Oleg Tarnopolsky is Doctor of Pedagogy, Full Professor at Dnipropetrovsk University of Economics and Law (Ukraine) where he chairs the Department of Applied Linguistics and Methods in Foreign Language Teaching.

When in 1995 I returned from the United States, where I had been working for four months as a Fulbright scholar doing research in the field of EFL teaching, I was filled to overflowing with new ideas and hopes of changing the EFL teaching situation in my country – Ukraine. I was naive enough to think that just disseminating those ideas among the Ukrainian EFL teaching public was a kind of magician’s wand. You wave it in front of people’s noses and they change their obsolete teaching styles and become zealous adepts of the latest approaches.

But what could be expected of practical teachers who heard me and the ideas I tried to spread for the first and, quite probably, the last time in their lives? After a conference or a workshop they had to return to grim classroom realities, to the harassment of lacking decent textbooks, of having poorly motivated students, and of meeting strict curriculum requirements (to teach just that portion of grammar or just those topics in a given semester).

That is why in 1999 I returned from my second EFL research programme in the USA and several professional visits to the UK with full understanding of the simple truth that nothing will change if you just tell as many people as possible that there are other and better ways of teaching English than those used by them. It is a cavalry attack on a fortress that can be taken only after a long siege.

Gathering a small group around you to analyse such better ways thoroughly and to actually try out in practice what has been discussed – only that can do the job, at least for some of those who are in that group. But it means not episodic academic conferences or workshops but long teacher retraining programmes with a small number of participants.

The retraining programme

The important issue is the organisation (structure) of the retraining programme. In designing it the following facts should be taken into consideration:

The trainees should be supplied with some initial information for their consciousness-raising as to modern approaches to foreign language teaching. It would not be the best solution to supply that information in the form of traditional lectures because, in that case, the information will be nothing more than abstract knowledge. An interactive narration seems to be more appropriate – with the mentor giving trainees some facts (e.g. facts about learners’ learning strategies) and asking them a number of questions to elicit their opinions and ideas as to those facts. Those elicited opinions and ideas serve as the starting points for trainees’ making their own conclusions and developing their personal attitudes to a certain approach being discussed.
The trainees should be given an opportunity of discussing their own opinions and ideas, however different – those differences serving as the basis for formulating or changing the underlying concepts of teaching and learning a foreign language in the direction of modern trends and approaches. Therefore, a kind of seminar or colloquium should follow every interactive narration session.
The new concepts and approaches should be tried out in practice. The best solution would be real classes with one trainee trying out new ideas while the other trainees are watching her/his performance for further analysis and critique. But such an approach is rarely practically feasible. A substitute may be presenting fragments of classes developed by one or several trainees – those trainees presenting their fragments to the entire group with the purpose of discussing them and listening to the critique given.

The teachers’ retraining programme should consist of at least three kinds of sessions: 1 interactive narration sessions, 2 discussion sessions (seminars or colloquia), 3 teaching practice sessions with all the trainees in a group observing and then analysing practical teaching demonstrated by one or several of them.

My experience in training and retraining EFL teachers in such a kind of programme has shown its very high efficiency, particularly in what concerns changing trainees’ attitudes. Observing those teachers’ classes after their finishing the programme demonstrated considerable changes in their teaching styles, approaches which became quite advanced, especially if account is taken of teachers’ visible desire to change and advance.

Reorganising the programme

Carry out a tentative recruitment survey to be fairly confident that, if a retraining programme is announced, there will be enough practical teachers from your institution (or several educational institutions) eager to participate.
Clearly define the goals of your programme. They may be related to a certain limited area or several areas (for instance, training teachers how to organise content-based learning or enhance learners’ independence). But it should be kept in mind that if obsolete teaching ideas, approaches, methods, and styles are dominant and all-pervasive in the given teaching/learning environment, changing just one or several aspects will not change the system.
Compile the full curriculum of your programme and make extensive and detailed plans for all the interactive narration sessions, discussion sessions, teaching practice sessions. When planning teaching practice sessions, make sure that you have opportunities of including into them several sample EFL classes held by yourself to demonstrate the most important points.
Select, collect and develop all the materials and resources that you will need for the programme. Special attention should be paid to providing as many handouts as possible and to selecting only those resources and literature for the trainees that can be readily accessed by them. Constantly replenish and extend your resources in the course of the programme since you will soon find out the impossibility of foreseeing and preparing everything before the actual work has started.
Get the support of your institution’s administration for organising the EFL teachers’ retraining programme in that institution, clarify the conditions (including the financial ones) of training teachers in that programme. The issue of giving the trainees a certificate of that institution after their graduating from the programme should be finalised at the very start with the content and form of the certificate approved by the institutional authorities.
Do the actual recruitment of trainees for the programme – first of all young inexperienced teachers who as a rule accept changes more readily and are often quite enthusiastic about them. The teachers who come to be trained of their own accord are certainly the best choices, but you should be prepared to enroll trainees who were required to enroll by their school administration, university department dean or chairperson and whose personal willingness is questionable. Such people will need special attention because they have to be convinced of the necessity of changing their habitual approaches, methods and teaching styles.
Request your trainees to attend a preliminary ‘organisational’ session to explain thoroughly the aims and structure of the programme, the ways of holding sessions, the expected outcomes, the system of testing, essay-writing and grading. Very important is negotiating the schedule and timing of sessions that should be convenient for all participants and not interfere with their own classes or other obligations.

The success of the programme mainly depends on the psychological environment in which the sessions are carried out. Relaxed, friendly, unconstrained and interested discussions and exchange of opinions will do more than any number of lectures. Interacting and sharing views to arrive at some common conclusions is much more important since only in interaction and open, unrestrained discussions can the trainees develop and acquire new attitudes to teaching. It is changing attitudes and not supplying information that should be considered the principal goal of the programme because only the teacher who has relevant attitudes can really master and successfully apply new state-of-the-art approaches in ESOL.

Conclusion

Thoroughly retraining a dozen teachers, so as to make them convinced adepts and experienced practical users of modern state-of-the-art approaches to EFL/ESL teaching (a long siege), may do more than lecturing hundreds of them on such approaches in a series of episodic and disconnected presentations, seminars, and workshops (cavalry attacks). Therefore, if you have set yourself the goal of changing the way EFL/ESL is taught in the country or region where you came to work, the ‘long siege’ method is the best choice for achieving the results you are aiming at.

Resources

IATEFL. Teacher Trainers and Educators SIG. Retrieved August 22, 2003, from the World Wide Web: http://www.ihes.com/ttsig/. The link to IATEFL Teacher Trainers and Educators Special Interest Group takes you to The TTEd SIG Mailing List that gives access to a variety of information related to training ESL/EFL teachers.
Pennington, M C (1995) The teacher change cycle. TESOL Quarterly, 29, 705–731
Richards, J C (1996) Teachers’ maxims in language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 30, 281–296
TESOL (n.d.). Teacher Education: TEIS. Retrieved October 19, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://www/tesol/org/issafil/intsec/f-te.html. The link to TESOL’s Teacher Education Interest Section takes you to information in the Past columns from TESOL Matters where materials on teacher education published in TESOL Matters can be found. You can also subscribe to the Electronic Discussion List to participate in ongoing discussion of issues concerning ESL/EFL teachers’ education.

Email: olegtarn@fregat.com