David Crystal - The Biggest Challenges for Teachers

Introduction

The speaker introduces the biggest challenge in teaching language and how it has changed over time.

Keeping Pace with Language Change

• The biggest challenge in teaching language is keeping pace with language change.

• Language is changing faster than ever before due to the internet fostering new varieties and experiences.

• Teachers must keep up with these changes as their students are already ahead of them.

Globalization of English

• The globalization of English is another big trend in language change.

• Only 2% of the population of England speaks Received Pronunciation (RP), so teachers should not teach that it's the only kind of English.

• Students will encounter a variety of accents and dialects around the world, so teachers need to improve their listening comprehension from the beginning.

Choosing Varieties to Teach

• Teachers should choose which varieties to expose their students to based on where they are likely to go and how often they're likely to encounter those situations.

• American English and British English are obvious choices, but other varieties like South African, Australian, or Indian English may also be useful.

The Complexity of Language Teaching

In this section, the speaker discusses the challenges of teaching language and keeping up with changes in language and pedagogy.

Challenges for Teachers

• Implicit in what you're saying is another challenge for teachers where they're teaching now or teaching in the future how to keep up and bear in mind they're not linguists with time to analyze all that's going on.

• Changes in language and perhaps changes in pedagogy are difficult to keep up with.

Importance of Language Teaching

• No aspect of human behavior is more complex than language.

• Translating, interpreting, and language teaching are the two most important jobs in the world because of this complexity.

• Three-quarters of the world's population is bilingual.

Teacher Salaries

• The speaker recommends increasing teacher salaries by a factor of at least four to reflect their complex professionalism.

• Time needs to be allocated for research into questions related to language teaching.

The Internet as a Resource

• The internet has made it easier to access materials from different parts of the world.

• It is now easier to expose students to different varieties of English through online resources such as newspapers and Skype interactions.

• Organizing these resources may require some initial effort but will save time in subsequent years.