A new episode of TEFLology is online now here. Actually once again, I'm several days late on this, and it's been up since last Wednesday.
But better late than never, here I am with my review.
I'll admit this wasn't my favorite episode of TEFLology, but let me attempt to be fair, by acknowledging how difficult it must be to consistently produce a bi-weekly podcast.
If I was doing a TELF podcast, for example, I could maybe do about 5 episodes before I exhausted all my areas of interest in the field. These guys are on episode 48 by now. It must be really tough to keep coming up with new and interesting content.
But that being said... yeah, this wasn't my favorite episode. I didn't find any of this week's topics particularly interesting.
...Or at least that is to say, I didn't find the topics inherently interesting in-and-of themselves. What saves this show, and makes this podcast still fun to listen to, is the terrific banter these guys have back and forth with each other. So even though I thought the idea of exploring Pokemon Go on a TEFL show was pretty stupid, I still enjoyed a lot of the jokes these guys had back and forth among themselves.
Anyway, the topics for this week were:
Storytelling,
Tsuda Umeka and
Pokemon Go.
I'll list my thoughts about each topic below.
Storytelling
In this segment, the TEFLologist discuss a new study that examines the benefits of being a good story teller, based off of this Washington Post Article: Why Good Storytellers Are Happier in Life and in Love. Studies find the way people tell their own stories has an outsize effect on their life satisfaction
I, however, was skeptical about the value of this study.
For example, take this quote from the article (which was also mentioned in the TEFLology podcast),
Research shows that the way people construct their individual stories has a large impact on their physical and mental health. People who frame their personal narratives in a positive way have more life satisfaction.This seems to me like a classic "correlation does not equal causation" fallacy. It's not at all clear to me that people have more life satisfaction because they frame their personal narratives in a positive way. In fact, the cause and effect is probably the reverse. If you have more life satisfaction, you're more likely to frame your personal narratives in a positive way.
Plus, how are they measuring life satisfaction anyway? The article never says, but presumably it's by participants' self-reporting, right? And what is a personal narrative? It's also a form of self-reporting, right?
Which means that this article is essentially saying: "People who self reported positive things about their life were more likely to self report positive things about their life."
So count me underwhelmed by this study.
The second part of the study was that: "women find men who are good storytellers more appealing."
Actually this part I can easily believe.
I noticed a long time ago that guys who are smooth talkers can get a lot of women even if they aren't particularly physically attractive. Keeping a women entertained, and making her laugh, seem to be the key to winning a woman's affection. (These are all skills I'm terrible at, so I've had no personal experience with this, but I've observed other guys do it often enough. Also, Neil Strauss devotes a whole book to chronicling how otherwise unattractive guys can become great at picking up women if they just master the smooth talk.)
I believe storytelling skills are a part of smooth talking, so I'd believe this part of the study easily enough--even if I thought this wasn't so much "news" as it was just common sense.
But even so, I'm skeptical of the shoddy methodology of the study, which appeared to be just presenting women with pictures of men, and telling them that some of these men were good storytellers, and some were not.
What is nice about TEFLology, however, is that the discussion format of the podcast means that any claim advanced by one TEFLologist seldom goes unchallenged by the other two. So just as I was thinking that this study didn't really prove anything, one of the other TEFLologists gave voice to my skepticism.
"It seems to me like a strange thing, I mean, just saying you've got three people: one of them has a positive trait, one of them has a medium trait, one of them has a poor trait, which one do you prefer? And the only thing you know about them is that this one has this positive trait," said one TEFLologist.
Yeah, those were my thoughts exactly.
Another TEFLologist countered that the study wasn't only about storytelling traits, but also physical attractiveness.
But physical attractiveness is such a subjective variable that I find it difficult to believe it was adequately controlled for. As the TEFLologist responded: "Yeah, but different people prefer different types, so..."
What does all this have to do with teaching English?
Well, one of the TEFLologists was arguing that we should be teaching our students more storytelling skills, because this study demonstrated storytelling skills have great value in life.
Possibly. Although speaking personally, I'd need a lot more training before I was prepared to teach any story telling skills. I'd need to learn these skills myself before I could teach them.
In terms of getting students to listen to stories, however, I am all about using stories in the English Classroom.
In my own Young Learner classes, although I don't teach them productive story telling skills, much of the class is based on learning English through stories.
In each class, I try to spend some time watching a movie (which is a narrative) and some time reading a story from a graded reader.
(A colleague who observed one of my classes once commented to me that my entire class seemed to be based off of listening and reading stories in one form or another).
This is partly because of my belief that Young Learners learn English best through comprehensible input, and partly based off of a comment a former manager of mine once said to me. "People don't want to learn a language because they like studying grammar," he said. "People learn languages so they can have access to the stories and culture of that language."
Tsuda Umeko
This was part of the TEFL Pioneers section of the podcast, a segment in which the TEFLologists look at the lives of famous English teachers.
This segment was good for what it was. The TEFLologists did a good job of recounting the life of Tsuda Umeko and her contribution to English teaching in Japan.
...assuming you're interested in this kind of thing. Which I wasn't particularly.
I'll be honest, I don't find the TEFL Pioneers segment of this podcast particular useful.
As someone who listens to this podcast primarily for professional development, I am not really interested in the biographies of TEFL teachers. I'd be interested in the theories they developed, particularly if those theories are still influential today. (So I enjoyed the previous episode's discussion on Alan Waters). But I'm not particularly interested in learning about people who opened new schools, or who were the first to start teaching English in their part of the world.
Sidenote: Of the books on Tsuda Umeko's reading list, I was familiar with A Tale of Two Cities.
Pokemon Go
I remember in a past episode (I forget which particular one) the TEFLologists were talking about a paper they saw presented at a conference which talked about the benefits of using Angry Birds to teach English.
You get the sense that these poor guys have been to way too many academic TEFL conferences, and have seen way too many TEFLers desperate to get published by shamelessly exploiting the latest pop culture trends.
The cynicism comes through in the episode, and the cynicism in and of itself is amusing.
"I reckon at next year's or any conferences coming up it's going to be: 'The Effects of INSERT POKEMON GO on INSERT ENGLISH, INSERT SKILL, reading INSERT...Using Pokemon Go to INSERT something..."
Spoken like a man who's had to sit through too many of these awful academic conferences.
So the cynicism about the TEFL academic conferences and publishing industry was amusing.
And also in this section particularly, the banter between the three TEFLologists was particularly good. I found myself chuckling a bit at their various back and forths.
But in practical terms for my own classroom, I didn't get anything useful out of this section.
Oh well... for a bi-weekly podcast, it doesn't do to be too demanding.
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