Reading this book isn't going to give you like a completely new curriculum, a
completely different way of teaching English from start to finish, with all the exercises
you could ever possibly need at all levels. But it is going to cause
you to reconsider the validity of some of the ways you currently approach teaching English.
And if you're not a teacher yet, this will hopefully get you moving
in the right direction. It's meant to supplement and compliment whatever your experience happens
to be. Welcome to another Happy English podcast coming to you from New York
City. And here's your English teacher, Michael. All right, thank you
John, and thanks everyone. It's Michael here from Happy English and I help
people speak English better. And this is Happy English Podcast, Episode six ninety
six. And today I am so excited because I have a very special guest
for you. It is my pleasure today to welcome global educator and author Gregory
Deal to the podcast today. He's got a new book out entitled Our Global
Lingua Franca, An Educator's Guide to Spreading English Where EFL Doesn't Work, which
is a book that explores the cultural and economic importance of spreading English as a
universal language. Gregory, Welcome to the Happy English Podcast. Thanks for having
me here. Yeah, thanks for joining me. Tell us a little bit
about yourself, where you're living now and how you ended up there. Sure.
Well, I'm originally from San Diego, California. I spent eighteen years
there and then I kind of became obsessed with world travel and made it a
mission to see as much of the world as I could over about the next
ten years. So I went to about fifty countries, oh my god,
and in several of those I taught English and got a pretty up close and
personal look at the education system in many of these countries. In every continent
except for Antarctica. Really, I don't think they have much of an education
system there. So I think, except for that, except for the penguins.
Yes, I'm not sure what they're learning. Maybe they're learning English there,
And that's that's kind of what inspired this book, because I saw things
that disturbed to me about the way English was being taught in every country I
went to, and I thought, that's really odd, because you might expect
that maybe in one part of the world, certain errors in their understanding of
English or the way they teach English might proliferate locally, right, you're even
among a few countries in some part of Asia, maybe, right. But
to see the same things happening all over the world kind of blew my mind,
Like, how could everyone be doing this wrong? This isn't rocketdience,
Like it should be easy enough to know, for instance, if you're using
English correctly, if you're teaching it in an effective way, like if a
high rate of your students are even achieving basic conversational fluency in English, or
they're just memorizing what you tell them to memorize. And it really just seems
like almost everyone is doing this wrong. And that's kind of what my book
set out to explore first, to understand why this is happening, why it
matters that we fix it, Why teaching English is one of the most important
things we could do for certain types of people in life to improve their personal
situation, their economic situation, help improve their opportunities in life. And basically
what we can do is teachers to improve the effectiveness with which we teach English,
no matter what situation we happen to be teaching in. You said that
in all over the world, in your experience, you've found some similarities in
not good things that are being taught or not good methods. Yeah, and
since the book has come out, actually I have shown it to many English
learners and English teachers around the world. I have used it as teaching material
with some of the students I teach, many of whom are online in countries
I haven't even been to. But still, so far everyone has told me,
yeah, you've perfectly described what it's like to learn English in our country.
How did you know? And I said, well, I just assumed.
I just generalized based on what I personally witnessed. I said, well,
it must be happening everywhere. I have a large enough sample size now
to consider this might be a global problem. And so far no one has
contradicted me. No one has said, what are you talking about, Gregory,
We have a great English system here. This isn't at all what it's
like where we live. So what are stub of the issues or problems in
English teaching that you've come up with? Okay, Well, in all the
countries I've taught in English is usually a mandatory subject right right, one where
people might spend up to ten years in elementary school and secondary school learning English.
You'd think after ten years of learning almost anything, you should be at
least minimally competent edit right, if not an expert, you right, almost
anything, right, mathematics, history. And yet the vast majority of the
people who are subjected to this can barely have a conversation in English if at
all. That's not what I would call being minimally competent in English, And
I would find minimal competence as conversational fluency or better. And do you think
that's because this ten years of learning English is just for example, the goal
is to pass a test, or it's just something we think our students should
learn. In other words, the goal is not to be able to have
a conversation. The goal is something else. Yes, So there's a huge
difference between actual practical competence in English and assessed competence, which is what schools
are designed, what can we easily test and demonstrate as having accomplished, Which
is also why the highest priority in EFL education tends to be teaching as many
vocabulary words as possible. Have you noticed this, Yes? The first thing
people always care about is how many words do you know? How many words
can we get you to memorize and circle correctly on a test, because that's
really easy to measure. That's really easy to say, Look, you're twice
as good at English now as you were before because you can now recognize twice
as many words, But can you actually use those words effectively in real world
communication. There's a difference, absolutely, And it seems to me that in
a lot of places, it seems that they think about English education as just
something measurable and to pass the test, and it's a school subject. It's
like science or math or social studies. You learn it and then the next
year you learn more, and maybe you forget what you learned the previous year.
