1) Passionate as I am about classrooms, I don’t know how good they are for language learning. Learning is essentially a private matter, although in classrooms all learning is meditated through the social context of the classroom. It may be that the social factors are so strong that the things we would like to happen pedagogically don’t actually happen because social factors like maintaining relationships and not losing face are far more important.
2) Enthusiastic as I am about teaching, I don’t know what the relationship is between teaching and learning. Allwright wrote an article in 1984 about why is it that learners don’t learn what teachers teach. Many things can get in the way of what gets taught and what is available to be learned at any given moment.
3) Convinced as I am of the need to get trainee teachers to read and discuss books and articles written by leading methodologists in our field, I am not sure that doing this in a pre-planned linear way, working through topics such as teaching reading, writing, listening, speaking, vocabulary, classroom management, testing, etc. is the best way.
Having experienced students’ reactions to reading ELT blogs and meeting ELT professionals at our IATEFL-Hungary conference last year, I think a better way might be to initiate my students into the profession by alerting them to all the exciting things that are going on in the blogosphere and twittersphere, encouraging them to take part in the discussions and helping them to meet, both online and in person, all the generous ELT people that are around at the moment. Inevitably this will be much more random and immediate than traditional methodology courses and will involve a degree of personal contact with methodologists that was never possible before.
4) As excited as I get about going to conferences, and I’ve been to more than my fair share in Central and Eastern Europe over the last 20 years, I am no longer sure about what the relationship is between attending conferences and the overall improvement in language teaching in the particular country that a conference goer comes from. You often see the same faces at conferences and while I’m convinced that you pick up lots of good ideas and get lots of energy from conferences, what I’m less sure about it how this gets passed on “back in the schools”. Organising and arranging for teachers to observe each other teaching and talking about it afterwards, or arranging classes to be filmed and then watching the recordings afterwards, both at a Ministry level and locally, (top down and bottom up,) might be a more effective tool for teacher development for many teachers.
5) Try as I do to be as authentic as I can with students in the classroom, I am longer sure to what extent sharing personal information and eliciting personal information from the students is helpful for creating the kind of atmosphere which is conducive to good learning. Too much personal stuff is obviously no good but too little might be equally bad.
6) As much as I love methodology, I am no longer as sure as I was that the strong forms of communicative language teaching that I have been enthusiastic about for such a long time, or any particular methods for that matter, are better than others for language teaching. Some students will learn well regardless of the methodology, and it may be that methodology is mainly aimed at involving and giving support to those students who don’t have the advantages at home and who are not as rich as other students.
7) Believing as I do in using the English class to achieve not only linguistic but also cultural and pedagogical aims with students under the age of 18, I am no longer as confident as I was that a problem solving, cross-curricular, critical approach to language learning is effective with teenagers. Together with a group of Hungarian teachers, a German colleague and I wrote an intercultural coursebook which embraced these ideas but I now realise that materials in themselves aimed at achieving certain aims are by no means enough. Just taking students through a series of steps as laid out in a coursebook will not automatically lead to the aims that any particular coursebook writer had in their heads at the time they wrote it. And even if you work with the coursebook in a very creative way to develop those critical, problem solving skills there may be other things preventing you from doing so.
8) Interested as I am in applied linguistics, I don’t know how much of it in its present form really benefits classroom teachers. Much of applied linguistics research gets presented to other applied linguists at conferences around the world in forms that most classroom teachers are unable to digest or benefit from. I’ve always thought that we should take our lead from what teacher’s agendas are, rather than imposing our own research agendas on teachers and conducting experiments on them. Don’t get me wrong, I work with lots of good people who do excellent research but I just think we need to think more about the relationship between teachers and researchers.
Rod Bolitho, in a paper he gave to a 1984 Bologna conference organised by the British Council, argued that : “ In most countries, the power base of teacher education is clearly and firmly in universities and colleges of education. As long as this is the case, theories will always be handed down to teachers in training for them to wrestle with and interpret. They will always have to meet the theorists, applied linguists generally, on their territory and on their terms.”
9) In fact, I’m not sure,in secondary schools anyway, that the English class is an appropriate place where important issues such as career decisions, racism, climate change and caring about the world in general are best raised and discussed as carrier content for the learning of English. Ken Wilson has raised this on this blog.
“The fact of wanting to talk about these local and serious problems in the English class is something that has come up before. It begs the question of whether the students are getting the chance to air their feelings in their own language in other classes. I wonder if they are.”
