Language without culture
Last weekend I was at the TEA conference in Salzburg, Austria, where I gave a talk entitled BRIDGING THE CULTURE GAP IN THE CLASSROOM. One of the claims I made was that in the vast majority of circumstances, the kind of language we teach in EFL classes has no particular geographically located cultural sub-text. As teachers, we generally have to deal with meanings pure and simple. of course we DO need to be clear in our explanations of what things mean and make it clear to students how they’re used, give extra examples, and so on, but generally cultural information is irrelevant and beyond the realm of what we do.
At the end of the talk a young native-speaker teacher working in Austria asked me whether or not I was claiming that language could be taught to a high level without really dealing with culture, whatever that might mean, at all. I answered that up to Cambridge Proficiency level, I think it’s quite possible yes, and that just a brief look at the kind of language students get tested on at CPE level is enough to prove how irrelevant ‘culture’ is to the understanding and processing of meaning. I mean, here’s a random sample from the first CPE test book I could lay my hands on this morning:
Much as I dislike her, I still . . .
An argument broke out . . .
It didn’t live up to my expectations
As far as I’m aware
He had to be restrained
It’s been earmarked for preservation
It has come a long way since . . .
The country is lagging behind
I could go on, but clearly none of this language is ‘cultural’ in the sense that it requires local knowledge in order to be explained.
The teacher who’d asked the question looked slightly deflated on hearing this and gave a very specific example, which I’ll paraphrase here:
“The other day with my Upper-Intermediate group, I wanted to teach the expression little white lies, so I began by asking the class – they’re all young adults – how I looked. I have to say, I was totally shocked by their brutal honesty. They ripped me to pieces, commenting negatively on her hair, outfit, weight and so on!”
She was so taken aback that she told the class how rude and blunt they’d been, to which they replied ‘Well, you did ask us!’
Now, personally, I think if you want to teach LITTLE WHITE LIES, there are less risky ways of doing it! I think you just set up a situation where, say, your beloved gets a nice haircut which you think looks terrible and they ask you what you think, you say how good it looks and that it really suits because you DON’T WANT TO HURT THEIR FEELINGS, so decide it’s better to TELL A LITTLE WHITE LIE. Nothing cultural there, as far as I can see.
But . . . but . . . but . . IS there perhaps something in the way certain people express negativity (or politeness) that’s somehow inherently cultural? Is the problem in the exchange between the native-speaker teacher and the brutally honest young Austrians actually the problem of the native-speaker filter? if the Austrians had been talking to Russians, say, or Germans or maybe even Indonesians, would there have been less shock and offence?
A few examples here to clarify what I mean. My wife is Chinese-Indonesian and despite the fact we’ve been together for nigh-on eighteen years, we still have the odd row sparked by what I subconsciously process as rudeness. It’s usually something to do with requests, where maybe she’ll say ‘Pass the remote control’ or something and I’ll snap ‘Please!’ Her business partner, however, is German; they both speak incredibly good English and have lived here for many many years. When talking to each other, they’re fine and don’t process each other as rude in any way. The problem is the native-speaker filter. They both seem very conscious of this as when writing emails, for instance, to natives, they know how to, as my wife would say, ‘tart it up to keep English people happy’!
I’m reminded of the many times students have looked sort of bemused when I’ve presented chunks like I WAS WONDERING IF YOU COULD POSSIBLY . . . and asked why on earth you don’t just ask CAN YOU . . . ?
Another German woman came to a version of the Bridging the gap talk that I did at IATEFL this year and at the end told a story about how she’d come to work on London in the hotel trade after graduating and was very upset that people complained about her being rude. What bothered her most was the fact that no-one made it clear to her for a long time that much of this was just to do with the choice of certain direct styles of asking or relating negatives rather than using more indirect variants which were more palatable to . . . yep . . . the native-speaker filter.
There was a big story here maybe ten years ago when a leading chef said he wouldn’t be employing any more Eastern European service staff as they were, and I quote, ‘rude’. I often wonder if this was essentially a similar issue.
Which brings me to my main question, really, and it’s this: is the fact that some people deal with conflict or negotiations more or less directly or indirectly relevant to language teaching? If so, in what way?