It doesn't matter. In other words, it's not a language that you
can actually communicate with or a tool you can communicate with. It's simply something
we do in school this year from ten o'clock until ten fifty in the morning.
And you're only incentive to learn it if you're like ninety percent of these
students, is just to retain the information long enough to get a passing grade
and avoid being kicked out of school or punished by mom and dad. Right,
that's not incentive to actually learn how to communicate in a new language.
And if you think about it, English is so goshed door and useful,
it shouldn't be very difficult to find ways to motivate students almost anywhere to actually
want to learn how to use the language. Yeah, and considering the fact
that we have, you know, this phenomenon called the Internet and social media,
which presents tons of opportunities to use the language. When I thought I'd
studying Japanese in nineteen ninety, I had a book and a cassette tape and
my classmates, who I didn't really see after school anyway, that was about
all I had. I didn't have I couldn't go on Instagram and see people
teaching Japanese or speaking Japanese. So yeah, there's plenty of ways you can
use it these days. Yeah, in all languages for the reasons you just
stated, it should be much easy to learn now because there are so many
more opportunities for exposure, but English in particular, because it produces so much
media and because it is used as a lingua franca in so many parts of
the world, you really don't have to look very hard to find reasons to
want to learn it or demonstrations of how people are using it all over the
world. Right, That really isn't true with any other language, with the
exception of other major world languages that are used as like Russia. Here in
Eastern Europe where I live in Armenia currently, there's the local Armenian language that
is only spoken by three million local Armenians and maybe others who have moved to
other parts of the world, but also every Eastern European post Soviet countries speaks
a fair deal of Russian too, so that's like the regional lingua franca.
If an Armenian wants to talk to a Ukrainian, both of them will speak
decent enough Russian that they can communicate. So that's an incentive for Armenians and
Ukrainians and Georgians and whoever else to want to learn Russian, which they all
tend to do without having to take Russian classes in school because there's just enough
exposure and there's enough practical reason to want to learn the language. Nobody has
to sit there and jewel them with Russian tests to make sure they're memorizing as
many of Russian words as possible, and they're all generally conversationally fluent or better
in Russian, and so probably they're not shy about speaking either, right,
it's the English are And actually it's funny because I'm trying to learn the Armenian
language living here, and oftentimes my neighbors won't know the Armenian word for something
because they're so used to just using the Russian word, like a chainsaw.
We needed to use a chainsaw or something, and they said, well,
that's a droujeba And that didn't sound like an Armenian word to me, and
they said, no, that's the Russian word. And I said, okay,
what's the Armenian word. They didn't know because they just used the Russian
word to talk about chainsaws, like there is a rush an Armenian word.
I just don't know what it is. And I'm sure somebody in the capitol
probably could have told me. But around here, all my neighbors just the
Russian word. That's really funny to me. It's like being an American living
near the border with Mexico and not knowing the English word for something you're just
used to calling the Spanish word. I guess it's just funny to me.
But my point is that if we can get all these people to learn Russian,
very well, without ever having to force them to sit down and memorize
it. Why can't we replicate those same conditions with an even more useful language
like English that has spoken all around the world. And I know that it
is because most of the time that I was traveling to those fifty countries,
I was only speaking English and that was enough to get me around the world
quite comfortably. There's no other language in the world you could say that about.
So how do they learn Russian there? It just organic cultural osmosis exposure.
I mean, they may study the grammar of it in the school,
but most of the people I know who speak conversational or better Russian never studied
it. It just everyone here knows enough Russian because they're exposed to it,
because it's part of their culture. So then how do we get people to
have that same kind of exposure in England? Well, as I said,
English produces more information either educational or entertaining in nature than any other country,
any other language. I mean, and there are very easy ways to test
this. I use an example of Wikipedia in the book, I say,
have you ever tried to use a non English version of Wikipedia? We,
as English speakers, we think Wikipedia is like the most vast and complete repository
of free information available on the Internet. Right, there are six point five
million Wikipedia articles currently in English, and they all tend to be long and
very detailed and full of information that links to other sites and sources of information
about whatever it is you're looking up. Try to do the same thing in
Armenian. There are one twentieth as many articles, and they tend to be
a lot smaller, a lot less complete, a lot less dynamic, and
they have far fewer sources that they can link to, because there just aren't
that many published resources in the Armenian language that they can link to. So
if you only speak O Armenian and you're trying to study virtually anything, what
are your options if you want to watch rubies or play video games or listen
to music and you can always speak and understand Armenian, how many options do
you have compared to if you understood English? Right? Not very many?
