Why did a German professor of Linguistics write a paper on the German Portfolio entitled "A wolf in sheep's clothing"?

03.1 EUROPEAN PORTFOLIO OF LANGUAGES. Background

03.2 Talk on Portfolio at British Council 2004 conference. Venice

Amsterdam research that throws light on the central failure of last 20 years language didcatics

03.3 "Can't we work with Portfolio"?

03.4 Critique of a set of Portfolio boxes

1. The big takeover. The putsch. What becomes BIG gains deference just for that bigness! What NEW didactics lies in Portfolio? Is it neutral or prescriptive? Its practioners don't agree over this.

Is all that money being spent for the modest reason of giving us a check list? No, obviously, given the size of funds requested and gained, some big promises have been made. An Italian expert Palamedesi has written in a Portfolio introduction that the European Parliament sees the "Framework" and "Portfolio" as the means for effecting a quality European learning of languages and that they are also hospitable to "innovative" teaching. In my view this is precisely what they aren't. What has happened is that a group of sincere but mistaken "language intellectuals" has managed to convince some European politician-bureaucrats, who themselves have no knowledge of language teaching, of a supposedly "new" solution to language learning. By employing politically correct phrases such as "plurilinlual" and "pluricultural"a sustaining rhetoric has been used. However in order to convince the funds-giving bureaucrats, the "intellectuals" have over egged their case.

  2. The Humanistic warm words in Portfolio claims.

Portfolio is "sold" with terms borrowed from a humanistic ideal of education which Portfolio itself in no way justifies since it itself is only a vague description of "language competences". Even in that limited area it is also false in its pretensions since its categorization of competence is at best just a background recipe for a boring phrase book. Hardly a didactic breakthrough! The "descriptors" of the Portfolio do not have a potential for such pedagogic width - they are in the end merely language technical, rather like chapter headings in a phrase book "Telling people about yourself", "Daily routines" etc. They are certainly not educational in the humanist sense and it is for this reason that lesson material will be so dull under "Portfolio". There is a sleight of hand occurring which possibly the inventors are not aware of: though it has been useful to gain funds.

The experts who administer the Portfolio and organize large scale "experiments", in various regions of Europe, use all the fine words of humanistic notions of education (eg."autonomy of the student") and so, having as it were stolen all the clothes and made great show with them, no one is noticing that the actual Portfolio project is in no way adequate to such fund raising fine words. I'm afraid that "the devil" is not, as we say usually "in the detail" but in the fine packaging. A bullying aspect of this is the fact that anyone who points out the didactic implications of Portfolio will therefore seem to be also objecting to the fine words employed on the packaging! Road blocked.!

Portfolio practitioners' main humanistic claim is that these "portfolios" will "empower the student to take control of his own learning". Great play is made of terms such as "student autonomy". This is all well and good, but when you look at the banality of the language descriptors in Portfolio (are THEY the bounds of language and expression!?) can we seriously expect street wise adolescents to participate in such an exercise in "autonomy"? The valuable humanistic concept of aiding intellectual independence in the student will just be trivialized and made into another exercise in hypocrisy.

3. Is Portfolio hospitable to a better didactics or has the old just been given expensive new clothes?

I have said that the descriptors are both banal and hard to embody in anything interesting but there is a more serious matter which concerns a confusion amongst the believers in Portfolio.

On page 8 of the document "The Common European framework", that as it were sired Portfolio, there is the following assurance: the authors have "no intention of being prescriptive about methods of language teaching: they are non dogmatic, not irrevocably attached to any one of a number of competing linguistic or educational theories or practices". Now I have head of an interesting attack on Portfolio by a German professor of Linguistics at Jena University . The title is all I have read so far but it fits perfectly into the seriousness of what one could call the portfolio problem. His title is "Portfolio, a wolf in sheep's clothing". Quite so, and that humble denial on page 8 of the Framework is as it were the wolf's bleat.