Bridging the culture gap in the classroom
Just a brief look at how English is used is enough to suggest that CULTURE seems to permeate the way we process the world in a wide range of ways. We talk about arts and culture; we have the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; we discuss company cultures and youth culture and subcultures; we make generalizations about French or Spanish or Polish culture; we fret about high and low culture, popular culture and celebrity culture; we are told – at least in England, we are – that there’s a culture of yobbishness and violence on our streets and that we live in a culture of greed and self-interest. We talk about things being part of – or not being part of – our culture. We debate cultural values, our cultural needs, cultural shifts and the cultural dominance of the USA.
And, of course, culture seems to have started permeating the way we think about our job as teachers of English as well. We’re constantly told at conferences that we need to be thinking about culture when teaching language – and that without intercultural competence, whatever communicative competence students may develop is basically meaningless. Here are just some of the preposterous claims about the relationship between language and culture that I’ve heard being made at conferences over the last couple of years:
- Language without culture is like a finger without a body.
- Culture and language are intimately related. They go hand in hand during the teaching-learning process.
- Language and culture are not separate, but are acquired together, with each providing support for the development of the other.
- The person who learns language without learning culture risks becoming a fluent fool.
Now, I often feel with culture that the nearer we get to it, the more we look at it, the more elusive it becomes and the more it slips away from our grasp. I freely admit to finding much of the discourse around culture in language teaching both confused and confusing, and if I feel like that, as a native speaker supposedly steeped in the culture of the language and who teaches multi-lingual students in the UK, whatever that may mean, then how much more confusing must all of this be for the countless non-native teachers around the world, teaching predominantly monolingual groups who may well be using their English far more frequently with other non-natives than with natives?
What I want to do in this session is to explore a few key questions and suggest a few tentative answers. Firstly, I’d like to ask what is it we actually mean by culture anyway. In general, I think there are two main ways we can consider culture. One is culture as PRODUCT, where culture equals the arts – music, painting, the theatre, and so on – along with history, cuisine, festivals, etc. Seen from this view, here are a few images that one might see associated with English culture.
This is essentially a STATIC view of culture.
Then there’s thinking about culture as a PROCESS, with culture as social practices and processes. Culture in this light is a site of change and conflict and revolves around the variety of languages operating within a society – the language of gesture, of clothes, of sexuality, of race, of gender and so on – and the ways in which reality is represented or constructed through a range of communication divides. In this definition, of course, you can take PRODUCTS – a skinhead haircut, football, mobile phones, a crown, a cross – and read meanings into them through an analysis of their relationships with other products, with social participants and with the products themselves in past incarnations. Looked at this way, jokes, newspaper articles, myths, archetypes, TV shows, advertising, films, street art and so on all give you windows into a culture – none of them representing a REAL culture, but all of them driven by particular cultural agendas – the writer or teller’s desire to perpetuate stereotypes in order to maintain order – as with woman driver jokes, etc. – to raise social consciousness, to whip up patriotism, to challenge long-held attitudes or stereotypes and so on. Seen this way, perhaps THESE images tell us something interesting about England:
Given all of this, some core points about culture surely emerge:
1 Culture is not static. It is fluid and dynamic.
2 Culture can basically mean almost anything and everything.
3 The notion of unified national cultures is a myth. Everything is in dispute.
4 With English, this is of course complicated by its status as global lingua franca
Now, before anyone here has an attack of rage, I should add that culture is clearly located geographically and nationally IN SOME WAYS, yet within that we’d do well to bear in mind the fact that we are all unique and we all participate in globalised cultures and orient ourselves to all of this as individuals in our own way. Ultimately, developing ourselves as inter-culturally competent and globally oriented people surely has to involve being able to word our own worlds – and being open to learning about the worlds of others – and of course this latter may involve rethinking our own assumptions, withholding judgments and becoming aware of the fact that the view contains the viewer. Realizing that we are all different, but we are also all the same.
I’ll move on to consider what this might mean in the classroom in a while, but first I want to explore one more common assumption – that teaching English must automatically mean somehow also teaching the CULTURE of England or the UK or the US – or of the people for whom English is a mother tongue.
I’ve gathered together a sample of linguistic items from a variety of big-selling global English coursebooks – Upper-Intermediate and Advanced level – and just consider to what degree you feel they are CULTURALLY rooted; in other words, to what degree would they need to be explained with reference to specific cultural phenomenon of the UK – or US.
She wanted the ground to open up and swallow her.
