Teaching Unplugged – Scott Thornbury, and Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching – Jack C Richards and Theodore S Rodgers

I don’t think I really wanted to review these two books. It was a bit of a ‘why the hell not’ moment, mostly as I was packing things up and found these two volumes laying about. But I am deeply afraid that my bias will come out. My bias, which is borne from a lot of the very real experiences that I have, is largely that the academics who work in the ESL industry are so completely removed from the working conditions of the industry that they are actually too clueless to help. McDonald’s hires gourmet chefs to design their burgers. Those chefs have no idea what it is really like to work in a McDonald’s.

Bias? Maybe that isn’t the right word. Vitriol.

Thus I am deeply skeptical about everything that comes out of the ESL industry. But I also think that much of what is taught about ESL methodology is mostly pseudoscience, and on my sister blog I have some snarky thoughts and evidence to this point. I am reminded of what Noam Chomsky said about people working in the various postmodern ‘theory’ fields, whose work seemed to often be a cargo cult science borne of the jealousy of the real sciences. This is all controversial, and I myself with my fancy master’s in semiotics (hypocrite!) only believe all this piecemeal depending on my mood. So we will not get to deep into all that.

Teaching Unplugged – Scott Thornbury

Scott Thornbury finds his inspiration from Danish film director Lars Von Trier.

No, I am not making this up.

Lars Von Trier released (announced?) his Dogme95 in 1995, with the express purposes of giving storytelling power back to directors and away from movie studios. In 2023, we can see why this was needed, and we are disheartened to see that it failed. Thornbury created his Dogme teaching methodology (expounded in Teaching Unplugged) to give teaching back to the teachers and away from the tyranny of the course book writers.

lmao. This guy doesn’t get it.

ESL teachers are often paid about minimum wage. If you are lucky, you are paid a couple of bucks more as a compensation for your preparation hours. Typically a teacher works 25 (student contact) hours per week, and the other 15 is meant for lesson prep. At my last job, if you worked 40 hours a week, your pay worked out to €8.37 gross (€5.69 net), but if you work only 25 hours, your rate is €13.4 per hour gross (€9.11 net). And this is in a city where the average out of center rent is about €420 per month without utilities.

Tyranny of the coursebook? ESL is a part time job, and the coursebooks are our liberators. Every full time teacher I know moonlights as something else. Teaching is what you can do till you can do something more lucrative. Coursebooks allow ESL teachers to not do any prep work. Lessons based on coursebooks are boring, but at the rate they are paying us, that is what they will get until wages go up.

So what is Thornbury’s solution to all this? A book that is 18 of methodological explanation and 49 pages of activities. Many of these activities are identical to the ones that you would find in a god damn coursebook. So liberate yourself from their coursebook by buying my own. Coursebooks are the main cost to an ESL teacher, and this book costs about as much as one. But if you had a course to teach with the expectations to get a student from CEFR A2 to B1, this book will never help you with that.

What is the fucking point? To defraud ESL teachers out of money. That’s what much of this is about.

When this was assigned to me, it was done so while we were learning about teaching methodologies. That is not what this is at all. It is, again, a glorified activity book.

Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching – Jack C Richards and Theodore S Rodgers

DNF – No idea at what percent, as I kind skimmed here and there looking for information I could use for a research paper.

In ESL, the wave of people for whom the word ‘privilege’ is bandied about has yet to die off. All around the world you meet many of the most useless Americans, Canadians, Brits, Irish and Australians imaginable who are working in a certain field only because they are native English speakers¹. The industry started to curb this maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and now some kind of a teaching certificate is nearly mandatory. Still you would be surprised at how many CV’s I get from people who have been in Budapest for ages floating only on their foreign passport, and with their skills twenty years out of date expect a job from me merely because they are native speakers.

I think ESL methodology never got over its anything goes phase. I think ESL is not guided by SLA principles, but instead practices what I like to call ‘Aperture’ science – they throw experiments at the wall and see what sticks. So this is supposed to be a book of differing teaching methodologies. The only issues is that they are never tried outside of laboratory conditions, and their laboratory has nothing to do with real teaching. Some of the methods here may be useful, but other are laughable. One of the methodologies of this book is ‘The Silent Way’. Where a teacher is meant to not interfere with a class as much as possible, but sort of be a silent guiding force in the class that merely facilitates the students’ interaction with each other.

Wot?

The students are paying you for your input. Literally. They are paying you to provide a model of what the language should actually be like, and to correct them when they do not correctly reproduce that model (when they produce something outside of acceptable limitations).

So what is this book? Again, it is a book of classroom activities that you can occasionally take out to add some flourish. This will be used when the kool-aid swilling teachers observe other kool-aid swilling teachers, and they want to impress each other. All the other teachers will go to ESL brains, or Busy Teachers, or any of those other sites that produce actual functional lessons plans.

Because this shit doesn’t work.

This book was written in the 1980s. The industry really had no standards then. And yet, we are still using these resources as models of what teaching could be like. In the 80’s ESL teachers were paid a living wage, and thus could dedicate their time to thinking about how to maximize their teaching with such frivolities. The academics who promote this shit are a lot like the useless English speakers I mentioned above, completely devoid of any sense of what reality is like on the ground.

Conclusion

There is no real recommendation to this review. I hope to have provided you with some context. If you are stuck in25 ESL as a career choice, you’ll read these very niche books. You likely will not if you don’t fall in that niche. I think I am writing these to simply warn those people who do read them to keep a skeptical mind.

In short, fuck this. I am going back to reading something utterly mindless.

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1 This isn’t a race thing, and I hope my description above makes that clear. The privileged only seems to not work with white South Africans on a dice roll, even if they are native English speakers and not native Afrikaans speakers. It is a passport privileged. But I have met these useless people in all imaginable colors.