Money Talks
I have been in contact with most of the bigger publishers and other material providers in Sweden during my 40 years of teaching. They all admit to one principle: They are in it for the money and seem not to care about the Curriculum. Curriculum doesn’t sell.
To make a book that sells, teachers need to buy it. As far as I can see, textbooks haven’t changed structurally for generations, not even when they were transferred into a digital form, into Books-in-Box. They still have texts, grammar lessons, wordlists, translations, and fill-in exercises. I had those 50 years ago.
The recognition factor makes teachers feel safe. According to several publishers, teachers want their grammar, their translations and their wordlists before they commit to purchasing books for their students as that is the way it has always been.
It’s high time to react and be warned by Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneering computer scientist and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom:
The most damaging phrase in the language is “We’ve always done it this way (Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper)
The problem is that the Curricula (lpo94 and lgr11) have actually changed in the last few decades along with the research findings in second language acquisition (SLA). The latest Curricula have been based on Communicative Language Teaching with the emphasis on functional language and communicative SLA.
Furthermore, the students should gradually learn to take more responsibility in their own learning and should also be able to have a say in the planning of their education. The latter seems to be too much to ask, but I wish we could at least get rid of the three remnants of the Grammar-Translation Method which was prevalent until World War II:
1) explicit grammar
2) translations and
3) bilingual wordlists.
So far, I have only found one textbook in Sweden that has none of these. I hope that someone could prove me wrong.
Grammar
Ever since WW II, scholars of Applied Linguistics have tried to find better, more efficient methods to teach SLA than the Grammar-Translation Method. First, we got the Audio-Lingual Method that started developing during the war and a watered-down version hit our schools in Sweden in the 60s. After that, research has moved gradually towards the Communicative Approach and Task-based Learning. There isn’t a researcher left, who would claim that anyone could learn communicative language skills through studying grammar rules from an early age – or any age in fact.
Research over a period of nearly 90 years has consistently shown that the teaching of school grammar has little or no effect on students. (Hillocks & Smith, 1991, “Grammar and Usage”)
The Curriculum writers have known this for decades; According to the Commentary Material to English, teaching traditional grammar lessons in the classroom is against the intentions of the Syllabus.
Research shows that students can utilize studies of linguistic structures better when they experience that the structure covers an imminent need and it clearly improves communication. (Commentary Material to English, Skolverket 2017, p 14. My translation.)
Linguistic elements like grammatical structures and spelling should be presented only when there is a functional purpose, in order to clarify and enrich the communication. (Commentary Material to English, Skolverket 2017, p15. My translation.)
Translation
The challenge of translation was already noted by one of the first scholars translating the Bible from Hebrew into Greek (Septuagint (LXX); 300-200 BC). He wrote how the text translated into Greek wasn’t the same anymore as it was in Hebrew. All translators are bound to find the same dilemma.
Still, we expect our young pupils to translate to and from the target language, often word by word, and some teachers even grade their results. After a lot of practice, the students learn “Swenglish”; language that has Swedish sentence structure and line of thought with English words. Swenglish is even used in some of the teaching materials today, written by teachers who learned it at school.
This is what I say to my students when they try to translate something: Translation is so difficult we’d better leave it to the universities and professionals. And the Syllabus clearly agrees. What is not mentioned in the Syllabus, should not be a practice in the classrooms, and in this case, the Commentary Material explicitly states the reason why translation is not there:
Mediation that includes the ability to translate is eliminated from the Syllabus in order to be able to teach entirely in the target language (Commentary Material to English, Skolverket, 2017, p 10. My translation.)
Furthermore, in our classrooms, there are students with other mother tongues than Swedish. Mixing the English instruction with Swedish words, translations and grammar explanations makes it unfair and discriminatory.
Glossary
I can understand the practicality and need for a quick look at an English-Swedish wordlist next to the text a student is trying to understand, as long as every student in the classroom has Swedish as their mother tongue. I have written such lists myself. But giving a one-word translation, e.g. serve = ‘tjäna’ (Swedish) doesn’t help much outside the context. Neither serving a sentence nor serving tennis balls has anything to do with serving at restaurant tables.
Looking at the translation from the other way around, there is hardly any Swedish word in a real dictionary with a one-word definition in English. A quick Google search serves the following translations of the Swedish ‘tjäna’: “earn a living; earn one’s bread; earn; earn wages; serve; make a living; deserve; be deserving of; make a profit” (interglot.com). Even a list of translations is useless if there are no example sentences to show their usage.
Still, the textbooks serve us with these simplified Swedish-English wordlists and the teachers use the audio-lingual method of drilling the vocabulary and serve weekly word tests to their students. This doesn’t serve them right as the unfortunate student will later be at a loss trying to *serve money* working at their future job.
*an actual mistake by one of my former students
As the following quotes indicate, there’s a lot to be desired to close the gap from the current practice to what both the research and the Syllabus say about teaching words, the futility of translating them and what to do instead:
Explicitly teaching words thoroughly is not necessary and may even be undesirable. (McQuillan and Tse)
[I]ncidental learning from context accounts for a substantial proportion of the vocabulary growth that occurs during the school years. (Nagy, Herman, Anderson, Pearson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1984)
One of the purposes of English studies is that the students will develop and utilise various strategies so that they can overcome difficulties in communication. (Commentary Material to English, Skolverket 2017, p 7. My translation.)
Students must be given opportunities to develop their guessing competence. (Commentary Material to English, Skolverket 2017, p 14. My translation.)
What Can Teachers Do?
The only way the publishers will move up from the 1950s into this century is if the English teachers demand books and teaching materials that align with the current Curriculum incl. Syllabus (lgr11) and decades’ worth of research behind it.