Burcu Akyol's Blog

Herbert Puchta is one of the authors who is very well-known by English teachers in Turkey. Especially the ones who attend ELT conferences regularly… He has been to Turkey several times and shared his valuable knowledge, ideas and experiences with us. I found the chance to meet him in person at IATEFL, Cardiff. This year he has become the President of IATEFL. Since IATEFL, Cardiff was my first international conference experience, I was a bit nervous at the beginning. He was one of the people there who made me feel relaxed with his friendly attitude. After the conference, he came to Istanbul for a series of talks. I met him here and asked him to have an interview with me for my blog. Although he was extremely busy, he didn’t say ‘no’ and kindly accepted my offer.
Here is the interview with Herbert Puchta…

When and how did you get involved in English language teaching? Do you remember your first lesson?
It’s a strange story. I grew up in Austria and started learning English at the age of ten… and fell in love with the language from the very first lesson I had as a student. Somehow there was a strong sensation that ‘that was it’ – my passion, my life, my everything. And even as a young kid I thought a lot about the way I was taught – by a teacher, who, by the way was extremely friendly, but who heavily relied on grammar translation teaching (we are talking about the stone age of foreign language teaching). So it was clear to me that I was going to study English later, and become a teacher of the language I loved so much. I can’t remember in any detail the first lesson I taught (and if I could, it would probably be a waste of space and – should there be anybody who bothers to read this – the reader’s time to describe it, but I’m sure it was on lines similar to those along which I had been taught – i.e., language as a formal system that students could best learn through translation, studying bi-lingual word lists etc. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I can now see that those initial frustrating experiences plus a strong and clear intuition that what I was doing was the wrong thing, combined to provide powerful motivation for change!

What changes have you observed in ELT since you started in the profession?
To put it in a nutshell, it was the changes that I found myself first going through as a teacher, and then gradually trying to contribute to bringing about as a teacher trainer and writer. As a teacher, it was first an orientation towards ‘more speaking’, but the method that seemed best able to help to achieve that objective in those days – audio-lingual teaching with its boring pattern drills and its behaviouristic formula – turned out to be a grave disappointment for me as a young teacher who thought he had found what he was looking for. Then came a period of dramatic change trying to implement communicative language teaching – an exciting period, because I came across a number of colleagues who influenced my thinking: Hans Eberhard Piepho from the University of Gießen in Germany, Mario Rinvolucri, John Morgan, Tessa Woodward, Günter Gerngross and many, many others. And then I was lucky, too, since I had always had this strong interest in psychology – and when I started to develop an interest in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), I had the good fortune to study with the best people in the field – Todd Epstein, Michael Grinder and, above all, Robert Dilts! That was an enormous eye opener into the workings of the human brain – into how we forget and how we can learn to remember better; and this perfectly complemented the changes in the field of ELT – changes that, first, I tried to implement in my own teaching and then had the pleasure of communicating to colleagues and my students: a change towards communicative language teaching, with first of all a strong focus on model of balanced language skills, then gradually looking at developing materials that were hopefully more relevant for the students, and looking more closely at what was going on ‘inside and between the people in the classrooms’ (to quote Earl Stevick. What followed naturally, I believe, was the application of Howard Gardner’s model of Multiple Intelligences (which led to the book, Multiple Intelligences in EFL that I had the pleasure of co-writing with Mario Rinvolucri), and a successful attempt to apply latest findings on the importance of mental imagery work to EFL (again, that led to a book – Imagine That! – co-written with Jane Arnold and Mario Rinvolucri).

What’s your favourite quote?
Leadership is creating a world that people want to belong to (Gilles Pajou) – a principle I’d like to see implemented in more and more classrooms around the world. A teacher who is driven by this belief will manage to make her students ‘feel at home’ more effectively, to quote a phrase from Erwin Gruwell’s book A Freedom Writer’s Diary. This is a book, by the way that every teacher should read – or if you want to be inspired and moved, watch the film starring Hilary Swank.

If you hadn’t been a teacher, teacher trainer and author, what would you have been?
I went through a short period as a teenager when I thought it would be great to be a photographer, and having trained in various schools of psychotherapy, I did once think about becoming a therapist.

What qualities do you think make a good teacher?
Being a human being, having an interest in finding out how students learn successfully – and sometimes fail, and then strive to improve what we do in our classrooms when it doesn’t work – plus an excellent knowledge of the language we teach, and, above all, a sense of humour. Teachers who can laugh with their students, and – occasionally – about themselves will be able to create a much better rapport in the classroom.

How did you get involved in writing?
It followed on very naturally from all the other things I had been interested in. For me, writing is something I couldn’t or wouldn’t want to do without, and I think it would be very helpful if we all wrote more, and shared our more of our ideas with others.

What advice would you give to a potential writer?
It’s all in what Obama says – YOU CAN DO IT! Believe in yourself – especially when you get stuck. Write, write, write – and share with others. Get feedback from people who are serious about what they do and who you can trust, and see criticism as constructive.

You have your own web site. Can we say that you are a technophile? In what other ways do you use technology?
Mmh, yes, I’m a bit of a technophile and find modern technology fascinating – but that doesn’t mean I would go into creating my own website. I’ve got a son who’s in IT, and fortunately he does that for me. And he tells me off regularly too, since I get behind with updating it…

What do you think about the rapid changes in technology and its impact on learning and teaching?
The pace of technological development is indeed fascinating – and some of it certainly has the potential to significantly enrich the teaching and learning process. The challenge will be to find principled ways of integrating technology into the teaching and learning process, and not to be fooled into believing that technology per se will be the new wonder drug that cures all problems. Technology has to serve the teaching and learning process, and its intelligent use needs to be guided by firm pedagogical principles; I am wary of those who say that all we need to do is bring technology into the classroom and everything will be better. However, technology can indeed make a valuable contribution, if we know how to use it well!

Finally, what do you think about the future of ELT in terms of teaching methods and changing student profile?
I think teaching will become even more student centred, and at the same time I can see a growing need for what I call ‘leadership’. It’s the teachers who manage to help their students feel at home in the classroom, who listen with empathy and accept their students as human beings who will be better able to cope with the changes.

I would like to thank you for answering my questions. It is a great honour for me to share this interview with my colleagues on my blog.
My pleasure!