Maybe this is what we should make sure happens in a more serious systematic way in another part of the curriculum and across the curriculum in the students’ own mother tongue. Might it not be that the English class is the place where we concentrate on the nuts and bolts of the language, the place where we explore how the language works, where we help students to learn how to learn, where the grammar and the functions of English become the focus?
This would be a difficult one for me as language teachers in schools have more freedom than any other subject teacher regarding the content, and potentially it’s a place for exciting and interesting things to happen, but if social factors inhibit people expressing their views on the more serious and controversial issues anyway, then why raise them? On the other hand, if our learners, as a group, express a keen interest in discussing a certain topic, fine by me!
10) Finally, when I did my one year Diploma in the Teaching of English Overseas PGCE in Manchester in 1984/5, I thought I knew how to teach and how learners learned. After doing my MA in ELT in Lancaster in 1991/2, I came out being very unsure about how learners learned English but more sure about being unsure. Nearly 20 years later I still don’t think I know how learners learn English in classrooms but I’m less bothered about that now. What I do know is that trying to get access to how learners define being in the classroom and what being in the English classroom might mean for them is likely to help us understand what happens in language classrooms better. And if we understand language classrooms better, we might become better teachers, and if we become better teachers our students might learn more… Or not. 🙂 Any thoughts on any of these 10 things?
A very interesting post – and very sobering too. I’m interested in following up the Allwright reference – does it refer to ‘The Importance of Interaction in Classroom Language Learning’ by any chance? If it is, do you happen to know if it’s been collected in a book anywhere?
yep, these are the references! I first came across them in 1991/2 on my MA course in Lancaster. Dick Allwright was my thesis supervisor.
Allwright, R.L. (1984a). The importance of interaction in Classroom Language Learning. Applied Linguistics, 5/2, 156-171
Allwright, R.L. (1984b). Why don’t learners learn what teachers teach?: the interaction hypothesis. In D. M. Singleton, & D. Little (Eds.). Language Learning in Formal and Informal Contexts. Dublin: Irish Association for Applied Linguistics. 3-18.
Hi Mark,
It is exciting to see all these issues in 1 place! I actually share a lot of these concerns 🙂 Let me comment on some of them.
3) As a trainee I think I did benefit from “working through topics such as teaching reading, writing, etc. in a pre-planned way”. We did the whole thing in a very practice-oriented way, put ourselves in the students’ place etc, but there was a logic in it and I’m glad that we did that. After this, however, randomness (in the elective methodology courses, etc) was great and spiced things up and opened new perspectives but without that solid foundation I think I would’ve been confused. But maybe that’s how I learn and others might benefit from other approaches.
6) I realized that a mixture of methods might be the best way to teach. Grammar-translation and drills can be as relevant as using free communicative activities in certain cases. Some students just cannot work well through co-operative activities and learn way better individually or if they can compete. I think we have to find the balance. I think our students should try a lot of different things.
I also believe that there are about 20% of students that will learn a lot no matter what you do, another 20% will learn nothing, no matter what you do, and there is that 60% for whom what happens in the classroom matters a great deal.
8) I think I feel the same way about applied linguistics. I’m afraid I learned way more from methodology classes, or ones under the diguise of being app-ling courses but that were very practical in fact. (And I don’t mind research and statistics, I like working with numbers, etc.)
7) and 9) I agree: the secondary school context changes a lot of things about teaching and learning, no wonder I dealt with that in my thesis 🙂 But kids do like discussing these things in the English class, and it can be very motivating for them. We do “concentrate on the nuts and bolts of the language”, but we often talk about things the students could talk about in Hungarian but they don’t necessarily get the chance to.
You just have to get to know your students, observe their reactions to certain methods and topics, and respond according to these observations. If you know your students, you will see if you come up with a topic they don’t want to talk about. And that can vary, I mean I don’t think there’s a formula that fits every group or every student.
And you have to accept that social relationships and not losing face will always go first for teenagers, and you can try to build on that (you basically have to be a genius to succeed in that, but hey :))
WOW. Any thoughts? Yes, like this was not the post for someone who is already in doubt about a lot of things/everything after 27 years of teaching to read?
I’ll just take on 1.) Classrooms may not be the only great place for language learning, but remove them and a lot of kids are never going to get started in a language. I have attempted to learn 5 languages in my life, and I only got anywhere with the 2 that I studied in a classroom.
I think our challenge as teachers is to get the classroom to be a springboard for all of the other ways students have at their disposal to reinforce their language learning, and a place where those experiences can be shared.
