Teacher Discussion Forums

Something Londo Molari said in one of his post caused me to revisit something that has been knawing at my brain for several years...something that I haven't resolved. Let me say right at the outset that this is not really about 'Applied Linguistics', but there is no suitable heading for this subject, and since AL is where I visit with some regularity, I thought it might as well be posted here as elsewhere.

Also, I know I'm probably going to be beat up pretty thoroughly for my thoughts here, because I intend to call into question people's very livelihood. But my personal issues remain unresolved, and sugar coating them just won't get me anywhere. So here goes.

I was an English teacher for quite a few years before I retired a couple of years ago. I loved my work, and especially loved working abroad and living in a culture different from my own, with the sense of adventure that comes with that, and the satisfaction of meeting and working with people (often the cream of the society, in my view) whose ways of looking at the world offer sometimes attractive alternatives for me.

I taught in public schools, private language academies, and university language departments. I worked exclusively with adult students, and I'm sure some of my thoughts here are colored by the fact of this exclusivity. I worked with students in large classes, and small classes, as well as one-on-one. Some of the students became personal friends who maintain that friendship even today. I care so much for a few of them, that they seem like my children.

I worked very hard at my job as English teacher, partly, at least, becaused I loved the work so much, but partly also because I felt that I bore a deep responsibility toward those individuals who sought, for whatever their own personal reasons, to come to my classes for study of the language I was lucky enough to speak as a native. I also personally studied the language in as much depth as time would allow, both because I found it interesting, and because I believed that I should genuinely know something about English if I was to regard myself as qualified to teach it. My study of English was very productive, I believe, and I did not have the services of a teacher other than my own readings and thinkings, but that alone was quite sufficient. I still study English, even though I have no further career reasons to do so. It's just plain interesting.

Some of my students did very well in class; others did less well even though they tried hard, or so it seemed; still others clearly (to me) were wasting their time. I always understood (I thought) that those students who worked harder made more progress than those who did not work very hard, however talented they may have been. Still, I deeply believed that my work with them, my guidance, my insight surely was genuinely helpful.

But now, I'm beginning to come to terms with the possibility that all my efforts, and sincerety, and even knowledge, were, for all those many years, mostly irrelevant. What counts...really counts...is the student, and little else does. Teachers may be entertaining, disciplined, witty, fun, great explainers, warm, friendly, knowledgable, determined...all of that. But maybe that simply makes them entertaining, disciplined, ...etc. Where the rubber meets the road, if students learning language is truly the goal, so what? What counts is the student, and what he or she does personally and on his or her own nickle. Classes, at best, may perhaps provide momentary inspiration for some students, but then everything else is entirely up to the students. And the inspiration is short-lived. It needs constant replenishing, but the most successful students can replenish it themselves rather than relying on their teachers for that. Indeed, maybe the best teachers, the most effective ones, are those who are skilled at inspiring something in their students. Maybe that's a matter of personality more than anything else. I don't really know. Maybe you have to be passionate about your subject to inspire others. I do not believe it has anything at all to do with skills in 'educational technology'.

At bottom, what I wonder is: "Did I make any real difference at all as a teacher?" And I have some serious doubts that I did. Those students who did well would have done well with or without me. All that mattered was what they brought to class, not what I brought. I was a fortunate teacher, in that students generally (though I hasten to admit, not universally) respected me and liked me. I had what I thought was a "successful" career as a teacher. But now that I have the luxury of time to sit back and look over that time of my life and evaluate it in the harsh light of, well, what I think is reality...now that I don't have to make a living at it anymore, I'm pretty well convinced that TWALTing is probably likely to result in as good an outcome as any other general 'method'. It's students that matter, and little else. I don't really think teachers do, as tough as that may be for most teachers to swallow.

If you're teaching now, can you honestly claim that your students are making good progress in their ability to really use English as a direct result of your efforts? Am I totally daffy here?

Larry Latham

Not totally. It does come down to the students in the end I suppose.

Though it is different with youngsters. There are 15 and 16 year olds who have a really useful command of English thanks to their classes. It's not that they have done the "summer with a family in the UK" nor anything else that their colleagues haven't , except the private academy classes. I know they may be more motivated or brighter or whatever but I'd like to think the classes have something to do with it too.

More to the point we change their lives. When these young people are a couple of years older an FCE or CAE or a respectable TOEFL score, whilst not being in themselves much more than hoops to jump through, are passports to grants, studying abroad, jobs with multinationals (if that's what they want). Some have been accepted as emigrants. I had a friend in Sarajevo whose students really needed those TOESL scores.... to get out . I bet they were motivated though.

At the least, many have had a far better Erasmus year than their friends, who stuck close to the linguistic and cultural security blanket of other Spanish people or maybe very daringly Italians and Portuguese while they were in Holland or Germany or wherever for their exchange year.

