Since Web 1.0, web-based generators have been around. Brian Eno released generative music in 1997, and deep dream generator appeared much later. At the moment you can randomize anything, including randomization itself thanks to many resources. Several successful projects have been developed in addition to simple functions, which utilize a quantum random number generator.
For stochastic enthusiasts, programs based on entropy sources such as thermal noise are no less appealing. No field of activity is exempt from random functionality. Paper postcard exchange Postcrossing matches mailers using random addresses; a number of dating apps match users arbitrarily; chatroulette and omegle are famed for matching random users based on their search criteria.
The foreign language teaching industry has a number of projects that generate lexical units or sentences for group discussions or individual studies. Assigning random tasks can help prepare for international exams and alleviate general fatigue from textbooks with their rigidly defined structure. Among teachers, this fatigue is especially noticeable as they must deal with the exact same content of the courseware year after year.
Even if a textbook set comes out in a new edition, the main changes will be related to stock photographs, which, as many students note, merely fill up empty space in the book, and appear to be added for the sake of colour and a “modern” look. Old textbooks, by contrast, often contained witty illustrations manually drawn in accordance with the material, and reflected phenomena and topics that today’s editors would not have approved due to their demands for equality, diversity, inclusion and tolerance.
A massive number of depersonalized stock photos in contemporary printed textbooks, in theory, should have been phased out a long time ago. In the 21st century, it is already hard to surprise or motivate anyone with a full-colour publication which consists largely of characterless stock photographs and a sparse assortment of activities related to discussion topics or speaking exercises.
Moreover, many language learners, even those of a young age, admit that they often go through the textbook contents ahead of time, often right after purchase, so the excitement of learning a new topic or taking a new module never comes. The reason for this is, of course, students’ natural curiosity, or, if you like, their inquisitiveness for something new. Having flicked through the pages of the textbook, students soon find the topics and visual materials too familiar and even trivial, since they are present in any modern textbook. Modern educational materials suffer from another drawback: the authors tend to focus on just a dozen main topics, which are often repeated from level to level. Typically, in general English classes, these topics revolve around friendship, “modern” communication, employment, entertainment, travelling, and housing. From a superficial perspective, the above-listed topics, with their corresponding vocabulary and grammar, appear to relate to all expressive and perceptual skills. Clearly, a textbook cannot introduce all necessary subjects, especially those that have developed in recent years, that is a great deal later than the entire chain of creation, publication, and distribution of the textbook. It remains embarrassing for foreign language teachers to see old technology and devices in textbooks, outdated designs for browser windows from the Internet 1.0 era, out-of-date applications, programs, and websites, as well as their invented counterparts, in an effort to avoid copyright issues, and to reduce the cost of licensing, which, for publishing houses like Longman, or Oxford, and Cambridge with a multimillion-pound turnover, is highly surprising.
Essentially, what textbook developers do not take into account is closely scrutinized by students and teachers alike. Such obsolescence would not be as apparent if textbooks were updated on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this does not happen, and, as a result, language learners become apathetic and unmotivated. Students have little patience for school textbooks dominated by sterile, “safe” topics, which are mainly illustrated by bland photographs from photo libraries. As soon as a teacher hands out such a textbook and learners realize they must systematically study its pages, they anticipate yet another tedious step on their journey to mastering language skills.
It is, however, even more concerning that the textbook may become the only tool that teachers use, unless it is diluted with dull Power Point slides that contain visually jumbled materials, resulting in a loss of interest or even annoyance among students. It is also common for self-made resources to violate copyright, lack source links, and display poor design.
The Origins of Grandomastery
In the beginning, Grandomastery was just a simple application for Android 1.3 devices called Random ESL Questions. Some certified IELTS experts used it to create tasks for the Speaking component of the test.
Over time, Random ESL Questions developed into the Grandomastery website, which at first included the same activity with random questions on a large variety of topics and then gradually grew to 30 activities. Some activities which previously were only paper based moved to the platform.
One of such activities is called Random Magnets — earlier lexical units were placed on magnet cards in a classroom setting — the author created hundreds of magnets with well-known English proverbs, which the students were instructed to create on the marker board; the more absurd and humorous the sayings, the more attention they received, since new proverbs were supposed to be grammatically and lexically correct.
It is inherent in adolescents to create their own unique verbal works of art and not just copy what already exists. Even when it comes to Palmer’s lookup tables, teenagers tend to perform these tasks in a funny, absurd, and eccentric manner — turning this activity into an insightful learning experience. Several colleagues have also acknowledged that their students struggle with tasks where the odd variant needs to be crossed out, and, strangely enough, on the emotional level — students are reluctant to cross out the answer, which is, albeit incorrect, but at least funny and original. Evidently, this is a combination of age factors, as well as a desire to avoid the “correct” banal answer at all accounts. Correct answers do not inspire creativity, nor do they contain a punchline or an absurdist element; they are not suitable for posting on Twitter either, and have little to do with learners’ aspirations to express themselves. In contrast, Random Magnets enable learners to create a fresh statement or even several within the framework of grammar norms.
