Well, Minkyeong, I really REFUSE to pay for "academic" conferences that are overwhelmingly commercial. Why should I pay Oxford University Press to advertise their rubbish? If they want to advertise to me, they pay.
Richard Johnstone WAS quite academic; he's a very serious scholar, and he's the world's foremost expert on primary foreign language teaching and programme evaluation. He's the guy we really need to go to in order to evaluate whether our experiment with foreign language teaching at primary level here in Korea has been a waste of time or not.
About ten years ago he wrote some very good articles in which he argued that you couldn't evaluate primary foreign language education simply by evaluating what kids could do with what they learnt.
First of all, what they learn is largely an activity, a set of actions, rather than a body of testable knowledge. Secondly, the kids are VERY good at fooling us; they pick up lots of "prefabs" (that is, prefabricated phrases like "Thank you" and "Good morning" and "Can you swim?" ) and use them very effectively, but they can't actually make their own very well. That's going to give them high tests scores and low communicative competence. Thirdly, we're not really teaching them English for use anyway. We are teaching English for relatively BROAD, GENERAL, LIBERAL goals, like international understanding, and abstract thinking and understanding your own mother tongue as just one of many languages.
I thought that sounded pretty good! Plus, he's a fighter. He's spent his whole life fighting to prevent minority languages from dying out (e.g. his own language, which is not English but Scots Gaelic, which he had to learn as a second language). This means that unlike most English language teaching people, his real background is something like PREVENTING the spread of English, or anyway, making sure that other languages are not displaced by it. This is obviously important to us here in Korea, where English is being taught as a semi-colonial language.
Some of what he presented was quite interesting. In particular, there was a body of data from Croatia, where they start elementary English education at age SIX, and give them FIVE hours a week. After one year of this, the teacher can write a paragraph on the blackboard and have the kids come up and point out things like subject, verb and object and talk about nouns and adjectives and verbs. This suggests a remarkable degree of META-linguistic understanding, and that is an important goal of primary English education, as far as I'm concerned (nobody else seems to care much about it, though!)
He also presented some interesting data on vocabulary learning. In Croatia the kids have a lot of trouble with the word "kettle" but no trouble at all with the word "bottle". This is because they know exactly what a bottle is from every day experience (we would say iconic experience). But they don't know what a kettle is, because they use ordinary cooking pots to heat up water in Croatia. So they have to learn what kettles are from definitions, that is, from second order symbolism (but Professor Johnstone's not a Vygotskyan, so he doesn't know that's why).
Unfortunately, Professor Johnstone presented using Powerpoint, which I really hate, because it prevents people from presenting a sustained argument organized around data. Instead, they just do a business presentation around so-called "bullet points", that is, horrible lists of noun phrases, which they present like slogans or lines of products. This is not a good way to present complex ideas, and if I had my way, Powerpoint would be forbidden at all academic conferences.
The audience was also American, and therefore quite rude. They would raise their hands and ask rather silly questions in the middle of his talk (instead of waiting for the end). A few times they actually interrupted him with a question. He was clearly surprised, and then annoyed. I was annoyed too (because then there was no time for questions at the end, when it was clearer what questions remained). But on the other hand, I guess that's how a lot of teaching is done these days; the professor just puts up the Powerpoint on the internet, so there's not much point in listening to the actual talk, and the students just use lectures as question and answer sessions.
Afterwards I talked to Professor Johnstone a little, and tried to find out if ANY work was being done on the general cognitive benefits of bilingualism, outside so-called communicative competence. He said there was nothing, except for Cummins, in Canada, and of course, Michael Cole (in Liberia). But that's all twenty or thirty years ago. So the answer is, nothing!
I think the reason is quite simple. English language education is being done by people who are ONLY interested in English, and not in other subjects or liberal education generally. Even Professor Johnstone--although his talk was very good, it was quite narrowly linguistic; he's basically a Chomskyan who believes in an innate language instinct which unfolds under the influence of "comprehensible input". I tried to point out to him how completely at odds this is with his own interest in minority languages as second languages, and how little it helps us understand the metalinguistic knowledge of those Croatian kids. But somebody interuptted, trying to sell something....
dk