Job Discussion Forums

[shmooj]

At the end of each 7 week term here, we have a feedback session. In this, my students who regularly rate my classes as "great" or "fun" have been very helpfully telling me why this is so.

The things that stand out that make for a "great" class are, according to my 29 students today:
using inductive grammar approaches
animated body language
jokes and making them laugh
smiling a lot
not frowning when they are attempting to form an utterance
being strict and keeping a high pace and high expectations
filling in a listening activity before actually listening to the tape
attempting a guess before I tell them what the answer is

So, there you are. Slap a label on that and it will be my Approach


Interesting that the OP mentioned time for a new paradigm. I picked up the July 2003 copy of ELT Journal and on p278 there's an interesting article entitled "The end of CLT" Here's an interesting quote to spur our discussion into its second page...

[struelle]

[shmooj]

Steve

I've read most of what Lewis has produced re the Approach and I think that you have missed the point Baxter is trying to make. In fact, your example plays right into his hands and shows how woefully short of the mark proponents of this approach have defined context.

He doesn't mean context in a sentence, he means context as in sociolinguistic context. Considering most materials in the EFL classroom are BANA in origin taking such a narrow definition of context has serious social implications for the students and their education.

Read Holliday's excellent "Appropriate Methodology and Social Context" for more on this.

[leeroy]

Let's not beat up grammar too much - I am in the (painstaking) process of learning Spanish and it's sometimes nice to know explicitly how grammatical structures are formed, as well as "discovering" them.

I'm not saying "we should only teach grammar" - but let's not forget about it either. Pointing out the odd past participle here and there is no bad thing. Sometimes grammar and functions go quite well together - my stock "hypothesizing" lesson is also a 2nd conditional lesson. There are the "If I were..."/"If I could..."/"If I had..." (etc..) lexical expressions, clear functionality, and grammar all wrapped up into one nice, neat little package!

Grammar Translation need not be the devil either. OK, so it's not particularly useful here in an ESL environment - but while in Indonesia I found it helpful to sometimes break down and translate sentences from English to Indonesian and back again.

And the Direct Method? It's fun! I have found Asian learners responding very well to audiolingual style activities - even simple drilling is cool and a vastly under-used resource (in my humble opinion).

Principled Eclecticism is the approach for me - my students tell me they like my lessons because the style of teaching varies. (God, I sounded really arrogant then didn't I?). There is only so much that we, as teachers, can do. After all;

You can lead a student to the class, but you can't force them to learn.

Right?

[Shellbell]

What a great thread

I totally agree Leeroy; principled eclecticism is the way forward.

Shmooj, although it's true that Lewis does advocate lexical lessons where language is decontextualised, there is no reason why proponents of the Lexical Approach can't teach language lexically in context by training learners to notice lexical chunks in spoken and written language, once they have processed it for meaning. When I showed some Chinese Upper- intermediate learners how to do this they were gob-smacked and agreed that being able to spot the lexical chunks in a text was a really useful skill.

I also can see where teacher Lindsay is coming from arguing for exposure to the language as communication before analysing it for form.

I would have a slightly different take on exposure to the language, though. Krashen talks about the desirability of beginners being allowed to have a 'silent period' before they are expected to produce the language.
I vaguely remember reading about some research studies that seemed to indicate that beginners could acquire language faster if they were exposed to natural language in use 'roughly -tuned' to their comprehension level via a modified TPR approach and not forced to produce language before they were ready. The study compared a group who were expected to speak from the beginning with one that were allowed a silent period. At the end of the students' courses the two groups were tested on comprehension and production. The group who had spent a lot of time listening and doing but not having to speak scored a lot more highly on the comprehension test and equally well on the production test.

Has anyone tried this approach?

[Will.]

Nice ideas being expressed here, this would not be amiss on the APP Ling forum.
As theories go, there is always another one.
I did tap into the Dogme one for a while and that provided me with a few ideas.
http://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.intl=us&.src=ygrp&.done=http://groups.yahoo.com%2Fgroup%2Fdogme%2Ffiles%2F

I think that the best new theory we could come up with sshould address the needs of the teacher and not the needs of the student.
This means considering the needs and desires of the "professional " teacher:
A theory that espouses the finer points of teaching needs; Prep time, lack of resources, attitude of employers in out-of-the-way places.
A theory of teaching that fits in your back pocket, doesn't need a book to buy and read. A theory that we can all USE and not discuss for ever and anon before deciding not to bother with it after all.
How to teach with a hangover and not show it. Teach and travel, How to be a backpacker.
Damn! someone beat me to it.

