THE MYSTERY OF GRANDOMASTERY OR WHAT'S WRONG WITH TODAY'S ESL INDUSTRY

From the dawn of the Web 1.0 era onward, there have been a variety of web-based generators, ranging from random number generators to poetry generators; in 1997, Brian Eno released generative music, and much later, deep dream generator appeared. There are many resources at the moment that allow you to randomize anything, including randomization itself. In addition to simple functions for generating random numbers, such as math.random, a number of successful projects have appeared, including Randonautica, which uses a quantum RNG as well as a pseudo-random number generator. Programs based on entropy sources like thermal noise, for example, hold a similar fascination for stochastic enthusiasts. It would be difficult to identify a field of activity where one does not find random functionality. Postcrossing, a paper postcard exchange project, uses random addresses to connect mailers; a number of dating apps use random matchmaking; notorious Chatroulette and Omegle randomly match users based on their search criteria.

It is no secret that the foreign language teaching industry has produced quite a few projects that generate random questions or lexical units that can be used for group discussion or individual learning. Random assignments, photographs, and pictures can help prepare for exams, as well as alleviate general fatigue from textbooks and their clearly defined structure. This fatigue is especially noticeable among teachers who, over several years, end up memorizing the entire content of the courseware used from year to year without any changes. Even if a tutorial comes out in a new edition, as a rule, the main changes relate to images taken from the collection of stock photos, which, as many students note, merely occupy empty space in the book and seem to have been added for a tick, presumably to make such books look more colourful and modern. It is therefore increasingly recalled that old textbooks contained witty sketches created by illustrators strictly in accordance with the materials which, interestingly, often reflected phenomena and topics that would not have been approved by today's editorial policies based on political correctness, inclusivity, tolerance and respect for cultural diversity.

The very idea of the abundance of depersonalized stock photos in printed textbooks, in theory, should have been phased out long ago. Common sense seems to tell us that in the 21st century it is already difficult to surprise or motivate anyone with a full-colour publication, consisting mainly of characterless stock photo resources and a scarce number of assignments on discussion topics or speaking exercises. In addition, many language learners, including those of a young age, have repeatedly admitted that they often looked through the contents of a new textbook in advance, often immediately after its purchase, so the mystery of exploring a new topic, a new module of the course never came. Quite naturally, the reason for this is students’ curiosity, or, if you like, inquisitiveness. Within a few seconds of flicking through the pages, the topics and visual materials of the textbook become familiar and even trivial, especially since the visuals are the same as in any textbook. There is another inevitable drawback of modern textbooks - the fact that their authors focus on just a dozen major topics, which are often repeated from level to level. For example, in general English classes, these are usually variations on the themes of friends, communication, employment, entertainment, history, and modern technology. 

On the surface, it may seem that the above-listed topics, accompanied by the respective vocabulary and grammar, are relevant to all aspects of expressive and perceptive skills. Clearly, the textbook cannot possibly include all necessary topics, especially the phenomena and concepts that have emerged in recent years, that is, much later than the entire chain of creation, publication and distribution of the textbook. Teachers of foreign languages still feel uncomfortable when they see outdated technology and devices in textbooks, browser windows with designs from the era of Web 1.0, applications, programs and sites that have sunk into oblivion, and even their invented counterparts following a tendency to avoid copyright issues, or to reduce the cost of acquiring the appropriate licenses, which, especially for large publishers from Longman, Oxford, and Cambridge with their multimillion-pound turnover, is highly questionbegging. In essence, what is generally not taken into account by textbook developers is closely scrutinized by students and teachers alike. If textbooks were updated at least once a year, such obsolescence would not be so evident. However, this does not happen, and, as a result, foreign language learners end up apathetic and undermotivated.  Disgusted by school textbooks, largely dominated by sterile, "safe" topics, students are exposed to a similar politically correct idealized world, generously seasoned with impersonal images from the photo libraries. As soon as language learners acquire such a textbook, and realize they will have to thoroughly study its pages, they anticipate yet another tedious step on their way to mastering language skills.

However, an even more serious concern is that the textbook, with all its obvious flaws, may become the only tool used by teachers, unless such classes are diluted with dull Power Point slides, created hastily from visually scattered materials, resulting in a lack of interest, or even annoyance among students. Self-made resources are often in violation of copyright, they lack source links and display poor design.

