EFL: Are We Teaching Too Much, And Training Too Little?

As a co-founder of English Attack!, I’m in frequent contact with teachers of English from around the world. In parallel, I regularly speak with school administrators, Directors of Studies, owners of language schools, publishers of language-learning textbooks, and language testing companies, and through these contacts and conversations am able to see English language learning from a variety of perspectives.

While the theories of how a “foreign” or second language is learned have evolved over the years, and the approaches on how best to structure and conduct language education continue to be discussed and refined, there remains in the field of EFL a basic paradox: that of persistent low levels of proficiency for literally hundreds of millions of people around the world “learning” English, despite having had years and years of classroom (and, in some cases, extracurricular as well) language instruction.

Year after year, surveys such as EF’s annual English Proficiency Index show very little change in the overall proficiency indexes and relative rankings of countries, despite an increasing number of countries starting compulsory English language education earlier and earlier and continuing it through to the end of secondary education. How can this be?

We often speak of the “plateau” that individual learners of a language reach after a certain number of years of instruction: a level of proficiency that they tend to stall at, and beyond which they find it very difficult to progress. But what if the whole field of teaching EFL in schools has also reached a sort of plateau? What if current methods, practices and educational infrastructures have delivered all they can realistically deliver without some form of radical re-think?

A television documentary I happened to be watching the other day caused me to start thinking about this paradox in a different way. The program reported on the subject of vocational training in Germany - a very widespread and respected alternative to university education there - and pointed to this practice as a major reason Germany enjoys a rate of unemployment, at 4% currently, less than half that of most of its European neighbors. And I found myself drawing parallels to a bold experiment in alternative education in France, the école 42 computer coding school in Paris, which has no teachers, a radical learn-by-doing philosophy, and highly motivated students who essentially train themselves until they learn very advanced coding skills – practically guaranteeing them employment upon graduation.

But what if the whole field of teaching EFL in schools has also reached a sort of plateau? What if current methods, practices and educational infrastructures have delivered all they can realistically deliver without some form of radical re-think?

Teaching versus Training… could the distinction be a key to the Paradox of the Plateau in national EFL school programs? A Google search on that “vs” produced hundreds of results, with useful distinctions between the two terms. Broadly speaking, all sources agreed on the definition of Teaching as “imparting (predominantly theoretical) knowledge; causing someone to learn or understand something by example or experience; encouraging someone to accept something as a fact or principle.” There was also broad consensus on the definition of Training as “helping someone to acquire a particular (practical-oriented) skill or type of behavior through sustained practice and instruction.” Two interesting distinctions were that “teaching provides information, knowledge, and experience whereas training facilitates learning” and “teaching usually creates the ‘need to know’ of knowledge” for students, whereas in training, “the students themselves approach the knowledge as they realize the need to know.”

However, when I searched for “language teaching vs language training,” I could not find a single article, blog post or book passage on the subject. The closest result was a piece titled “The Differences Between Language Teaching and Language Coaching” by neurolanguage expert Rachel Paling. In her paper, she describes the language teacher as “the active player” who is “responsible for all the transmission” and who “guides the learner through the learning material” which tends to be “followed in a strict order of building block process; the style is… directive, demonstrative, instructive and often mandatory.”

Paling goes on to describe the role of the language learner, in contrast, as “passive,” taking in the information being imparted but often finding it “hard to relate to the learning.”

Obviously, very few teachers of EFL or ESL would agree with such a limiting definition of their roles, or that of their learners. Yet many, particularly in secondary education, would agree that their learners indeed have trouble “relating” to the language lessons they are forced to sit through year after year, or the course books they are expected to work through week after week. 

We know, given the aforementioned Paradox, that sheer volume of teaching – in terms of years of instruction - is not, by itself, enough to result in language proficiency. But what is the alternative?

Could it be that after a certain number of years of “teaching” – assuming that early on, “teaching” is the right approach – learners of English would benefit from a switch to a more training-intensive approach? At a certain point, don’t they need less time spent on understanding the distinctions between the Active and Passive voices, and more exposure / immersion / repetition / drills / talk time / accent reduction / learning autonomy / learning-by-doing – and the self-confidence that would come from that?

Recent language education movements such as Dogme, and even ones now decades old like the Lexical and Communicative approaches, recognize the need to move from the teaching of language structure to modes of instruction with more pattern recognition and practice – in short, the need for a greater focus on language training. But are teachers actually taught (or trained?) to train? Would it be fair to say that TEFL and CELTA courses, not to mention the MATESOL, are, in fact, very knowledge-intensive in nature, focused on the theory of language transmission more than the nuts and bolts of language training? And would it be understandable if the graduates of these courses then felt, at least subconsciously, compelled to extend the “teaching” approach to their learners, rather than switching over to training, at some point, as a more goal-oriented approach? What is for sure is that one hears a lot more about “teaching” in the ELT industry - especially relative to primary, secondary and even university-level education - than one does about training.

Maybe there’s a semantic bias at play here. “Teaching,” in the image of an Aristotle or a Socrates, is seen as noble, humanistic, generous, “pure,” and holistically related to the advancing of the human spirit. “Training” is an altogether more recent concept, anchored in commerce, seen as tied to the professions or a trade, and conducted by people not perceived, on the whole, with the same degree of respect or prestige.

