P’s ELT Blog

The first time I ever taught a song to any of my students was in a small middle school in Dujiangyan, about 45 minutes drive from Chengdu, Sichuan province, in south west China. Me and my colleague Matt got up at about 7.30 in the morning and met the driver of a tiny minibus, who drove us there. He greeted us - always - with chocolate milk and a piece of the spongiest sponge cake you’ve ever seen.

Class began around 9.30. We had three classes before lunch, and one more after. My favourite class was the one right before the lunch break. The teacher always came to meet me in the teachers’ room before the class, and then went for lunch with us both after class. She always gave me loads of ideas about what I should teach, and encouraged me. She knew I was just an inexperienced, untrained teacher, but she knew also that I liked being in class and I loved the students, and that they liked me, too. I always tried to work on things that had been covered in their textbook - giving the students topics to chat about based on what they’d learned in the regular teacher’s class.

The teacher told me the topics they’d studied the week before, so I could prepare something to talk about. This particular week, I’d been told that the students had been learning about animals. I decided I would teach them to sing Simon and Garfunkel’s “At The Zoo”. Being inexperienced, I really didn’t realise it was going to be far too hard for these twelve and thirteen year olds. The night before class, I wrote down the lyrics and tried to simplify them a bit, but not nearly enough:

Someone told me
Its all happening at the zoo.

I do believe it,
I do believe its true.

Its a light and tumble journey
From the east side to the park;
Just a fine and fancy ramble
To the zoo.

But you can take the crosstown bus
If its raining or its cold,
And the animals will love it
If you do.

Somethin tells me
Its all happening at the zoo.

The monkeys stand for honesty,
Giraffes are insincere,
And the elephants are kindly but
Theyre dumb.
Orangutans are skeptical
Of changes in their cages,
And the zookeeper is very fond of rum.

Zebras are reactionaries,
Antelopes are missionaries,
Pigeons plot in secrecy,
And hamsters turn on frequently.
What a gas! you gotta come and see
At the zoo.

So I got into class that morning and sang the song for them. I am not a good singer and my voice got the students laughing. They liked the song and wanted to sing it, and I began to write the words down on the board for them (no photocopier for me in Western Sichuan). The students enthusiastically tried to sing along, but they kept turning around in their seats to look at the face of their Chinese English teacher, hoping for a better idea of how to pronounce these strange words, and what they meant - “Antelopes are missionaries” - what? I tried in vain but was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new words. The students, though, wouldn’t give up. I abandoned the first verse and we tried sing just the bits with the animals in. I changed a lot of the words to make them easier. The students were still chuckling at my dreadful voice (a voice which, a few weeks later at the same school, had another teacher in tears of laughter as I wailed my way through “Take me home, country roads” - I’d been asked to teach that one, it wasn’t my choice!), but smiling, also, as they played with these new words, imagined these new animals and the strange ideas they were connected to.

Of course the students knew, too, that I was asking too much of them - but they forgave me, unreservedly. Why? Probably because I smiled so much, just like they did. Because they knew that I loved to be with them and because I knew, too, that I was trying my best and it was just a mistake that the song was too hard. They limped to a semi- tuneful rendition of the animal bits, gave themselves a round of applause, and ran off for lunch. As usual, some of them shook my hand as they ran past me. There was always a couple of students who were incredibly polite, and stayed seated until I had left the room - one girl who seemed younger than the rest, who face was incredibly bright; and a boy, whose hair seemed too big for his head - they smiled always, even, as in this class, when I couldn’t help them to understand.

I don’t know whether that school is still standing, or whether it was destroyed in the earthquake. I have tried to find out; but nobody I’ve tried to get in touch with has replied to me. So I don’t know if those children survived. What’s almost for certain is that they will have lost, or seen injuries to, their friends, family, loved ones, as the earthquake brought down schools and houses all over Dujiangyan. Their homes may have collapsed; their beautiful town, with it’s UNESCO protected irrigation system and the beautiful temples and gardens I walked around one day after school, will in places be unrecognizable. So, maybe, will their school  - old, dilapidated, but livened up but the brightness of their faces, and their voices, as on the day when they struggled to learn that impossible song.

