Started: May 28, 2018
Finished: June 10, 2018
Why I Read This Book
As regular readers of this blog know, for the past year and a half I've been doing a book club at work for professional development. Every month we choose one book from the DELTA reading list (list HERE), read the book, and then meet up to discuss it.
This book was on the reading list, and plus a couple people had recommended it to me as being particularly useful for the DELTA. So I suggested it to the book club, and we read it last month.
Reputation
This book comes highly recommended by a number of people.
My manager told me it was one of the key texts for the DELTA. He told me that any speaking lesson I did on the DELTA should reference this book.
The book was useful, he said, because it does a good job of breaking down speaking into all the various subskills. Too often during a speaking lesson, teachers just give students a conversation topic and let them talk about it. (This is something I've often been guilty of myself). But Martin Bygate demonstrates how the skill of speaking is actually made up of a lot of smaller subskills, and that an effective speaking lesson can target these subskills individually.
At the same time, however, my manager told me that this book is more of a reference book, and not something you would want to read straight through. (I read it straight through, and found it a bit boring, but more on that below.)
Another one of my colleagues, someone in the product development department, told me that this book had come highly recommended to him by his manager, and that he had used the information in this book to create a workshop on how to teach speaking subskills. Although he had also admitted he didn't read the whole thing straight through.
General Impressions/ Readability Factor
Martin Bygate writes very clear, easy to understand sentences.
Despite this, however, I struggled with this book. My eyes often glazed over as I read it, and I had trouble absorbing the information.
Some of this is on me, because this book is a textbook, and not pleasure reading. I can't expect the author to spoon-feed me everything. It's on me too bring my focus and concentration.
But, there were also some frustrating things about this book.
Much of the book is made up of "Tasks". There are 114 Tasks in this book (which only has 114 pages of text--actually less than that if you subtract blank pages in between chapters). So it's probably not an exaggeration to say half the book is Tasks.
These tasks are a series of questions or exercises that the reader is supposed to reflect on.
Take, for example, Task 57;
Task 57
Why might the interaction be affected by the number of people who have information to give? What difference is it likely to make if both participants have a responsibility for seeing that information is communicated?
Have you any information or experience which might confirm or disconfirm this view? What is your intuitive opinion? How might you get such information?
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| From p.65. Notice how there are multiple tasks on the same page. This is very typical. |
I understand that these tasks are useful for reflecting on the content, and thus (in theory) consolidating it into long term memory. But this isn't the way most normal people read books. When I get a 30 minute break in the middle of the day, and I go to the coffee shop to get some reading done, I want to read straight through the book. I can't stop every two paragraphs to reflect on the task.
I think this is what my manager meant when he warned me that this book was not meant to be read straight through. Individual sections of the book are very enlightening, and probably deserve to be studied in detail. (The colleague I mentioned above created a whole workshop out of mostly just pages 49-50 of this book). But it's very hard to read through this book for long stretches of time. You find yourself just reading Reflection Task after Reflection Task.
At our bookclub, someone suggested that this book wasn't meant to be read in a month, it was meant to be read over a year, and thus have time to properly reflect on all the Tasks.
My own suspicion is that this book is more useful for teacher trainers than for teachers. If you just focus on one short section of this book, the many different exercises and tasks are very useful for creating a 60 minute workshop. You could have your teachers work through the exercises, talk about them, do some group feedback, et cetera.
Another issue: all the TASKs are in boldheading, and largely seem to have replaced subheadings. It makes it very hard to keep track of the organization of the book. Usually when reading textbooks, I try to skim the headings and subheadings first to see how the content is organized. (A reading skill I picked up HERE). But in this book, there are very few subheadings, and instead most of the large bold face print is just numbering tasks (see picture above). So when I preview a chapter, all I see are just the task numbers. In an information dense book like this, clearer subheadings and less Tasks would have helped me to keep track of the content.
Chapter 11 I found particularly irritating, because it consisted of large extracts of second language learners describing pictures. The data is valuable to a linguist, but as a reader I really struggled to pay attention to it. My eyes really glazed over.
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| From page 86--But the whole chapter is like this. |
(Okay, granted, I'm whinging here. I could have easily solved this problem by reversing the order in which I read it. But, the book's editors also should have organized this material in a more reader-friendly way.)
Conflicting Viewpoints
Okay, one more complaint here before I get to the useful information that I got out of the book.
Actually it's more of a pseudo-complaint, because I do understand what the author is doing and why he is doing it. But nevertheless, it was a factor in my reading experience.
One of the frustrations about TESOL and SLA in general is that no one agrees on anything. So a textbook can't really tell the reader what is true or not. All the textbook can do is tell the reader the different conflicting theories.
(This is one of the frustrating things about reading too much in TESOL. Sometimes I feel like I've wasted hours reading in the field, only to come away with very little concrete information.)
This frustration is extended to this book. There are several different conflicting categorizations of speaking subskills, and Martin Bygate presents different views, with examples, and then invites the reader to reflect on them.
To be fair to Martin Bygate, I think he's doing exactly what he's supposed to do with an introductory book like this. But... at the same time, everyone in my book club agreed that strident opinionated authors are more fun to read than balanced and fair authors.
Krashen and Michael Lewis might be wrong, but they are never boring. And they are also a lot more memorable, because they spend their whole book developing one viewpoint.
A survey book, however, has a tendency to just become boring and forgettable. "These authors think this, but these authors think that. What do you think?"
It's also a bit confusing because of the way the book is laid out. In chapter 8, Martin Bygate lays out different possible views of speaking subskills. But then in chapter 9, he gives several ideas of activities that relate back to specific views of speaking he defined in chapter 8. Which caused me to have to flip back to chapter 8 to remember which views he was talking about. It may have been better to integrate the methodological views with the classroom activities that came out of those views, rather than separating the specific views and the specific activities into two separate chapters.
...Okay, now on to other stuff.
Other Stuff
* In the past, I've prepared a lot of materials for bookclub books. But I've been busy with other stuff lately, so I've not kept up with that. And have nothing to show.
So instead I will steal the slideshow presentation that my colleague had made for our bookclub (with his permission). The full version is (slides, pub), but the part that is most directly taken from Martin Bygate's book is slides 4&5. Those slides here (slides, pub)
On slide 5, my colleague wrote: "Choose one or two production and one or two interaction sub-skill to focus on at a time. Like grammar, speaking skills are entire systems, but they must be taught incrementally to be effectively understood and applied."
We got into some interesting discussion at the bookclub meeting if it was possible or desirable to explicitly teach all of these subskills. Someone pointed out that you would never teach the students how to make "false starts" for example.
Nor would you consciously study all of these skills in your first language. In your first language, you would just pick these skills up through input and interaction.
And could you study all of these things consciously, and then be expected to hold them all consciously in your mind when monitoring your conversation? (Krashen wouldn't think so).
Although to be fair to Martin Bygate, I'm not sure he ever advocated that all of these things have to be consciously taught in the classroom. I think in his book, he just described the sub-skills so that teachers can be better aware of them. (Unless I'm remembering wrong).
* Connection with some other books I've read: Martin Bygate makes the same point that I had previously read in Scott Thornbury and Dave Willis--namely that speaking is less syntactically complex than writing, both because of the processing demands of the speaker, but also because of the processing demands of the listener. Martin Bygate says, as do Thornbury and Willis, that we shouldn't expect nor desire that our students talk like a book when they speak.Video Review
Video Review HERE and embedded below.
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