With adults it's more frustrating. Yes there are those whose progress seems anecdotal. But when a student says" The Americans/Germans/Koreans came again and this time I understood them much better" or "we got the contract" "it was a much more successful conference" he or she may have just kept their job. You've certainly helped put a smile on a few faces . And the only difference between the first and second visit was those classes with you.

You could spend your working life making widgets or testing whoopee cushions. What sort of dark nights of the soul would you be having after half a lifetime doing that?

Oh...it makes me wonder....

Sometimes I do sit down and ponder what I am doing. A Portuguese speaker teaching a foreign language to other Portuguese speakers, so that's a start for most of them won't struggle to utter some English, that's real frustating, and when I start teaching I had a terrible command in English and I used to think if I was just deceiving my pupils.

I've got a 48-year-old engineer who's been studying English with me for about 2 years now, he can't speak a single sentence, I believe his very nature and the way he learnt things at school is determinete in this for he loves to work with words and lexis, so be it!

I was a Geography teacher at public schools here before dedicating myself exclusively to English, the other day I stopped at the traffic light and those two young men dresses like clowns were doing some tricks in other to get some money after the show, for my surprise one of them was my student! Have I failed with him? Hasn't he had many opportunities so far? The 'system' is to be blamed? I frankly don't know.

Sometimes (as JuanTwoThree pointed out) simple things for them like when my student told me that an American asked him for copies and he answered him in English makes them happy and they see where they are putting their money in.

As you said Larry, it boils down to them, their interests, their motivation, but what can we do? Guess Aldous Huxley once wrote that our experiences are our owns, lovers try to fuse in each other but the feelings will always be to the self and if you were their teachers and not someone else...well, I could have been born in California and you could have been born in Brazil.

And somehow your knowledge has influenced me, I wouldn't have given Lewis's work a closer look if I hadn't starting taking part here (yes you can call me a Lewis's acolyte.)

In the end, someone must do the dirty work and teacher are always in the backstage, our merits are for ourselves and only recognised by us and some few students.

José

Without wanting to blow my own trumpet too much, I had an Advanced Spanish adult class this year who, at the end of the course, bombarded me with individual and group notes, emails, cards etc praising me for what a great teacher I was and how they couldn't have done it without me. I like to think that my efforts made a difference to some of those people, whether it was making activities engaging, being encouraging when they were struggling, asking questions rather than spoon-feeding answers, all the usual stuff. One thing I had limited control over was the fact that they were, quite simply, a nice group who got on well and helped and supported one another, which made a huge difference.

Having said that, I think that realistically we can divide most groups into 3 sets: the motivated students who will learn no matter what you do, the ones who won't get it no matter what you do, and the (usually) large middle group to whom your efforts will make a difference.

Finally, as a teacher I try to experiment and do different things rather than stick to the book/method/activity I know and love. Since I started sharing the aims with the students and writing them on the board, I've noticed that more students became engaged and knew what they were working towards. When I started emailing students who'd missed the class to let them know what we'd done, attendance and retention improved. There is a lot that the teacher can control.

So, I think it's a bit extreme to ask if our teaching makes a difference. There may have been some to whom it made no difference, but I suspect they're a minority. They say you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink. What you can do is make the water more drinkable.

Hey all, esp. Larry.

Self evaluation is sometimes being hard on oneself and at times I have shared some of the feelings you've described above. But then my experience is often like that of lol, in that my work does have its rewards and those rewards are simply the multiplied apreciation that I've already given to my students.

So much depends on the individual students and what they put in that sometimes what they got out doesn't always seem so clear. But as I use the same "plan and expose your planning" as others do here, I am myself reminded day in day out of what I am doing with these people and why. Left to my own devices (which indeed, woody, I often am) I do think I am getting through to them what I have to offer them and hope I have also helped them to understand how to take advantage of all the learning situations that they are presented with in their daily lives.

This is the right place to post your message, Larry, you know that there are many many who will respond to your thoughts with their own. (Without realizing it, I just cut myself short!)

peace,
revel.

I think that this is just the point Larry. It is all so personal, the motivation of the student is always the real key. Modern methods are supposed to motivate, supposed to get away from the dreary bad old days. They do not succeed very well. Anglo-Saxon children still fail miserably at language learning, even with all the fun and games.

And then, the best students (and only a few really get anywhere near fluent) are left eating low quality "motivational" fodder.

How do we motivate properly? We try harder to create a society that values education.

How do we motivate properly? We try harder to create a society that values education.

Exactly. Why do you think the Scandianavians and the Dutch speak such good English? Mainly because they understand that noone outside their borders is going to speak their language. If they want to get on in life they simply have to learn another language; it's as important as knowing how to read and write. On top of that, most of their English language TV and films are subtitled, not dubbed so they get a lot of exposure to the language.

