ES: Hi, Matt, and thanks for taking the time to tell English Spotlight about yourself. Teaching English abroad has become a popular choice for everyone from recent college graduates to retirees, and it is a real pleasure to have the opportunity to talk with someone as distinguished as yourself. You created the most popular ESL board game, a TEFL website, and from what I hear you have something new up your sleeve. When did you start teaching English?
Matt: When I first came to Thailand in 1988.
ES: 1988....So that makes almost 20 years now. What made you decide to become an English teacher?
Matt: I'd always liked the idea of being a teacher of some sort, and wanted to live and work overseas, so teaching English fit the bill. I did a TEFL course in Sydney in 1987 and then headed off to Asia. After traveling for a few months I settled in Thailand and began teaching, and I'm still here nearly 20 years later.
ES: Wow, you are one of the true TEFL veterans of Asia. I taught in China, Korea, and Japan for a total of 5 years and, after getting married recently, have settled back in Japan...at least for now. Have you been able to learn any Thai over the years? I hear it's a difficult language.
Matt: It’s one of those languages that you really have to make an effort to learn. You don’t just pick it up by living in the country, like you can with a language like Indonesian. And this is because Thai’s a tonal language, so what sounds like the same word to us can have as many as five totally different meanings, depending on the tone, like high tone or low tone or rising tone or whatever. And for foreigners, these tones are really difficult to hear, because our ears haven’t been trained to hear them. To Thai ears, the difference between these tones is huge, and they really can’t understand why we have trouble hearing them. It’s a good example of how learning a language isn’t just about vocabulary and grammar, but it’s also about learning a new way of listening. To learn Thai, you have to learn how to listen tonally. And then you have to learn how to speak tonally. If a Thai says you speak clearly, what they mean is that you speak with the correct tones, but if an English speaker says you speak clearly, they mean you pronounce vowel and consonant sounds correctly. Totally different conception of what it is to speak clearly. So yes, Thai’s a difficult language to learn because it requires learning a new way of listening, not just learning vocabulary and grammar. And it’s also a very idiomatic language, so that makes it difficult to learn, too.
ES: Do you think learning a Foreign language is important for TEFL teachers?
Matt: Absolutely. Learning Thai has definitely helped me understand what learning a language really involves. I can put myself in the shoes of the learner, and being able to do that has to make you a better teacher.
ES: Studying a foreign language is certainly one way anyone can become a better teacher, regardless of how much training or experience you have. Do you speak any other languages?
Matt: I learned Indonesian in high school, and spent about 6 months living there in the 80's, so at one stage I wasn't too bad, though it's been a while since I've used it.
ES: Indonesian is an unusual language to study in high school. Why did you choose it?
Matt: The only other options were European languages – French and German – and it seemed to me more sensible to study the language of one of our neighbours. And I’m glad I did. It came in handy on my travels – not only in Indonesia, but in Malaysia as well, as Indonesian and Malay are very similar languages. In the same way that Thai and Lao are very similar. A bit like ‘buy one, get one free’. It’s great going to new country, and realising you already know the language!
ES: Where are you teaching now?
Matt: I'm having a break from teaching at the moment, but I still create ESL materials. I've just finished a book called ‘1000 Phrasal Verbs in Context'. It's something for learners who like learning vocab by figuring out meanings for themselves rather than trying to memorize given definitions and word lists. And as with most of my projects, I got a bit carried away and ended up writing 2000 contextual sentences as well as 1000 quiz questions. In the end it involved a lot more work than I'd originally intended, but I'm pleased with the result now that it's done. And it's just been released in ebook format on teflgames.com and esldepot.com.
ES: What a great idea! Teaching in Japan and Korea is always a battle to try and get students to learn English, as opposed to simply memorizing it for a test of one sort or another. How did you come up with the idea for your book?
Matt: Phrasal verbs have always been an issue for my students. From my early days of teaching, it was clear that they hadn’t been taught phrasal verbs properly. And not knowing them meant they couldn’t follow a basic conversation with native speakers. And these weren’t kids, but young adults who’d studied English for years, through elementary school, high school and in some cases through university as well. And yet they struggled to understand basic conversational English, and this made them really frustrated, as you can imagine. They’d studied hard for years, and they knew all sorts of obscure vocabulary and all sorts of advanced grammar, but if you said something like, ‘Keep on trying and don’t give up’ they wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about. Because none of their teachers, and none of their curriculum designers, and none of their textbook writers, had ever seen fit to teach them phrasal verbs, beyond a few basic ones like ‘get up’ or ‘put on’. What they’d been taught was formal written English, and what they needed in the real world, in the world of business and work, was informal, conversational English. So over the years I’d put together a lot of remedial material for learning phrasal verbs, and tried lots of approaches to helping my students learn them, and I thought this type of material could be useful for other students as well, so I developed it over a year or so and now it’s out there as an ebook.