I can’t stand being the centre of attention.
I think I’m quite a level-headed sort of person.
Compulsory military service should be abolished.
I spent a lot of the holidays just roaming around the countryside, exploring.
She has no qualms about giving her child a head start.
That film has had a lot of hype.
They fell on hard times.
The kidnappers released him after his family agreed to pay a ransom of $100,000.
He swore under oath that he’d spent the evening at home.
Hold your breath and count to ten.
I had an interview for the job, but I blew it.
Now unless I’m missing something, there’s absolutely no cultural baggage attached to these sentences and they can be explained with reference to wherever your students happen to be – or nowhere at all. This isn’t to say that nothing in English ever requires cultural background information. Clearly to deal with any of these sentences here –
Shoom span a Balearic mix of Detroit techno, New York garage and Chicago house.
Nationalist murals started springing up in areas like the Falls Road when IRA inmates of the Maze prison began a hunger strike.
The NUT has long been run by hardcore members of the Loony Left.
– you’d need to know a fair bit of unusual cultural information – but these ARE not – and should never be – EFL material, in much the same way as students don’t need to know about presidents of the USA or the kings and queens of England.
Language can obviously be used to represent culture and sometimes certain phrases may even encode certain things that are more dominant in certain circumstances than others. Take for instance the phrase EVEN IF I SAY SO MYSELF and its close cousin EVEN IF YOU SAY SO YOURSELF. These are both relatively fixed expressions used to undercut oneself – or someone else – when you think there’s some slightly big-headed boasting going on, and this may or may not be a ‘cultural phenomenon’. Whilst these expressions may be interesting, they’re really not what most students need to get better as speakers of English as a medium for international communication.
The main point here, though, is that while language can represent culture (and particularly personal culture), it does NOT encode it. There is NO culturally correct way of doing things within English itself. Norms vary, in linguistic behaviour as in any other kind of behaviour!
So what does all this mean for what we can – or should – be doing in our classrooms?
Well, it’s pretty clear that the traditional concept of culture in English language teaching, which far too frequently involved facts and figures about Britain – though in reality this usually meant England, and a rarified upper-middle class slice of English cultural life at that – is no longer valid! The world has moved on from a time in which students could be sold visions of Windsor Castle and Bath, Stratford-upon-Avon and Stonehenge and perhaps given the occasional extract from Dickens or Shakespeare.
I think that for culture to work in the classroom, it has to be done with some basic principles in mind. It has to:
1 be a two-way process
2 be global in perspective
3 include language
4 allow space for the personal
Students are now in a situation where they are likely to travel and met people from many different corners of the world; they’re also in a globalised world where they may be eating Japanese food, watching Mexican movies, listening to Swedish music, reading Danish novelists and so on. As such, the UK – or US – should receive no higher priority than anywhere else, though I guess we do always have to bear in mind the expectation of SOME students – and, perhaps, some parents and even teachers as well – that learning English WILL involve a focus on ‘the homes’ of the language.
In addition to this, though, is the more complex reality that the vast bulk of students around the world will nevertheless be learning their English in classes that are monolingual. I hesitate to add ‘and mono-cultural’ because the simple fact of sharing a nationality doesn’t mean that students will necessarily share any particular thoughts or experiences or opinions. Students will operate across a range of micro-cultural worlds – or sub-cultures – unique to themselves. Indeed, in many ways, I think it’s important for students to realize and to recognize the diversity and complexity of their own local and national cultures before they can hope to understand similar issues with regard to other nations and cultures.
That notwithstanding, it still remains the case that the real way students get to develop intercultural competence is to travel, meet people, build friendships and relationships with people from more radically different backgrounds to themselves than their classmates. Given this, if students are to get the chance to think about how they would represent their own realities to others from around the world, then the materials used in the classroom have a responsibility to bring the world to them. This means looking to use cultural products and processes from around the world partly to simply teach students about the world, but also – crucially – to provide points of comparison, to serve as a springboard for cross-cultural comparisons and evaluation. There needs to be, if you like, global input but local outcomes.
So let’s explore some ways in which all of this can work in our classes. In an ideal situation, it should be possible to combine all of the areas I’ve just mentioned into one scheme of work. Let’s look at both a reading and a listening that have cultural content from around the world, that focus on some useful language and that allow plenty of space for students to respond from both a national and an individual perspective. Both these examples are from a Pre-Intermediate book, so for A2 students moving towards B1. First up, a listening-based slot from a unit called EDUCATION.