[shmooj]

[Shellbell]

Will
Thanks for that link . I'll check it out. As for a theory that addresses the needs of the teacher, have you seen 'The Minimax Teacher' by Jon Taylor ISBN 0-953309-89-4. Although not strictly speaking a theoretical book , it is based on sound educational principles and what's more it's brimming with very practical ideas dealing with a few issues you've mentioned(not sure about the hangover though ).

The blurb on the back says' The Minimax Approach aims to increase learner efficiency by:reducing teacher input; encouraging greater student involvement and freeing teachers to focus on key areas such as monitoring and feedback.'

It's the best EFL book I've bought in a long time, but a little too big for the back pocket I'm afraid.

Shmooj,
Yes, you're quite right I did misunderstand what you were saying. I'm glad you 've explained what BANA stands for as I was curious about that I do see what you're getting at and I would certainly want to do that wherever I was teaching. Cross-cultural awareness is really important.
I'd like to get hold of Holliday's book to find out more. Ta

[Will.]

Thanks Shell, it sounds good.

[johnslat]

Dear Shellbell,

[OzBurn]

At the school where I work, students have been exposed to as much as eight years of "communicative" language teaching. Almost all of them show a vast number of fossilized errors. One reason is that the students have been told by their previous teachers that what matters is that they "communicate," not that they speak correctly. Another, more important reason, is simply that their bad habits have been in place too long. A final reason is that they were never taught correctly to begin with.

I do, however, have two students who came in "fresh" this year, without prior English -- one because he had never had an English course, the other because she had failed to learn at her previous school (she had an English vocabulary of about eight words: pencil, pen, book, student, teacher, etc.). I've used the Lado English Series with both of them. It works very well. It's based on audio-lingual theories and has a minimum of "grammar" rules. The student learns the grammar in a formal sense after he has learned how to speak and understand the structure.

Lado, of course, is not in fashion. But the series readily adapts itself to repetitive drill, with timed performance goals, which are quite important if one wants to ensure retention and successful application in context.

The communicative approach may be successful with students who have had years of grammar-translation with a strict teacher, but by itself, from what I have seen, it teaches mostly bad habits. It's a disaster. I laugh when I look at the "beginner" level of CLT textbooks like Inside Out or Cutting Edge. As if anyone who is a beginner could ever master the wild range of content in the first lessons of such trash! It's a cruel joke for both students and naive young teachers with a fresh CLT-based CELTA, who are taught that they will teach by "eliciting" responses. Nor is this just my opinion. I talked to a guy who taught at International House, that CLT mecca, and he admitted that their results with beginners were just terrible. (Needless to say, this does not prevent them from offering beginner courses.)

As far as what students think constitutes a "great" lesson is concerned -- I wouldn't put too much stock in that. What makes a great lesson in terms of English language acquisition is a lesson in which the students learn a lot and subsequently retain it. Students are often poor judges of this, and teachers are even worse, since ego plays a role. From what I have seen, more than 90% of teachers think that they are doing a good to excellent job. Students can have fun during a lesson and leave bubbling, but having learned very little. On the other hand, students may have to work very hard during a lesson and leave exhausted, but having learned a lot.

A great deal of progress was made in language teaching, during the 1960s. Many effective drills were invented and applied to language teaching, and results improved. All this work appears to have been lost now.

There were problems with the audio-lingual approach, to be sure: It was too boring to use all the time, and there were few communicative applications. However, it did generally work to teach the structure of a language -- and students learned to listen and speak, not just to read. CLT is in fashion now, but from what I am hearing on this and other boards, Asian students tend to hate it. I'd say it is time for another look at the audio-lingual materials that Lado and others produced. If they were married with the best of the communicative applications, it might make for the best of both worlds.

[struelle]

[shmooj]

[Stephen Jones]

[leeroy]

We Hate Teaching English was brilliant. Whatever happened to Simon Barne?