Are your teachers certified?

We are often asked at LingQ if our tutors are certified, or what their qualifications are. Many of our tutors are, in fact, certified teachers. However, I consider that to be irrelevant. What matters is their enthusiasm and their competence in the use of their own language. I think that competence in the subject being taught, and enthusiasm, are more important than any teacher's degree of certification. It is interesting that several studies in the US have shown that teacher certification has little influence on the success of teachers.

Comments

[Spanish School]

Steve,

I completely agree with you and often find that teachers who have not had formal experience, or have been corrupted by our academic system that is horrible at teaching languages, are better language teachers. Do you have any links to the source the "studies"?

[Rollo]

Anyone who has had access to the inside of the educational establishment could tell you that teacher certification is just a mechanism of control for the unions. They are afraid of uncertified teachers and home schooling because they both threaten their comfortable existence.

[skyblueteapot]

I am not certified, but my husband thinks I should be ;-)

[skyblueteapot]

Seriously though, if people want to know how good LingQ tutors are (and it's a very valid question), then we need a mechanism for students to give feedback on their tutors or maybe to gather statistics on their progress by tutor. A teacher is only as good as the results they get, no matter how many qualifications they get.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Helen,

We will have that one day. Meanwhile your courses are popular which is the best sign.

Steve

[ed]

The following comments are about teaching in general and not about LingQ tutoring.

The best teachers I have seen are ones that seem sort of average at first glance, but by the end of the class you realise that you engaged with the material a lot and you are actually chatting to your friends or thinking about your life with reference to the material. Then it happens again, and again, until well after the course is over.

I think teacher popularity is somewhat significant, but I also think that a lot of students prefer, or find it easier, to engage with the teacher's personal qualities rather the material. I have observed popular teachers who had their students chorus drill grammar rules... yes you read correctly... drill the rule like "Use the present tense for routines" etc... and this was representative of his general approach. The reason he was popular was that he was an extremely entertaining storyteller for ESL students (a talent in itself). So the students would spend about 50% of each class getting some great listening practice, but with no viable follow-up, or comprehension checks (no form focus phase). I imagine I would like his class too, until I realised I wasn't getting much value out of it. I will add that a lot of the grammar-centric lessons-- grammar McNuggets, I call them-- where the teacher leads the student to "discover" his preconceived grammar "rule" by means of a an extremely processed text that would never appear in reality, are not necessarily better.

I think my type of good teachers are usually popular, but they also always a small minority. And they are usually popular because they have found their niche: the right course, the right school, the right admin. That is, if they had to turn on a dime and teach something new, their popularity wouldn't automatically transfer because they would need time to engage themselves in the new material in order get the message across. The personality based teachers usually can pick up anything and "teach" it, although they usually just 'get the students to do XYZ' in between unrelated routines that are effective in engaging the students in the teacher's personality, but not necessarily in an effective way vis-a-vis the material.

I also believe that current certification is largely a union mandated hoop to jump through, but I also know that public school administrations create conditions that foster unions. They are too often populated by people that have completely lost any sort of vision or passion for teaching and (un)wittingly put obstacles in the way of front line teachers who have to face the students everyday.

I don't think enthusiasm and competence in the material is enough, I also think teachers need to know how to reflect rigorously and with discipline on what they do with help of older hands. It is more amenable to an apprenticeship program that lasts 3-5 years than an academic program. That is not a part how our culture works unfortunately.

[skyblueteapot]

But as I understand it (which possibly I don't), LingQ tutors are not teachers, and we aren't paid to instruct students. We are (at least partly) self-taught language learners ourselves. In other words, we are practitioners in (pretentiousness alert!) autodidactic polyglotism. If you start pushing us into a schoolteacher role you are missing the entire point of LingQ, which is to be a new and (pretentiousness alert still active) iconoclastic method for student-centred language learning. We are trying to replace traditional language schools, not imitate them.

If you want an educational model, I would suggest that of the traditional British university. The academics are subject practitioners and researchers, at the cutting edge, extending the boundaries of their discipline. They weren't hired because they were good at teaching students, although students and other academics are expected to learn from their expertise.

Some of my university lecturers had poor teaching and peculiar social skills. As an undergraduate I was bemused by their methods of disseminating information. Had I been a postgraduate, with the experience, motivation and subject knowledge that implies, I would have learned a lot from them. They really knew their subject areas in a way that few other people in the world (and certainly no school teachers) did.