Contrast that with the UK (actually, pretty much any English-speaking country - how many polyglot Americans, Canadians, Australians New Zealanders or South Africans have you known?). Here, when I try to teach Spanish to 16 year olds on Travel and Tourism courses the response I get from most of them is "What's the point? Everyone speaks English".

All the same though, although self-motivation is the key, and although "research" never shows clear differences in results between different methods, we have to get in that classroom and teach. We can't just read the newspaper out loud. We have to decide on a method to use when teaching, the best one we can identify. So we may as well just ignore these dispiriting kind of "nothing matters" thoughts.

Woody wrote:So we may as well just ignore these dispiriting kind of "nothing matters" thoughts.

I do hope you haven't misunderstood me, Woody. My musings aren't meant to be dispiriting. And I also suppose they really don't have anything to do with anybody but me. My purpose is to remind myself against too much indulgence in patting myself on the back for "what I accomplished as a teacher." My senses tell me that any of my students who excelled would have done so with any other teacher too. Many of the comments you and others have made here are quite sensible, and probably needed for the industry. But my status as a "has been" gives me more freedom to be critical of my estimation of my own effectiveness. I pretty much feel the same way about my children: they have succeeded despite having to put up with me.

Larry Latham

I think you can sleep easy, Larry: you strike me as someone who really cares and who always makes a very genuine effort to respect, reach out to and engage your conversational partner. It's very important, this "being there" for the students, and a teacher who can make the language relevant to the student(s), and not always appear at a slight remove from the moment-by-moment "moments", will probably be more helping than not.

Ultimately, the passion the teacher has for the ability of the language to reveal aspects of the students to him or her (rather than just a passion for the language itself - what is that, precisely?) is what is going to make the difference. The students aren't just guinea pigs or performing seals clapping for fish.

Larry, I salute you!

You can be in my gang in the playground if you want.

Hey Larry and all!

Isn't it nice to have direct replies to your thoughts?

It well may be, Larry, that the motivated student would get a lot out of any learning situation with just about any teacher. Like a gifted musician, they are able to not only take advantage of the class contact but are probably also putting in a lot of their own time on the subject at hand. Sometimes it matters that the teacher be famous and well known, that aura implies a lot of disciplinary matters that can contribute to class economy and taking on responsibility for one's own learning. You evidently participated in that process, always leaning towards what you know best, maybe your students have learned something extra from your way of doing things. I can't look for improvement in certain classes, I would not be with them long enough and don't always remember how they were to be able to compare with how they are now. In the long run they always spend more time away from me than with me, so I'm peeing in the ocean but, every little bit helps.

Don't know if that makes sense, but at least I didn't say how many years I've been teaching ESL (23---darn!)

peace,
revel.

Thanks to everybody for gettin' into this. Thanks too for some nice comments...I promise I wasn't fishing for those.

I remain pretty well convinced that it was the students efforts outside class that made all the difference, both for those that succeeded and those that didn't. My efforts might have been appreciated by some, but appreciation isn't what gets you effective in a second language. I still believe I made little difference. But I'm really OK with that. It doesn't make me depressed. I did what I was paid to do, and much more. And I had a great time doing it. I'm not about to give any of my paychecks back.

But I'll take it further. I'm also suggesting that you probably don't make as much difference in your students' language progress as you might like to think you do. However, I think you ought to be OK with that too. The main reason I bring this up is to hint that maybe we all could afford to cool down just a bit here with our sometimes heated arguments about English grammar, and especially about ways of teaching. At least, if I'm anywhere near right in believing that teachers really don't make that much of a splash regardless of their style or method, then we ought not to get so fired up about how we do whatever we do in the classroom. This is not to point at anyone who posts at Dave's. Again, it's myself I'm really cautioning here. Instead, let's focus on what genuinely counts. It's better to consider what our students do when they're not in the classroom. That's what will make or break them as language learners.

I like what Woodcutter said: We ought to concentrate on building society's appreciation of education. That would most definitely have an impact. Pretty words, but how do we do that?

Larry Latham

I'd like to give you another compliment you won't appreciate - I think your major talent in life is probably for facilitating uplifting discussion and arousing educational enthusiasm. You do that so well here, and therefore, you are not permitted any more forum holidays. Changing society ain't easy, but I guess you do your share.

(In case you don't grasp the hidden insult, I reckon you are better at that than understanding second language acquisition! )

LarryLatham wrote:My efforts might have been appreciated by some, but appreciation isn't what gets you effective in a second language.

(you=the student)

You may be more wrong than you realize there, Larry...but not as wrong as those teachers who seem hellbent on making the lessons as lifeless as possible.

All I'm saying is, if the method (textbook and methodology) aren't getting it quite right, what's a teacher to do? Give up trying to improve things? Make no effort provide the students with things that they will surely appreciate (and which would therefore surely AID acquisition)?