The Origins of Grandomastery

Grandomastery started out as a simple application for Android 1.3 devices known as Random ESL Questions. It was soon adopted by several certified IELTS experts as a resource for generating tasks for the Speaking part.

Within a few years, the Random ESL Questions application evolved into the Grandomastery website, which included free-topic questions, as well as, eventually, 30 different types of activities. The second in line was the Random Magnets task, which was previously a deck of magnet cards with lexical units to be placed on the whiteboard in an actual classroom setting. The author of this article created hundreds of magnets containing well-known English proverbs, from which the students created their own on the marker board - the more absurd and humorous the sayings were, the more attention they generated, as the assignment demands the new proverbs be free of grammatical and semantic errors.

Particularly in adolescents, the desire to create something of their own, not just correct or already existing, is inherent. Even Palmer's lookup tables are performed by teenagers in a funny, absurd, and eccentric manner - a way of bringing such tasks closer to insightful learning. Our colleagues have repeatedly admitted that students struggled with tasks in which the wrong answer had to be crossed out, and, oddly enough, on an emotional level - it seemed as if there was an irreconcilability with the necessity to cross out exactly the answer albeit incorrect, but at least funny, non-trivial, original, rather than conventional and fitting. Apparently, this is not just due to age characteristics, but also to a natural desire to avoid the "correct" banal answer. Learners do not find a creative component in the correct answers, there are no punchlines or absurdism in them; right answers are not suitable for posting on Twitter either and have nothing to do with learners’ aspirations for self-expression.

Random Magnets, on the other hand, allow learners to create a new bold or antic statement or even several within the framework of grammatical norms. Some elements from well-known proverbs may be recognized in them, but it is the satire of hackneyed sayings and the invention of new meanings that attracts Grandomastery users.

The third, but not less popular, Grandomastery activity type involves a closed chain of lexical units, on the basis of which it is proposed to create a story that consistently combines the given concepts. Random Story contains unexpected lexemes, and Grandomastery intends to create several variations of this activity, depending on the level of learners’ language proficiency and fields of activity.

Of course, all this takes time and effort, so the creator of Grandomastery would be grateful for any informational support of the project and, in appreciation, is glad to provide you with access to Grandomastery Premium.

Random Abstractions is another leitmotiv type of Grandomastery task that focuses on abstractions and involves finding similarities between seemingly disparate abstract phenomena. Most of the tasks at Grandomastery are based on the principle of bisociation, popularized by the influential encyclopaedist and intellectual Arthur Koestler in his book "The Act of Creation". Any truly creative activity according to Koestler consists in connecting several planes, for example, art, science or even humour. Due to the unexpected nature of the combination of different formations and phenomena, bisociation occurs, that is, the overlap of two seemingly incompatible planes. In jokes, this moment is the climax, or punch line, containing the salt of the joke; the more unpredictable its climax, the brighter and “better” the joke itself. When performing exercises from the Grandomastery cycle, we can observe a similar principle.

Young learners are by nature creative, especially when composing new stories, expressions, or even words, whereas older individuals, even at advanced levels, are completely rule-oriented; due to tradition and conservatism maintained in most educational and professional institutions, they are only concerned about the correctness of the assignment: “What tense should I use here? What am I supposed to say here? What is the time limit? What is the recommended answer length? What is the best way to answer the question? Do I need to provide an example?" etc. Such questions arise even in situations where no restrictions are stated in the tasks, the answers may be expressed in any manner, and their grammatical and semantic components depend entirely on the students’ desire and intention. We believe that such a psychological framework arises due to the excessive instructiveness and formalism of modern textbooks and tests for language proficiency. In a sense, we are dealing with Stockholm syndrome, only in methodology. Even at the earliest stages of language learning students are expected to take on some of the work of instructional designers. They need to read the task instructions very carefully. If the task is broken down into a) and b), language learners need to clearly work within this dichotomy; if a module covers a specific grammar topic, they are forced to use corresponding grammatical constructions in speaking tasks, and so on. Thus, the communicative approach can be compared in a sense with an autocracy, deprived of freedom of speech or action, whose days are numbered, and time is counted in the reverse order. It is no coincidence that, in the opinion of many experts, communicative language teaching should be replaced by a systematic one, which would take into account abstract, theoretical thinking based on analysis, synthesis, and incorporate abstract concepts, which are almost completely excluded from modern courseware and language tests. Many experts feel that the communicative method focuses on specific topics, and the communication itself is interpreted in an unacceptably simplistic manner. For example, no textbook allows students to consider a sentence from multiple perspectives. Grandomastery Random Statement Activity, for example, offers the possibility of looking at the problem from a variety of different perspectives.