ES: More and more people are going abroad to teach English every year. What advice do you have for people interested in TEFL/TESOL?
Matt: Get properly qualified by doing one of the top-flight courses such Cambridge CELTA or Trinity TESOL, or the SIT course. You'll have a better chance of getting a decent job, and you'll really know what you're doing. And if you know what you're doing, you'll enjoy doing it, so you really do need to get yourself properly trained. And then put together your ‘bag of tricks' with lots of graphic materials, photocopiable worksheets, quizzes, and activities and games, of course, though I wouldn't be so crass as to suggest getting Word Up, of course...
ES: Ha Ha! Good way to bring it up. Can you tell us a little about Word Up?
Matt: Well, it's a quiz game with over 4,400 questions in 5 levels of difficulty, from beginner to advanced, and each player gets a question sheet from which they read questions to another player. The questions are in 4 categories; Missing Word, Crossword Clues, Multiple Choice and Spelling, and players throw the dice and move their pieces around the board and land on various coloured squares. Each colour is associated with a question category, so if a player lands on a yellow square, for example, they answer a Spelling question, and if they land on a green square, they answer a
Crossword Clues question, and so on. And if they answer correctly they get a token of the same colour, such as a yellow token for answering a Spelling question, and the first player to collect 2 tokens of each colour, meaning 8 tokens altogether, is the winner. But there're other things too, such as the red ‘Word Up' squares. If someone lands on one of these they have to pick up a Word Up card and follow the instructions, which might be to swap a token or answer any question for two tokens, or lose a token, or
whatever. And then there are special squares like Bonus and Stop and Free Choice and Miss a Turn. So there's plenty of strategy and luck and other typical game elements in there too. And all this hopefully makes it a lot of fun as well as being useful in terms of helping students improve their English.
ES: How does the board game help students learn English?
Matt: For a start it gives players the chance to practice their skills in reading, listening and speaking, and also tests their vocab, grammar, spelling, and general knowledge. But there's nothing ‘bookish' in there, no grammatical terms like ‘relative clause' or ‘subject' or ‘object' or whatever. It certainly tests grammatical awareness, especially in the Missing Word questions, but it doesn't test knowledge of grammatical terminology or abstract grammar, as such. It covers a huge number of language elements, including hundreds of phrasal verbs, collocations and idioms, use of prepositions, conjunctions, and articles, as well as general vocabulary and usage, and so on. And the players seem to remember the language elements they're exposed to during the game, whether it's new vocab, or an idiom or a collocation they didn't know, or a grammatical pattern they're not familiar with. And they probably remember the material because they're genuinely focused on what they're doing. And this is one of the general benefits of
games, especially competitive games. They motivate students to concentrate, simply because they want to do well in the game. And once they're genuinely focused, they're learning, whether they realise it or not.
ES: Where and when did you come up with the idea for the game?
Matt: I've always liked board games, and while I was teaching in Thailand in the late 80's some friends and I would get together once a week to play Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit. And it occurred to me that language-based games like these could be created specifically for the purpose of teaching English. And that was when the idea of creating Word Up came to me. And once I'd settled on the general idea of a quiz game, the format came to me pretty quickly, including the question categories, the way the different levels of difficulty work, the basic design of the board, and what not. But then the real work began, which was writing and grading all the questions. And that took about two years of pretty solid work in the end.
ES: How have students responded to the game?
Matt: From all reports the response has been great. And from what I've seen myself, students do genuinely love playing the game. They like having their abilities tested, and they like the competitive aspect. And some even get their own games and play at home with their family or friends, which they can do, of course, because all the answers are provided.
ES: How about English teachers? Have you gotten and feedback from others who have used it in their classes?
Matt: I get lots of positive feedback, so it seems to have gone down well with teachers as well as learners. I get teachers contacting me saying how the game really helped them turn things around with a difficult group, getting students to loosen up and relax and start joining in or whatever. And helping them to create a more positive atmosphere in the classroom. So it seems to help some teachers on that level as well as in the more usual ways such as being useful as an ice-breaker, or as a change of pace from regular course-work, or as an activity teachers can use when they're filling in for another teacher and haven't had time to prepare a lesson, or whatever. They seem to find lots of uses for it.
ES: Where can we get Word Up?
Matt: You can order it online at here. Or go to the distributor page on the same website and check the list of stores that sell the game.
ES: You also have a TEFL website www.teflgames.com. What have you learned from running a website?
Matt: I've learned how little I know about running a website! I'm far from being up with the latest web applications, and most of the free games and materials on the site are fairly basic printable quiz questions and classroom games and that sort of thing. Though I did manage to
make a series of java-based interactive games which are pretty popular. All this stuff is free and it's at teflgames.com/games.html if anyone's interested in checking it out.
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