Listening
You are going to hear an interview with an English girl, Rebecca, who has a Spanish mother and an English father. They moved to Spain when she was 11 (she’s now 13) and she now goes to a Spanish school – and so does her younger brother.
A Before you listen, discuss in groups which of the following things you think are good about school in your country:
- the relationships between students
- the class sizes
- the amount of homework
- the subjects available
- the resources
- the textbooks
- the approach to teaching
- the parent-teacher relationship
- the school hours
- the holidays
Next students listen to the interview with Rebecca and process it for gist – and then process it in more detail. Finally, they hear Rebecca’s father talking and process this for gist before finally having the chance to compare what they have heard with their own realities, to give their own opinions about what the dad says – and to voice their own thoughts and feelings about their own school system. Here’s the basic material:
B Listen and find out which things in exercise A Rebecca talks about.
C Discuss in pairs whether you think these sentences are true or false.
Listen again to check your ideas.
1 Rebecca and her brother made friends straight away.
2 She needed help with Spanish.
3 She had to do the last year of primary school in both England and Spain.
4 There are fewer years of secondary school in Spain.
5 In primary school, she had several different teachers in Spain, but not in England.
6 The approach of the teachers was different.
7 She didn’t have to do much homework in England.
8 Her friends in England seem to like school more.
9 In both England and Spain, students sometimes have to repeat a year.
D Now listen to Rebecca’s father talking and answer the questions:
1 Which of the things in exercise A does he mention?
2 Is he positive or negative about them?
E Read the audioscript on page 142 to check your answers.
F Work in pairs. Discuss these questions.
- Which system sounds more like your country?
- Do you disagree with anything the father says? Why?
- What
would you like to be different in schools? - Is/was there anyone from another country in your class at school? What is/was their experience of school? ?
Finally, this all leads into some vocabulary that helps students discuss their own school experiences better next time around.
Vocabulary: students and teachers
A Add the nouns below to the groups of words they go with.
assignment class school subject
textbook test approach course
1 choose an optional ~ / study eight ~s / my favourite ~
2 do an ~ / set an ~ / hand in my ~ / mark some ~s
3 buy a ~ / read from the ~ / copy from the ~
4 have a ~ / study for a ~ / pass a ~ / set a ~
5 do a Maths ~ / design a ~ / fail the ~ / teach on a ~
6 give a ~ / go to ~ / pay attention in ~ / control the ~
7 leave ~ / the head of a ~ / enjoy ~ / go to a state ~
8 have a good ~ to learning / take a traditional ~ / change your ~
B Which of the collocations above apply to teachers and which to students?
The language work can also precede culturally oriented texts, of course. Here’s the start of a lesson from a unit called Dates and History that begins with some core vocabulary for describing historical events.
Vocabulary: historical events
A Complete the fact file about Britain with the correct form of the words in the box.
end become be defeated
invade gain be crowned
join rule be founded
* London 1…………………. by the Romans two thousand years ago, during their occupation of Britain.
* The Vikings first 2…………………. Britain in 786. They continued to attack the island for years and occupied half the country.
* Britain briefly 3…………………. a republic after a civil war between Royalists (who supported the king) and Parliament. The war 4…………………. in 1649, after the Royalists 5…………………. in the Battle of Preston and the king’s execution.
* At the height of its empire, Britain 6…………………. a quarter of the world.
* The United States was a colony of Britain until it 7…………………. independence in 1776.
* The longest-ruling British monarch is Queen Victoria. She 8…………………. in 1837, when she was just 18, and died 64 years later.
* Britain didn’t 9…………………. the European Union (or EEC as it was then called) until 1973.
B Find the nouns in the Fact File which mean:
1 a war between two groups in the same country.
2 the time a foreign power lives in and controls a country.
3 the act of killing someone for doing something wrong.
4 a short fight which is part of a longer war.
5 a royal leader such as a king or queen.
6 a large group of countries controlled by another country.
Again, the UK features, but certainly isn’t the main focus of this particular lesson. That comes next and is introduced via this short text:
Reading
You are going to read an article from a newspaper series called Around the world in 300 words.
A Read the introduction and discuss the questions in pairs.