It is noteworthy that even in traditionally criticized old textbooks written several centuries ago embodying the grammar-translation method, information was presented without excessive visual load and tended to be deeply imprinted in the memory of students. The number of typos, inaccuracies and poorly composed materials, as is often the case nowadays in modern textbooks even from such publishing giants as Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, was incomparably smaller in old textbooks, which were written by a few authors, not hundreds. In textbooks of past centuries, the material was clearly formed, that is, a maximum amount of information could be represented in a limited number of symbols, making perception and memorization extremely straightforward. Despite a number of shortcomings of the grammar-translation approach, such as the lack of speaking tasks, the communicative method is not without its flaws, particularly the lack of exercises to consolidate grammatical or lexical skills within each individual unit. For a certain skill to be activated, additional up-to-date resources are needed.

Regarding additional resources available on the web, it is worth noting that most of them either do not meet minimum requirements for visual design - they are often made in the style of Word Art from Microsoft Word 97. Even in materials from the most popular resources like busyteacher, iSLCollective and ESLPrintables the visual and content components leave much to be desired - a quick search of any of these resources reveals that even materials intended for adults can contain low-quality clip-art images from the last century with unsightly layers of frames, meaningless, inappropriate and disarranged decorative elements; texts in such materials can be italicized, boldfaced, underlined at the same time, and displayed with completely unthinkable colour combinations. Surprisingly, such handouts are in great demand, which raises the question of how this is even possible in the age of web 4.0. Extraordinarily, such dilettantish resources still exist and are not removed by the creators themselves; what is more, they are also available for purchase, and most likely are highly sought after which raises the question about aesthetic and technical competencies of some fellow teachers. It is similarly striking that the number of Comic Sans worksheets with distorted low-resolution pictures and complete absence of any colour scheme or code design, is growing every year. A similar situation is observed on Instagram and Facebook, where, in addition to visual noise, there is also animation; in terms of modernity, usefulness and ease of perception, these resources differ only in the presence of stock photos instead of clip art, and Lobster font instead of Comic Sans. In one of his first books, marketing guru Seth Godin strongly recommends that all CEOs, even those of large companies, take a course in design so they become aware of what makes a high-quality, modern, understandable, practical design.  After even the most cursory review of the resources popularized and created by certain foreign language teachers, a similar recommendation seems logical, since directors have whole teams of designers at their disposal, whereas teachers or trainers, with their desire to create yet another “worksheet” or “printable”, are limiting themselves to nothing more than a text editor, or even, considering the majority of resources, plain old MS Paint. Of course, there are high-quality commercial projects that have overcome this problem and represent a truly professional level of visual design, but most often such resources are fee-based, intended for personal use, or only available as applications requiring a payment, subscriptions, etc.

Grandomastery's creator is well aware that the project is a far cry from a design standard. Though the visual design of the site has been reworked multiple times and simplified, it still needs significant improvements in terms of design, despite the positive dynamics of such changes. It was decided in 2021 to discontinue Amazon Associates and Abebooks affiliate programs, effectively resulting in Grandomastery receiving no revenue even from the most unobtrusive banners, displaying only relevant books on the pertinent subjects, such as integrative thinking, creative development, bisociation, etc. To eliminate visual clutter, Grandomastery activities use images only if they are truly necessary, such as Random Image activity, designed to help students develop their image-description skills by working with a random image, as well as with nontrivial questions assigned for the corresponding piece of art, which enable the development of a monologue speech of no less creative nature. It should be noted that Random Image is not the only Grandomastery task, which, in addition to generating the object, is accompanied by supporting structures that allow students to work out certain speech functions, but not ad nauseam, since tasks are generated for both the teacher and students. Therefore, each generated task is a new, unpredictable experience for all the participants of the educational process.