I’m not really one for sentiment; but it brought tears to my eyes when I saw the photographs of the dead bodies of the children of Dujiangyan.

I realise what I wrote below is not very practical, so I’ll expand on it a little bit.

My classes come in to the British Council twice a week. They squeeze in their lessons between parental responsibilities, work, being a good wife/husband/friend, studying other things (aside from learning English, IT is the one thing in Oman that everyone is trying to sign up for at present) etc. They have busy lives. Some classrooms only add to this busyness.  I think language classrooms should be an antidote.

How often does a group of similarly aged yet diverse group of people go and sit down in a room together for three hours, with no clear communicative purpose? People sit down for work meetings, to eat dinner, to talk to their childrens’ teachers; but an English class has only the purpose of assisting these people to learn English. Since English seems to be learned just as well through genuine communciation as through any other method, why not add a second purpose to this three hour session - to share experience and reflect on being human?

Again, I don’t wish to be taken for suggesting we make English classes philosophy lessons. A simple example: some time a few weeks ago, my Intermediate group and I discussed our Mums. It was a very simple conversation, with students in groups trying to define what their Mum’s meant to them, and defining what a mum “is”. But this simple conversation brought the class together. We got some very good language study out of it, but more importantly it created an atmosphere in class which I’ve never experienced before - an amazing closeness.

Another beautiful example has just been posted to the Webheads In Action yahoo group: teachers and students sharing stories, through YouTube, Voicethread, and this blog:

http://elearningctj.bloxi.jp/a/how-we-met-each-other/

about their own love stories. Something which surely every person, everywhere, has experienced the feeling of being ion love… so why don’t we use class time to talk about these things?

Conversations like these are easy to scaffold, and for me the key to turning them into top quality language learning exercises is making sure that the learners are given some sort of linguistic “squeeze”, so that they are producing interaction of higher, more native like quality than they would be capable of without a teacher. So you can say “OK, tell you stories again, but this time try to use these features of connected speech”. Or you can feed in some juicy words or phrases. Or a certain grammar structure. Or some discourse markers to signpost the story. It’s really very simple, I think…

So, language classrooms can be about moments of simple humanity like this - should they be? Let me know what you think.

With all the debate raging on the dogme group about Critical Applied Linguistics and the political and philosophical orientation of our teaching, I tuned in to ted.com and saw this wonderful video of Amy Tan, novelist, talking about the roots of her creativity:

What she said moved me tremendously, especially in that moment of soul searching, during which I was asking myself if my philosophy of education was good enough - whether I wasn’t simply ignoring important questions which need to be brought to the attention of our students, or ignoring skills which people desperately need in these times. The talk reminded me that there are different types of people in our world. Some seek to change the world, even in small ways; others simply seek to understand it.

Another video, again on ted.com, quoted an old Jewish proverb:

Question: What’s more truthful than truth?

Answer: The story

It was Tan’s talk which particularly expanded on this idea, though. She told a story about how she went to Guilin to visit a Dong village (the Dong people are an ethnic minority in China). When she returned, National Geographic magazine asked her if she wanted to write a story on China. She agreed, and returned to the village to research it. Shortly before her arrival, part of the village burned to the ground after an old man fell asleep with his electric blanket on. Tan describes how the process of going to the village and tuning in to the mindset of the people there helped her to reshape her views on the judgments she came to regarding how the villagers punished the old man’s family (to get the details, you’ll have to watch the video). She argued that creativity comes from the act of shedding your own convictions about the world and trying to enter the reality of another. She asks two important questions: Why do we simply take on the knowledge we receive from others, without explicitly questioning it? Why do we judge situations we have no personal knowledge of?

Stories seem to provide a way into other worldviews that we simply could not approach otherwise. The shared humanity of a story primes us to consider and understand ideas which we are less easily shared.