So there is a crucial issue, which the perpetrators of Portfolio are not in agreement about. Is Portfolio or its source "The Common European Framework" prescriptive or proscribing of didactic methods or content or is it NOT? Now Peter Brown of Trieste , chair of EAQUALS, (along with the text of the "Common European Framework" itself -page 8) states that it is not closed: it is open. Well who would say otherwise. Who in a context of "autonomy of students self evaluation" and "global potential intelligence" would admit to shutting out other effective teaching for reasons of ELT theology? Despite Brown's belief that Portfolio is open, he let the cat out of the bag in his talk by telling us to think of Portfolio as being just one of a number of "massive stones", which were in the course of being quarried or erected. God help us!! The Druid are coming!

At the British council conference of March 2004 I was present at the talks of 3 key speakers who were proselytising for Portfolio. Gisella Lange, an inspector for the Lombardy region, stated in her program note that "Portfolo had rejuvenated teaching"! It was interesting that at these 3 interventions from "big" speakers that I heard nothing about teaching but all about the assured "transformation".

So part of the over selling of Portfolio has been the claims for its ability for "rejuvenating teaching" (despite the Framework's modesty about methods on page 8) In fact I believe that this is a logical impossibility because the implicit didactics is based on the same wishful premise as that of the conventional wisdom of the last 20 years: namely, that we should "acquire" a language in the classroom in a "natural way".

4."Communication"

Any classroom didactics that bases itself on an imitation of ordinary daily language use will be boring and not sufficiently focused on the forms of language. (ie grammar) "Language activities" is a much better form of practice than pseudo "communication".

"Some post-communicative methods like to oppose "lower-order thinking", which they equate to rote memorization, to "higher-order" skills. The former are to be avoided, the latter are the core objective. Recent experimental research by Hulstijn and his team at the Kohnstamm Institute (University of Amsterdam ) indicates that higher-order skills cannot function properly in the foreign language without well developed levels of lower-order automatization (Hulstijn 1999).

Quoted in "On the mortality of language learning methods" given as the James L. Barker lecture on November 8 th 2001 at Brigham Young University by Wilfried Decoo.

My point of departure is this. I insist that there is a "good" grammar teaching, and that it is allied to speaking practice, fun activities, games, theatre and semi extemporising, all of which has been very appreciated by real school kids in real schools. (see comments. 6.4 - 6.7) However, the theologians of "acquire" fall on me as a heretic.

For the last 20 plus years the guiding wisdom behind theory and text book practice has been the "communicative approach". The idea of this didactics was that instead of teaching piles of abstract rules and lists, we should get straight into real language: "communication". Like all new turns, this had its good sense and its exaggerations. My objection to much of the fanfare brouhaha of Portfolio is that its implicit didactics (denied by some and affirmed by others) is no more than a continuation of that "Communicative Approach" which I think has been a failure in language teaching. It has lead to great uncertainty about forms (grammar) and limited vocabulary, and above all, it has not left students we have met with any of that basic dexterity in manipulating what the Amsterdam research called levels of lower-order automatization. Besides this the triviality of the "real" material has lead to a great boredom. "Daily routines" "What do you do when you get up"?

"Communication" in the classroom context is not so easy to effect and I think that a term like "speaking activity" might be a less slippery term. Many of the so called "communicative" activities in class are dull, unfocused imitations of communication. So if the material is unlikely to change, why should we ask pupils to take part in this "autonomy"? I have seen so many teenagers in class and it seems the ultimate insult of a boring school system to ask them to measure their own "achievement" and become "autonomous" when this is precisely what the CONTENT of lessons and much teaching is failing to give them. In this sense I think it is justified to call the Portfolio project a con.

