P’s ELT Blog

Last week I met a couple of the other members of the dogme discussion group online for a short chat about teaching. It was fun, and nice, as always, to hear about the efforts others are making to teach in a way which takes more account of the students’ lives and needs. So we heard from Mercedes, who begins all of her classes with an extremely in-depth needs analysis, and then goes away and builds a syllabus for the students, which they then work on for the next few weeks. As she told us, the syllabus is still highly flexible once it’s been agreed, leaving room for other ideas and needs to emerge during the course.

Dennis also spoke about his teaching with German learners of English. He used a task based methodology, based on topics of genuine concern to the students (he cited the example of getting the students, in groups, to make up rules for an imaginary shared apartment - knowing full well that these recent arrivals at his university would be engaged in exactly that kind of debate (though probably in German) in their real lives.

With these examples, and some of my own, being talked about, one of the things that became more clear than it does on the list is that it’s impossible to generalize beyond context. For example, Mercedes spoke about often asking students to re-write reports they’d already written in order to work out errors and get closer to something native-like. She asked me if I might not do the same thing with my learners, who have trouble with writing in particular, but who take a short glance at my error corrections and then put their papers back into their files and wait for the next thing to begin. Both Dennis and I answered that we felt we couldn’t do that, because the learners would simply not feel it was a worthy investment of time; they would want to move on to something new. Yet for Mercedes’ students it is almost a necessary activity, since her students are business people who frequently write very similar texts, and who want to write these texts with a high degree of accuracy.

There’s really nothing like talking to other teachers for enriching one’s own experience: yet I find a lot opf teachers are reluctant to go into their styles of teaching at any depth, perhaps because they fear feelings of inadequacy?

I’ve finished reading the Dornyei and Murphey book, and an excellent read it was too. Towards the end of my YL classes, I decided to try out a few ideas I’d read about (the classes finished yesterday). One of those ideas was about roles. Having read the relevant chapter of the book, I started noticing things about the roles my students took when they were working, quite autonomously, on projects. For example, in almost all of the groups their seemed to be one or two students who took the lead, creatively. They asked for and assumed for themselves responsibility for the overall look and contents of their projects. This left one or two other students with less authority and power within the group. The students responded in different ways to this lack of power. Two of them, one boy and one girl, very noticeably assumed the role of general helper. They tidied things up, went and got pens and materials for the others: they accepted their less creative status within the group. I’d also say that, to some of the group at least, it was a lower status: these group members sometimes had to put up with somewhat disrespectful treatment at times.

In other groups, students who didn’t manage to assume (and have recognised) a creative role split from the main group. One group of five students, for example, split into a three and a two, because the two students wanted more creativity than they were being allowed by their peers. The refused to accept the administrative role assigned to them, so they set up a counter-group.

All of this would have slipped by me unnocited, if I hadn’t read the book. So having noticed these things, I decided to delve a bit more deeply and set up a discussion activity in which the students were divided into groups of three students, and each assigned a role (by me): initiator, provocateur, and wrapper. Hopefully the tasks of the roles is clear from the names - to start discussions, to provoke further and deeper debate, and to wrap things up when a satisfactory conclusion had been reached. This exercise was a copy of an experiment cited by Dornyei and Murphey. I tried to make it clear that students didn’t need to worry that the role didn’t fit them, since each student would get to try each role at least once. I found the results quite mixed; in some groups, the roles were performed extremely well, and debates flourished as a result. In others, the provocateurs in particular were less active and as a result discussions got wrapped up without being pushed as deep as they might have been. The students did seem to take to one or two roles more than others, quite naturally. Some students were able to perform their roles more fully when I was monitoring them than when I wasn’t.

I asked the students to complete a feedback form to help me assess what they’d learned from the activity. Most enjoyed it; most expressed a preference for one or other of the roles, and a discomfort with another; most also said that their awareness of the importance of roles in discussions had been improved. In particular, they noted the importance of provocateurs.

When I first read the chapter on roles, I have to admit that I was skeptical. Perhaps this reflects my own reluctance to be assigned roles within groups. I personally feel pinned down by them, and I don’t like to be pinned down, I like the flexibility that comes from appearing enigmatic. However many of my students seemed very comfortable in certain roles, and on reflection it’s impossible not to note the presence of a great many roles within each group I taught. One student, in my highest level class, is clearly the leader, though he’s never been assigned that role. Several others seem always to be relied upon to break silences; still others work as unofficial provocateurs. And I’ve become more open to the idea that these roles emerge socially - are suggested, assigned, and accepted by the whole group, rather than being nothing more than the students personalities coming out.

This week, and for the next two, I’m teaching young learners. I’ve been lucky - I got two of the highest levels in the school. The top level are simply astonishing. In the first class, I asked them to talk to each other about their achievements in life. One is Oman’s representative at the Middle Eastern Students Conference, held yearly in this region. Another is waiting for conformation that he will travel to the Olympics as a member of the Oman national fencing team.  Another has mastered English, and French, has good spoken Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, and is now learning Tagalog.

