TESOL 2000: Navigating the Millennium provided a benchmark on how quickly the field of English language teaching has grown. From the hundreds of presentations -- starting at seven in the morning to as late as eight in the evening -- and eight different plenaries, four themes emerged. The first is the growing internationalization of the organization itself. Next is the expanding paradigm of educational research. Third is the integration of teaching with new technology. Finally is the place of language teaching in the migration of peoples around the world.
Last year's conference in New York City set an attendance record of 10,000 participants. TESOL 2000 drew a smaller number, but was no less impressive considering the Canadian venue. A much smaller city, Vancouver drew a remarkable 7,000 people, twice the number that attended TESOL '92 in that city. Until now, the 14,000-member group has been primarily an American one, mostly concerned with national issues. However, numerous international members and TESOL affiliates, from Costa Rica to Pakistan -- among the 58 countries represented at the convention -- were given travel grants to attend this year's conference.
As well, there is a growing advocacy in TESOL of language teachers, nationally and abroad. The group is battling the assumption that anyone who can speak English can teach it, which leads many private schools to recruit unskilled native speakers and to pay low wages. In Canada, a TESOL affiliate organization, TESL Canada (Teachers of English as a Second Language) has developed national standards for teacher qualifications and the certification of private schools. In future, TESOL expects to lobby governments to prevent discriminatory hiring practices on the basis of race or nationality, maintain a database about employment issues, and to commission a task force to develop a set of international standards.
TESOL 2000 also marked the end of David Nunan's tenure as TESOL President. He opened the conference by joking that his plenary address should have been "Seven Stories about Language Teaching" rather than the "Seven Hypotheses" advertised in the conference handbook. However, by the end of his talk, it became clear that his anecdotes about language teaching were, in fact, the basis of a broader notion of data and of educational research and several hypotheses.
Citing the ground-breaking ethnographic studies by Shirley Brice Heath in the 1980s, Nunan used his "seven stories" to describe the language learning process, starting with his early experiences as a "hippy" language teacher with a batik shirt. "My next story is of 'Ing,'" he began at one point. "How many people in the audience know "Ing? You all teach 'Ing.'" The audience was stymied. Was "Ing" a type of Asian student? Nunan laughed, "'Ing' is that thing you stick to the ends of verbs when you want to indicate actions in progress."
To the audience's amusement, Nunan described how earnestly he had instructed his students in proper grammatical forms, only to have the students leave the class and use it entirely differently. In the case of the gerund form, he remarked, learners often initially use it as a general marker of verbs, particularly the past tense. He explained how this represented a stage in the proper acquisition of the form and was therefore not as retrograde as it appeared.
Nunan used the example to show the complexity of learning, and he called for a greater appreciation of that. He suggested the "architectural" model, where learning is seen to proceed in a "lockstep manner" floor by floor, was the model underlying many educational programs. He argued for its replacement by an organic metaphor--"language learning as a garden." Nunan explained that his perspective came from his experiences and from an ongoing collaborative research project where some 60 language learners at the University of Hong Kong have been interviewed about their high school experiences learning English. "Is this research?" he asked rhetorically. "We haven't looked for averages, norms, samples, and populations." Then he outlined his seven hypotheses about language learning:
(1) learners need to re-interpret and transfer input
(2) students never learn in a linear, additive way
(3) they need opportunities to assimilate new ideas and feelings into their learning process
(4) the learning process should be emphasized as well as the course content
(5) teachers should find each student's best way of learning
(6) learners need to be able to negotiate their learning
(7) the course should reflect the complexity and instability of learning.
In conclusion, Nunan maintained that story telling, which can lead to problem definition in the field of education, is often more important in research than problem solving, as the problems are often poorly understood. Summing up his experiences, he added, "There wasn't a single learner who didn't force me to reconsider what I was doing in my classes on a daily basis."
The third of the conference themes was explored by a plenary speaker on Saturday, the last day of the conference. This was Randy Bass, an American Studies professor and the Executive Director for the Centre for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University. "We're going to become 'wired' long before we know why it is we became 'wired," warned Bass. He made the distinction between hyperactive teaching: "wired" for technology and "smart" classroom applications.
Then he focused on three uses of computer technology: inquiry learning, based on thick data bases of primary and secondary online resources; community-building through online interaction and bridging; and finally, "constructionism" where students are given the tools to build knowledge instead of simply consuming it. He provided several examples of teaching through computer media.
Notwithstanding a few technical glitches, Bass demonstrated how students could use a CD-Rom of The National Museum of Art to curate their own mini exhibitions through saving paintings and their descriptions into computer files that teachers and other students could view. He mentioned how a collection of 192 personal narratives about the California gold rush at the Library of Congress website "The American Memory" could provide learners with authentic primary resources for an exploration of 19th century prejudices against race and culture.
Bass also showed how the computer software "Course Info" could help create student project folders that other learners could examine; documents could be posted and links made to related websites. He termed this kind of cooperative learning a "cognitive apprenticeship." The teacher's thinking is modeled to the students as that of an expert learner or subject area specialist. At the same time, the students' thinking is made transparent to the teacher, and useable to other students in the class in a kind of reciprocal teaching. Acknowledging that class time spent using technology often meant the sacrifice of content, Bass argued that an in-depth approach was better than covering too much content superficially.
"Technologies make it possible to create pedagogies where students are reflective about their own learning, but only if this dimension is built in by design," added Bass, noting that pre-packaged materials and technologies had to be adapted for classroom use. As educators "navigating the new millennium" he concluded, "we have to know what and how does teaching produce learning, and what role might technologies play in that."
Finally, a late-breaking political development dove-tailed nicely with the fourth conference theme, the place of language teaching in world migration and multi-culturalism. Ujjal Dosanjh, the Attorney-General of the province of British Columbia, of which Vancouver is the commercial and population centre, had agreed to address a plenary. Shortly before the conference, he was selected as the B.C. premier, Canada's first Indo-Canadian provincial premier.
Dosanjh, who emigrated from a small Indian village, learned English as a second language, obtained a law degree, established a legal practice, and entered politics in 1991. "An immigrant leaves his job, his profession, his language, his ability to express himself -- you feel like a child again." He reminded teachers at the conference of their special calling.