Tissue rejection in language education

A question that comes up regularly in my language teacher education courses is why we can’t seem to find a ‘best’ teaching method. I usually respond that there is no such thing as a universally effective way to teach, because what seems to work well in some cases, often fails in others. One of the most effective ways to describe this phenomenon is the ’tissue rejection’ metaphor. In this post, which I originally wrote in 2015, I discussed what ’tissue rejection’ means in language education, building on a metaphor in Adrian Holliday’s early writing. Ten years later, Holliday’s metaphor remains prescient. In fact, it feels even more relevant as globalising pressures, ranging from AI innovation to the encroachment of neoliberal policies in education, exert ever stronger pressures onto our classrooms.

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What does ’tissue rejection’ mean in language teaching methodology?

The term ’tissue rejection’ was first mentioned in the context of language education by Adrian Holliday, in an article that appeared in Applied Linguistics in 1992, Tissue Rejection and Informal Orders in ELT Projects. Im this seminal contribution, Holliday used used the evocative medical picture of failed transplants describe the unsuccessful introduction of teaching innovations in a language education context. In his paper, he used the term as a metaphor for what happens we take a teaching method that works in a particular educational setting and uncritically introduce into a different setting, where it fails to catch on.

BANA & TESEP settings

The ’tissue rejection’ metaphor builds on a distinction that appears in Holliday’s early writings, between what he called BANA and TESEP models of instructed language learning. This is a somewhat dated distinction, and in fairness to Holliday, his thinking has evolved since then. Still, I will use it in this post, because its clear-cut lines help to make the ’tissue rejection’ metaphor more vivid.

In BANA (British, Australasian and North American) settings, language learning tended to take place in private schools or language learning centres affiliated to universities. In these settings, Holliday argued, there was often a ‘relatively clear contract between institutes and mainly adult groups who come specifically to learn English’. By contrast, in the TESEP model, derived from the words Tertiary, Secondary and Primary, language learning did not usually have an instrumental objective (Holliday 1998: 12).

Each of these two models had evolved different teaching methods, which aligned with local cultural expectations, learning materials and resources, classroom arrangements, and so on. For instance, in BANA settings, learners were likely to encounter ‘a process-oriented, task-based, inductive, collaborative, communicative English language teaching methodology’, which Holliday called the ‘learning group ideal’ (p. 54). In TESEP educational settings, on the other hand, it was more common to see more traditional, transmissive, form-focused approaches to language learning, because these were closer to the mainstream education norms in such settings.

Importing BANA methods could lead to tissue rejection

The problem, Holliday argued, was that TESEP often tended to be perceived as less-than-effective, and BANA methodology was usually seen as the remedy to this problem.

This is, in a sense, similar to a situation where a patient undergoes surgery, which replaces a failing organ (ineffective methods) with a healthier transplant (the learning group ideal). However, when such innovations take place, we do not, and cannot, replicate the entire BANA model in the new setting. Rather, what travels is a limited selection of methods, which often do not fit very comfortably in their new context. The new method (the ’tissue’), which was effective in its original setting, then becomes a source of disruption in the new setting.

A common scenario of ’tissue rejection’ would unfold when a language teacher tried to introduce pair-work or group-work activities in a class where learners were more comfortable working individually under their teachers’ guidance. In such a case, learners would likely start engaging in off-task behaviour or become disruptive; fellow teachers might complain about the noise levels in the language class; and parents might question the language teacher’s professionalism.

In other words, this was not just a question of an innovation not working; the attempt to introduce a foreign element led to system-wide disruption in the new ecology.

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Extending the tissue rejection metaphor to language education policies

Holliday’s example of tissue rejection focuses sharply on the question of teaching methodology and the global relevance of Communicative Language Teaching. This is a topic to which he returned in later writing (e.g., the 1994 classic, Appropriate Methodology and Social Context), and rightly so, as it reflects the concerns of English Language Teaching in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Even today, while the distinction between BANA and TESEP is perhaps not quite as relevant and although there is some consensus about teaching eclectically, the tissue rejection metaphor continues to resonate. This is because the way we teach languages and think about our professional practice continues to be shaped (perhaps more forcefully than in the past?) by forces that originate outside language education. In the following sections, I turn my attention to some current challenges that language education faces, seen through the lens of Holliday’s metaphor.

