I made it safely–and surprisingly without incident–to Malaysia, my fourth stop! As I start to schedule my first interviews and observations with EMS Languages here, I will also reflect on the previous two language schools. (I finished work with both last week.)
My post this time will consist of a Málaga-specific summary as well as a section with general patterns that I notice between Cusco and Málaga.
I copy an important blurb from my last research summary post:
As a reminder, I am studying different approaches to English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching with a focus on accent training.The different schools I will observe differ with regard to two main features: first language backgroud (i.e. Spanish in Peru) and program centralization (how many locations the school has vs. how standardized or regimented their curriculum is).
“Accent Training” is a loaded term. I will not study accent correction or accent coaching, which is when a student seeks to “improve” or “neutralize” their so-called foreign accent in, for example, thier English. Everyone has an accent: you, me, our President, the neighbor down the street. My accent, the Californian accent, happens at this moment to be a prestige accent in the world; therefore, many ESL learners want to speak with my accent. But what about in 50 years? What will the prestige accent be then? My point: while everyone has an equal accent, society constructs a valuation system that categorizes accents within a heirarchy.
Instead, what I will study is a metric called accent differentiation, or the frequency and amount of different accents students hear, For example, students who hear many different accents very often have a higher degree of understanding for an additional language than students who hear one accent (their teacher’s) and no other accents with any frequency. I inquire in my world study whether ESL teachers are listening to this key bit of language acquisition research.
Main points from Spain:
– This language school was decentralized with only one location. In the current summer session, there is only one English teacher and two students, one of whom I was unable to observe.
– Differently from Maximo Nivel, the teacher is a second language English teacher who also teaches Spanish. He reported that he feels comfortable teaching English up to the intermediate level.
– The teacher also owns the company, and faced significant benefits after he moved his company online in the wake of the pandemic. He noted that the lack of a commute was a positive, though he also highlighted that he felt online teaching was just as effective.
– The teacher integrated me quite a bit in the lesson, which surprised and delighted me! It was moving to see in real life how increased accent differentiation–even within one lesson–impacted the student. The student remarked that he felt challenged and engaged while he tried to understand my speech.
– The student at the school experienced a low level of accent differentiation in the classroom, though he interacted with a high level of accent differentiation at work.
– Most students in Spain take English classes not for fluency, but rather for test preparation. The students therefore do not want to learn English so much as they want to pass a test. The teacher noted that he usually speaks Spanish (sometimes exclusively) during lessons so the students can gain the skills they need for the test.
General Patterns:
– I saw high levels of accent differentiation at work and often in the personal lives of the students at both schools. In Cusco, many students worked in the tourist industry and spoke English with a wide variety of foreigners; in Spain, the student worked for an American company and spoke English with his colleagues from around the world.
– The market for English instruction caters to the specific demands of the country. In Cusco, students needed to prepare for a broader demand on their language skills: tourists with accents from around the world, requesting drastically different things from them. In Málaga, students needed to prepare to pass an exam; thus, the need for test-taking skills supresedes the need for communicative ability in English.
– There is often a question about whether a second-language instructor is inherently worse than a first-language instructor. It depends on the instructors in question. For example, some students seek out an instructor either with their own first language or with the target language as the first language. It is contingent on the student’s prejudice and how they think they would learn with a certain type of instructor. However, factors that exist externally to the instructor’s first language also matter: the teaching materials (and their corresponding level of accent differentiation), the classroom environment, the course level, the teacher’s teaching ability and experience, etc. etc.
Cheers,
MEG