But when someone has to make a text book of CEF and Portfolio parameters, it inevitably turns out just like the previous books (because underpinned by the "acquire" didactics of "natural language") - Ironically the justified critique of much grammar teaching as a metalanguage of description obstructing language use, is exactly what Portfolio is with its labyrinthine grids and busybody complexity,

5. The implicit didactics of Portfolio. "Acquire".

The distinction "learn" versus "acquire" is bogus in the school context. It sets up the fatal premise that teaching can use "natural" material which will be "absorbed" painlessly by pupils. It disapproves of "unnatural" language activities such as translation, memorising (in the form of games please!), drills, grammar, vocabulary learning (through games or dictionary use!) etc etc

"Acquire" - "learn" is by now such a familiar distinction that "acquire" is nowadays used in preference to "learn"! That in itself speaks volumes, as did the student's anonymous comment who wrote he'd learnt more in my 5 grammar focused, fun days than in the previous 7 years. The "acquire" distinction occurred when theorists took a look at an L1 child's learning of the mother tongue, and, as it were, said, "wouldn't it be nice if we could get the previous sort of language learning onto a "natural" base so that children at school could learn (acquire) languages as L1 children". Pure wish fullfillment. The age is wrong and the time span (2 hours a week) is pitifully dissimilar and above all, teachers are not mothers! How much focus, restriction and repetition they give and above all how much desire to comprehend there is. This is vastly neglected. Most children are forced to go to school. None of them feels the driving need to communicate and be understood of my 2 English girls, imbedded in an Italian environment. But they certainly apprteciate lessons that are fun and render English understandable.

None of the present "acquire" based disaster will change with Portfolio/ Framework, which still describes natural language use as if there were no difference between mother tongue learning and school learning. For this reason I regard Portfolio/ Framework as merely a rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

6. Portfolio as educational shark. It hoovers up funds and so starves genuine open experiment.

This is a serious objection. In my view a merely bureaucratic test system, by dressing itself in high sounding humanistic aims, has effectively blocked the search for genuine educational innovation of the sort to which the Portfolio practitioners allude but do not have access to and which modern schools have such need of. What I call a "humanistic" content and methodology would aid a real intellectual autonomy in the student. This very difficult ideal of all education cannot be gained on the cheap by getting students to "autonomously" tick the epistemologically mortifying "language competence" boxes of Portfolio.

As for this "student autonomy", I am always very chary of such concern for the student in the context of the present school system and the widespread boredom of pupils in secondary schools. Schools are institutions of authority. The state demands children's presence. In England parents can be fined for their pupils' absence. Students go to class, they follow a given syllabus, they obey the requirements of the teacher, they are expected to do homework, and pass exams and above them stands the threat that if they don't pass those exams, that their future LIFE will otherwise be put in jeopardy! Now I am not objecting (in this instance!) to this system of constraint, but I do want to point out the rather unpleasant hypocrisy in all this talk of autonomy: especially if that which the students must become aware of and use, is as vague and woolly as the Portfolio competences.

  7. Portfolio boxes.

Let us just look briefly at one or two of the descriptors of Portfolio. Bear in mind too that these are taken from a Portfolio intended for 9-15 year olds.

By the way, if these A1 A2 etc competence boxes are so comprehensible from one end of Europe to another, why is there the need of all those "trainers" in Portfolio? And if the teachers need trainers, how will the poor students be able to practice their much trumpeted "autonomy"? ( I see there is a 90 euro online course published by Garimond offered to Italian teachers for them to understand the mysteries of Portfolio!)

When Portfolio is in place a student will be piloted by these "trained" teachers and, because its "descriptors" are so vague, will lead to a gigantic BLUFF. Two years ago I received a fax from a school in Brescia before going to do an intensive week of English. The fax contained a grid box of competences attained. I prepared my material accordingly. I arrived to find the fax was pure fiction. This is because the descriptors are too vague to teach.

Let us look at a concrete example of a descriptor of competence.

