Classrooms on the Danube: An exploration of the quality of classroom life.

Following the death of Václav Havel many things have been flashing through my mind, recalling those monumental days in Olomouc and Prague in November and December 1989.   Over the last 24 hours I’ve been in touch with several people who experienced that time together, some of them are teaching, some are in journalism but all of them were heavily influenced in their attitudes and values by what happened when they were involved in shaping the future of their country during the university strike.

Students on strike in 1989 in Czechoslovakia

During the revolution, although the students were on strike, the classrooms came alive.  They drew and painted posters,produced a student newspaper almost every day and held meetings about the strike. In fact, the students were actually more active and involved when they were on strike than they had been before! I found myself thinking that the task of teachers after the revolution will be  to try to harness the same kind of energy that was there in the making of the revolution for the purposes of  English language learning and English studies in general.  In those six weeks I learned a lot about what my role should be as a teacher afterwards and those events have  informed my teaching methodologies ever since.

I felt that I had gained an enormous amount from the revolution and afterwards asked a group of students what they themselves had gained from the whole experience of  taking part in the strike and this was one of the replies I got:

One personal anecdote from one of my students

“It was all very dramatic for us: the work at school, typing, painting, drawing posters, going to villages and towns in the whole of Moravia and talking to people, taking part in demonstrations and meetings at the theatre, in the hostel and in the sports hall. Every day nearly the same.  But during the month I learned and got to understand a lot of things.

I understood the meaning of some phrases and words which had been empty for me until then. I think I have learned (a bit at least) to listen to people, to consider their opinions and mainly to tolerate other opinions. And generally we have learned how to discuss, thinking while speaking and hearing, not to be scared of voicing our own opinions. I am proud of being a student now.”

I  know that those were very special conditions back in 1989 but the skills which were developed during that strike amongst students are the same kinds of skills and values that I think are central to teaching and teacher development today.

Linking the revolution with the English classroom

When I returned to Czechoslovakia in 1992 after doing an MA in ELT at Lancaster University and writing my dissertation on teacher development in Czechoslovakia there was one quote I always used to use and work with in both pre-service sessions and at conferences. It was a quote by Václav Havel and one we used to discuss at length. I think it is still relevant in teacher training today. I am convinced that English can  be a subject which develops the kind of critical thinking and involvement in civil society which Václav Havel was  trying to encourage.

” The most basic sphere of concern is schooling.  Everything else depends on that.  What will our schools be like?  I think that in ten years they should be fully reformed and consolidated.  The point, understandably, is not just the reconstruction of school buildings or the supply of computers and new textbooks.  The most important thing is a new concept of education.  At all levels schools must cultivate a spirit of free and independent thinking in the students.  

 

Schools will have to be humanised, both in the sense that their basic component must be the human personalities of the teachers, creating around them a “force field” of inspiration and example, and in the sense that technical and other specialised education will be balanced by a general education in the humanities.

The role of the schools is not to create “idiot-specialists” to fill the special needs of different sectors of the national economy, but to develop the individual capabilities of the students in a purposeful way, and to send out into life thoughtful people capable of thinking about the wider social, historical, and philosophical implications of their specialties.”

Václav Havel 1992

Two of my former students in Olomouc had this to say in the last 24 hours

” I was crying all day long yesterday because it all came back. If you haven’t been through it, if you haven’t felt the atmosphere penetrating your skin, you can’t understand as the experience was so unique, that’s for sure.” Lenka

And there was always a very special relationshiop between Havel and Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. I still have the ticket of the Velvet Underground concert I went to in June 1993 on the wall of my flat that Havel also went to.
 

 

ELT Summer Courses as learning communities and ways of developing a rich learning environment: A process approach from the perspective of a course tutor.