Right? So does that not already give you an enormous incentive to at least
learn basic English to have a little bit of access to this whole world of
information that's going on around you that you're currently blind to. So you mentioned
that like ninety percent of the students you've come in contact with can't have a
basic conversation. Do you think that could be because they don't realize that they
can use English in that way, or they're not motivated to use it that
way for some reason, and like they don't have the concept right, as
you said in the book, it's an international currency, right, So languages
are currencies of information. So I'm thinking maybe they don't have that idea,
like, oh, I can actually use this language to learn more things and
to get more knowledge. Yeah. So I would blame the teachers for failing
to properly motivate and incentivize the children to want to learn English, because it
should be super easy to demonstrate to them how useful English is. But the
ones who do get good at English, because of course you could try to
contradict me and counter argue that well, but lots of people do get good
at English, Gregory, where are all these people coming from? English is
the fastest growing, most used language in the world. Yeah, okay,
but those people are the exception actually not the rule, And the way they
get good at English typically has nothing to do with the way that it's taught
in school. Almost always. Again, in every country I've been, and
certainly here in Armenia, the people who can actually have a real conversation with
you in English will get truly fluent, truly masterful language are not people who
learned it in school. They're people who had friends who spoke English, who
became obsessed with Western media, who took private tutoring and just had the opportunity
to be organically exposed to the language and saw the practical benefits to learning this
language. Those are the most of my friends here who speak good English.
They only speak English with me. They won't even speak Armenian with me,
partially because they just really want to practice their English with a native speaker,
but also they just they think they have so many more options when speaking English.
They feel like English is a much freer, much more versatile language.
So I'm inundated with English while living in Armenia. I almost never have to
use the Armenian language here. Try reversing that. Try being an Armenian speaker
and going to live in America and surviving only speaking Armenian. That wouldn't get
you very far, right, So we can see that it is clearly possible
for people to see the benefits of learning English, and it is clearly possible
for them to naturally acquire it in the same way they might acquire other major
languages that they're naturally exposed to. So the only question in my mind is
what is preventing our educators from creating those conditions that lead to successful language acquisition
with English? Why are we all following dog bureaucratic instructions that demonstrably do not
work. Because the success rate of creating competent English speakers is so small,
why can't we as individuals say, what can I change about how I'm teaching
English, regardless of what kind of institution I might be working in or if
I'm working independently, how can I improve my approach to actually start to see
my students learning and using English better. That's what the book is all about,
right. One of the first problems I bring up in the book is
how little English is spoken in the English classroom. You'd think that'd be one
of the first most obvious things that when you're learning English, you want to
be exposed to as much English as possible, to the extent that you can
understand it at least, and you want to be encouraged to use it as
much as possible, again, to the extent that you can functionally, and
instead that doesn't happen. The native language teacher, for some reason, teaches
almost exclusively in their native language, and when they do use English, it's
often wrong English, not just like stylistically unconventional, because there's lots of choices
you could make in English that we couldn't really call wrong, maybe just odd
or not what an American would say, maybe right, But there's also things
that are just objectively wrong too. They just learn grammar incorrectly, they learn
pronunciation in correctly, they learn basic phrases incorrectly, and nobody seems to notice,
which you probably should notice. If you've ever seen like a Western movie
and you notice people are using those words or those phrases differently, do you
ever stop to wonder, Wait, did I learn this wrong? Or is
that just a different way of speaking English? Lots of people don't believe in
me, but maybe even though, Yeah, the teachers are either not interested
in improving their English or that's just their job to teach English from there.
Yeah, well it's a combination of yeah, not knowing themselves and not caring
enough to question the mandates of their job. They're just following orders, right.
I've had many conversations with English teachers here to where I try to tell
them, actually, that's not the correct way to say that or do that.
You know, I'm a native speaker and I'm also a teacher. Also,
I'm a professional writer, so I know a few things about the language.
