I’ve started another thread because I think we are the equivalent of people who stand in corridors at parties, ensconced in conversation, but blocking the way to the bathroom for everyone else, heh heh
.You raised a few very pertinent points, Larry, it’s always a pleasure to read your posts. Thank you for your kind comments, re. my rant – at this point, on a related note, I just wanted to say that it’s really lovely to take part in a courteous thread where people can express opposing opinions respectfully, without fear of being axed
I agree, in general, with what you say.
Let me play the devil’s advocate, because by teasing out these matters, we both find answers to the questions we ask, don’t we?
1) Fluency – what should we expect?
!
... then why do intelligent people come to English classes for so long and still not develop enough fluency to function well in a real conversation outside the classroom or to write a simple letter or a business e-mail?
What level of fluency do you expect your adult learners to be at after 5 years of English class?
You mentioned the fact that everyone has the ability to learn a language or we wouldn’t have learned our own. A good point. For the sake of argument, let’s think about Cooke’s essay about the comparative ‘success’ of a child’s language acquisition, where he pointed out that if an adult learner were in the target language environment all the time, receiving mostly undivided attention and 1-to-1 ‘teaching’, we would expect him/her to be ‘fluent’ in a matter of years. Yet a child still speaks imperfectly well into his tenth or eleventh year.
Take my case, for example: I’ve learned German for 16 years, have a first class honours degree in it, have lived here for 5-6 years, have a German boyfriend and speak German, with the exception of in my classes, all day long. I would *now* consider myself fluent. I still have to be careful when writing a business letter or e-mail, sometimes have problems understanding or holding a conversation with someone who speaks strong dialect. I have an ear for languages, I’ve been told, would have probably been one of the students that you would class as “highly motivated and conspicuously talented” (though I might flatter myself with that, heh heh.) I was raised almost bilingually, learned two foreign languages at school, and a third at university. Yet it has taken me this long to achieve near-native speaker fluency in German and I’m still not perfect, despite the fact that I have the learning skills, educational benefits, learning support, exposure and motivation required to learn a foreign language.
So can we honestly expect such fluency from students who have had EFL class (as opposed to ESL), once a week for 90 mins, for 5 years? I mean, it’s sometimes highly frustrating for a teacher because we often notice a student’s mistakes more clearly than his progress. Perhaps you are expecting too much of your students? We have to have high expectations of our students in order to motivate them and spur them on. But aside from poor teaching, there are so many elements that contribute to student not becoming as fluent as we would expect. I don’t have a defeatist attitude, I have a realistic attitude – I know exactly what learning a foreign language involves… and how long it takes!
2) Use of games in lesson plan
In any case, I understand your points about wasting class time with games or other activities that don’t move students forward on their proverbial path of knowledge. Yet one thing that worried me about the activity that you proposed was the weightier element of the theoretical v. the practical. As I said, I would seldom present a group of students with all the aspects of a particular tense in the one go because I think it’s too much, too soon. Do all your students know how to implement all the ways of using the tense after this lesson? Do they need to? Does this lesson balance procedural v. declarative knowledge? Can students leave the classroom actively using this tense – and using it correctly? The reason why I favour games – and I use the word games broadly – because we have to set up a situation for students to experiment actually using this language to convey meaning and understand what is meant. This leads on to another argument, - of which you are no doubt aware, Larry – that is, should we use ‘artificial’ situations, texts or language, in a classroom? My argument is that as soon as anything hits a classroom setting, it becomes – in some way – artificial. A ‘game’ can set up a situation to draw out the target language in a spontaneous way, in a non-threatening environment, mimicking situations or language students need in the ‘real world’. You could use a newspaper text, sure, but a newspaper mightn’t provide the language structures or vocabulary students would use in ‘real life’ (am thinking of the better quality newspapers in Britain and Ireland – God forbid my students would have to work with the tabloids, heh heh.) Students might be less interested in the language of current affairs than how to get a room with air-conditioning on holiday.
Sorry, that all sounds rather distracted …. I don’t have the answers but find that the journey to something that resembles an answer is more interesting than the answer itself!
3) What do our students want? Do they necessarily want what we want?
Neil made a good point too – there are students in my classes who are there primarily for the social element. Seriously! I had a bit of an eye-opening experience with a group of jolly senior citizens who, without so much as a trace of shame, admitted they were there to have fun first, learn English second! Many of them didn’t get out of the house much and loved their weekly English class for the hi-jinks and social contact it provided. That completely went against my teaching ethos… but I managed to get them to learn something, anyway, using games, communicative activities, role-plays dialogues and all those things that are funny … and productive.
In other words, you are lucky if all your students are there purely to learn English and better themselves… I have a mixed bag of motivations in my students!
4) Function of teacher
That brings us on to the subject of the real function of the EFL teacher and I again think it’s a case of nasty reality colliding with our sweet idealism. Of course in the case above I sometimes felt like the MC, not the teacher. Of course, I have had classes (most notably with sulky teenagers) where I have felt that my primary function was to stop them killing one another. Of course, I have had classes where I battle with a gnawing sense of despair when I realise that e.g. my Turkish student neither speaks nor writes High German, nor ‘High’ Turkish, but speaks dialects of both unintelligible to anyone living 20 kms away, even has difficulty holding his pencil because it’s so unusual for him, and needs to learn enough English to pass his school exam and get a training place. In other words, much as I would love give contemplative, earnest classes to teach students about language, its functions and forms, I first have to overcome other hurdles and get students to a point where they can learn, fullstop.
And much as I would love to be able to give contemplative, earnest classes to teach students about language, its functions and forms I also have to eat, pay rent and electricity – when you are teaching 20+ classes a week, you don’t have the luxury of this contemplation and extensive lesson-planning – a point that was made on the other post, I think. You say (quite rightly, I expect) that your lessons don’t need much preparation. I’d say that when I do a similar exercise I need to prepare it carefully, so my students will be able to tackle it well. If I were paid more, if the EFL situation in my part of the world were more stable, I would be paid more and could do less. As it is, I teach 20 classes and work (inc. preparation) 60 hours. Add to that the time spent thinking, worrying about students, helping them between classes, and God knows what else, I have a full time full-time job, 24/7. So, yes, I rely on a variety of activities that I know well, that work well, that fulfil my aims – all my aims. It’s not an ideal situation but it’s the real situation and, believe me, I am doing my absolute best!
Off we go - let's see what this 'lucky dip' of a post brings!
Regards,
Rania
.
. 
Such seems to be my fate now, as some of you will no doubt be delighted to hear. 
I personally began teaching with minimal training (in-house training from the school I was employed by) and learned by doing. When I finally took my CELTA, my trainers told me that I had already had ‘excellent teaching skills’ before course begin and the course put ‘the final polish’ on them. But let me be brutally honest (this brutal honesty is becoming my catchphrase, eh? 
– working with people who (a) believe they know everything and (b) refuse to stand down, change or adapt their point of view. I honestly don’t want everyone to agree with me. I have really enjoyed this debate because coming up against another point of view has made me think about and question my own. I have no problem whatsoever with changing my mind or/and admitting I know less about a subject than someone else or/and saying “I understand why you feel that way but I personally feel this way…” because I think being able to do that makes me someone who recognises she has a lot to learn and is open to doing so. I’m glad we have this forum to be able to debate these issues and I’m doubly glad to have encountered people who don’t reduce an idea exchange to a mud fight. In my opinion, a good teacher always learns, grows, questions, expands, adapts. We’d all be pretty useless teachers – IMHO – if we reached a fixed opinion and stuck by it, unthinkingly und unwaveringly 
.