It has been a long time since I last wrote on my blog and I think it’s to do with changing circumstances. I have taken a year out from teaching in Budapest and have been dividing my time between being with my mother in Wolverhampton and developing materials for courses at SOL in Barnstaple where students come, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, for a 10 day immersion course in British language and culture. I’m also taking a break from my role as co-ordinator of Hungary’s IATEFL Culture and Literature Special Interest Group, it was in IATEFL-H’s mELTing Pot that this first appeared.

Last summer I was working on two teacher training courses and have been reflecting on what makes those courses effective and enjoyable. This blogpost addresses these issues. Some of the things are just as valid on any teacher training courses and some are specific to a summer experience.

“A summer school doesn’t work without people who are there for you, care for you and help you. All in all, ingredients on their own don’t make a dish, but putting them all together you can make a delicious meal.”
I have taught on summer courses every summer since 1991 in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Russia and Britain and drawing on that experience I’d like to 1) give practical examples of what seems to create a quality, rich and relaxed learning environment and 2) address what a process approach to a summer school might be. Earl Stevick argued that what goes on between learners is the most important part of what goes on in a language classroom. Similarly, during a summer school, if you adopt a process approach, attending to what goes on between sessions and between days might be the key to a course’s success.

 

The “meat” of a summer course is traditionally seen as the pre-prepared sessions which tutors bring to summer courses. I have now come to realise that concentrating on getting the meat right might not be the key ingredient of a summer school. 10 years of my life were spent as a vegetarian and I’ve never liked the “meat metaphor” to describe the main element of anything anyway. I prefer the idea of a risotto, partly because of my love of Italian cookery and partly because the success of a risotto is to do with how much something is stirred, when it is stirred, how it is garnished, what is sprinkled over it and when. How things are glued together and recycled will depend on constant attention to the unfolding of the course process, much in the same way as being attentive to when we add and blend in herbs and spices in a risotto.
There isn’t a recipe for the success of summer courses but what follows are some ingredients which seem to help the process along. I have included some relevant comments by teachers to exemplify and illustrate key aspects.

I. Creating a stress-free atmosphere

1. Balancing work and relaxation

Teachers who attend summer courses have usually just finished a hectic and exhausting term and see summer courses as partly holidays and we need to bear this in mind in any preparation. A recurring issue is striking the right balance between content, time allocated to reflection and time for relaxation. Summer schools are places where teachers can share common concerns and gain strength and a sense of optimism from being together, in the knowledge that they are not alone and that their concerns are not specific to their own teaching contexts. Being freed up from family roles and responsibilities allows space for these issues.
“On our way to Lynmouth, I talked to one colleague and I found that we have so much in common, discussing even a delicate private matter and getting the best advice like we have known each other for ages, a benefit from a 10 minute informal talk.”

2. Setting the mood by pre-course communication between tutors and course participants

A process approach to summer courses will involve constant discussions with tutors both before and during the course. Writing to course participants beforehand and asking them to do a pre-course task is a nice way of gently getting teachers into the mood of the course. This might involve reading an article of relevance to the course and commenting on it. Asking teachers to bring photographs or objects of personal interest to be used in sessions or just welcoming them to the course with a kind message and expressing how much you are looking forward to working together can also be part of a pre-course message. You can also provide information for teachers and be available online to reassure them about things they might be unsure of.

Hiya everybody,

Just wanted to say that I’m really looking forward to meeting you all next week on our course. Devon is an enchanting place. I spent my holidays there every year from the age of 2 to the age of 16…..

Hi Mark,
I got your message, thank you for the nice words. As this will be my first time in England, you can imagine how excited I am. Counting the days,
M

3. Getting to know each other and learning names

All courses include “getting to know you” activities. These may involve getting teachers to meet each other and write down where people come from, a good teaching experience they have had recently, a band they like, or something interesting they have just read.

Teachers can arrange themselves into a map of where they come from. This year in the four corners of our map we had teachers from England, Bulgaria, Morocco and Poland. They then said who they were and where they come from. You often hear people asking whether the group is good or not, but tutors also have a role to play in promoting good group dynamics, even on courses which only last four days and good beginnings can contribute to this.