A1 "I can write essential information about myself." "Essential", "can write". What does "essential" mean? Experts may have decided but can a student and what and through whom has a "trained" teacher learnt what is "essential"? It begins to seem as if after all Portfolio does have a pan European curriculum - a phrase book! If the "trained" teacher will know clearly - after training, what is essential, why can't we all be told without mystification? Especially the poor "autonomous" pupil! Consider "can write". Now that is even more in doubt. Will trained teachers be told what is meant by "can write"? This is not a facetious question. We are dealing with busy teachers and bored students who are being asked to understand this lumbering pan European system. What structures (yes, poor old grammar) are intended in this "Can write"?

Consider a higher level C2 "I can express myself fluently and can express finer shades of meaning precisely" ("shades" of meaning" are never precise. They tend to be subjective) What does "fluent" mean (in a foreigner, aged 9-15)? What does a "fine" "shade" of meaning signify, or what is "precisely" in a foreign speaker? This is not facetious Think of the poor teachers and students who have to decide what has to be LEARNT (sorry , acquired) to be able to pass such steps of testing. Yes, this "wolf" has teeth!

8. What is "experiment" in language teaching? Is it one educational formula that is given massive funding and then is given out to all European regions for them to "experiment"? In fact this ambiguity about prescription is useful. You can vary the mood music. You could call it a an imposed experiment, and it is the sort of pan European Brussels initiative that gives the European Union a bad name. The trouble is that it will be a very long experiment, and all its institutional backing will crowd out voices of dissent and negative judgement about its effectiveness.

The so called "trials" of Portfolio are not scientific in method. When educational bureaucracies hand down a system, (and Portfolio is a system as well as a honeypot), paid state officials (= teachers) are not free to say "this has not worked. This is not helpful". Their professional competence and their ability to "get on" in the hierarchy will be jeopardised by a non enthusiastic response. Portfolio is now a "big fish": a shark that devours any possible alternative view. Its "success" has been piloted and enforced.

The Placebo effect. As Wilfried Decoo wrote in his, "On the mortality of learning methods", in any of language learning's periodic NEW things, a host of enthusiastic "trainers",. backed with funds, can "rejuvenate" teaching, especially since much of the "new" is bolstered by the well tried "old". What is annoying is that this Portfolio "new" thing is just giving a second life to the old and anyway, it might be nice to hear an apology from the very same inspectors and experts, who for the last 20 years have sold us what is now (apparently) discarded!

9. We don't need systems in language teaching. We need a pluralism of things that work . We need to just decide on some guiding principles around which to organize our teaching practice.

As a concluding thought: an aphorism of William Blake. "I must create a system or be enslaved by another's" Language teaching doesn't need systems. Teachers should be encouraged to build their own way, and this personal way of doing things should be made up of an accretion of useful procedures that are easily bolted on to each other. The system should in fact be a hospitable bricolage. All that is needed is a few general principles.

•  Understanding the basic regularities of language (grammar!) helps students in a school context of 2 hours per week..

•  This "Grammar" should not presented simply as abstruse rules. Focus on this regularity of use in immediate speaking activities.

•  Ways of enlarging vocabulary must not be neglected. (this lack is the constant that I have seen in our visitors to Middlesmoor.

•  Memorization is fundamental in learning a language and should not be left to homework. The lessons themselves are the place in which memorsing should occur.

•  Fun and pleasure are important aids to memory (= learning) These are in short supply at school.

•  Music, theatre and "prepared" extemporizing are useful

•  You can't "acquire" a language at school.

•  Speaking activities should be central. You can only speak by speaking!

•  Text books can end up impeding speaking.

•  Enliven text books with external "surprises".

•  Creative writing and (prepared) "extempore" talking activities are most important. Etc .

Let's offer teachers an accumulation of methods, not a strait jacket.

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03.1 EUROPEAN PORTFOLIO OF LANGUAGES. Background

03.2 Talk on Portfolio at British Council 2004 conference. Venice

03.3 "Can't we work with Portfolio"?

03.4 Critique of a set of Portfolio boxes