Caroline Coffin: Negotiating difference for future action: Systemic Functional Linguistics meets Academic Literacies

Caroline Coffin’s plenary talk was far less dry than the title suggests and Coffin discussed some very practical applications of the theories she discussed, offering strategies to help reduce student failure.  Coffin  gave the broader context in UK Higher Education (and elsewhere, though the terminology and emphasis varies) of more emphasis on (successful) teaching and learning, with a drive to improve Attainment, Progression and Retention, with more internationalisation and broadening of access. Coffin described a research project at the Open University where they had looked at the problems faced by Health and Social Care Students where there was a 50% failure rate (the students are a mix of native speakers of English and speakers of English as an additional language). Coffin had actually followed a course and completed the assignments (she passed). She suggested that EAP was comparable to CLIL (another acronym – Content Language and Integrated Learning) and felt it needed a “transformative pedagogy”, in which students, faculty and EAP practitioners would work together to move from a “skills deficit model” to a shared understanding of “a complex set of writing practices”.

Coffin illustrated her talk with an examination of the case study approach which is a central part of teaching and learning in Health and Social Care, and how students needed to progress through a hierarchy of Narrate -> Classify -> Explain -> Argue.  Thus, for students to be successful, their lecturers (and EAP lecturers) need to help them integrate their lived experiences (for instance as Nurses, Social Workers) with academic theories.  Coffin then contrasted the emphasis in Health and Social Care on the desire from lecturers for “decontextualised academic theory” with Business Studies which has more emphasis on “concrete lived worlds”. I’m familiar with both areas, and found this comparison interesting, as it explained why having recently studied for an MBA, I was not always helpful as I thought when commenting on drafts of  a relative’s written assignments for their Social Work degree. In the same way, an EAP lecturer needs to be prepared to help students working with very different faculty expectations, and for this Coffin advocated the use of linguistic analysis approaches similar to literary criticism, where form=meaning.

John Swales – Revising an EAP textbook

Like many delegates I was very pleased to see the guru of EAP and ESP in action, and intrigued by the challenges Swales faced in writing a new edition of his very successful Academic Writing for graduate students which he co-wrote with Christine Feak and which  sold 100,000 copies between 1994-2012. Interestingly its publisher Michigan University Press is determined to keep this as a print only publication, which I felt was misguided, when so many students would expect at least a Kindle version.  Swales had a tricky relationship with his new “development editor”, and related the story of their disagreements over a publication that has become financially important to its commercial viability. Curiously, it seems that instead of the success of previous editions making the publisher trust the judgement of Swales and Feak, particularly on editorial and linguistic issues, the opposite seems to have occurred.  The session illustrates the challenges many of us face in the sometimes delicate author-publisher relationship.

Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner - Balancing old and new activity types on an academic writing website

We were also inspired by this video of J.K. Rowling’s 2008 Harvard Commencement speech on failure (thanks to Carol Read, IATEFL President):

Like J.K. Rowling, our speakers all seem super confident and  very funny (though they are not quite so wealthy), they are all brilliant teachers and presenters. But like Rowling, beforehand they were  petrified, and had spent a lot of time reflecting on their lives as learners and teachers, wondering what stories they could share so publicly.   And reflecting on their failures brought back memories of very real and painful experiences.   But I suppose their willingness to reflect on failure, and share it, is part of what makes these individuals successful, and the audience that evening appreciated their willingness to do this. I think from hearing the comments afterwards, and seeing the comments in the links below showed that we were successful in our objectives for the evening, we wanted to be entertaining, but we wanted to encourage people to reflect on their own failure stories. And in doing so I think a few people may have exorcised a few demons in the process.

You can find some excellent summaries via Chia Suan Chong’s excellent blog and links to reviews of the evening. Chia also posted a great quote from Tintin:

Failed? They are plenty of others willing to call you a failure, a fool, a loser…but don’t you ever see it of yourself!
You send out the wrong signals, that’s what people pick up.
You care about something you fight for it. You hit a wall, you push through it.
There’s something you need to know about failure: you can never let it defeat you.

Captain Haddock, The Adventures of Tintin

You can read more about the evening from Chia’ summaries, reproduced here:

Damian Williams on the Tailor Made English blogsite

Patricia Amada Alarco-Vizcarra’s photo journal and Lu Boderman’s highlights.

Sophia Khan’s blogpost wrote about the reasons why she found the Failure Fest brilliant, starting from the celebration of failures as an opportunity for reflection to the fact that the sharing of a personal emotional experience like a failure allows us to focus on our similarities than our differences.

Josette LeBlanc’s blogsite Throwing Back Tokens  expressed her sense of relief while having a bit of fun through each of the guest presenter’s sharing storied of their failure to show their vulnerability.

Ann Loseva’s blogpost was a clear example of how the Failure Fest went on to inspire teachers to reflect on and share the failures they have experienced.

Beta Gamma Sigma (BGS) is a prestigious international honour society for students and staff of business schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International. The founding principles and values of the Society are honour and integrity, pursuit of wisdom, and earnestness. BGS has inducted more than 650,000 students into membership since its founding in 1913, and its e-magazine has a circulation of 170,000 members.

The first is an arcade style iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad vocabulary learning game called Word Carrot that I have been working on the past few months with three colleagues in our new company, LearnAhead Ltd. The app will appear on the Apple App store in early January 2012.