I'd be happy to share with you what I know. And ironically,
English learners are happy to talk to me. Usually they really want to hear
what I have to say, they really want to practice the English with them.
But other English teachers feel threatened by someone like me. They don't want
to hear, Oh, that's so nice to you, Gregory, to offer
to help me perfect my English, because that's usually one of the hardest things
to do, to go from being good at English to being like, you
know, truly native level fluent. Right. So to have someone who can
actually help you do that is a really valuable thing if that's your goal.
They don't see it that way at all. I see it as very threatening.
They cherish the way they've been taught to do it. So somebody coming
along saying, actually, you're speaking English and correctly and you're teaching it the
wrong things to your students is really really threatening to them, right right,
And they don't have the internal motivation to want to improve. Obviously, yeah,
I've had. And then you get some students who get praised for learning
it the wrong way, you know, the high grades, high test scores
that teachers say, a great job, you know, you're doing so well,
you're an overachiever. And then again when someone like me comes in and
says, again, you know, I'm kind of the expert on English here,
maybe you should listen to what I have to say. Let's say,
well, that's not the way I learned it in school, all right.
Well, I don't know how to tell you nicely that the way you learned
it in school is wrong. It's just no easy way to say that.
You just have to be willing to consider the possibility that maybe you didn't learn
it the best possible way, and there's stuff you don't know. So is
there hope? Is there a way out of this? Well? I wouldn't
have written the book if I didn't think there was some hope, right,
It'd be a useless endeavor. I think what's most amazing is that English continues
to spread and grow as a functional world language in spite of the horrible education
and conditions we have for it, which must mean that there's enough natural incentive
and ability to be natural exposed to it and acquire it happening outside of the
existing education systems to me right, and I think if we can get enough
teachers to see that, it is possible to get de monstrallly better results by
changing the way you teach, which also would probably reflect well on them economically,
because you know, you can probably charge more money and have a lot
more students if you could start saying I teach differently than all the bad English
teachers you've had throughout your life. You'll learn more with me faster, and
yeah, I charge a bit more money for it. That's the approach I've
taken now. When I still do like online teaching or local here, my
students generally don't care about my credentials at all. I don't even have a
college degree. I am tefel certified, but that's kind of irrelevant to them.
The way I teach, I basically just say hi, I'm Gregory.
Here's the experience I've had teaching. Here's what I see is wrong with it.
I'm going to guess you've had really bad experiences trying to learn English?
Am I right? If so, why don't you try this way? This
is how I approach English teaching, and it gets a really good response from
people. Every student I have essentially says like you finally address the problems that
I've had with everyone I've tried to learn English from that kept me perpetually trapped
at this low level of English. So again, I'm not saying this to
toot my own horn. I'm saying it's indicative of there being a global problem
in the way we teach English that it seems relatively few teachers have caught on
to. You know this, reading this book isn't going to give you like
a completely new curriculum, a completely different way of teaching English from start to
finish, with all the exercises you could ever possibly need at all levels.
But it is going to cause you to reconsider the validity of some of the
ways you currently approach teaching English, and if you're not a teacher yet,
this will hopefully, you know, get you moving in the right direction.
It's meant to supplement and complement whatever your experience happens to be. And this
is made additionally complicated by the fact that conditions are different everywhere in the world.
There are going to be different errors that pop up in different places,
different ways of pronouncing things or thinking about grammar, depending on whatever the native
language you're coming from is. And so it's really up to the individual teacher
to tailor and address those problems as they encounter them with whatever situation they happen
to be in. My book is just a generalized guide of principles that you
should keep in mind as you're doing this. And what are one or two
principles that we should keep in mind? Okay, Well, so the way
I tend to teach now is mostly in small groups, and it's entirely based
around things people actually want to talk about, which which is easier to do
when you're at the intermediate level or above right, working with very very beginners.
Obviously you have to start somewhere with basic phonics and words and very simple
grammar. But once you're at the point where they can start to organically express
themselves a little bit and they have reasons to want to say new things in
English, I see my job as like an overseer of guiding their ability to
express themselves, and so I prompt. Yeah, I'm a facilitator. I
don't command them now say this, now say this, now do this?