[ed]

HI skyblue

I agree that LingQ is more analogous to the British university system (without trying to sound too pretentious) than a school system. Although it is sort of unique.

I think that the reason LingQ is such a good idea is that it delegates a lot of the teaching roles (material selection, homework assigning, community fostering) to students with the attendant reduction in fees. The main activities in LingQ are listening reading and LingQing.Tutors are primarily facilitators by giving the students a native speaker to satisfy their craving to try out some of their new language. As a tutor, I feel my job is to just hold my end of the conversation and be ready to suggest or invite a new topic when needed. (Of course while providing correct phrases in the chat box).

However, some students are sort of trapped in "learned helplessness" mode (probably because of their public schooling). A lot of my students haven't got very good reading/listening LingQing stats and feel like it is the teacher's job to structure the conversation, so they come to the tutoring sessions in a passive mode. I am fine with that because I will just suggest common topics off the top of my head. But I think this student expectation that the tutor has a structuring role is quite pervasive. I think the Courses development reflects this.

By the way, I think that the researcher as poor/peculiar communicator archetype is pretty common in North America too. However I think that it is often a cop out on the part of the researcher who enjoys the "sage on the stage" role (my dad was a regionally prominent economics prof who,to limited extent, had that role). Communication skills can be learned fairly quickly to some extent by even the most socially maladroit person. If they refuse to do it and they are so valuable that they must be kept on, then the institution should provide teaching assistants. This is especially true in the softer sciences and arts. Perhaps stuff like computer science etc is fairly objective so communication skills may not be so vital.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Our tutors are competent speakers of their own language, and they are enthusiastic about language learning.Their role is, to paraphrase Krashen, to encourage the learner to become independent. That means to make them enjoy the language, to help them to understand how to learn a language, to encourage them and to provide feedback. Yet in fact the good tutors tend to create a kind of mutual dependence with the learner, as they get to know each other. Each is anxious not to disappoint the other.

I should add the that, in addition to all the input based activities at LingQ, the tutor's reports from the learner's discussions and writing submissions, highlighting the learner's mistakes, do increase the learner's awareness or attentiveness, and are an important part of the learning process.

Our tutors do not resemble school teachers who have a need to teach a curriculum, nor do they resemble research oriented professors at a university. The latter are often pursuing obscure subjects of interest only to their peers.
But not all professors are like that. My interest in languages all stems from a French professor at McGill University by the name of M. Rabotin.

[skyblueteapot]

I dare say there are more appropriate models we could use. I have experience of being a university lecturer, so it's a comparison that springs readily to mind.

I am suggesting a university as a more appropriate model for LingQ learning than a school for the following reasons:

University lecturers are generally people who are expected to be paractitioners of their subject first and teachers of it second. In as much as all LingQ tutors are both competent native speakers and competent independent foreign language learners, I think we could consider ourselves to be experienced practitioners in the field.

By the time you reach university as a student it is assumed that you are an increasingly independent learner, for whom spoon-feeding a strict syllabus is not helpful or appropriate. Ditto mature, post-experience LingQ learners.

Furthermore, Steve has invented a new system of language learning, and has written a book on the subject. I see him therefore as a subject practitioner who can motivate and encourage others to become subject experts in their turn. Some researchers and practitioners are also very inspiring tutors and mentors.

[Koichi]

That's cool :) We do the same thing at eduFire.

I totally agree, that certified teachers aren't necessarily better teachers. It's all about the enthusiasm, as you say (though, of course, there are exceptions on both sides).

It's cool to see what you're doing over at LingQ, keep up the good work!

[ed]

Skybue

I like your analogy, but just a couple of things that I want to bring up.

You needed to learn your way to a lecturer's post. I didn't need to learn English (fundamentally anyway).

Also I think languages for communication are unique subjects. They seem like academics because there is usually all this text involved, but I think they are best viewed as somewhere along a continuum of athletics and art. I like to use ballroom dancing as an analogy. Both languages for communication and ballroom dancing require a partner, form-focus and expression.

As tutors, I think, we fill the partner role, with all the empathy and encouragement that being the skilled partner implies for any decent person, especially with regards to my first point.