“I liked the idea of recalling positive experiences in the warmer (remembering a good lesson). I’ll definitely use something similar in the warmers after the summer holidays.”

Learning names and using people’s names appropriately is always good. Name cards are sometimes used on courses, although they may lead to not investing the time and effort which is usually needed to memorise and use names.
Time spent in between classes and on the first two evenings can be devoted to this by regularly consulting the list of course participants and trying a bit harder each time to make sure you know who is who. This year we took photos of all the teachers on the first day and on the second day projected them and got people to identify everybody.
“I love being here and I appreciate all the effort on the part of the tutors to get everybody involved”

4. Playing music on courses

Music has a huge influence on the mood of a summer course. I sometimes have a tendency to play music too loud but greeting people in the morning with songs like “Good day Sunshine”, “Raindrops keep falling on my head”, “ It’s a beautiful day”, “Manic Monday”, “Friday I’m in Love”, can be very welcoming, played on the appropriate days and at appropriate moments. Playing music in between sessions also has its place but we should be sensitive to when silence is best. Songs can sometimes become soundtracks to courses which come up either in sessions or as part of social events and which can then be sung on the last day. My own examples of this have included “Falling Slowly”, “Streets of London”, “Steal Away” and “Green Grow the Rushes O”.

“Using music was so relaxing for me because sometimes I feel very nervous”

5. Paying attention to timing and breaks

I have never experienced a course where there haven’t been people who have been upset at tutors going on too long in sessions and eating away at precious break time. When you are working with process this isn’t always easy and I have been guilty of this on many occasions. However, I also know that sometimes deviating from the pre-planned programme or taking a break in the fresh air is best. Giving up a session might also sometimes be the best course of action when working with process if a fruitful discussion emerges.

This should be negotiated openly and sometimes voted on, preventing resentment from building up throughout the course. If teachers are able to make choices they feel empowered. Taking feedback early on can also be very informative for tutors. This might be best done either informally, if you don’t want to make a big issue of something, or you might choose written feedback at the end of the second day.

Providing fruit during breaks or during classes is always appreciated. This may be passing round grapes, cherries, strawberries or blueberries or whatever is in season. Sometimes teachers share their own fruit. On one course I made the watermelon the actual content of the session, teachers tasted it and we looked at literature about watermelons. In the final poster summaries of the course a nicely coloured red and green watermelon featured on all posters: an example of the power of VAKOG and engaging all the senses! (Namely: Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic, Olfactory and Gustatory.)

“It was so nice to go for a five minute walk, to have lunch together in Cafe Libri, to talk to local people there.”

II. Reflecting on and recycling course experiences

Keeping course diaries which tutors may look at informally during the course and then go through and comment on at the end of the course can be an excellent way of getting teachers to reflect. The content and structure will depend on the nature of the course but reflections on new experiences and implications for teachers’ future classroom work are likely to feature on most summer courses.

“Writing diaries is a great idea not only for making interesting or important academic notes but also for remembering certain moments, feelings, people and situations”

The use of course photos and videos in breaks or at the beginning of the following day is a useful tool for developing course cohesiveness. This might involve regularly projecting photos and videos of the course taken by both course tutors and course participants as part of the beginning of a session or as background to breaks. It is wonderful to see the smiles and laughter on teachers’ faces when they see moments they have experienced collectively. Making the teachers themselves and the content that they generate part of the course itself helps teachers to feel part of the course rather than just having “input” projected onto them.

Leaving space for teacher contributions every morning and giving different participants opportunities in pairs or threes to review the previous day’s work in the form of a poster, powerpoint or pictures is also good recycling. This might involve reviewing new language, new teaching ideas or memorable course moments.

“Filming was great, seeing myself in the videos and then using them for different purposes worked really well.”