In a recent informal discussion with my students (post-secondary business school/college) almost all of them expressed the desire for more hours of language class in their curriculum, not fewer.
Very thought-provoking post, but don’t think yourself to death!
“Learning is essentially a private matter” : is it really ? part of it is private, yes, but we also learn from interaction, conversations and social events. All the more so when learning a foreign language : we learn through communicating with others, reading what other people wrote, listening to the radio other people made.
Hi Mark,
I’ve only been teaching twelve years, but I too have begun to think that learning is a magical process. There are so very many variables and what works here will not there. I agree with many of your observations… I dare not say in respectable circles that I don’t believe there is ONE METHOD; in the front lines… whatever works. That said there is a lot to be learnt from the discussions and writings past and present, though I am convinced that much of it does not move beyond the conference, publications, and higher education spheres. Some of the “methods” I have found key are an openness, daring, and a humility before the mystical process that is learning.
One more thought. One of the reasons I LOVE what I do is the fact that ELT allows me to explore together with my students anything and everything we want (meanwhile this learning thing seems to be happening). We DO talk about and discuss topics that are never mentioned or covered by those bound by a more “rigorous” curriculum.
All the best
Thank you for inviting me to this blog on Ken’s blog. I like many of the issues you point out, because they are quite thought-provoking. For number 7 and 9 issues, I am having my students learn about other cultures through global collaboration connections. In a ning, through Skype, and Voicethread we have connected with schools from various countries to speak English and learn about each other. The students enjoy this because they get to speak with other students their ages. It is more authentic and believable versus what they read or what I tell them. I kind of grouped this with 9 because in my area, racist attitudes exist for one of the groups we are connected with. I am hoping that by collaborating at a young age that my students will not grow up with the same stereotypes as the current generation.
Also, I believe that methodology largely depends on what the teacher is comfortable with and believes in. I believe the teacher’s attitude has a large impact on the student. If the teacher is forced into a certain methodology and does not find merit it in then many of the students will probably suffer from this. Moreover, a teacher becomes more confident if that teacher is trained in the methodology. Some methodology is forced upon a teacher and that is when trouble brews. Of course, this is entirely from my own experiences and observations.
Thanks for the reference Mark – that’s great.
Agi,
Interesting that you think that methodology matters for 60% of your students, if that is correct it means that it’s very important!
Your observation that “you have to accept that social relationships and not losing face will always go first for teenagers, and you can try to build on that.” Again, if that is correct then we need to give it high priority in all that we do in the classroom.
Thanks for your detailed and useful observations.
Betty,
Can’t agree with you more about this “Classrooms may not be the only great place for language learning, but remove them and a lot of kids are never going to get started in a language.”
It re-inforces what Agi was saying about how methodology matters for 60% of students in our classrooms. Classrooms are really important for giving people help, support and motivation and to create an interest in language teaching. We, as teachers, have a really important role to play in all of this.
Andrew,
good to hear from you, why do you think it is that “much of it does not move beyond the conference, publications, and higher education spheres.”? Is it anything to do with there not being proper structures within schools for interesting ideas to be passed on from enthusiastic teachers who, for whatever reason, do enjoy and have time for reflecting on their own practice? There is another angle to this, why should teachers constantly feel pressurised into updating their knowledge without the help and support that many people would need for this?
And Shelly, thanks for taking the time to comment. We haven’t met before but I enjoy reading your blog and tweets. Communicating with students in other countries is a fabulous way of widening our students horizons. I had the good fortune to spend 10 weeks in West Germany at the age of 16/7 and it had a huge impact on my openness to the world and of course led me to challenge many of the anti-German stereoypes I had grown up with in Britain.
How much of classtime do the students spend communicating with students in other countries?
And any methodology that is forced onto teachers is likely to lead to negative reactions.
Thanks to all of you for contributing to the discussion, we all benefit from it. I don’t think myself to death Betty but I do think it’s good to question what we do. I’ve been involved in ELT projects for many years and we are always expected to talk them up and say how many people we have influences and how much better everything is as a result of lots of money being spent and how much better students learn. A pause for critical reflection is never misplaced.
…being MUCH less experienced than you are..I, nevertheless, would like to comment on…
…social interaction in classroom and my ‘role’ as teacher: I’m sometimes at odds with myself, swaying between being ‘authentic’ (motivated, cherishing illusions, usually good-tempered…sometimes bad-tempered and tired, spontaneous, sometimes speaking English or Italian fluently…sometimes not!…often being confused or chaotic…) and ‘acting out’ my roles as teacher ‘appropriately’.