1 Do you know anything about the country? What?
2 Why do you think UK people don’t know much about it?
Ask most people on the streets of the UK what they know about Kazakhstan and the only thing they can say is “We played them at football.” Ask where it is, and they may mention it’s near Russia, but that’s all. Yet Kazakhstan is huge – the 9th largest country in the world and the size of Western Europe. We think it’s time people got to know it better. Oh, and yes, it is near Russia – they share a border of 6846 kilometres!
This then moves into the main comprehension questions and the text itself.
B Read the article and answer these questions.
1 How many years have people lived there?
2 How has the Kazakh lifestyle changed?
3 When did the country finally become independent?
4 What’s the main industry?
5 What’s the most interesting information for you?
6 If you know the country (or know about it), is there anything important that isn’t mentioned? Would you change anything in the text?
C Discuss your answers in groups.
Around the world in 300 words…
Kazakhstan
People have lived in the region since the Stone Age. The society was nomadic – Kazakh comes from a word meaning ‘free spirit’ – with different groups living off seasonal agriculture and animals such as goats, sheep and horses, that fed on the steppe grassland. For many centuries, the Silk Road trade route went through the region, which led to the founding of cities such as Talaz, now 2000 years old.
Islam was introduced by the Arabs in the 8th century, and Genghis Khan’s Mongol army invaded in 1219. Over the next 200 years, a distinct Kazakh language, culture and economy emerged, although still based on nomadic life.
This traditional lifestyle changed during the 1800s, when the country was occupied by Russia. The political and economic changes and a growing population caused by people settling in the region resulted in hunger and tension. It eventually led to fighting in 1916, followed by a civil war.
In 1920, Kazakhstan became part of the communist Soviet Union. Over the following decade, the last Kazakh nomads were forced to live on farms or work in industry. Other people within the Soviet Union, including Germans, Ukrainians and Koreans, were also sent to work there.
After gaining independence in 1991, Kazakhstan’s economy grew rapidly. It’s now the 11th largest producer of oil and gas as well as an exporter of many other natural resources.
Population: 16.4 million.
Capital: Astana (changed from Almaty in 1997)
Place to visit: The Charyn Canyon.
Big building: The Pyramid of Peace, Astana. The cultural centre aims to bring together all the great religions.
Special day: 22nd March. Nauriz celebrates Spring, friendship and unity. It was banned during Soviet rule.
Firsts: The horse was first tamed in this region.
The oldest and largest space launch site in the world is Baikonur Cosmodrome. It is leased to Russia.
Next week: Kenya
There’s then some grammar work that derives from the text –
Grammar: prepositions and nouns / -ing forms
Prepositions go before nouns. If we need a verb to follow a preposition, we use use an -ing form to make the verb into a noun.
After gaining independence in 1991, Kazakhstan’s economy grew rapidly.
Some verbs are followed by particular prepositions.
Economic changes … resulted in hunger and tension.
It eventually led to fighting in 1916 followed by civil war.
A Match the verbs to the prepositions with nouns or preposition -ing forms.
1 lead a from the Stone Age
2 result b on support from the king
3 depend c of corruption
4 date d to a revolution
5 be accused e in people leaving the country
6 be opposed f for joining NATO
7 be caused g to joining NATO
8 be involved h people from playing music
9 ban ij in the independence movement
10 vote jl by economic problems
B Write five true sentences about events or people in history, using verbs and prepositions from exercise A.
and finally a task that has a local outcome again.
Speaking
Work in groups. Discuss the following:
A What you would put in Around the world in 300 words for your country?
What would be the most important events?
What places would you mention? Why?
What would go under the headings Place to Visit, Big Building, Special Day and Firsts?
With these kinds of tasks, there’s obviously a large degree of flexibility in terms of how teachers exploit them. They can just be discussions in class time, with maybe some time built in for individual planning; they can be homeworks – with web searches encouraged – that lead into presentations; they can be blog entries on a class blog, and can include pictures, videos even, and can even be shared with other schools around the world if the teacher is class-twinning in some way with other international classes.