III. Being inspired by and drawing on the participants and their culture

1. Giving teachers opportunities to introduce their own culture

On courses where there are teachers from different countries it is always good to create space for talking about their cultures. Singing evenings are good for this. I often work with teachers from the countries of ex-Yugoslavia and it is always heart-warming to see teachers singing songs together which they love and have in common. Cooking together can also be great for this.

For instance, this summer teachers showed us T-Shirts, dresses, flags and banknotes  from their different countries. ELT courses are not just about ELT, they are also about learning about each other and each other’s countries.
“The group is great, the people come from different countries so we can share experience from our countries and we can compare our countries”

2. Celebrating birthdays and anniversaries

If anybody has a birthday on the course, which they invariably do, it’s a good idea to acknowledge and celebrate it. On the last course I was on, the teachers organised a party for Ahmed from Morocco. It was a wonderful initiative and contributed greatly to the cohesiveness of the course. Other anniversaries might also be referred to such as July 4th and the birthdays of famous people.

“We celebrated Ahmed’s birthday with his host, John. His home made birthday cake was so delicious.”

IV. Better communication between tutors and course participants alike

1. Noticing teachers’ moods and responses to the course

On any course there are different ages, levels of English and levels of engagement. Some people experience the course as more tiring and others won’t be feeling good for whatever reasons at any given moment and some might be struggling with being away from home. We don’t need to know everything but we need to be attentive to how people are feeling and respond appropriately.

Making an effort to spending an equal amount of time with people might be a part of this. Obviously tutors will get on better with some people but at the end of each day checking the list of teachers and seeing who you have spent time with is likely to help you in deciding who to give more attention to at future “in-between” moments.

There isn’t enough time on a summer school to go through Tuckman’s group cycle of forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning but there is forming and adjourning, and there may be a moment of storming where resolution of group conflict might be necessary.

“I would say your ‘every person matters philosophy’ works brilliantly as each person in the group feels rewarded and supported”

2. Communicating and co-operating with other course tutors

Regular communication with other course tutors about the content and process of the course is crucial. Course participants need to see that tutors work well together and misunderstandings, which always occur between tutors, need to be talked through. Even tutors who have a very similar concept of how summer schools should be run will need to work through conflict and it is vital that time is found for this. Some element of team teaching can contribute to this.

3.The use of people’s mother tongues

Giving teachers space to speak their own languages is obviously necessary, it can be tiring speaking English all the time. Some teachers might feel excluded from conversations if they do not share the other teachers’ mother tongue, so intervening can be helpful, but the teachers often realize this themselves.

“There is only one thing that I’m sorry about which is that some people use their mother tongue quite a lot. I don’t think it’s appropriate to do this in a multicultural environment where English should be spoken and used.”

4. Socialising with the teachers between and outside sessions

Knowing when to leave teachers alone and when to engage with teachers in coffee breaks, at meal times or on excursions can be important. No tutor is the same and some tutors love going off with teachers and having a smoke while others like being quiet in the classrooms, gathering strength for the next session. What I do feel though is that being generous with your time and being available for teachers outside the sessions is one of the responsibilities of being on a summer school. On residential courses a willingness to stay up late might also be desirable! On two Serbian summer schools I remember us offering late night films for those who were interested.

The social aspects of summer courses can be just as important as the pedagogical aspects and a willingness to join in these activities by tutors and course participants contributes to a cohesive fun summer experience. For instance, I once saw a great pub quiz by Philip Kerr, and Verissimo Toste did a brilliant illustrated talk on his visit to Mozambique. Success of the evening activities usually depends on audience participation and interaction and doing a quiz at the end which draws on the course itself is perfect for that as well as being learner-centred and a good review of the whole course. As one of the quiz activities I have sometimes used pictures of the teachers showing a bit of tongue or necklace  from which their identity should be guessed.

“The pub quiz was brilliant, full of good ideas, highly competitive and in a really nice atmosphere. The ‘Picture Quiz’ was just great! Really motivating, bringing people closer to each other. I will try it with my new class after coming back from our class trip at the end of August. Thank you for organising this, it was great FUN!”