Aligning AI with language education

It is difficult to write anything about education today without mentioning artificial intelligence. Applications of AI today are transforming language teaching and learning in profound ways, but it appears that much of this transformation originates, not in the educators’ or learners’ needs, but in the agendas of corporations outside education. The extent to which the priorities of these corporations can align with the values of language teaching and learning is still unclear. This raises the risk of ’tissue rejection’, when corporate innovations are transplanted wholesale into educational settings without adaptation and without regard to the contextual needs of language classrooms.

Psychological mismatches in language teacher education

Another example of tissue rejection comes from the field of language teacher education. Nowadays, most teacher education programmes are likely to include some coursework on language education psychology, which explores questions such as language anxiety, motivation, identity etc. Such work often builds on a well-established humanistic tradition of TESOL, which which foregrounds the lived experiences of learners and teachers, emphasising empathy, self-expression, critical thinking, and respect to local particularity.

More recently, however, language teacher education has seen an influx of positive psychology models that seek optimise performance, resilience, and productivity. It is important to note that such thinking originates from outside language education, where it served needs removed from teaching and learning, such as a perceived failure of traditional therapeutic approaches.¹ Whether these new grafts are accepted or rejected remains to be seen, but the signs of shock in language education are very visible, not least in the mismatch between language and pedagogy and scholarship that purports to inform it.

Disillusionment with continuing professional development

A further site where we might observe tissue rejection is continuing professional development (CPD). In principle, professional development serves to sustain teachers’ growth over the course of their careers, building on their existing expertise and responding to evolving classroom realities. Too often, however, what drives CPD is external agendas: pre-packaged workshops, accreditation schemes, or mandatory trainings that prioritise institutional compliance over teacher agency. Professional development schemes which reward teachers for research publications, and disregard other forms of professional writing and knowledge production and sharing are clear examples of activities that work well in one system (academia) but are patently unsuitable for others (schools).

When we mandate professional development in such ways, with little regard for the contextual knowledge and needs of educators, it risks being dismissed as irrelevant or burdensome. The resulting disengagement is not evidence of teacher resistance to growth, but rather a protective response to initiatives that aligned poorly with the lived ecology of teaching.

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Why tissue rejection happens

The key thing to remember in this case is that the problem does not stem from the teachers’ classroom management skills. Rather, tissue rejection is due to the mismatch between the culture from where the method originated and the culture where it is being implemented. Returning to Holliday’s metaphor, it is similar to what happens when a patient’s immune system attacks an otherwise perfectly good organ that has been transplanted into said patient’s body.

A complexity perspective

Writing in the 1990s, Holliday did not explicitly make this connection, but complexity theory² can help us understand what tissue rejection involves.

The starting point in this explanation is that language teaching and learning are activities that take place in a complex web of relations, where everything connects with everything else. What is important, in understanding such systems, is that the actual components are less important than the relations that develop between them. A coffee mug might be a better container than a plate for transporting soup in a car (it ‘better fits the ecology of the car’); a pencil may be more effective than a stylus in a school with unreliable access to electricity, and a spoken explanation may be more useful than a textbook when working with very young learners. In these examples, our focus is not on the components, but on thinking what ‘better’, ‘more effective’ and ‘more useful’ mean in different settings.

Tissue rejection happens when we disrupt the web of relations in the complex system of language education. Such changes may be well meaning, and indeed there may be good reasons for wanting to change the structure of the system. But making such changes requires patience and sensitivity. Complex systems tend to be adaptive: this means that they can usually absorb small changes (the introduction of a new teaching routine, a digital innovation), as long as we give them time to form new connections.

Change in complex systems

Complex systems, however, are not static. These systems do have a capacity to adjust,³ but only when new elements are introduced slowly and with some care. In our 2021 book, The Intentional Dynamics of TESOL, Juup Stelma and I describe how all systems, including language education, inherently have normative, adaptive and creative impulses,⁴ and we suggest that systems tend to maintain a balance between them, even as they change.

