Who is the industry leader in language teaching?
Hi, I'm Chris. Head teacher at OuiCommunicate.
We're home to speakers of English who wish for a step up from traditional French classes.
In this article, we'll talk about the industry leaders in language teaching.
More exactly, the absence thereof.
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Who is the industry leader in language teaching?
In our economic tradition, the business that sells the most is named the industry leader. The distinction of “leader of an industry” is always synonymous with size and sales. Mc Donalds is the traditional industry leader of fast food because they sell the most.
Language teaching doesn’t necessarily answer to this ranking system for the simple reason that quality, not size, determines the effectiveness of a source of learning. An international private school might have thousands of students worldwide without being leaders in education. They just happen to be the largest.
Unless their students all graduated knowing 3 languages with minimal effort, we would have no reason to consider that this school is leading anything else than sales contracts. The snowball effect is comparable to pop music bands whose chance of a slot at a festival is strengthened by the number of festivals already played. One encourages the other but doesn’t improve the music.
Because of the nature of education, determining a leader is complex. It really depends how we choose to score it. At this moment in time, there is no consensus on the best place in the world to learn English, Spanish or French. There isn’t a prestigious language school in which all teachers aspire to work. No one has emerged as a clear number one.
It is worth pausing to consider this fact. Not one language teacher or school has distinguished themselves enough to make any noticeable difference with their peers.
The reasons for this are numerous, starting with the impossibility of comparing results within one school, but also between schools.
Teaching is one of the few professions that require the full involvement of the person buying the service. As a consequence, no language teacher can be great by themselves. It is all in the hands of the student. No teacher can be “great” if the student doesn’t allow it.
Product reviews by students are no reliable guarantee either. A less effective but engaging class might be graded highly while a “boring” class that insists on the correct use of the fundamentals might be seen as poor quality. Not all language schools have the purpose of teaching languages as much as they wish to propose an enjoyable hobby to their clients.
The inside analysis of the language and its grammar, combined with a reflection on how to teach it makes this field of knowledge so unusual that only the professional truly understands what is truly happening. Where a student sees “French words”, a teacher will see skills, rules, patterns, priorities and levels of complexity.
In a fascinating way, the anonymous 20 year old who sets themself up as an impromptu teacher from their bedroom has a chance of proposing an effective teaching practice if they connect with their student. A big-name language school could just as well propose an ineffective class because of subjective factors that didn’t meet the taste of the student.
Most complex of all perhaps are the many unknown influences that shape the customer’s final decision. The geographical location of the school often weighs more heavily than the quality of the teaching. The fact of sharing a learning moment with a group can seem more advantageous than being coached individually. If this was a train, the enjoyment of the ride would matter more than the destination.
But some businesses have tried
Language schools who want to combine growth and reputation have but few options to strengthen their brand. It usually goes through the implementation of a regimented teaching method.
Their product becomes a uniform teaching style that the freelance tutors are trained to follow. Having done 3 job interviews with such companies, I saw “behind the scenes” and the sheer ugliness of these businesses.
The first was for a Chinese company that required of teachers to say hello in a certain way, make students repeat words, fill in absurd paperwork, as well as avoid a laundry list of topics about religion, philosophy and politics. You were employed as a human repeater of pre-programmed classes.
The second was for a Belgian company that specializes in seminars in old castles. During the training week, they made the prospective teachers repeat cues that they would later use on the students. A class with this company meant asking a student to repeat a sentence as many it took to get it right. We literally had to ask them 20 times the same question until it was perfect.
The third company modestly refer to themselves as a “teaching corporation” and present the same robotic approach to teaching. Funnily, the staff at human Resources found English challenging despite all the opportunities to learn it. I quickly abandoned the onboarding process when I realized that they too did not require teachers but human repetitors to push their brand forward.
These three large companies are not alone in their category and many others follow the same internal logic. They have in common that their growth goes hand-in-hand with the sacrificing of originality, resourcefulness and ultimately, the true practice of teaching. Somehow, somewhere, people buy their services.
It is probable that such developments occur when teaching falls in ambitious hands. Similar developers would just as well apply their grandiose vision to avant-garde art by proposing to build “the largest collection of pieces of art” while missing the point of the artistic creation.
In their view, it is size and sales that matters. In our view, it is substance and human experience.
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To conclude
To some. it will seem self-evident that language teaching has industry leaders. They will name the schools with the most longevity or strongest reputation such as the British Council, the Alliance Francaise of the Goethe Institut.
While it is unlikely that these schools propose a mediocre service, it is just as true that their knowledge of teaching and of languages has not evolved past a point that is commonly accessible to other experienced teachers.
The entrepreneur Richard Branson might decide to launch Virgin Languages on a worldwide scale with a billion dollar budget and still not improve past the practices that other teachers don’t already hold.
The complexity of our mission as teachers is not dependent on the hardware in our offices. It depends solely on factors that are psychological, creative and artistic. The leader of the industry might very well be you or it might be me. We’ll just never know.
