Learners are social beings who learn and develop best in a mutually supportive environment

developing language learnerbookcover

Last week I looked at the first of five propositions in Allwright and Hanks’s “The Developing Language Learner”.  These propositions are to do with how they would like learners to be treated by teachers.  The first one was about learners being unique individuals who learn and develop best in their own idiosyncratic ways. The second one is about the social context of the classroom. While they acknowledge that “learning alone” might be attractive for some people, they claim that most people seem to enjoy being in a learning group and the environment is likely to be more productive because of the mutual support such a group can provide.

My interest in the social context of language learning is that classrooms are the reality for most people in the world who learn English and drawing on everything that they offer for language learning might create more memorable learning opportunities and a place where both students and teachers actually enjoy spending time.

In 1984 Allwright wrote an influential article “Why don’t learners  learn what teachers teach?” and developed a view of classrooms which was less to do with one to one relationships between language items that are taught and then learned or not learned and more to do with learning opportunities.

“I believe it helps if we look at language lessons as co-produced events in which all the participants are simultaneously involved in the management of interaction and, ipso facto, in the management of their learning. Following this line of thought, we can look upon language lessons as sets of learning opportunities, some deliberate but many incidental, all created through the necessary processes of classroom interaction” Allwright 1984

If learning happens as a result of the interaction between people in the classoom then it means that the social aspects of how people work together in class are crucial to what is available to be learned.  Most people agree that asking questions about things you don’t understand is a good learning strategy, yet probably due to a fear of public humiliation or loss of face or embarrassment learners very rarely ask questions.  Cherchalli in Algeria in 1988 quoted a learner who said: “Sometimes I feel like asking the teacher a question, but just realising that perhaps the rest of the class understand I hesitate.”

This is a good example  of social factors inhibiting good learning and teachers are likely to gain greater insights into classroom practices by trying to understand why it is that students don’t talk in class  at specific moments instead of always urging them to participate orally. In fact, allowing people to sometimes remain silent instead of reprimanding them for not participating might lead to more oral participation in the future. If students sense that we notice and realise that they have other things on their mind, or aren’t feeling well  they are likely to respond more actively on other occasions.

Of course, making “why is it that some students are sometimes somewhat shy to speak in class”  (that’s a lot of s’s)  a topic to talk about might also lead to more classroom talk.   If it is not only the teacher but also the students who have an understanding of how social factors inhibit what might be pedagogically more appropriate everybody is likely to benefit.  And with learners who are still at a level where this is difficult in English, in monolingual contexts or near monolingual contexts, why not do it in L 1. Hopefully this will lead to a more supportive learning environment in the classroom.

How else can we develop this mutually supportive learning environment in the classroom? Jill Hadfield has some  activities  in her “Classroom Dynamics” (1992) book, including this one

classroom dynamics

where she gets students to fill in a questionnaire about contributing to a group discussion including questions such as: Did you contribute any ideas? Did you encourage anyone else to contribute ideas? Did you remain silent? Did you interrupt anyone or shout them down? Is there any way you could help the discussion to go better?

Discussing these things acknowledges that learning is mediated and shaped by the social context of the classroom and can potentially contribute to a better learning environment and more opportunities for more people to learn.

In an IATEFL online discussion on class-centred teaching in December 2008 Simon Gieve commented:

“It seems to me that one of the most important things a teacher has to do is to create a learning community in which they not only create wide open channels of communication about the progress of a class as a learning community from learners to themselves, but also create a willingness between learners to act as learning partners. This is not so much about being nice and friendly, but being professional about their role as learners.”

simonandines'sbook

Getting students to think of themselves as becoming “learning partners” for themselves and for the rest of the classroom group might be encouraged by the  kind of task that Jill Hadfield is suggesting with her questionnaire. For me it is about getting people to have a more generous attitude about helping everybody to learn better. All of this is related to recognising both the social and pedagogical aspects of the classroom,  being sensitive to existing relationships within the classroom but at the same time encouraging learners to be more responsible for creating a better learning environment for everybody.

In practise this might involve teachers saying things like:

“It’d be good to give other people a chance to talk, wouldn’t it? and

“You might not agree with what Andi said but let’s listen to what she’s saying and then talk about it afterwards”

or ”  It’s not very nice to laugh at David like that just cos he’s made that mistake, is it?”

It would also involve the learners themselves saying things like:

“shhh, can you listen to what Petra is saying  instead of talking to each other in Hungarian (or whatever language)”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a student in the class saying something like this, both linguistically and socially? In fact the language that students learn in the  more active management of their own classrooms and the negotiation of what happens there is the very language that they need to be more sensitive and effective communicators in English.

Finally another dimension to this has been documented by Van Lier in “From Input to Affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological perspective” (2000)

…an ecological approach to language learning avoids a narrow interpretation of language as words that are transmitted through the air, on paper, or along wires from a sender to a receiver. It also avoids seeing learning as something that happens exclusively inside a person’s  head. Ecological educators see language and learning as relationships among learners and between learners and the environment.”

This echoes Earl Stevick’s claim that the most interesting things that go on in classrooms go on inside and between learners (1976)

earlstevick

and relates nicely to Allwright’s concept of learning opportunities.

In 1985 Mike Breen encouraged us to see classrooms as coral gardens drawing on Malinowski’s metaphor for describing the culture of the Trobriand Islands. He saw classrooms as essentially social encounters with a distinct culture of their own and by no means artificial places which just prepare people for “real” life elsewhere.  If we see second language acquisition much more socially contextualised and attach more attention to the social processes going on in classrooms then we might create the mutually supportive environment that Allwright and Hanks believe to be desirable.

In fact, one might argue that at a time when more and more time in spent online,  classrooms have a very important social function in teaching people to listen carefully to other people, to respect other people, to co-operate with other people and to teach people to be an active participant in and value a mutually supportive environment as well as, in our case, to help learners to learn English.

In terms of quality of life in the classroom this is all to do with living life in the here and now, investing time and effort and thinking into making the classroom a place we look forward to being in and in which students feel they belong to and recognising that life in the classroom can be just as rich and enjoyable as being anywhere else!

“The ideal of using the present simply to get ready for the future contradicts itself. It omits, and even shuts out, the very conditions by which a person can be prepared for the future. We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything”

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John Dewey. 1963  Experience and Education MacMillan London, quoted in Legutke, M & Thomas, H. Process and Experience in the Language Classroom Longman New York 1991

Any thoughts on all of this? Feel free to comment!