Katherine Bilsborough

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YL exams

The C word: (censorship) … and the Z word

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This blog post is going to be controversial. I know this before I even begin writing it. This is a short post about some of my recent experience of censorship while writing primary materials. It was prompted by having a Z word struck out. Last week I was told that I couldn’t include a zebra in a story. I’ll come back to this at the end of this post. In the meantime, here’s a nice colourful photo of a zebra. It’s my quiet protest.

(Don’t) write anything you want

All ELT writers understand that we can’t just write anything that occurs to us. That would be daft. When we write for a publisher or a Ministry of Education, we have to follow a curriculum and use specific language in a specific order. This language usually comes in the form of a scope and sequence document. I hadn’t really thought much about the name of this of document until now but it is exactly what it says on the box, a document in which the language that needs to be taught is scoped out into units and lessons, following a logical sequence.

Having to follow such a document is fine. In fact, it’s more than fine, it’s good because ultimately the materials we create need to provide the target learners with the language they need to do one or both of these things: (a) to successfully graduate from their school year and move up to the next level or (b) to pass an official external exam. Having everything neatly planned makes it less likely that we’ll miss something important, like the preposition of place, next to, a key grammatical structure in the Starters exam, or circus, a vocabulary item that examinees are expected to recognise in the Flyers exam. Yes, these S&S documents are useful.

Up to here, everything’s fine.

But sometimes a writer is asked to change something they’ve written because it is too sensitive for a particular market. Lots of markets have restrictions and typical examples are things like, no references to hamburgers or anything pig-related, please. Incidentally sausage is in the Cambridge YLE list, but pig isn’t.

It can sometimes be difficult to navigate the do’s and don’ts because, depending on the end-users’ location, they might change or even be contradictory. I’ve been asked not to write about the Hindu festival Holi and I’ve been asked to specifically write about it. I’ve been asked to change names because they were too Christian (David) or not Christian enough (Jasmine). Sometimes a name is just deemed to be too unusual. This happened with Adele. Adele? Really?

A couple of questions

So I’d like to pose a couple of questions with primary learners in mind:

What happens when you aren’t allowed to use a key item of vocabulary that appears in a YL exam which the learners might be sitting? How will learners be able to recognize these words if they don’t come across them in a classroom?

You can see a list of these words in the The Cambridge English Young Learners Handbook for Teachers (available to download freely here as a pdf).

Who is saying ‘no’?

And does all of this extreme caution always come from Ministries? Or might some publishers be proactively censoring things they suspect might cause problems later down the line?

Diversity? I don’t think so

And last, but certainly not least, the most pressing question of all. How can we possibly have more Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity in our materials if we aren’t even allowed a range of names?

And the zebra?

What’s all that about? you’ll be asking yourselves. Well, it begins with Z. And I was recently told that no words that begin with a Z are welcome in Arab countries because they all sound very rude. Other ELT writers have been told the same. But zoo and zero are in the Cambridge English YL handbook. It’s just as well that nobody is writing a story about a zoo or a CLIL maths book for primary. Oh, hang on a minute …

On a final note, if any commissioning editor is reading this and thinking I might spell trouble, it’s OK, I usually do what needs to be done. I also don’t do what mustn’t be done. At the end of the day if I accept a work offer, I have to accept the client’s brief. I just think it’s important to raise these issues from time to time.

19 Sept: My week in writing

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Variety is the spice of life: learning how to juggle

This week variety is the name of the game. I have been writing a lot of bits and bobs, rushing to finish off a couple of projects which have been dragging on longer than I’d have liked. I recently took Rachael Roberts’ Switch off stress. Switch on success course, which I highly recommend. One of the topics we looked at was productivity, not so much how to increase productivity, but more how to work smarter so that the time we spend at our desks is time well spent, thus freeing up time for other things. I have to admit that this is something that I’m still experimenting with and if I were back at primary school, my teacher would probably write something like ‘making progress but needs to get her act together’ on my end of term report. This week I’ve used two techniques that seem to have worked well for the kind of work I’ve needed to do. The first is the Pomodoro Technique, which I’ve been using on and off for a few years and the second is ‘blocking out time’, a common sense approach that is ideal when you are juggling numerous projects.

Reward yourself! Nobody else if going to do it.

I’ve been writing exam practice resource pages for a primary course book. Each page is aligned to a specific paper on a Young Learners exam. There is enough space for a sequence of activities leading up to the main task which replicates the real thing. This kind of work is easy in some ways. I am familiar with YL exams and the levels. But restrictions imposed by the publisher in terms of how many stock photos I’m allowed to brief or how much new illustrations we can commission, have thrown up a few challenges. There were 20 pages in all so I made myself a nice little table to tick off each component as soon as I’d finished it. I decided to give myself a small reward after finishing 50% of the work and then another, bigger reward after finishing everything.

Reward yourself!

A second opinion

I’ve also been working on an article for IATEFL’s Voices magazine for teachers who are writing materials. I sent in the first draft last night so that felt good. When I send in an article to a teaching journal or magazine, I usually say something along the lines of, I’m happy to make any changes’ because editors usually have a good idea of what works best for their publication. Usually requested changes are few and far between and consist of things like a request to increase or decrease the number of words (it’s always a good idea to ask what the word count is and then stick to it), a request for a reference I might have forgotten to include or a photo to accompany a piece. I’ve only once got into a discussion (argument is too strong a word) about edits that were made to a piece I’d written. That was because I felt my voice had been removed and replaced with another, posher voice. It grated on me, so I asked for a second opinion before writing back and asking for my voice to be reinstated. Second opinions aren’t just a good idea for patients getting medical advice. I suggest getting one whenever you feel uncomfortable about something that is going on in a work environment.

Identify your unique set of skills

The last thing I’ve been working on this week is an S&S (Scope and Sequence) for an upcoming course. This was for the third level of a primary course which follows on from two that are already done and dusted.  It wasn’t until quite recently that I discovered I’d developed the skills need to write a good S&S. I’d been writing them for years but seeing them as the first step in writing a book rather than something which could, in theory, be a standalone project. One day, out of the blue, I was asked how much I charged to write a six-level S&S in line with a country-specific curriculum and aligned to a specific set of key learning skills and competencies. This was when I realised that it was something I could itemise in a list of skills on my CV.

It made me wonder about other skills that I might possess, unknowingly. An interesting self-reflection task might be to have a discussion with yourself, describing what you actually do when you do a particular job, pausing after each step to ask: Is this a skill that I could highlight as I look for work?

Thank you for reading my blog post.