5. Providing proper closure to courses

Having ceremonial beginnings and endings gives a satisfactory sense of both accomplishment and closure. Some courses fizzle out as people drift away without proper endings. I’ve found creating group posters which capture the essence of a course effective in this. As an activity, teachers can then vote on the best poster.

This summer, Uwe Pohl, my co-tutor, made coloured cards for teachers with their names on each one. Each teacher drew a card with somebody else’s name on it and they were invited to write a gift for them and say why they were giving it. It was a lovely activity and many people were very moved by what people had given them when they read it out to the whole group. I was given a picture of Ukrainian storks with “Made in Ukraine” written on it, as I had worn a “Made in Poland” storks T-shirt. The teacher had noticed this about me and thought I’d like it as a present. I did!

If there are certificates to be given out, tutors might share this task, as well as singing a song, having a drink and sharing a few nibbles. It is the end of the summer school but it won’t be the end of people’s newly found friendships or even professional co-operation. Creating appropriate channels to share both personal and professional concerns will extend the summer school experience and keep precious memories alive and keep people in contact with each other. This might be done on Facebook or another internet site.

Final Thoughts

Working on summer schools is one of the most satisfying professional experiences that I have had throughout my career as a teacher trainer and I am still in touch with people who were on summer schools I taught on 15 years ago. It’s good to go the extra mile and be 100% immersed in the summer school experience. I’d like to end with a comment from one of the teachers which I received inscribed in a book, “The Still Point” by Amy Sackville.

Dear Mark, It’s difficult to capture in words what this course has given to me. During these days I felt like being ‘at the still point of the turning world’. Being with you all was a really exceptional and inspiring experience. Thank you. Barnstaple, 23rd July 2011.

And finally the sea and in particular the Atlantic Ocean is very special for teachers from Central Eastern Europe and being by the sea and reflecting on its role in British society and British history is a key ingredient of SOL courses in Devon as you can see in the responses of these teachers from Serbia and Croatia in the video.

How not to be an alien

The linguistic,cultural and educational benefits of learning English abroad.

When I arrived in England I thought I knew English. After I’d been here an hour I realised that I did not understand one word. In the first week I picked up a tolerable working knowledge of the language and the next seven years convinced me gradually but thoroughly that I would never know it really well, let alone perfectly. This is sad. My only consolation being that nobody speaks English perfectly.

These were the words of the famous Hungarian Mikes György or George Mikes in English from his little book “How to be an Alien” In it he describes his observations of both the English language and the culture he encountered as a journalist when he was there as a young man. In order to write his little book he kept a diary of all the interesting little things he noticed and then turned them into a kind of “What are the English like as seen by a Hungarian”. While the book is fairly dated now it is still an entertaining read and can be a good springboard for discussing how we get to know languages and cultures better.

My own formative experiences of getting to know other countries and cultures

I have often wondered how I myself got into languages and travelling and I can point to two very formative experiences that I had, one at the age of 10 and the other at the age of 16.

In the 1930’s cruises for schoolchildren were pioneered in Britain using troopships that were not used during the summer and in 1967 for the price of £29 then, I was lucky enough to take part in one of these educational experiences. At sea, on the way to Norway we had lessons about where we were going to in classrooms on board ship and when we were in Norway, after being on land all day, in the evenings we wrote up our logs or diaries recording our experiences when we weren’t enjoying Norwegian folk dancing.

For all of us it was the first experience of foreign travel and the educational value was considerable,  we were exposed to history, geography, other religions, bits of Norwegian, the fact that there was another currency, and on some trips, to Egypt for example, children witnessed terrible poverty leading sometimes to life-changing attitudes towards life and the world.

We went in May during term time. I’d love to know now who organised it and how many schools were contacted about the scheme. I went to a little primary school where we had a fairly even mixture of children from working-class and middle-class backgrounds.