Minor perturbations, like a tweak to a classroom routine, trying out a digital tool on a small scale, or shifting assessment practices bit by bit, tend not to cause much disruption, because systems can gradually reshuffle their patterns and find new ways of working. In contrast, large-scale reforms, externally imposed training packages, or uncontextualised technologies are likely to overwhelm the system and trigger the tissue rejection response. In my book, A language school as a complex system (Kostoulas, 2018), I describe a case study of such failure.

This is not to say that innovation is impossible; but it does suggest that initiating and sustaining sustainable change requires a sensitivity to local ecologies, as well as respect for the agency of teachers and learners.

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What prevents tissue rejection in language education

If tissue rejection signals the inability of an innovation to align with the ecology of a classroom, then the challenge for educators and policy makers is not simply to design better methods, but to ensure that these methods can take root in the target contexts.

The challenge is not simply to design better methods, but to ensure that these methods can take root.

Empowering teachers

As hinted above, foregrounding teacher agency and is one way to ensure this. The fourth property of intentional dynamics, which Stelma and I outline in our 2021 book, is the ability to respond to purposeful change.⁵ This involves identifying opportunities for transformation, or creating them if they are not there, and then acting upon them.

It is important, when thinking of purposeful change, to remember that such activity is teacher-driven. One reason is that language teachers (should) know their classrooms, their institutions, and their learners better than anyone else, and this means that they are better positioned than anyone else to identify action opportunities. Secondly, even when centrally planned, activity is local: this means that it is teachers who will enact change in practice, based on observations and opportunities that make sense to them.

Entrusting language teachers with such responsibility, of course, also requires supporting them, so that the decisions they make reflect good preparation and informed judgement. Teacher research literacy, as promoted in our ReaLiTea project, plays an important role here: by equipping teachers with the tools to investigate their own practice, we allow them to mediate between external ideas and local realities, selecting, adapting, and reshaping innovations so that they are more likely to fit in the system.

Leveraging system adaptivity

Another point worth stressing is that change needs to be gradual and sensitive to context. Language classrooms are resilient: they usually have time to find their balance when we introduce new ideas carefully, on a small scale, with enough space for feedback and adjustment. The implication for institutions and policy-makers seems clear: rather than invest time in the search for ‘quick fixes’, it would probably be more productive to cultivate an ethos of collaborative experimentation and critical reflection. Let me bring in another image, this time from gardening. A gardener would not expect the same seed to thrive in every soil or climate; they would always pay some attention to the conditions. The same applies in education: what grows depends on the institutional climate, the professional culture, and the relationships within each classroom.

When these conditions are recognised, and when change is introduced alongside what is already working, new practices can settle into place without unsettling the whole system. In that way, classrooms evolve gradually, in ways that feel sustainable and inclusive, and they support genuine learning instead of provoking tissue rejection.

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Some final words…

The ’tissue rejection’ image is a powerful metaphor that helps us to understand the social and cultural intricacies involved in teaching English worldwide. Although the original premises of the metaphor (i.e., the existence of two incompatible English Language Teaching models) have given way to more nuanced thinking, the spectre of tissue rejection is still a key concern in language education.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this post and that it was helpful to you. I am very keen on reading about any stories of ’tissue rejection’ from your teaching experience. You can share your stories in the comments below — and also feel free to use the social sharing buttons to forward this article to anyone who might find it interesting.

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Notes

1. It is also important to note that positive psychology is viewed with increasing scepticism outside language education (see, for example, the edited volume by Brown et al., 2018). ↩︎
2. Or Complex Dynamics Systems Theory (CDST), as seems to be the growing terminological consensus. I sometimes use ‘complexity thinking’ or ‘complexity theory’ to describe the use of CDST as a metaphor that helps us understand and connect theoretical insights in language education, as opposed to more technical uses of the theory. ↩︎
3. In fact, some theorists prefer to call them Complex Adaptive Systems, although the term does not appear to have gained much traction in language education theory. ↩︎
4. We also described purposeful/intentional patterns, but this is a point that we are still working out. See our latest paper (Stelma & Kostoulas, 2024) for a more developed position on the topic. I will come back to this later. ↩︎
5. I told you I would come back. ↩︎

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