Unpredictability is essential, since it is the thorough preliminary analysis of courseware by the participants of the educational process that leads to their burnout much faster than working with a resource that is constantly updated and whose activities are generated in real time. Despite the obvious benefits of the stochastic ‘a la integrandom’ strategy to practice speaking, many teachers, even native speakers, find that real-time task generation is challenging in the sense that it is almost impossible to prepare themselves for a lesson or even a training course in advance, despite the very fact that extensive preparatory acquaintance with the material before it is "presented" to the students leads to diminished interest in the learning process and to an increase in teachers' irritation, hidden with varying degrees of success. Quite frequently, the longer the teacher works within a certain course framework, the more difficult it is for them to hide annoyance and other negative emotions when students find it difficult to understand the tasks in the textbook which the teacher has almost learned by heart. The situation when a new exercise is displayed for the first time simultaneously for the student and the teacher reduces the difference in the levels of perception of the displayed information and, thus, helps the teacher to put himself in the student's place.

It is worth noting that in Grandomastery you can generate not only each of the tasks by clicking on the button with the corresponding task at the top, but also arbitrarily choose the activity type - the Random button, in the upper right corner, is responsible for this. The Random script assumes the presence of so-called "weights", that is, coefficient indicating how frequently a particular activity type will be generated. For example, Random Question, due to its versatility and the number of questions themselves (as of this writing, there are more than 3000), is displayed much more often than, say, Random Job Interview, which is also based on bisociation, but is more specialized and relevant to people who practice spontaneous speech.

Grandomastery platform, perhaps, would not be the most suitable tool for conversation clubs or even creative quizzes if it did not provide for the possibility of going through the entire cycle of 31 tasks in random order - the CYCLE button located in the upper right corner is responsible for this function. 

In addition to the main version of the platform with the ability to generate all types of tasks, Grandomastery offers a separate section dedicated to carefully selected exercises for integrative thinking training, suitable not only for learners of English as a foreign language, but also for native speakers themselves in order to improve their improvisational skills and spontaneous speaking. Also, such exercises make it possible to assess the creative component of a candidate at a job interview; according to our colleagues from HR structures, such exercises relieve job seekers from unnecessary stress, on the other hand, allow them to demonstrate competency in integrative thinking skills.

Grandomastery is a constantly evolving project in terms of its quality and variety of content. The purpose of the platform is to remove any constraints or restrictions and to enable its participants to look at various phenomena, albeit extremely negative in nature, even hackneyed concepts or neglected and avoided social constructs from an arbitrary, and therefore new, unusual point of view. If our approach is close to your heart and comfortable to you, you can join the Grandomastery as a trainer, or as a grandomaster if you are eager to achieve the cherished external and internal coherence of oral or written speech. In our tutors section, we'll keep posting interesting profiles of trainers - both native speakers and colleagues, representing different cultures, who professionally teach English as a foreign language with elements of Integrative Thinking. Furthermore, Grandomastery, as a CPD accredited platform, offers free certificates for experts, our teachers and our active members. We use the accredible.com service, thus anyone who teaches and practices grandomastery with us can upload their registered Grandomastery certificate to linkedin and other social media with a single click. Grandomastery plans to translate the platform into other languages and optimize the official application for integrative thinking, available in the Premium section, a more comprehensive and constantly updated version of Grandomastery, including a greater number of tasks within each activity, as well as the ability to create individualized exercises on any topic suggested by our clients.

The purpose of this article was to provide a critical review of the problems in the English language teaching industry, in particular, the obvious shortcomings of modern educational courseware. It should be clarified that Grandomastery is not at all opposed to language textbooks, and, of course, in no way is it an alternative to structured teaching materials. Yet, due to the tangible shortage of exercises that promote the development and practice of speaking skills, Grandomastery serves as an additional technical tool that is not only educational, but also entertaining. Despite the name, edutainment does not always imply gamification in the modern sense - with a system of awards, animated effects, arcanoids and other pseudo-immersive dynamic content. Essentially, Grandomastery is a cybervintage concept - it involves original vintage materials with virtual elements added such as spectrogram activity to measure speech fluency. Combining original materials and virtual elements should be called serendipitous, that is, unpredictable, conducive to ad hoc discoveries. The aim of Grandomastery is to become a kind of vade-mecum for anyone interested in practicing and teaching integrative and productive thinking, as well as higher-order thinking.

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