There may be elements from well-known proverbs in these sayings, but it is the satire of hackneyed phrases and the discovery of new meanings that attract Grandomastery users.
Another Grandomastery activity involves writing a story that incorporates a closed chain of lexical units. The plan is to create variations of Random Story activity based on proficiency levels and fields of activity of learners.
This all takes time and effort, so Grandomastery’s creator would appreciate any informational support about the project and, as a thank you, would like to offer you Grandomastery Premium.
Grandmastery tasks like Random Abstractions focus on abstractions and involve finding similarities between seemingly dissimilar abstract concepts. A major element of Grandomastery is the principle of bisociation, championed by the influential author and philosopher Arthur Koestler in his book “The Act of Creation”. The essence of creativity is connecting different planes, for instance art, science, and humour. Bisociation occurs when two seemingly incompatible planes overlap, when different phenomena and formations converge unexpectedly. In jokes, this moment is the climax, or punch line, which contains the irony of the joke; the more unpredictable the punch line, the more intriguing the joke. We can observe a similar principle when performing exercises from the Grandomastery Integrative Thinking Platform.
Young students are by nature demiurgic, in particular when it comes to creating new stories, expressions, or even words; older individuals, even at advanced levels, are entirely constrained by rules; traditional and conservative educational institutions tend to make all students worry about the correctness of their task completion, making students wonder: “How should I phrase this? Is there anything I should say here? Is there a time limit? Can I give a longer answer? What is the best way to respond? Is an example necessary?” etc. Such situations occur even in the absence of any restrictions in a task which presumes that its grammatical and semantic components are wholly dependent on the students’ intent and desire.
The excessive formalism and instructiveness of modern textbooks and tests are also responsible for such a psychological framework. Essentially, we are dealing with Stockholm syndrome, only in methodology. Students are expected to assume some of the responsibilities of instructional designers from the very first stages of language learning. It is imperative that students read and comprehend the task instructions carefully. If an exercise is broken up into a) and b), the learner must categorically adhere to this dichotomy; for example, when a module teaches a particular grammar construction, learners are ever expected to use it in all speaking tasks and exercises. The communicative approach can thus be compared to a tyrannical regime, with limited freedoms of speech and action, and whose days are numbered. Interestingly enough, according to many experts, communicative language teaching must be soon replaced by systematic language teaching, which would incorporate an abstract, analytical, heuristic and conceptual thinking approach, virtually absent from modern courseware and language tests. The communicative method is perceived by many experts as one which focuses on a very limited number of topics, and the taught communication skills themselves as unacceptably simplistic. A modern textbook does not provide students with the opportunity to examine a sentence from multiple perspectives, unlike, for instance, the Grandomastery Random Statement Activity, which allows a learner to view the problem from a variety of different perspectives.
Despite the traditional criticism of old textbooks which were written several centuries ago and which were solely based on grammar-translation, such books were easy on the eye, and students remembered information efficiently. There were incomparably fewer typos, inaccuracies, and poorly constructed exercises in old textbooks, which were written by a handful of authors rather than hundreds, as is often the case today even in textbooks from publishing giants, including Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. A textbook from past centuries presented material in a clear and logical manner, that is, with a moderate number of symbols that could convey much more information, making comprehension and memorization very straightforward.
Although the grammar-translation method has some shortcomings, such as a lack of speaking exercises, the communicative approach has issues as well, especially when it comes to consolidating grammatical or lexical skills within each unit or module. For a skill to be fully activated, additional resources must be updated. In terms of online resources, it is important to note that most are not meeting even minimum design standards — they often look like Word Art from Word 97. Even in materials found on popular online resources like busyteacher, iSLCollective and ESLPrintables there are many problems with the visual side and the content of materials intended for both — children and adults — even materials specifically designed for adults may contain clipart with unsightly frames from the last century, unnecessary, inappropriate, and disorganized decorative elements; text in such materials may be italicized, bolded, underlined simultaneously, and displayed in totally unimaginable colour combinations.
It is astonishing that such revolting handouts are still in high demand regardless of the Web 4.0 boom. Yet, such embarrassing resources still exist and are not taken down by their creators; additionally, most of them are even offered for sale and seem to be sold well, indicating that both their creators and users lack even basic aesthetic and technical competences. Furthermore, it is striking to see the number of Comic Sans worksheets with distorted low-resolution graphics and no colour schemes or code designs. Similar problems are encountered on Instagram and Facebook, where visual noise is accompanied by animation; the main differences between these resources are that they use stock images rather than clipart, and Lobster typeface instead of Comic Sans. Seth Godin, a marketing guru and author of one of the world’s most popular books on marketing, strongly recommends that CEOs of large companies take a course in design in person so that they could learn first hand what makes a modern, understandable, practical design of high-quality.
A cursory glance at some of the materials prevalent among foreign language teachers suggests a similar recommendation to our colleagues, particularly since chief executives have their own design teams, as opposed to teachers and trainers who tend to hammer out their “worksheets” or “printables”, reducing to a simple text editor or MS Paint as their primary resource.
