Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi there - a question for all of you. The communicative method is the one I was taught to teach all those years ago and worked particulalry well with European and not so well on Asians. Would this be true for those of you working in Asia?

This topic was "explicitly" mentioned here:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=1748

This is also connected (and some of the same posters appear and contribute):
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=2867

The following thread started touching upon it when some teachers in Taiwan got involved:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 5019#15019

Then of course there are the threads started by Londo Molari, the most relevant of which (it mentions Japan) is perhaps:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=3379

A couple of posts begun by lolwhites that seem relevant:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=2623
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=2809

Not trying to stifle discussion or say "we've been there, done that"...it's just it's hard with such a broad topic as CLT in Asia to know where to begin (looking for comments, asides or little tidbits, even with the help of the search function - a lot of posts have built up over the years that Dave's has been running!).

And let's not forget there's the Asia (Job Discussion) Forums!

The best thing about the communicative approach, especially when teaching speaking skills, is the emphasis on fluency over accuracy. I find many students, Asians included, are preoccupied with getting the grammar correct when speaking whereas the CLT approach is primarily concerned with the communicative message rather than the grammar which forms it.

The main reason that students (anywhere) might struggle with "the grammar" is simply that they haven't been taught (well) enough (re. which form(s) would help fulfil which function(s) in the context(s) given)...granted, it's frustrating that even in very clear and/or controlled ("practise") contexts, oriental students can be so damn plodding, but I don't think the answer is to posit a dichotomy* and go to either extreme (not saying you would, ssean, but the implication is nevertheless there in the discussion); in fact, one could argue that de-emphasizing form and widening the possible scope of the activity would actually increase rather than decrease the average oriental student's response time!

Those teachers on Dave who seem to want to focus on form to the detriment of meaning and/or function (the dreaded woodcutter, but especially the "unfamous" superstylist and master of the exclamation mark, Londo Molari!! LOL!!!) have, to my mind, not really answered the questions that their (examples of their) approach raised; but equally, intoning just "CLT, Fluency not (necessarily) Accuracy"　etc would also seem to beg questions.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but Dogme caught my eye and got me thinking... (see the 'Out, damned Lewis! Enter the Lacksitall Approach instead!' thread).

Anyway, despite what I've written above, I can see where you're coming from and agree with the general point you're making, ssean.

*'Accuracy vs Fluency (we could probably just roll these into "Appropriateness" or "Effectiveness", and try to disregard the time it takes to form the utterance; that is, why are people who make loads of mistakes considered "fluent", and are there no accurate speakers who aren't fast with it?).' (from the 'Interesting, but ultimately distracting dichotomies' thread).

**You might find this post, where it mentions a Japanese student, interesting:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... =5522#5522

Without wanting to overly stereotype, my experience of "Asian" students was that they were very reluctant to say anything unless they were 100% certain that it was correct. They also tended to think that there was no point in speaking English to anyone except me as non-natives would be unable to point out their mistakes. Any correction from me often prompted a "sorry" response from the student, as if they had to apologise for not knowing something. They wanted to be told what to say so they could say it, rather than experimenting with the language and learning by getting it wrong.

Anyway, the upshot of this was that getting them to speak or practise anything in pairs or groups was an uphill struggle. I wonder whether there was some kind of "loss of face" associated with making mistakes in front of others, though I don't really have the expertise to make that sort of pronouncement, as I haven't really studied the cultures in question and only have experience of teaching these students in multilingual groups, though I once had a group of Japanese teenagers for a week and the silence was deafening for the first couple of days.

Not that his applies to everyone, of course. In my French class there's a student from China who is one of the most outgoing members of the group.

Have you tried discussing your methods with them and explaining why you're asking them to do certain things?

Many thanks for the replies and the links - which I haven't had too much time to look at yet. Certainly, there does seem to be a link with my experiences of Japanese students (and Indonesian ones too) with those of lolwhites. A lot of deafening silence as one of you said.

It would also seem, to me at least, that context and motivation is so important If the motivation is to pass an exam or get a good grade then it would appear that is the sole reason for communicating. Anything else would be extraneous to needs.

You know what, boys and girls?

The nice Australian university people I am currently in the thrall of have concocted a whole module of "Introduction to Applied Linguistics" and scarcely given the ole communicative method a passing mention. They didn't even to seem to think it was necessarily written in stone that it was the bestest thing!

Hallelujah.

They didn't even to seem to think it was necessarily written in stone that it was the bestest thing!

I didn't realise anyone here had ever said that.

They didn't even to seem to think it was necessarily written in stone that it was the bestest thing!

What is their take? That a range of methods suitable to one's context is? Or that it's fluid? Or work out what's best for you and your groups? Or dare I say do what works.

Fluffyhamster wrote:

I'm not sure what the answer is, but Dogme caught my eye and got me thinking... (see the 'Out, damned Lewis! Enter the Lacksitall Approach instead!' thread).