Okay eight out of ten, you know, but rather just to correct them
as they make mistakes, which is very common even up to the advanced levels,
mostly because you have these fossilized errors that pop up over and over again,
the things that you've been learning wrong for twenty years that even if you
now believe me that you've been saying it wrong all this time, it's really
hard to kick that habit because you're just so used to saying it the wrong
way. Right. So part of my job is really just correcting errors as
soon as I hear them. Just you have to not be afraid to be
rude a little bit. You have to not be afraid to interrupt someone in
the middle of a sentence as soon as they conjugate something incorrectly, or you
say the word wrong, you say, wait, nope, no, it's
like this. Remember remember I told you this before, Say it like this,
Okay, continue, you know, And part of it is prompting them
with the types of questions and discussions that they otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity
to be exposed to an English which again is going to be different for each
person in each situation you're in. But the people who've gotten pretty good at
English are used to just hearing the same kinds of conversations over and over again,
right, So they can say a certain limited range of things very well,
very confidently. But then if you ask them a question they aren't prepared
for, or on a subject they've never had to talk about in English before,
they kind of freeze because they don't know. Maybe I know some other
words they need for this, but I've never had to construct a sentence like
this before. So that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to
gradually branch out from that very basic level of English competence to ever more elaborate,
complex ideas, all spontaneously, of course, right right. It's great
if you can first understand me when I'm talking about these things in English to
you, But can you spontaneously construct a sentence no one has ever prepped you
with before that you haven't had the opportunity to translate back into your native language.
You just have to start organically thinking in the language as quickly as possible.
And afraid to make mistakes. And that kind of prompting the students and
giving them those topics does get them to more organically discuss those topics, or
at least try to discuss those topics. Yes, as long as it's something
they actually want to expreiss, something they're invested in emotionally. Otherwise, what
reason do you have to to try to say things that are initially difficult for
you? Right? Right? Which means I have to actually get to know
my students and talk to them and say, what's important to you? What
do you want to discuss? You know? So I say, okay,
let's talk about these things in English. Share your perspective, your opinion,
your emotions. How does this make you feel? You know? Great?
Like? That's the kind of thing that once you get them going, once
you get them comfortable enough using the language to talk about these things, they
just want to keep talking more about it, right, And then that results
in building their fluency and building their communication skills. Yeah, but if your
students want to talk about video games or sports rather pet cat or whatever,
again, the subject is mostly irrelevant. Matters is that they're emotionally invested in
it, and it's and it's enhancing their ability to communicate in English. It
can't be something that's already easy for them, right, right, that makes
a lot of sense, right, and that naturally easily branches into other topics
that we haven't even directly discussed. It just changes the way they think.
Your ability to communicate is a product of your ability to think. Could you
say that again? Your ability to communicate is a product of your ability to
think, and in this case we mean thinking in English as much as possible,
not thinking in your native language and translating to English, which always creates
this kind of clunky, awkward, like a slow web page loading kind of
effect, where you know they'll say two or three words, well, I
think Armenia should talk more about the political situation with You know, it's obvious
that you know they want to say something, but they're still kind of internally
translating really quickly, and that's why you're getting that stilted effect. It's it's
much different when you can see that they're organically thinking and co daniously expressing in
English. Gotcha, So we're kind of out of time, But where can
everybody find your book? Again? The name of the title of the book
is Our Global Lingua Franca, an Educator's Guide to Spreading English where EFL doesn't
work. I think anyone who's trying to teach a second language needs this book,
that's for sure. So where can where can my listeners find your book?
And where can we find you online if they want to? Our Global
Lingua Franca is on Amazon and other major book retailers like Barnes and Noble.
It's even available as an audiobook if you prefer that. And if you want
to learn more about me, go to my website. Just my name Gregoryedeal
dot net. Deal is spelled d I e h L. Or hit me
up on Facebook. That sounds great. And if you go to my website,
my Happy English dot com, look for podcast episode say ninety six,
and you'll find links to Gregory's book and also to his website right there below
this podcast. All right, Gregory, thank you so much for coming on
the podcast today. Thanks for having me, Buch sharing your ideas. I
do think that the English learning world, in the English teaching world, needs
kind of a facelift into the twenty first century from what it is. So
hopefully we can take these ideas that you've presented today and have our students speaking
better and more fluently with them. And what a fascinating new world that will
be if one day we do have a truly shared global language that virtually everyone
speaks. Right, right, sounds awesome? All right, my friend,
thanks for coming on the podcast today and have a super day. Thanks.
Thanks, all right, and there you have it again. If you want
to find out more about Gregory, just visit my Happy English dot com check
out podcast episode six ninety six and you can see all of those links there.
And remember, learning another language is not easy, but it's not impossible,
and I'm here to help you on your journey. This podcast is brought
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