English is a Non-inflected Indo-European Language (from a work in progress on English teachers abroad)

They come from all over. Besides the recent graduates, there are elementary school teachers, beancounters, zookeepers, customs workers, divorcees, cinephiles, readers of the daily press, and writers of letters to the editor. Few were compelled to leave, none were compelled to stay in their home countries. You recognize them as those who speak a little too clearly, forming the words as if everything hung on a preposition. Telling a culture-shock story about life over there, their chins retreat into a tightening jaw: they’ve told it too often, it’s become fixed, repertoire. This time they won’t change enough to make it reverse compatible with you. They’ll be forced to say you had to be there, laughing for both of you at the undefined irony of misunderstandings. Their sophistication is a universal relativism that accepts all things. Life is what happened to them, not what they did.

They speak English. It is something they know without knowing what they know or how they know. The language is a mitochondrion mixed in with their being. To become teachers, they must have the precious commodity excavated and read back to them. In teacher training, they learn to see the air they breathe, and to show others less fortunate how to gulp it down. Now I understand.

The lesson must be about something. Break it down to courses, modules, tasks, reincorporations, semi-controlled practices, and at each moment you are doing one thing to the exclusion of others. This shows purpose and control. And while you explain the present perfect continuous or a tricky phrasal verb, they listen, understanding between 40 and 70 percent of your words, and taking from them whatever they need: the non-syllabic rhythms, the formation of a fricative. Why that word, made of those sounds and not others? It’s arbitrary—but also fully determined because you must use that one word. The signal separates from the noise, the acceptable sentences build themselves into the membranes of the ear. In order to speak it, the teacher must speak about it as if it were geography.

None of this may be said. In order to make the process less terrifying and to give us some agency over language, they have pedagogy and pedagogical talk, made up of these specialized terms:

Communicative, i.e. the communicative approach. Like dynamic, a meaningless adjective conferring instant credibility on its user. The implication is that the last twenty years have witnessed a renaissance following on dark ages during which teachers and students were too stupid to communicate. After an interviewee or teacher tells you about an idea, you can always nod seriously and say: “Hmm…but how would you make that more communicative?” There is no known face-saving response, no matter how dynamic you are.

Lexis. Vocabulary. By squinting slightly and calling it “lexis,” the inevitable tedium of memorizing long lists of words is transformed into a sleek methodology with a ring of Japanese engineering excellence. Vocabulary is not communicative, but lexis most certainly is—so students will pay cash money for it.

Idiomatic. Teacher talk for “Haven’t the foggiest.” A catchall response to tough student questions. Example: Student: “You told us always to use contractions, so why can’t I say ‘Yes, I’m’?” Teacher, chewing on his collar: “Ah…that’s idiomatic, I’m afraid.”

TTT. Teacher talking time. The disturbing echo of KKK is not accidental. To be avoided since it smacks of the scholastic dungeons of the past when teachers used to explain things. Making your students prattle about hypotheticals and their personal lives is just more communicative. The hidden wisdom of the ban on TTT is that it permits fools to be silent.

Elicitation. A communicative way of reducing TTT by making everything into a guessing game. Instead of saying “post office,” the teacher elicits by drawing a post office, or miming one, or interpretively dancing one until one student cries uncle and says: “Post office!” This technique helps get rid of unruly students who do their homework and ask tough questions.