I will also talk about Doki, a  highly ambitious project to adapt existing Adobe Flash-based course materials originally designed for CDROM for learners of English, French, Spanish and German. I will describe the challenges that had to be overcome, including decisions about what technologies and platforms to adopt, copyright and intellectual property issues, and how to make such projects sustainable and commercially viable.

The webinar is scheduled to begin on Sunday 18 December at 1600 GMT.  You can view my presentation slides here:

The ESU asked me to help judge its two other awards this year, as it thought it would be good to mix up its judges and judging panels, for instance, one of the Biography Award judges helped with the Book Award, and that worked rather well.  Thus I was able to see the range of very impressive entries for the Book Award and the New Writing Award, supported by Cambridge University Press.  One of the Book Award winners, Pearson’s Speakout was a new course  that incorporated authentic BBC materials,video podcasts and Youtube resources very well indeed, while Garnet Education’s delightful Sunshine course for very young learners was very low tech, featuring two puppets, demonstrated here by fellow judge Dede Wilson:

There were 99 entries for the new Cambridge  ESU New Writing Award, and 24 of them formed a very impressive long list for us to judge.  The winner was Özge Karaoglu Ergen from Turkey, who won for her entry called ‘Bubble and Pebble’, a series of digital interactive games  brought to life with voices recorded by her students, and images that the students have drawn and coloured. You can see more on her blog. Highly Commended was Yann Desdevises, an English teacher from France for   ‘Selling A Green House’, where he created a lesson for his 16-year old students to create a sound track for a promotional video on YouTube to sell an eco-friendly house.  You can see them both in the background of the picture of Dede above.  Seeing their work makes me very optimistic about the future for digital ELT resources.

This is a fast changing area and there are no definitive answers, and my views are likely to change during my company’s second year of trading.

Smartphone or tablet?

There is overlap between the two types of device,  typically both have touchscreens, and most rely on common operating systems, the most popular being IOS (Apple for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) and Android (Google for a fast growing range of companies and devices).  Many App developers therefore try to develop for both to maximise their addressable markets, and to satisfy customers who own both types of device, as this allows them to buy the App once to install on all their personal devices.  Plus, although smartphones tend to be, well, phone sized and fairly predictable, tablets vary in size considerably.

Despite the overlap, the contexts in which consumers use the devices are likely to differ.  For instance, smartphones are useful for grabbing learning opportunities on the move, for short, fast paced learning sessions.  They are excellent for dictionary apps, and I am looking forward to using my new Collins Spanish dictionary when I go on holiday to Spain later this month.

But tablet devices offer a bigger canvas for extensive reading and rich media experiences.  There are now 25m iPads out there, and a growing user base of Android tablets, which should mean there is now a big enough market for language learning Apps that exploit their potential.

iPhone or Android?

iPhone (plus iPad and iPod Touch) remains the most straightforward platform for most publishers and developers. The devices and their operating systems are a known quantity, as is the Apple App store, which makes financial transactions straightforward.  Piracy is difficult. Small publishers and developers seem quite happy with working with Apple, who, unlike many retailers, pay their bills on time.  Some  object to Apple’s processes and its margins.

But the Android is likely to be the platform on many more devices.  When Android powered smartphones and tablets sell for below $100 a unit  we are likely to see an explosion in the number of users, and thus more opportunities for developers and publishers of language learning resources.

Flash or HTML 5/ JavaScript?

There is a fierce debate about what to do about Flash, which was the preferred platform for most interactive language learning materiall (there are some exceptions, e.g. English 360 and Vital English).  The problem is that website Flash games and activities will not work at all on iPhones or iPads, and do not always work properly on Android.

Developers are therefore moving to HTML5 and Javascript for new resources, particularly for websites that they want to be accessible on iPhones and iPads with a decent internet connection.  This leaves the problem about what to do about all existing Flash based materials, particularly for publishers who have up to 10 years worth of otherwise  perfectly usable learning resources.

The short answer to this is probably “wait and see” in the hope that new routines will emerge that will support the conversion of Flash to something else, or that Apple changes its position on Flash.

Will consumer overlap with education?

This is more a prediction than a question.  There has been little overlap between self-study resources and courseware used in educational establishments, except perhaps in dictionary publishing.  Already publishers such as HarperCollins, Pons and Pearson are licensing their resources to social media language learning websites such as Live Mocha! and Busuu.  Busuu has released some rather good language learning apps that enable learners to sychronise their learning profiles with the website.

In Germany, where the iPhone is popular, publishers are developing their App store products such as Cornelsen’s consumer Lextra brand and Klett’s Pons brand.

What should my organization do about all this?

Firstly,  existing websites need to be mobile friendly so that customers and other important stakeholders are able to find the information they need, especially contact information.  This can be very straightforward or difficult to do, depending on how the website is built.  This website is built in a public domain system called WordPress, which is very easy to make mobile friendly.  Content built in Flash needs to be moved off the front page, and key information needs to be taken out of Flash and rewritten in a format that will appear on mobile.

Organisations publishing print materials will need to format these materials in eReadable formats.     The most common is pdf, which is fine for many, but publishing materials in ePUB, offers a better reading experience, and enables the mobile reader to annotate and use an English language dictionary to look up words as they go along.

And some organizations may need to consider App development, which will be the subject of a future post on this blog..