Speaking for myself, I'm beginning to look back to the classical "trivium", which seems to have a lot going for it in the teaching of languages. You might want to look at this essay by Dorothy Sayers:
http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html
I have to say that I don't entirely agree with her (that's putting it mildly ) - in the latter part of the essay, she reveals herself as the ultra-right wing Christian fundamentalist that she really is, and she is clearly using rhetoric in a deceptive an unbalanced way to appeal mainly to emotion and neo-ethos (google it) throughout the essay - note her use of leading questions.

However, when you strip her politics and beliefs away, I really do find that the classical trivium is a pretty good approach, and her claim that during the Middle ages the very few who were educated were educated pretty well seems to hold water. I like her ideas about what age certain things should be taught.

Probably woodcutter's course is eschewing "the" CA (that is, Author A's or training institution B's view of what a CA "should" look and be like) in favour of more general headings such as Vocabulary, Discourse and/or Conversation Analysis, Pragmatics, SLA, Syllabus Design etc etc - it is after all a Master's level course (right) and not aimed at (supposedly) thicko fresh graduates in need of much patronizing, simplistic spankng and abuse generally.
http://writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej29/toc.html (Reviews of Schmitt's, and Cook's introductions to AL)

I recall something in a link that Londo provided (or something that somebody said in one of the subsequent threads discussions) about how CA is just a load of hot air produced by academics anxious to hold onto their prestige and perks (actual power to make teachers do entirely as the academic "says", versus a general "influence" or "fame", would be debatable)...sure, some writers rarely impress or make one pause for thought, but some do, often because they are in two minds themselves about whatever issues and really do seem to be trying to see or at least acknowledge a variety of viewpoints (hence my use of "says" just then).

Anyway, like it or not, and regardless of the appropriacy always for oriental students, the main reason why CA(s) have "cornered the market" is because of the virtual monopoly in the use of the word "communicative"; and just because some schools flog hangman as "communicative" doesn't lessen the power and import (of a proper and real consideration of) the term...it has undeniable implications for pedagogy/the starting and end points, assumptions behind and goals of, pedagogy...

Andy, I did read the whole of Sayers' essay, but can't say I was that impressed. There's her style for a start (as you yourself point out); then her reading much more into the use of the verb 'face' than the author(s) probably intended (I'm presuming they weren't being exact or literal in their usage/with the meaning - it's hard to tell given so little context):

Here is a sentence from no less academic a source than a front- page article in the Times Literary Supplement: "The Frenchman, Alfred Epinas, pointed out that certain species (e.g., ants and wasps) can only face the horrors of life and death in association." I do not know what the Frenchman actually did say; what the Englishman says he said is patently meaningless. We cannot know whether life holds any horror for the ant, nor in what sense the isolated wasp which you kill upon the window-pane can be said to "face" or not to "face" the horrors of death. The subject of the article is mass behavior in man; and the human motives have been unobtrusively transferred from the main proposition to the supporting instance. Thus the argument, in effect, assumes what it set out to prove--a fact which would become immediately apparent if it were presented in a formal syllogism. This is only a small and haphazard example of a vice which pervades whole books--particularly books written by men of science on metaphysical subjects.

Being the lazy and doubtless stupid reader that I am, I would take that at first glance (and probably second and third too) as meaning that insects are successful and endure through sheer strength of/weight in numbers (than due to any obvious advantages brought about by evolution, though they doubtless do have such advantages if we care to take to a closer look): I don't believe that insects have minds like humans, and therefore would only credit them with a "mass" mind made up of the sum of the "association"...

Perhaps more founded are my concerns over her apparent beliefs that inflecting languages are intrinsically the more valuable, and that Russian is "primitive" (that's a wooly use of a word if ever there was one - presumably she means that it is also a "valuable" or "pure" language mentally for students to learn...inflecting languages may well arguably be so, but I don't think any "normal" person ever has or really ever will enjoy memorizing conjugations or inflections for case etc by rote).

Most importantly, the essay ignores developments in politics and philosophy, which have made it hard (in at least an academic sense) for some to accept facts as the facts they purport to be (in subjects other than language anyway - and languages themselves e.g. whether to teach whatever language before or over another, and HOW, are obviously subject to controversy - as if such controversy were in itself a bad thing (it is only bad when it distracts totally from any learning taking or being able to take place, which is usually never the case)); that being said, I take no particular interest in the likes of Derrida.

About the only really reasonable thing she says is that a degree of explicit grammatical knowledge may come in handy when learning a foreign language (if only so one can understand and find one's way around reference books).

Basically, a language is not a set of facts that can be learnt purely through memorization, as the limited ability of many oriental students shows. I'm not saying there is nothing to be said for rote learning - it's certainly better than (the student, in their own time at least) doing nothing at all. Teachers, however, need to be aware not only of discrete facts (e.g. items of vocabulary, the various patterns of complementation etc) but also able to marshall those facts in a way that is true holistically to the nature of (the) language (there's metaphor to deal with for a start); there is a world of difference between knowing, as a NS student in a history class, the answer to 'Who was king at such and such a date?', and understanding the question itself (as well as knowing the answer!) as an EFL or ESL learner. (Note to woodcutter: The answer wouldn't need to be prefaced with 'The king of England at the date you mention was...' ).

