Job Discussion Forums

[wix]

I just discovered this interesting article about "dogme" which is a method of teaching English. It seems to be something like a freestyle or natural English teaching method.

Does anybody know anything more about dogme? I would be interested to have any ideas, opinions or experiences.

Related link: Yahoo! Groups: dogme

[chinasyndrome]

Hey Wix, thanks for the links. I had a look and am also curious. I hope there's someone out there who has actually taught using this method (?) consistently and can shed some light on the subject. I'll do some hunting and see if I can turn up more. Cheers.

[leeroy]

Yeah, I dabbled with this a little while ago. A fellow teacher a while back was really into the idea of materials-free lessons.

Although it seems like an excellent idea on the surface, in practice I found it a little hard to implement. A bit like communism...

[dduck]

I've just started teaching in Mexico. In some of my classes, students don't bother turning up with pen or paper and for some reason I don't understand the school seems to have a policy of not using any course books of any kind. Thank God, this doesn't happen in all my classes! I have yet to see a student bring a dictionary to class. I suspect this is teaching on the cheap cheap cheap.

It's quite interesting/terrifying creating lessons plans from thin air, I can tell you!

Iain

[PanamaTeacher]

leeroy--how did you give the class without material. Did you improvise every day or did you have some plan? what was the level of your students?

dduck--it is amazing how little people have in other countries. here most kids get one or two pencils and they have to last a whole year. and if notebooks "cuadernos" go up in price one or two cents, it is written up in the papers. are you in a small town?

[dduck]

[leeroy]

I think the idea stems back to the idea of students each having their own 'inbuilt curriculum', and that lesson content should evolve from the student's apparent needs, instead of saying "Today we're doing the 2nd conditional, whether you like it or not."

In essence, it is taking "student centredness" to ridiculous extremes.

Instead of, say, doing a listening on p.57 about "Mike & Julie's holiday plans", students should talk about their own holiday plans, past or future. The point being that the world of coursebooks is a fictional one, more or less irrelevant to the students and only related vaguely linked to their 'reality', whatever that may be.

Whatever a student says in the class (be it about politics, Britney Spears, or whatever) is an indication of what the student is willing to talk about, and this should be the class 'topic'.

And whatever language point the students need to communicate this idea should be the language focus of the class. Such things can't be planned as such, they just happen. This is the idea of dogme (as I understand it).

There should be nothing 'artificial' about the class, no 'props' should be used, and no b*llshit questions like "Is there a clock on the wall?". In the real world we don't do gap fills, and as the classroom should be as realistic as possible in its emulation of natural communication, neither should there be in the lesson.

I found that although it was a nice concept, often students like the idea of the teacher having something 'pre-planned'. Especially Asians, they like the idea of photocopies, of a planned lesson structure which makes them feel like the teacher knows what he/she is doing and the direction that the lesson is going to go.

We also have to follow curricula sometimes, there are tests to be passed, and sometimes (God forbid) students want teacher-led lessons. There is a discussion forum about dogme on yahoo groups. I think it's

www.groups.yahoo.com/groups/dogme

But the likes of Scott Thornbury and many others far more esteemed that myself all seem to think dogme is great, perhaps it is indeed more implementable than I perceive it to be.

(Apologies for any errors in this post, spelling or otherwise. I am half drunk and in a hurry.)

[Dr.J]

This is quite interesting but...it's not the first time I've read a theory by someone who thinks he's discovered the secret of the universe.

I think he's found one piece of the puzzle behind the sofa, and gets so worked up that all the other pieces are forgotten. There is no one 'key' to teaching, there's lots and lots of little keys, one for each student.

Damn, did I just contradict myself?

[Marcoregano]

Dogme...sounds like dogma. Don't bother trying it on Asians....it'll go down like a lead balloon....splash!!

[Sherri]

Can I ask a very primitive question? After reading the posts here and some articles on Dogme, I can't really find the difference between Dogme and a Type B, process syllabus. What am I missing?

[dduck]