I was only 10 when I went on the M.S. Devonia to Norway and was introduced to Norwegian stave churches and outdoor markets. It was the first time I saw live fish in a tank for sale in Bergen and we were also taken to the composer Edvard Grieg’s grave and his summer residence. It was my first trip “abroad” if you don’t count Wales, and the first time I was made aware of another culture and language.

My German experience

At the age of 16 I had the good fortune to spend 10 weeks in two West German families and went to school there and got to know a very different school culture from the one I had been used to, without school uniforms and “sitzenbleiben”, a strange idea for me, that if you didn’t get the necessary marks you had to “remain sitting” and do the whole year again.

In the families I stayed in I saw a dishwasher, a breadcutting machine  and an ITT cassette recorder for the first time, as well as being told to comb my hair properly before breakfast and take my shoes off when I entered the house.

“The families I was staying were both well-off, one a “Zeit reading” forester and the other an architect. I was wowed by machines to cut bread and an ITT cassette recorder. The daughter of the family, Daniela, had got an ABBA tape and the Swedish group had just won the Eurovision song contest with Waterloo. I was so jealous, not of the bread machine but of the cassette recorder. At home we’d only got one of those reel to reel things and this ITT machine looked so cool.

These experiences were the most formative experiences of my earlier years and they raise the question of how we can create experiences for young people which involve engagement with other cultures, learning about them and which in turn potentially lead to a better understanding of your own culture.

With the German experience, I came back not only much better at German, but much more motivated to learn more German. It also whet my appetite for travel abroad in general and I think I can safely say I would never have gone on to study languages at university without that experience. It was a very influential period of my life. On returning my German teacher remarked in my school report: “His sojourn in Germany has added a new dimension to his German studies.”

The role of ethnography in organising trips abroad

Bronislaw Malinowski, who was born in Krakow, is known as the founder of social anthropology. He is also remembered as the father of the functionalist school of anthropology as well as for his role in developing the methods of anthropological fieldwork. Malinowski is famous for his studies conducted among the Trobriand Islanders whose marriage, trade, and religious customs he studied extensively.

We owe a lot to Malinowski and the advantage of an ethnographic approach is that it combines the analytical and the experiential (or the cognitive and the affective). “The ethnographer is participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for a period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting whatever data are available .” (M. Hammersley & P. Atkinson)

We can encourage students and children to do exactly the same thing when they are away somewhere on trips, even trips within their own countries. An application of ethnography and a good teacher can help students to get the most out of language learning and cultural experiences by equipping them with the techniques, support and encouragement necessary for turning a more passive tourist experience into one where they begin to understand the other country, their own country and themselves better.

Aims of organising classes which prepare students for a trip abroad

Increasingly, it is becoming more possible to take students to Britain for short periods and the value of structuring these experiences in order to maximise the learning is enormous. 15 years ago I supervised a student dissertation in the Czech Republic of somebody who took a group of young teenagers to Britain. She saw fieldwork as an integral part of the trip and before the students went she organised 8 preparatory classes beforehand. The aims of the 60-minute sessions were:

* to get to know each other better, to work on building the group and to set up a good working atmosphere (students of  different ages and from different classes were asked to work in groups or pairs that were often changed).

* for the teachers to find out how much the students already know about Britain to be able to work with them on that basis.

* to work on a variety of topics about different aspects of life in Britain (using photographs, articles, magazines for  young British people, extracts of films and documentaries and maps.

* to get the students to think about the same aspects in the Czech Republic and to get them used to consciously make comparisons between the two cultures, as one of the  techniques used for observing and analyzing the target culture.

* to get them used to the habit of keeping diaries (writing a  diary about the seminars, adding pictures or newspaper articles about things concerning Britain).

* to practise doing interviews, helping them with thinking  about the questions they might be interested in finding out once they had the chance to talk to British people.