The notion of project work is something I’ve become much more enthused about as a teacher over the last 12 months or so, and is something that the Internet makes much more manageable. Whether you’re just using something relatively simple to set up like a class blog on wordpress or blogspot or whether you’re using something more sophisticated like voicethread, which allows you to place all kinds of texts, images, videos and documents online and to have conversations based around them, these kinds of sites allow students a real opportunity to practise wording their worlds, to develop their ideas and cultural ideas in the privacy of their own homes and in their own home, and to dig deeper into issues that we simply don’t have time to explore more in class. At their best, they also allow for the beginnings of the kinds of cross-cultural interaction that would have been unimaginable in a pre-Internet age.
Quick fixes, ELF and dumbing down in ELT!
In his 2009 book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell claimed that around ten thousand hours of deliberate practice makes a superstar. Failing that, at the very least, 10,000 hours of practice is the key to mastery – and putting the hours in is far more important when it comes to creating – or realising – success than any innate talent. As you’d expect, Gladwell provides plenty of pop culture examples – The Beatles played together in Germany for nearly 10,000 hours before they emerged seemingly fully formed to conquer the world; Tiger Woods had put in his 10,000 hours on the golf course before he was even old enough to learn how to drive a car, and so on.
Now, I have no idea how valid the research Gladwell bases his claims on is, nor any way of – or interest in – counting the exact number of hours The Beatles spent playing to drunk seamen on the Reeperbahn, but there’s surely something in this claim: the notion that nothing comes of nothing, and that any degree of success in anything requires a considerable amount of hard graft!
Yet how counter to much of our contemporary culture such claims run! We live in an age of instant gratification, of the belief that money buys us access to whatever it is we most desire, of shortcuts and of blagging. You see it everywhere, from the Pop Idol wanna-bes who crave fame for simply being themselves, and hope for a career in music without first having done the long hard hours learning their craft and gigging out on the road, to the folk who’ve learned a bit of Photoshop and think this makes them a graphic designer and in the desperate CVs we get sent at work from people who’ve not even done a CELTA but have instead done a two-day taster course somewhere and yet who think this entitles them to teach English in a university (I’m reminded here of the applicant a few years ago who, on being informed that we usually only took on teachers with DELTAs as a minimum requirement, spat back at us with “But I don’t want to be a teacher trainer or anything. I only want to teach!”). Examples are easy to find almost everywhere.
And the English Language market has been quick to capitalise on the myth of instant success. The web is full of courses that promise that you too can learn English in ten days – or effortlessly or even in your sleep! Published material and even schools are also quick to make such rash promises in search of student dollars. Naturally, students themselves are desperate to buy into these quick fix ideas. We’ve all met the students who think that simply working through Murphy’s English Grammar In Use (often for the third of fourth time!) – or translating and memorising random lists of single words – will unlock the door to fluency, or the students who arrive at Pre-Int level demanding IELTS 6.5 by the end of the term, and who are very very resistant to the message that increasing just 0.5 in the exam will take a MINIMUM of 150 study hours!
And when the industry is not busy promising the world, we as teachers are all too often simply downgrading our standards and hoping that getting by with less will become the new fully fluent! As I’ve already said elsewhere, I think the roots of this are complex and socio-culturally and historically rooted, but I do also feel that much of the debate around Globish / English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) over the last decade or so has inadvertently fed into a latent laziness on the part of many (frequently native-speaker) teachers! How can it be that such a well-intentioned (but I would argue misguided and flawed) project can have had such an impact?
Well, by attempting to list the elements of speech which are deemed to be non-essential to international communication (the third person -s, say, or the different /th/ sounds in mother or theoretical) and by stressing the fact that much use of English in the modern world will be between non-natives, the ELF theoreticians have inadvertently created a monster, feeding directly into the ‘why bother’ school of thought that afflicts teachers for whom teaching still sits awkwardly with their sense of self. Why bother correcting grammar if I can already understand what students are on about? Why bother with idioms or awkward sophisticated bits if lexis I’m not sure of myself if they’re only going to be talking to Greeks or Chinese or Germans? Why bother with the endless corrective drills of /th/ sounds? Let’s just focus on acceptable communication and activities and fun and be done with it. So the cries go up! And so the goals and targets that we teach towards go down!
I’ll be blogging more about ELF and the pernicious influence the whole debate surrounding it has had in the week to come, but hope there’s enough here to spark at least some kind of a debate.
I’d like to know how YOU feel about the value and purpose of the ELF project, the degree to which you think it’s been harmful / beneficial to the field and whether or not I’m right in my paranoid assertions that students are becoming more desperate in their hunt for shortcuts to success.