Could this difference be partially responsible for the continued hegemony of teaching over training in ELT? What else could be the explanation, as we approach the end of the second decade of the second Millenium, of tens of thousands of teachers of English around the world (no, not the ones reading this post…) still focused on the non-contextual teaching of grammar as a set of rules to be memorized? What other reason could there be for some teachers of English actually continuing to burden the brains of their bewildered students with phonemic charts? As a participant, and occasional speaker, for years now at ELT conferences at both the national and international levels, I have always been puzzled by the number of very arcane, highly academic linguistics-oriented papers and talks given airtime in the conference program, as compared with the paucity of presentations and case studies of more pragmatic training-oriented approaches and the results thus obtained.

Is language proficiency a knowledge or a skill?

There are, clearly, areas where proficiency can only be achieved via exposure to knowledge-based teaching. Advanced mathematics, for example, is impossible to grasp unless the fundamentals have been taught in a very progressive manner. The ability to do applied chemistry depends on a thorough understanding of how the building blocks of our world – the atoms, compounds, and elements – interact. Likewise, there are basic concepts in physics, which, if not acquired, make the practice of advanced engineering rather problematic.

In several non-technical areas, as well, proficiency depends very much on absorption of knowledge. History, sociology, anthropology, and economics are all disciplines requiring a deep understanding of the great movements of the human adventure, without which one cannot claim to have mastery of these subjects.

But – and now we come to a key issue - is language proficiency a knowledge or a skill? Most of us would say that it is both. A post on the subject in one of my favorite language blogs, Linguisticator, stipulates that a degree of education - even when divorced from the accumulation of knowledge as such - accelerates learning: “From studying methods, to time management, to sheer discipline, all education helps us in any further tasks we have to learn.” (The post also refers to a saying that education is “what we’re left with when we’ve forgotten everything we learned at school,” which I found quite clever).

The Linguisticator piece goes on to spell out the importance of language training (vs language teaching) in a way that bears quoting in full:

There are a number of “skills” specifically useful for language learning, some of which are included in other forms of education and some of which are not. Discipline, analytical thought, and self-reflection are all necessary components of successful language learning. Other skills, however, are less frequently a part of the learner’s repertoire already at the beginning of the process.

Understanding languages as systems, linguistic pattern recognition, memory techniques — and their application to language-learning — as well as certain skills of vocal flexibility - are all skills largely peculiar to language learning. Recognizing these as trainable skills before beginning or continuing the learning process can be game-changing.

Of course, it would be easy to dismiss the whole teaching vs training debate as too simplistic. Most language teachers would say that they both teach and train. And, historically, they have had to. Before satellite television and, especially, the internet, gave learners easy access to authentic L2 media in the language being learned, the only contact EFL learners would have with that language was via their teacher. A large portion of class time would thus typically be dedicated to reading texts aloud, listening to audiotapes, and, more recently, to watching graded, made-for-language-instruction videos. This classroom exposure to English came, however, at the cost of precious classroom time taken away from more communicative interaction between the teacher and her learners, or amongst the learners themselves.

Technology has, of course, changed all that. Online resources specifically designed to increase and enhance learners’ contact with authentic English (such as English Attack!, the resource I co-created) allow teachers to adopt the training-oriented "flipped classroom" approach now so often recommended. Learning units based on clips from films, television series or television news items can be selected from a vast and constantly updated catalogue with just a few clicks, and assigned to students for completion outside of the classroom on their own internet-connected devices. This allows for classroom time to be dedicated to active verbal production via discussion of the subject matter, target vocabulary, or some other aspect of the assigned learning units. Teachers save literally dozens if not hundreds of hours previously spent hunting for suitable video clips and packaging them into lesson plans; and learners see and hear much more authentic English as well as getting more speaking opportunities in class. Everyone wins.

A wonderful example of a teacher of English solidly espousing the “training” side of the scale is my friend Jason Levine, aka Fluency MC, who regularly enter-trains (apologies for the awful pun!) thousands of tweens and teens in middle schools and high schools from Paris to Poland with his rap-driven drills and collocation work. He captures the essence of his approach - and of the importance of language training - better than I can in this present post with his recent piece here.

The increasing number of teachers and trainers with a focus on idiomatic expressions, situational language usage and accent reduction can also be considered as belonging to the “training” camp, as are most of the teachers of English - such as Christina Rebuffet, Lucy Earl (English With Lucy) or Rachel Smith of Rachel’s English - increasingly active and visible on YouTube with their own video channels.

In conclusion, I’d like to offer my pre-emptive apologies to any teachers of English who have taken umbrage at the point I am trying to make. This piece was not intended as a point of view in the context of a sterile discussion about what is the more evolved or effective practice in EFL/ESL, i.e. “teaching” vs. “training.” Rather, it tries to highlight the fundamental difference between the two practices, and to argue - or at least advance discussion upon - which should be brought into play in the specific case of teens and adults having already had several years of classroom English language instruction in a school environment, yet having (so far) failed to achieve a level of English language proficiency commensurate with their needs and aspirations. The new digital and online resources now available to teachers and learners of English can be transformational. To quote "out of the box" American architect, inventor and thinker R. Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller: “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”