The three following quotes are from three of the children who were asked about the pre-trip classes during the visit to Britain.

Johana (14): “During the seminars I learnt that I do not have to worry about speaking.”

Petra (15): “My father also liked the idea of seminars. So, he decided to give me the money to go to Britain. We had seminars with our teachers and we had a diary and wrote there what we think.”

Barbora (13): “I did not know about ethnic minorities living in Britain before the classes we had before we went to Britain and now I know and I can ask people here about them.”

While in Britain students were encouraged to keep their diaries, writing down what they were doing, what they saw, who they managed to talk to, what they thought of it and how they felt. Sticking pictures, tickets or drawing into their diaries were welcomed. Every evening there was a 30-minute ‘diary-time’ to note the interesting things they had noticed both linguistically and culturally.

Lenka (15) evaluated the activity: “I have never kept a diary before. I like it, I write what I want.” “On the way to the Victorian Pier, which was our next destination, we saw a ‘lollipop lady. She is a woman and she has got a big sign ‘stop’ and she stands in the middle of the road when children want to cross the road and she stops the cars.”

One of the visits to a school Zdenek describes his feelings in a very imaginative way: “In the morning we visited their assembly. I felt very embarrassed, because all children were wearing uniforms, only our group ordinary clothes.” This is an example of where a child decentres and becomes more aware of their own culture, not so much as an alien but somebody who can distance themselves from their own culture.

My experience with working with Central and Eastern European teachers over the summer

Last summer I worked with two groups of teachers from 12 different countries mostly in Central and Eastern Europe in Barnstaple with SOL (Sharing One Language), an organisation founded by Grenville Yeo in 1991 to facilitate more educational experiences both ways between Central and Eastern Europe and Britain.

One of the courses was very much about giving teachers an ethnographic experience of England and getting them to think about how they might structure such an experience for their own teenage students. The teachers ended up talking to lots of people, including lifeguards on the beach, in order to find out more about the local community and the values and beliefs under the cultural iceberg which go beyond what is observable. These structured tasks slowly built up the teachers’ confidence in talking to people and deepened their understandings of the culture in which they were immersed for the 10-12 day period. These were some of the final comments by Alena from Slovakia in the evaluation relating to the usefulness of the activities we had done on the course.

“Talking to people to learn about the local environment, habits, jobs (like the lifeguards). Talking to people to find out what local or national institutions do like the National Trust and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Asking people real life questions such as directions. If I brought my students I’d exploit the time mainly for talking and using English in everyday conversations.”

It can be very useful to get students to ask simple questions like: “What’s the time?” and “How do you get to…” over and over again, so that they hear different variations and accents, all of which contributes to building up their confidence. And of course one of the important aspects of being abroad is to take photographs not only of the famous sights but of signs and unusual things, all of which can be a rich source of debate and language

learning.

This year I am doing these courses again and on one of the days we will be visiting an art exhibition in Torquay. How many times have you seen groups of teenagers in galleries, bored by the whole experience waiting to get out of the gallery and not enjoying the visits at all? Art offers enormous opportunites for linguistic, cultural and educational development in young people but sometimes we fail to exploit the learning potential in these experiences by not structuring the visits in a way which leads to more engagement on the part of the students with interesting tasks, worksheets and projects in general. This is one of the issues we will be discussing on our visit to the Devon Riviera, together with an exploration of Agatha Christie and her life!

In 1998, Uwe Pohl (the guy who I will be working with on our fieldwork course in Devon next week) and I took a group of Hungarian school teachers to Britain to meet lots of people, to take photographs and to get a deeper view of British society with the aim of developing materials back in Hungary and an approach to language learning which is more ethnographic and focused on the community than behaviouristic. We ended up writing a book called “Zoom In”, the aim of which in part was to get students to be both researchers of culture and language and not just behaviouristic language learners. It is based on a thoughtful, cognitive approach to language learning and one which explicity compares the culture the students/teachers come from with British culture in search of deeper understandings, an understanding of cause and effect and a more empathetic view of the world in general.