There are, of course, high-quality projects that provide excellent visual design, but most of these resources are pay-per-use, intended for personal use, or available only as paid applications.
In Grandomastery’s case, the creator fully acknowledges that the project is far from achieving design excellence. It has been reworked many times and simplified, but there is still a lot of room for improvement, despite some positive dynamics of these changes. In 2021, Amazon Associates and Abebooks affiliate programs were removed from Grandomastery, so the project lost the ability to earn revenue even from banner ads. Grandomastery’s activities are presented without visual clutter and bring in relevant images only when it is absolutely necessary, as in Random Image Activity, which provides students with image-description practice based on a random image and corresponding nontrivial questions about the art piece, which allows the development of a monologue speech of no less creative character.
As a side note, Random Images is just one of the Grandomastery activities, which, in addition to generating the object, include supporting structures for students to learn speech functions without being repetitious, since the tasks are generated for both the teacher and the students. As a result, each task generated is an unpredictable experience for each individual participant. It is crucial to maintain an unexpected environment, namely because As opposed to working with a resource that is continuously updated and whose activities are generated on the fly, the thorough assessment of educational materials results in participants’ burnout . Yet, in spite of the obvious benefits of stochastic task generation for speaking practice, many teachers, including native speakers, complain that with real-time task generation they cannot prepare in advance for a lesson or a training, even though it is no secret that the trainer’s extensive familiarity with the content before it is “presented” to the students leads to diminished interest in the teaching process and to an increase in educators’ irritation, hidden with varying degrees of success. When teachers work within a particular course framework for extended periods of time, hiding annoyance and other negative emotions becomes increasingly difficult, especially when students are having difficulty understanding the textbook exercises which the teacher has nearly learned by heart. In contrast, whenever the teacher and student see the same exercise for the first time simultaneously, the disparity between their perceptions of the information displayed is reduced, which makes it easier for the teacher to fathom the student’s perspective.
It is noteworthy that Grandomastery allows you to not only generate each task by clicking the button for that particular task, but also choose the type of activity — by clicking on “Random” button in the upper left corner. This Random script incorporates so-called “weights”, which indicate the frequency with which a particular activity type is generated. For instance, Random Question is displayed much more often because of its versatility (currently, there are over 3000) than, perhaps, Random Job Interview, which is designed specifically for people who practice spontaneous speech.
Probably, the Grandomastery platform would not be ideal for conversation clubs or even creative games if there was no possibility of completing the full cycle of 31 tasks in random order — that function is undertaken via the CYCLE button in the upper right corner.
Additionally to our standard platform, which generates tasks of all kinds for ESL learners, Grandomastery offers a unique section for integrative thinking exercises, suited not only for learners of English as a foreign language, but also for native English speakers, willing to improve their improvisation skills and spontaneous speech. Furthermore, such exercises allow an employer to evaluate the creative abilities of candidates in an interview. In the opinion of our colleagues in HR, such exercises are not only stress-relieving, but they also allow candidates to demonstrate their competencies in integrative thinking.
The quality and variety of the content on Grandomastery are constantly evolving. The platform’s aim is to remove any constraints or restrictions and to encourage its participants to consider various phenomena, often negative in nature, as well as ignored and avoided social constructs from a completely new perspective, resulting in a unique unusual interpretation. If you feel comfortable and at home with our approach, you can sign up to become a trainer, or if you wish to improve your oral or written communication, a grandomaster. Under the Tutors section, we will continue posting profiles of trainers — native speakers as well as colleagues from different cultures, who teach English as a foreign language using Integrative Thinking. Aside from that, Grandomastery, as an accredited CPD platform, grants free certificates to our experts, educators, and active members. We use accredible.com services, allowing our instructors to upload the Grandomastery certificates they register with us on linkedin and other social media sites with a single click. It is Grandomastery’s intention to translate the platform into other languages, as well as to optimize the official application for integrative thinking, which is part of the Premium subscription, a larger and more comprehensive version of Grandomastery, containing more tasks within each activity, and allowing individualized exercises to be created on any topic.
In this article, we discussed the issues facing the English language teaching industry, in particular the evident shortcomings of modern educational courseware. We should clarify that in no way is Grandomastery an alternative to structured teaching materials, nor is it opposed to language textbooks. Nevertheless, as a consequence of the scarcity of exercises that encourage the development and practice of speaking skills, Grandomastery serves as a complementary educational and entertaining tool. While edutainment is often associated with gamification, the term does not always imply the same thing — edutainment is not always about online awards, animated effects, and augmented reality. Grandomastery is essentially a cybervintage concept — it is a combination of original vintage materials and up-to-date virtual elements like spectrogram that measures speech fluency. A combination of these factors may produce unpredictable serendipitous results, conducive to ad-hoc discoveries. As a kind of vade-mecum, Grandomastery aims at providing a resource for those interested in practising and teaching integrative, productive, and higher-order thinking.
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