Well thanks for that, Andy! You post a link to a crap essay (irrelevant to ESL and, I would argue, of questionable relevance to native speaker compulsory education), which now seems to have put everyone off from continuing any discussion, and then don't even bother replying yourself to what I've had to say about it!

Please, if we're going to post links to long essays or papers, can we at least take the time to summarize them to a degree in our own words, and clearly explain the relevance (or not) of the piece for ESL specifically? Or, if the paper does indeed seem of questionable relevance, let's forget the niceties, the not wanting to appear to offend the poster of the link: let's just bypass (i.e. ignore) it (completely) and get back to the original discussion somewhat (if there are some who'd like to pick up on something that was said prior to the link being posted).

Fluffyhamster wrote:

Well thanks for that, Andy! You post a link to a crap essay (irrelevant to ESL and, I would argue, of questionable relevance to native speaker compulsory education), which now seems to have put everyone off from continuing any discussion, and then don't even bother replying yourself to what I've had to say about it!

Please, if we're going to post links to long essays or papers, can we at least take the time to summarize them to a degree in our own words, and clearly explain the relevance (or not) of the piece for ESL specifically? Or, if the paper does indeed seem of questionable relevance, let's forget the niceties, the not wanting to appear to offend the poster of the link: let's just bypass (i.e. ignore) it (completely) and get back to the original discussion somewhat (if there are some who'd like to pick up on something that was said prior to the link being posted).

Ouch. Sorry, Fluff, but I have been very busy lately, and I mean busy and not just with work. It isn't that I hadn't bothered to reply, I literally didn't have the time. I posted that essay not because I believe in what Sayers said, but because Sayers was about the only well known personality actively campaigning for what really are the lost tools of learning. I even indicated that there was a lot of rubbish in that essay, I'll go further, in fact - most of it is rubbish even dangerous rubbish.

Sayers has been successful in persuading quite a few schools to introduce these tools, however, one cannot ignore her driving Christian fundamentalism. The result is that these tools of learning are are used almost exclusively in Christian schools and often in an unbalanced way. This should not be surprising as one would expect a highly "traditional" approach in such institutions. I'm not going to pretend that I think that education was more perfect in Ancient Greece or Rome, they had other issues, it was afterall common practice to sodomise the pupils. Rather, I am suggesting that we pick the best bits.

That does not detract from the fact that the trivium probably had something going for it that can indeed be applied to the EFL classroom. Grammar has pretty much been a part of EFL teaching right from the start (certain method schools proscribing its use notwithstanding), we sometimes need reminding that grammar is more than just syntax and traditionally, grammar was a much wider subject. I have also found rhetoric to be well worth studying for the way I as a teacher come across in the classroom. The persuasive appeals of ethos, logos, pathos and neo-ethos are fundemental to classroom management (Sorry, I haven't got time to explain, see the link below for these words.) As are prepon and timing. I haven't found any use for dialectic yet. In Poland, dialectic is associated with Marxism and is a bit of a touchy subject anyway.

I have also used principles of rhetoric to prepare managers and directors to give business presentations in English. That is afterall what it was intended for - making speaches. Here Cicero's 5 canons of rhetoric come in very useful.

One of the best sites for rhetoric is:
http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/
"The Forest of Rhetoric" and yes, it's from Brigham Young University, which is a Mormon institution although here at least they don't try to ram Mormonism down your throat like Sayers does with Christian fundamentalism. At the end of the day, if there is anything worth looking at, it can be easily applied in a secular context.

PS I have no objection to returning to the original subject of the communicative approach, it's the best approach we have IMHO. Sorry if my reply has cut this discussion off. Maybe we could discuss my ideas in a seperate thread. Or ignore them if you think they are of no use.

Ouch indeed:

I'm not going to pretend that I think that education was more perfect in Ancient Greece or Rome, they had other issues, it was afterall common practice to sodomise the pupils.

Did they do that in class too or only outside it? After that, Xerxes' army couldn't have held too many terrors for those young spunky Spartans.

No worries, Andy, I know not everyone has as much time as me to while away on Dave's...but you know me, never one to avoid stirring things up if I imagine it'll produce some extra discussion (which it invariably does!)!

No worries, Andy, I know not everyone has as much time as me to while away on Dave's...but you know me, never one to avoid stirring things up if I imagine it'll produce some extra discussion (which it invariably does!)!

OK, but apart from stiring things up, what do you actually think?
You have accused me of not replying and I have tried to clarrify what I thought.
Are you going to use any new (old) aproaches in your classroom as a result of reading Aristotle and Cicero?

Just don't do anything like the bit you quoted back to me to your own pupils.