Typical field work tasks such as exploring portmanteau words with host families

One of the little tasks I will be getting the teachers to do next week will be to explore the word “staycation”. Portmanteau words are a lot of fun, Lewis Carroll developed them, James Joyce turned them into a fine art across languages in Finnegans Wake and they are a characterisic of the changing face of the English language, (e.g. blog, glog, webinar). With “staycation”  it will be good to find out from different people how they would define the word and what they think of it. If it’s used, who uses it? Is it used more in written or spoken English? Is it used more by working-class or middle class people? Is it used more in some regions rather than others? It should be a lot of fun. Curiosity for and exploration of other languages is one of the delights of learning about the world and it is our job,as language teachers, to develop and encourage that same curiosity in our students.

An unforgettable experience

All in all in terms of developing motivation, an ethnographic trip to another country can be an invaluable step in changing somebody’s life for the better, it certainly was for me when I went to Norway and West Germany. I was helped not to be an alien but how to participate in our common European culture in a more equal way and in a way in which I wasn’t saying because things weren’t British it didn’t mean they were worse. I stopped wondering why people drive on the “wrong” side of the road a long time ago! At the age of 16 I was taken to the border which divided East and West Germany.

“ Two years after the wall in Berlin was built in 1961, a tower was built in Bodesruh where my host family took me. From the top you could see miles into GDR territory. At the foot of the tower there was a map of the old pre-Second World War Germany, which was later to be partly dismantled, removing the parts that now belong to Poland and the Soviet Union.

Growing up in Wolverhampton, there was no real awareness of frontiers being moved or anger at having lost territories in the past. I had never met anyone who was either angry about or suffering from the lost British territories of the Indian sub-continent. I didn’t know families who had been divided by borders as I became aware of living close to the East/West German border. The day I went up that tower nobody was there to watch me in the way that the world watched when J. F. Kennedy spoke from the balcony of the Schöneberg town hall in West Berlin on June 26th 1963, 11 years earlier. For me though, this was a life-changing experience, although I didn’t realise it at the time.

I hadn’t been aware of the division of Europe, I’d given up History at school at the age of 14 and somehow I felt uneasy about what I was peering into from the top. Walls and fences cut through dense forest and marked the border between East and West.

East Germany was not a part of my families’ world any more but somehow, though, after peering over what some people called the Iron Curtain that day it had become part of mine. For a young guy  just turned 17, that landmark was as important as anything that I had seen in my time away from England so far. It bothered me. 6 years later I found myself living in the GDR as a student in Rostock on the Baltic coast.

If we can structure experiences for our students that challenge their existing ways of seeing the world and motivate them to learn English more then we might achieve more in ten days than in a whole term’s work. Going abroad changed my life for ever and without that experience I certainly wouldn’t be doing the course in Devon next week in the way that I will be doing it and I certainly don’t feel like an alien here in Hungary now!

We’re all going on a summer holiday, although it’s still the case that most people in the world don’t have holidays:(

It’s June 26th today and many people will be packing up for summer now and finishing their courses. Just let me take this moment to say how much I’ve enjoyed writing the blog this year and through it and twitter I feel more connected to the ELT community worldwide than ever before. Thanks to everybody too who has made the time to read my posts.

One of the highlights of the year for me was using a flip camera to interview people at the ISTEK conference in Istanbul this year in the role of roving reporter, and next week in Devon I will be doing the same, interviewing local people to find out about their lives and to listen to the language that they use and encouraging our teachers to do the same.

Finally, Mikes György wrote “How  to be an Alien”, I certainly don’t feel like an alien in Hungary and I hope our teachers don’t feel like aliens in Devon next week, in the end what unites us is far more than what divides us and far more important than what makes us different.

A week tomorrow I will be swimming in the sea here. I wonder how many of the teachers will be joining me?