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?

Classrooms as Coral Gardens

One of the  inspirations for this blog is an article written in 1985 by Mike Breen entitled ” The Social Context for Language Learning – A neglected situation”. It first appeared here:   Breen, M. (1985b). The social context for language learning – a neglected situation? Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 7, 135-158. coralgardens

In it was a central question addressed to the teacher: ” In what ways might I exploit the social reality of the classroom as a “resource” for teaching the language.”

It is, I think, a very different starting point from looking at classrooms than from the role of the coursebook and materials in general , the behaviour of the teacher, the teacher’s personality, or any prepared input that the teacher brings in for the learners to work on. It potentially challenges the way in which we usually prepare for lessons and it also challenges simplisitc relationships between what we might want to teach and what we hope gets learned.

Metaphors are of course very powerful tools in teacher education and I have spent many a teacher development session getting students to conceptualise how they see classrooms and people have come up with trees, ships, plants, swimming pools, race tracks, mountains, roads and many others.

Scott Thornbury had this to say about metaphors back in 1991.

“Images – and the metaphors that help identify them – far from trivialising the search for alternative approaches, offer teacher educators a valuable tool: they are a powerful – perhaps the most powerful – force for change and should be of critical interest to those whose business is educational change.”

(Thornbury, S. (1991) Metaphors we work by: ELT and its metaphors. ELT Journal, 45 (3).)

The coral gardens metaphor is one which has followed me around since 1991 when I was first introduced to it in Lancaster on my MA and one I continue to use. It resonates in the work of Rose Senior, Leo Van Lier and Dick Allwright and has a central role to play in an “Exploratory Practice” model for teacher development.  It comes from the anthropologist  Malinowski’s work in the Trobriand Islands where he spent time with the islands and realised that you cannot understand a culture by just learning the language. Similarly, you can’t understand a language classroom by just looking at the surface classroom discourse.

malinowski2I think the reason I like the coral gardens metaphor so much is not only to do with how much I enjoy swimming underwater, although that may be a part of it, but because it invites us to explore the depth, complexity and underlying meanings of the classroom much more fully than just looking at what is on the surface.

I’m also interested in the way in which this metaphor might be useful for busy, overworked, underpaid teachers, mostly women, to take a fresh look at their classrooms, to step out of the usual routines and to look at what goes on in classrooms in the same way that somebody from another planet might arrive on earth and explore what we do. The important thing with this is that it’s not about teachers becoming academic researchers with rigorous academic tools, it’s just about developing a way of trying to explore understanding what happens in classrooms with our students which may lead to more engagement and involvement on the part of the learners and in the long run better language learning. What do you think?

This is an extract from Mike Breen’s article, I hope you like it and can identify with it:

“A proposal that the classroom could be perceived as coral gardens may be initially reacted to as rather odd.  The metaphor derives from Malinowski’s classical studies of Trobriand island cultures, in particular those investigations he described in Coral Gardens and Their Magic. I offer the metaphor because it entails three requirements for research devoted to classroom learning. First, in order to understand the process of learning within a human group, our investigations are necessarily an anthropological endeavour. Second, the researcher should approach the classroom with a kind of anthropological humility. We should explore classroom life initially as if we knew nothing about it. And third, it is more important to discover what people invest in a social situation than it is to rely on what might be observed as inherent in that social situation. Just as gardens of coral were granted magical realities by the Trobriand islanders, a language class – outwardly a gathering of people with an assumed common purpose – is an arena of subjective and intersubjective realities which are worked out, changed and maintained. And these realities are not trivial background to the tasks of teaching and learning a language. They locate and define the new language itself as if it never existed before, and they continually specify and mould the activities of teaching and learning. In essence, the metaphor of classroom as coral gardens insists that we perceive the language class as a genuine culture and worth investigating as such.”

I was reminded of these things again last September in an IATEFL Teacher Development  SIG discussion group on technology,  when Nik Peachey was writing about not being “a fan of the classroom” and saying that the classroom is “totally artificial”.

This is what Nik said when commenting on one of  the original dogme principles as developed by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury.

“I’ve never been a great fan of the classroom and that’s one of the things I’ve often found puzzling about Dogma and it’s translation to teaching……The classroom is totally artificial and constructed rather like the film studio set and certainly isn’t the ‘on location’ where genuine communication takes place for genuine purposes.”  (Nik Peachey http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ttedsig/message/3690)

In the context of the coral gardens metaphor, I actually think that seeing the classroom as a real place with a real culture of its own is likely to help us to draw on its richness and complexity  as a valuable resource for  learning to take place and not just language learning . If we don’t believe in the classroom as a place where interesting and useful things happen, is it likely that our students will?

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”

process and experience in the languageclassroom_

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!