The Holy Grail of English Language Teaching

The title for this post comes from a recent post and subsequent discussion on Jason Renshaw’s blog about the application of Sir Ken Robinson’s recent TED talk to ELT. Jason posed the following question as a summative response to my comments: “Individualized instruction… is it (and should it be) our new holy grail in teaching?”

As far as “Holy Grails” in this field go, I suppose anything that focuses the pedagogical debate away from circular arguments on pet theories or techniques to the questions of how people as individuals actually learn is all to the good. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but asserting that everyone learns in different ways and we increasingly have the ability to tailor the process of learning to the individual needs of everyone is not the same thing as saying, “Hey, I’ve got the universal magic wand and here’s how everyone should be learning English.”

Jason is absolutely correct that it’s going to be hard work, but I strongly suspect that within two generations students in at least much of the world are going to wonder why the heck it was done any differently. (Much like the children of today in many places just can’t fathom a pre-Internet, pre-cellphone and pre-hyper-connected  existence.)

The “Holy Grail” of the Immersion Quest Project, however, is to utilize technology, resources and best practices make the process of learning English by children as accessible and leverageable  as possible by the widest range of interested parties.  This includes being portable into, say, the Peruvian Amazon villages my father did projects in close to twenty-five years ago, and which haven’t changed all that much in the intervening time. (One of those projects involved using donated HP “laptops”- this was the mid to late 80s- powered by solar panels we soldered together in our garage in Lima to assist the primary healthcare providers in those villages to make more effective treatment decisions.)

There has to be an option where comprehensive resources for English language learning by children are effective, flexible and free.

That’s my “Holy Grail.”