Nagging doubts: Confessions of a teacher trainer. Ten things I don’t know or am not sure about any more in training teachers to teach English.

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?