Not long ago, in rural Sichuan, China, I had an experience which primed me to understand these ideas. My wife and I had just found out that our plans to travel to the middle east had been put back due to visa problems. We went to Chengdu to enjoy ourselves for a few days, stopping along the way back to my wife’s village to see a friend. We went down to the riverside to watch the water go by for a while, then, as the afternoon wore on, decided to return home. We sat in an old bus in the bus station. Finally it set off. As the sky grew dark, we wound through the countryside. Eventually we were dropped off at a crossroads on a hill. We walked down the hill into a small village, hoping to find a ride back home. The taxi drivers there were merciless, asking far more money than was reasonable. There were no hotels. An old, sympathetic woman, spoke to me in Chinese and I answered her, but she thought I was speaking English and told me she couldn’t understand. The idea of being stuck for a night here, with nowhere to sleep, haunted us and we felt trapped by the encroaching darkness. Finally we accepted a lift back to our village in a beaten up minibus. The countryside, in the darkness, held secrets we could never perceive. In that darkness, with my wife holding my hand, and our driver cautiously rounding every corner, I began to think about death. It would have been so easy to die there - the darkness already inescapably surrounding us, only the cocoon of the minibus to protect us. That depth of darkness: all we could do is think, think, think our way deeper into the philosophy of the situation we were in on those narrow, unlit roads.

Of course we got home. We were greeted by my mother in law, worried about us and wondering why we were so late. We walked into the living room, which days before had been think with our presence - our computers on the table, my wife’s hair-dryer, a pile of junk food bought from the village shop; and now it was empty, the table standing bravely against the darkness. And there, I saw clearly, a sight I’ve never seen before - the ghost of myself, permanently written in the corner of the room, expressionless, waiting to be brought back to life: and to banish it, I needed to turn on every light, fill up the shadows with my things. My in laws have very few things - an old sofa, that table, a TV standing on an empty shelf. My life felt defined by material things, but I had no power to rebel against my materialism. It was something I needed, I felt, so as not to by an empty being.

I can never truly explain that evening to anyone - not even my wife, who was there with me. She had a different perception of it all - more in tune with what you might call objective reality. Her story was different to mine. But it was a story none the less - and that evening I found myself thinking, what is there more human than an experience - one that frightened us, made us think more deeply than we have done in years - retold as a story?

What does all this have to do with teaching? Merely that there is more to life than mere criticality. Mere criticality. The changes we wish to make only to the outside world, the world outside us. But to me, and I’m sure many others, the inner world is the real world. I can’t remember where, or from whom, I read the definition of love as the meeting of two inner worlds; but if that’s true, then what could be more conducive to love in the world than the telling and the patient understanding of stories? So I guess my point is that classrooms should be about those things which are universal, and encourage love. Telling stories, talking about fears, exploring what it is that makes us human.

Of course, this is no more a methodology than critical applied linguistics is. It is not something we should do in every class. It’s a counterpoint - a reminder that there is more to life, and more types of people in the world, than those who merely wish to change the world.

My young learners have been designing their own Wiki. It’s gone quite well, for a first attempt. Some of the students have not really taken to it, but others have done so in quite spectacular style, creating heaps of pages. One of the students made a new page after class yesterday. It was rather touching:

The British concil is a wandiful plase to lern english I like the british concil becuse it’s cleen and the cafeteria is wandiful they serve good food evry day I by hootdog and rani but I don’t like that some times teatchers chose the same studints to anser but I try thats the imprtent thing write best wishes zaher.

Sidestepping the fact that this student has some quite obvious spelling and punctuation issues, it’s lovely to know that he likes the British Council. It’s also really nice to get feedback like this from the kids. I never realised it would be a point of contention for the students that the same ones speak up so often. I don’t tend to nominate in class because I always remember, when I was at school, being the one who wanted the chance to keep quiet and think, rather than speak up. Getting this sort of feedback from the students is enormously useful for me, and another great reason to use tools like Wikis to get students active.

