Foreign language need of business firms’ by Sonja Vandermeeren and ‘“Feet speak louder than the tongue”: A preliminary analysis of language provisions for foreign professional footballers in the Netherlands’ by Eric Kellerman, Hella Koonen & Monique van der Haagen) address a question along the lines of does a particular language need to be taught? Once again we see the topic slide away from curriculum design to issues of policy, and the concept of ‘needs analysis’ has to be adjusted accordingly. Certainly the needs of learners are not the central focus of these studies; such research does not form a foundation for a curriculum design but feeds the decision-making process for management.

In all the chapters, ‘needs’ are presented as fixed and researchable, and the analysis of needs is seen as either a foundation for policy or as a necessary starting point for the development of curriculum goals. In the Chaudron et al. study on tertiary Korean, the learners are consulted comprehensively for their stated needs in terms of communicative tasks, after which the researchers collect the real-life samples that will form the basis of the teaching materials and a detailed syllabus. Teachers and students are then expected to fit in with a process of teaching and learning that is pre-planned by the research team. This conflicts with a view of needs as variable and negotiable.

The contrast between SLNA and the two TESOL volumes could not be greater. In DNC, needs analysis is foundational in the approach to curriculum design. The chapter by the editors, Snow & Kamhi-Stein, shows how different frameworks have made progress in making the design process less linear and focused on outcomes, and more cyclical and focused on process. Because this book is about the development of a whole course, needs analysis comes up in each of the chapters in some form, and most writers give a clear profile of their students and show how they developed a course to suit these profiles.

In PTC, needs analysis is not prominent in some of the chapters. For instance, the last chapter, on ‘freewriting’, mentioned above, does not justify the procedure in terms of needs analysis because it is essentially a process-oriented teaching method that can be added to any curriculum for writing skills. However, the teachers are clearly keeping their eyes on the effects of the activity on the learning of their students, and in this way they are indeed responding to learner needs. In the case of Dodson-Knight, who bravely takes on the use of a non-fiction bestseller as the single reading text for a composition class, a point comes when she realizes that her students have become bored with studying from the same book, and she is forced to reassess her approach (p. 154). In this way, even where needs analysis is not explicitly articulated, the cyclic nature of a reflexive approach to teaching is preserved.

Contextualizing the readings

The reader of an edited collection, whether practitioner, teacher-educator or researcher, is unlikely to read the book from beginning to end, but will cherry-pick the most pertinent chapters according to their own circumstances. This means that the reader would benefit from a consistent organisation of each chapter, with the context of each study being presented at the outset. The country the study is located in, the goals of the curriculum and of the students, the language being taught and whether it is being learnt as a second or a foreign language, whether the focus is oral or written language, whether or not the course is intensive, for migrants or international students, whether it is held at a workplace or a primary or secondary school, the length of the course, and so on – all such factors are of interest to the potential reader scanning the pages for relevance.

None of the three books does a very good job of consistently setting out this information early in each chapter. Furthermore, the compilation of references at the end of each of the TESOL volumes undermines the provision of context which is crucial for the informed reader seeking a relevant reading. Long's volume, which lists references individually for each chapter, fares better in this respect.

At the same time, in order to obtain the best value from any of these books, the reader would need to see beyond the contextual limits. Thus, it is unlikely that many readers of the DNC chapter by Jane Hardy, ‘Candidates in camouflage: Designing a proficiency test preparation course for the Slovenian Armed Forces’, will find themselves, as the author did, engaged in designing a proficiency test for the Slovenian armed forces, but her approach may well be relevant to teachers working under similar constraints. The fairly traditional approach here contrasts with the more innovative line taken by Heidi Evans designing a course for Japanese undergraduates in the Osaka region. ‘Animals in the language classroom? Teaching English and critical thinking in a social issues class’ tells how English language students are taken outside the classroom, giving them the opportunity to explore social issues through observation and research, even though they are not operating in an English-speaking environment. Less adaptable is Patrick Rosenkjar's contribution ‘American English as cultural expression’ set in Japan and describing an approach to teaching metaphor which would require very specialised knowledge. Students are asked to view the film Steel Magnolias and analyse conversation excerpts with reference to a range of concepts from the field of pragmatics. Readers not familiar with either the film or the pragmatics analysis adopted by the author will find it doubly difficult to understand and appreciate the course design described in this chapter.

Overall though, it is one of the positive features of both TESOL books that readers are offered choices for content and methodology. The books could be recommended for both local and foreign teachers in some of the countries included as a basis for comparing and evaluating the various approaches and discussing any intercultural issues that might arise. Indeed, we suggest that a welcome addition to this series would be a collection of articles by language teachers who actually come from these countries, for whom the challenges of teaching a second language take a different form. For example, one would suppose it unlikely that any Japanese teacher of English in a Japanese university would be confronted by students asking this question posed to Martin Momoda, author of ‘Not the puppet anymore: Infusing critical inquiry into a business presentation curriculum’:

Momoda's reflection reveals the same concern as Deborah Cameron with what she calls ‘a one-way flow of expert knowledge from dominant to subaltern cultures’ (Cameron Reference Cameron, Block and Cameron2000: 70). A volume by local, non-native-speaker teachers would help to counteract this flow by providing an opportunity for them to engage with an international academic discourse on language teaching.

Theoretical concerns

The approach in SLNA makes several of the chapters look more like linguistic studies than needs analyses, and their theoretical perspective has a lot in common with the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which focuses on ‘the authentic speech and writing of people interacting in naturally occurring social contexts’ (Eggins Reference Eggins1994: 3). While Downey Bartlett (‘A double shot 2% mocha latte, please, with whip: Service encounters in two coffee shops and at a coffee cart’) does make reference to Ruqaiya Hasan's SFL work, there is no evidence of the other authors' familiarity with this area of linguistics, despite its high degree of relevance to much of the research presented in this volume. The key to this connection is the SFL concept of ‘text’, which in practice is closer to the notion of ‘task’ than is allowed by Long in his chapter ‘Methodological issues in learner needs analysis’ (p. 23) in that it includes both oral and written modes, and captures a dynamic interaction between speaker and listener, writer and reader. In the study by Chaudron et al., when we come to the collecting of ‘target discourse samples’, we find a concept that looks very like the SFL idea of ‘text’. When these researchers further identify ‘prototypical discourse structures’, they are arguably talking about ‘stages’ in ‘generic structures’ (pp. 233f.). The advantage of SFL is that it is an overarching theory of language in which these concepts are embedded, and which would provide a rich source of insight into broader ideas of concern about culture and meaning in language learning.

By contrast, the two TESOL volumes are eclectic in nature. They present a range of examples of actual practice, thus reflecting the lived experiences of real teachers. Indeed, their success in doing this exposes an essential inadequacy in the Long volume, in which the quest for authenticity of task and text completely bypasses the authenticity of the teaching and learning experience.