All I Want For Christmas...
...is a wee bit more of a focus on ELL...rather than just ELT!
Yes, that is English Language LEARNing...not the gene or the enzyme.8 And, as it is almost Chistmas, I guess "turkey" might have been a better choice than "chicken" - I know, I know! Baby Jesus, Mary and Yusuf...everyone is a critic! 8 Actually, I was planning to use the title "BIG Questions in ELL (for 2013)" for this post but, quite accidentally, discovered that Scott Thornbury is using a very similar title for his new e-book (to be published very shortly by The Round). Scott's idea is a pretty cool one - "re-engineering" a number of the core posts from his great "A-Z of ELT" and helping those lovely guys at The Round realise their goal of creating more bridges between the blogosphere and the world of conventional publishing. The book is already shaping up to be a great addition to our ELT Library - you can get a "taste" (or a "tease") by clicking HERE. 8
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...YOU guessed IT !
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There is a bit of a problem with much of this "library" - a library that publishers have been helping us build up since the late 1970's...a library that, I would argue, misses a great deal of the the wood for the trees (trees all those conventional publishers are busy "chopping down" on our behalf)!TEACHers do, of course, need books n' stuff to help with their LEARNing. I'm not suggesting we should go all "Fahrenheit 451" on our favorite volumes and works of EDUliteracy. I'm saying perhaps we need a different "perspective" on how we look at the "business" we are in - and how we "do" that "business" around the globe through the books we read! 8 Let me elaborate...
...as if an objection or three would stop me!8 8
How many English Language LEARNers will be hoping that a big, fat guy (all dressed in "red" and hungry for minced pies) will "break into" their homes tonight - and leave them a copy of Raymond Murphy's "English Grammar in Use" (the new, revised, upgraded, on-line version - of course).A tough one - I know! 8 Well, if David Graddol is even close to being half-right - around a third of the world's population (yes, I said 33.33% of around 7,018,500,000 human beings - give or take a million) are trying to LEARN English...as I sit here and worry about whether I can find a "hindi" big enough to feed all my relatives here in big, bad Istanbul tomorrow afternoon! "Noël Baba" really did show a lot of "investment savvy" by picking up all those shares in CUP, Pearson and Cengage over the last 20 years! Damn my principles... 8 OK - I smell a roll with all these BIG numbers...let's see if we can't find some more legs for this post! If you (as I have just done) do a quick Google search for the acronym "ELT", you'll get around 37,800,000 potential bits of "bedtime reading". However, when you do a similar search for "English Language LEARNing" - Google can only come up with around 1,910,000 pages for you to ignore. And, "yes" - I know you can get just over 62 million pages of digital reading, if you use the acronym. But, then again...take a closer look at some of these hits! BESIDES...if you try "English Language Teaching"...the world's favourite search engine will cough up 171 million results for you. 8
Yani, almost three times as much "stuff" on TEACHing...than LEARNing!8 Now, this may not be much...when compared with the 252,000,000 results that you can potentially browse when you type the two little words "Justin" + "Bieber" (and do not even ask me what happens when you type "Lady Gaga")! 8
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The BIG question I have, when I consider these HUGE numbers...numbers that relate to LEARNers and their LEARNing (or SPENDing)...is this:
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Why do we call it the "ELT Industry" - ...not the "ELL Industry"?
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I said, a wee bit before, we ain't touched on textbooks...so I guess we should.
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English Language LEARNers spend king's ransom after king's ransom on these lovely "LEARNing opportunities" - but we hardly ever hear them being described as the cornerstone of the "ELL Industry".
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Or, did I just miss the memo?