The question is, how do you teach kids like these, who are self motivated, need to encouragement to take ideas and run? The way I’m doing it is simply to give them the ideas, and then let them do the running. An idea dropped into the classroom can lead to a class-worth of discussion with ease, as with a class - which I videoed, and parts of which I will publish here in due course - a few days ago, when we did the dogme thing - i.e. no plan, just see what happens - and ended up presenting reports on ways in which talent in Oman might be nurtured in the future.

Yet I don’t feel good enough to teach these students. They will go on to future’s far more exciting and full of achievement than mine. The most I feel I can do for them is simply to never be wholly satisfied with them. I try to let them know when they’ve done well, but never shirk from telling them what’s not so good, what needs to be (or simply CAN be) improved; trying to show them different angles on the things they’ve done.

They’re working on projects in each Wednesday class. They’ve chosen to make films, imagining how the future will look for Oman; or give PowerPoint presentations on what the world will look like in 50 years. The students themselves are anxious because they feel the need, as the top class, to produce projects better than the other classes. They want to show the way.

For me, I feel that teaching a class like this is both far easier, and far more challenging, than an average group. On the easy side, so little needs to be done with planning etc. A simple activity can be usefully drawn out for a long time - I made a point to them a few days ago, on the video I will post, and the importance of details in language learning. Talking in detail, trying to hear details when listening, trying to get below the surface of a text, so that it can be understood in all the detail of it’s socio-cultural contexts… But these details are not hard to find, they don’t require a lot of planning, because the students themselves are so intelligent and so willing to dive into these details, to search for them. Why flood the students with resources when their natural gifts for exploring ideas are so sharp?

But it’s hard, too, living up to the expectations of people like these. There was huge anticipation ahead of me handing back work I’d marked for them. If I’d realised how tense they were about getting their work back, I’d have put more effort into giving feedback they could work with! Today, as the students worked autonomously on a control rooms worth of laptops, video cameras etc., I felt totally useless, just waiting for them to have a question that I could answer… But this is not something I should complain about… it’s for the best that my usefulness to them is defined by the students themselves, rather than by me…

Robert Haines, a colleague on the dogme elt discussion group, has been writing a series of posts describing activities in his classroom, teaching South and Central American students english at a university in America. Rob’s classes rely, as is the dogme fashion, on the interaction between the people in the room, rather than on packaged materials, and his posts are a good way of seeing the approach in action. Certainly worth checking out.

Do other people have this problem? That you have weeks, or even months, when you just can’t be arsed? For me, I go through periods where all I want to do is teach, learn about teaching, type about teaching, talk about teaching… and then suddenly, out of nowhere, it’ll be the opposite - “do I HAVE to teach?” It’s sort of the same as my feelings about Van Morrison. There are times when I’m so passionately in love with Astral Weeks that I’ll be singing it everywhere I go… until I begin to get annoyed by it and put it back on the shelf for a few months.

Behind the scenes, though, I have been reading some books. Most recently, Dornyei and Murphey’s excellent book on Group Dynamics. It has surprised me somewhat. I often felt that group dynamics was one of my strengths - ever since my CELTA, I’ve been praised in observations for my rapport with students, and for creating a positive learning environment. But reading the book, I’ve been forced to realise that I’m seriously shoddy in several fairly fundamental areas.

A few examples: firstly, learning students names, and encouraging students to learn each others’ names. I always remember my students names. But I rarely actually use them… largely because I’m quite a shy person, and I tend not to use people’s names until I feel quite close to them. But since I hardly ever refer to the students by name, it’s not much of a surprise that my students rarely call each other by name. I try to include activities at the beginning of a course to help the students learn each others’ names. But I never tabulate these or put them on the board and use them in ways that enable the students to learn them without embarrassment…

Another example: here in Oman, the students tend to find their places in class and stick to them - i.e. the seating arrangement after week one is the seating arrangement for the rest of the course. I’d not really thought too much about this, and had rarely swapped partners around, though my classes feature an awful lot of pair work and chat. Reading the book caused me to wonder how I really expected the class to gel when they only have the chance to interact with two or three other students out of sixteen…

Simple realizations, but those ones are the easiest to put into effect, and sometimes also the most important. So I’ve drawn up a bit of an action plan for improving the dynamics in my classes. I haven’t finished the book yet, though, so the plan also remains a work in progress. Maybe I’ll post it here when it’s done.

I have four weeks left before a long overdue holiday. I’ll have been teaching for six months straight by the time it comes. Coming from my school in China, where I enjoyed about a third of the year off, that’s a long stretch… When I get back from the holiday I’m going to be starting my MA, in Applied Linguistics and ELT, with the university of Nottingham. How on earth am I going to motivate myself for two years straight?