When? Every time my pupils blame me for being ‘too sympathetic’…every time they tell me that the reason for not participating or not doing their homework is that they do not stand in awe of me (THANK GOD!!!..why should they?!!!)… Are they mixing up anxiety with respect (in the sense of mutual esteem…?)
Every time I’m blamed by some colleagues for being too naive, too young, too… or I’m told to stop teaching English-lessons in English…or Italian-lessons in Italian (?)
but I would also like to comment on intercultural learning:…I’m sometimes at odds with myself..getting to grips with my own stereotypes, prejudices, my own lack of knowledge…my fear of losing face…with the high degree of frustration tolerance and patience I sometimes need for a vast number of discussions with pupils and colleagues.
…but, nevertheless, I still believe (hope) that it is worth raising discussions, having self-doubts and overcoming them, being tooooooo naive, toooooo authentic, involved…facing the fact that human knowledge (so mine TOO) is limited!!!…IF we want to encourage young people to gain a non-essential world-view, to gain media criticism, tolerance…to overcome xenophobic sentiments (promoted by politics…and also some teachers)
Well, I really appreciate your effort!!! You mentioned your intercultural course book…I would like to show you what can be found in other books (and how important – I think – it is that teachers are aware of the responsibility they carry!)
‘Do you think a child should be brought up with two cultures and two languages, or is it better for them to be assimilated into the country they live in?’ (out of the Austrian course book ‘ Work it out in English 3’)
I even don’t want to comment on this because it is not worth commenting!!!!!
I want to conclude with own experience: Dialogue between a teacher and pupil…At the end of a project I asked 16 year old teenagers if they ever had heard anything about other cultures in their language classes…
Pupil: Yes, in Latin!
Teacher: In Latin (?)
Pupil: Yes, we learnt something about the Romans and the Greeks…
Teacher: What exactly?…
Pupils: About wars
:)))
(intercultural learning…quo vadis?)
Hi Trixi,
thanks for your honesty in the first part, it aint easy is it? I guess all of us, either consciously or not, are always somewhere between being “authentic” and acting out more traditional roles. I tend to gravitate towards the former but can see situations when the latter might be more appropriate. I woudn’t be put off by some of your more conservative colleagues though.
On the second thing “I still believe (hope) that it is worth raising discussions, having self-doubts and overcoming them, being tooooooo naive, toooooo authentic, involved…facing the fact that human knowledge (so mine TOO) is limited!!!…IF we want to encourage young people to gain a non-essential world-view, to gain media criticism, tolerance…to overcome xenophobic sentiments”
Of course it’s worth doing these things Trixi, not to tell them about wars as you say but to get them to think about how to avoid them.
Your final examples aren’t very encouraging but hang in there and keep at it, if you believe in these things then you aren’t going to be happy in the classroom if you aren’t doing them and in present day Austria and Hungary there is a big need for this kind of teaching. Thanks for commenting!
I love the sincerity and warmth of your post. I came across it thanks to a RT on Twitter just now and, although it made me stay awake for a little longer than intended, I feel it was worth it! 🙂
You’re expressing similar doubts that I’ve been feeling in the position of an EFL teacher, not a teacher trainer yet.
Language learning, teaching and teacher training are intertwined in many mysterious ways, so it isn’t really surprising.
I felt I had more to say, but it needs a bit more time for these to settle in, so will only add thank you for expressing these personal doubts in such an honest and open way.
Marian
Looking for the author of one of some extracts in my “quotes to keep” file, brought me back to your numbers 1. & 5. about relationships in the classroom 🙂 Great food for though.
With my University students, I found that what works for us, is to establish that we are in a totally “post-modernist” situation
(as in the definition: a departure from modernism, characterized by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories.)
i.e. whatever we do, we all know that we are in an English class pretending to do what we are doing.
Like playing monoply, that doesn’t stop anyone getting involved in the game, but at the same time puts the language being used just hairbreath below the surface. (not to say, puts the language at the centre, which is in fact the case!)
It’s also very easy to “break the frame” with some rapid explanations in their L1 too.
Fundamentally, once I had grasped what post-modernism is (a style I really do not appreciate in the arts BTW!) it “liberated” my attitude in the classroom – bit of a parallel with dogme there m’thinks LOL
Oops sorry – missed the review-before-posting button 😉