There’s been quite a lot of debate raging on the dogme yahoo group about Critical Applied Linguistics (CAL), with a couple of teachers arguing that EFL teachers need to think seriously about how their teaching is changing the world (in both big and small ways) and how to change their teaching so that learners begin to think critically about the world, the state we’re in, and how to merge critical thought and action to change the world for the better. One teacher in particular linked this to the process of globalisation and new capitalism (whatever that is) and spoke quite passionately about the need to show learners that they have a choice - they don’t just have to accept that globalisation is an inevitable fact. This teacher has even gone so far as to form a co-op with some of his students to discuss these issues.

Simultaneously, on the ELTECS list, a post came round recently with the following quotation from a new book on CAL:

‘By not questioning globalisation, all universities are by default serving the interests of the powers that be, which in today’s world are corporate business interests, Western governments … and co-opted elites of the non-Western world. For these interests, business as usual requires a steadysupply of compliant, technically competent manpower for the global economy,and a mass of enthusiastic consumers. For them school and university education is the means to ensure this.’

This subservience to globalisation is due to financial dependence of education on government funding, corporate research grants, and international students which would be jeopardised by a fundamental critique of current economic and social trends. The attitude is ‘Globalisation is a
fact. Don’t question it. Sure, it is creating some problems. Here is a grant to do research on them. Identify them, describe them and offer solutions that are possible within the globalisation framework’.

(from Jackson, M.G. (2008) Transformative Learning for a New Worldview: Learning to Think Differently. Hampshire: Palgrave)

All of this got me quite stirred up, and I feel pretty confused by it all. Of course, I would like to be able to work towards a more just world. Who wouldn’t? But isn’t it our job to simply teach English? Some members of the dogme group say no - in fact, we should view teaching criticality as more important than just English. By considering the state of the world now, and the role the English language is playing in it, we have to make sure that English teachers on the front line act to make sure that English does not go down in history as a tool of oppression wielded by only the powerful few against the oppressed many. A tool of the forces of new capitalism and globalisation.

Well, I really don’t know what to make of it all. I mean, the way the world looks back on the English language in 100 years, or whenever, is of no interest to me: and I have a fairly strong belief that people are greater than ideas and will not be limited by them for long. Certainly, critical thought and action have a strong role to play in the evolution of our societies, and it’s good to develop those skills, and perhaps this can form a part of our pedagogy… but… well, as ought to be clear now, I haven’t found the place for these ideas in my pedagogical worldview quite yet…

However, last night, I read a short passage from Guy Cook’s Introduction to Applied Linguistics, which I found enormously moving (and I’d like to point out that I don’t feel enormously moved by academic texts and more than most people do…):

Linguists and applied linguists have long used their research to combat injustices, both on a micro and a macro level, without needing this epithet [i.e. Critical Applied Linguistics]: for example, in the fields of social and ethnic discrimination, language death, prejudice against deaf sign languages, and the use of fabricated evidence in criminal trials.

[...]

Applied Linguistics is concerned with the most emotive and most important issues: the education of children, the rights of the disadvantaged, the changing balance of cultures and languages, the effects of technology on communication. These are global issues, but they are manifested in personal decision making too. As such, under pressure from all sides, it is faced with a number of options. Some are easy, but ultimately unsatisfactory. One is harder, but rewarding, both for society at large, and for applied linguists themselves.

[...] One [...] easy option is to become a vaguely formulated political campaign, though one more focused upon its own credentials than upon the redress of any particular injustices [i.e. Critical Applied Linguistics]. Yet another is to indulge in a disappearing act, appealing to the slippery concept of interdisciplinarity, as though applied linguistics existed only at the intersection of other fields, or were a ad hoc assemblage [i.e. Post-modern Applied Linguistics].

There are many voices speaking to applied linguistics [...]. Applied linguistics must listen to them all. But it must not then simply repeat what it has heard, allowing the loudest and most powerful voices to drown out the others. If it is to fulfill its aspirations, if it is to have any worth in its own right, if it is to be listened to, and if it is to intervene successfully in the many urgent language related problems of the modern world, then it must have a voice of its own. This will not be the same as any one of its parts, nor even the mechanical assembly of them all. It will be rather an emergent, autonomous, dynamic, exciting, and influential voice - one which can speak authoritatively, to and about the abstract formulations and findings of linguistics, and the experience of language use which dominates all of our lives.