By Barbara Dieu · October 14, 2009
In his post Dogme and Identity, Luke Meddings, one of the writers of the co-authored Delta Development Blog, points to the present excess of standardized course materials, content and technology we are exposed to in ELT. The 2007 article The Autumn of the Multitaskers in the Atlantic, while not specifically dealing with English teaching, also illustrates well the cognitive overload and haste we have to deal with presently and warns us against their dumbing down effects.
In both situations there is little room for slow conversations and the emergent language which arises from the learners’ own interests and shapes their evolving identity in the foreign language.
At Dekita, we have brought up the need for peer-centered learning and questioned the forced standardized content from the strict curriculum and the cookie-cutter model of the standard pre-packaged coursebook topics.
How can we guide our students to acquire what they need so they can express their thoughts, share them with others, and negotiate meaning in self-directed ways? How do we move from dependence towards greater independence and inter-dependence? How do we adopt a more process-oriented approach and interact in a more open and decentralized fashion which allows for self-directed participation, informal communication, inter-cultural and inter-linguistic development?
Is it possible to make time within your class to slow the pace and allow for different meaningful processing experiences, during which understanding and language are negotiated and appropriated individually or are our courses becoming devoid of meaning and as as queer as a clockwork orange?
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Sasa
wrote on October 15, 2009:
Hi Bee,
I enjoyed reading your post here. I think many of us teachers breathe havily in our strict curriculum classes. And our students as well. We don’t have (don’t take?) time and energy to question our teaching practice. But we should, and then also search for answers and share recipes that work with colleagues – do what we can to bring top-down prescriptions closer to real life.
This here is my new group’s view of learning English http://rostilj.blogspot.com/2009/10/english-and-english-learning.html
‘What do you remember from your English classes best? A view from the window.’ Smells like clockwork orange, doesn’t it?
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Elizabeth Hanson-Smith
wrote on October 15, 2009:
Hi Bee—Glad you are back into blogging!
You ask the important questions, e.g., “How can we guide our students to acquire what they need so they can express their thoughts, share them with others, and negotiate meaning in self-directed ways?”
But are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater when we abandon the standardized content (or “strict curriculum”), which is, after all, the accumulated wisdom of what students need to know of and about a language?
I’ve always felt confident enough in my own teaching to read the standardized (required) text, but make it my own by using project-based learning, authentic communications among students and with the world outside the classroom, meaningful activities, etc. That to me has always been the real job of the teacher—how to apply what we know about language learning to the texts we must use.
And eventually, we usually can get input into the kinds of texts we will use.
So I wouldn’t throw out the “pre-packaged coursebooks” entirely, but I would use them creatively.
Thanks for starting this discussion.
—Elizabeth H-S
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Barbara Dieu
wrote on October 16, 2009:
“the accumulated wisdom of what students need to know of and about a language?”
What do the students need to know? Learning any language, even our own one, is a lifelong affair. What students of a foreign language need to know about the language varies according to their own objectives and contexts.
I do not think that we need to throw out our accumulated wisdom out but no need to throw it at them either by forcing them into the publishers’ or certification mold and this is what the pre-packaged courses do. These courses and materials are, without any doubt, practical, efficient but they are not contextualized and our attention is diverted from the learner’s needs towards the content to be covered, the activities, the visual aids, the technology, the deadlines and the results. Learners are instructed on how to best perform in very precise circumstances.
So the common experience is that many study a language to pass a test and gain a certificate, to do well in an interview, when in reality the best way to learn it and build identity in the foreign language is by experimenting with it, perfecting it by plunging into situations, which more often than otherwise have not been covered by the books or in a classroom situation. Social media are, in this regard, a bonus and may allow for emergence.
Most of my students complain they are not interested in the content that comes in the books, CDs or “educational” material. It’s artificial, “smells of clockwork orange” as Sasa mentioned, even when teachers try to enliven it with activities, games and projects. Not that I totally discard them, however, there is a human dimension that has been totally neglected. As Luke mentions in the Dogme and Identity post, we need more conversations than performances.
I believe that the wisdom we have gained from our own experience and learning can be used for suggesting courses of action, guiding learners into how to better express themselves individually, according to what they want and have to say.
Not an easy task, as many of us have not found our voices either and are constantly shaping and reshaping our multiple identities and “appartenances”.
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