learning english

Teaching is a performance art. The whole show in the classroom stops if the teacher stops. So we have our lesson plans planned out like scripts; they skillfully modulate the time , enabling teachers to present the lesson, elicit participation and then, turn things over to the students for ‘pair work’ or ‘group work’. Like all performances, some are better than others.

In the two months I’ve been teaching for 6 hours each day in a classroom, I’ve had my good days and less good days when I plod page-by-page through the coursebook. On the good days, I have the course material in my mind and I know what the book says but, more importantly, I’m aware of some larger concept behind the immediate lesson and I manage to bring that out. The good students recognize the energy and excitement immediately and get on board and we all go for a wonderful two-hour ride that I think can be called ‘understanding’. What a feeling!

But…

I’m suspicious that the performance – even on a good day, perhaps especially on a good day – is mostly for my benefit. When things go well in the classroom, I feel great. But is the classroom there so I can feel satisfied with my performance or is it there so the students can learn? The more I understand the actual nature of the classroom and the more I talk to other teachers caught up in the business and pleasure of teaching, the more I believe the classroom is an arena designed to prepare teachers to improve their performance, without actually improving the learning.

The learning is an unknown territory. It is happening in some way in the student’s mind. The performance of the teacher is, of course, designed to demonstrate some ideas, to illustrate some examples, to motivate the student to think about the ideas and examples and to relate those ideas and examples to materials from their own lives. We no longer believe in lengthy sessions of memorizing rules of, say, grammar. We have instead, a little bite-size morsel of the ‘rule’ and lots of gap-fills and role-play and other learning activities. It’s all monitored by the teacher whose passage among the groups and pairs is marked by sudden silences and nervous looks. What sticks in the mind of the students is largely unknown.

At my school – a respected English-language school in Busan – students are ‘level tested’ in a five minute interview; it seems too short a time to be accurate but if you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, you’ll know that we make our decision about someone’s capability in the first 10 seconds and then spend the rest of the interview time justifying our choice. Unfortunately, the accuracy of our decision is not directly proportional to the speed with which it is made. So we test more as a useful organizational tool for student distribution to the various classrooms; the student may be in the right room or not.

How do we find the learning in all the teaching?

All I have learned by being in the laboratory of the classroom for the passed two months is to let the students decide what they want to do. In the Level 3 and 4 classes I teach, I ask the students if they want to begin each class with short talks given by students on any subject or with warm-ups from the book. There’s usually a long pause… then the overwhelming choice to give short talks. The results are interesting: engaged, unscripted speeches and discussions of subjects such as ‘women’s rights in Korea’ or ‘the increase in unnecessary cosmetic surgery’. Half the class is busy talking and arguing in English. Perfect.

And a few anonymous complaints at the front desk: too much ‘talk’ and not enough ’teacher’. Some students love the role of audience member, watching how well the teacher is developing his or her performance. It’s fine to have students as critics but we would prefer them to be creators, wouldn’t we?

Still, in language teaching there’s the tug between fluency and accuracy. The short talks given by students and the questions they engender, are great for fluency. And I know teachers who toss the coursebooks aside and simply chat like this for an hour or two. That maybe good but it is still teacher-dominated in disguise. We need a way that lets the lesson be driven by student interest and, at the same time, somehow brings forward the shape and pace of organized learning.

A teacher can be a performer or a baby-sitter but neither is right. There’s another role for teachers but I’m not sure what it’s called - something closer to spotter: we’re lucky to catch the learning going on and acknowledge it, maybe amplify it, so that it can happen again and more easily.

Share This

Share This

Teaching language is more physical than, say, teaching algebra or accounting or design. I taught design and the process was much more mental than teaching someone English. Language is ‘lingual’, as in “of or related to the tongue and lips” (my definition) and language is ‘dancial’, or whatever the adjectival form of dance is - ‘dancial’ has a wrong but nice sound, doesn’t it?

The theorists of language speak of pragmatics, which include all the ways we mean more than we say and that includes rules of speaking at a proper distance and how to wave your hands or keep them still, as well as all the more social dynamics of what you might be trying to achieve when you say something. A lot of heavy linguistics has gone down in this area but it’s safe to say that language, especially speaking and listening, is a dance.

Which brings us to science and Susan Wagner Cook’s recent experiments with hand gestures and Grade Four students learning to solve math problems. She started with what we know about language and worked back from there; as she puts it:

We’ve known for a while that we use gestures to add information to a conversation even when we’re not entirely clear how that information relates to what we’re saying. We asked if the reverse could be true; if actively employing gestures when learning helps retain new information.

Often, when trying to do math problems, students make a particular gesture to help them conceptualize things. In her experiment, Cook divided 84 third and fourth graders into three groups: one group made no gesture and learned the problem only by speaking; one group spoke and made the gesture; one group did not even speak, they only made the gesture while they solved the problem. Teachers gave all the children the same instruction, which used both speech and gesture. Here’s how Science Daily described the results:

90 percent of students who had learned algebraic concepts using gestures remembered them three weeks later. Only 33 percent of speech-only students who had learned the concept during instruction later retained the lesson. And perhaps most astonishing of all, 90 percent of students who had learned by gesture alone–no speech at all–recalled what they’d been taught.

Your results may differ, as they say. But is seems to me that in teaching and learning language, physical gestures can only help. I’m interested in anyone’s ideas as to what gestures may be beneficial but here are three obvious ones:

1. pointing forward when using the examples to explain the future tense
2. pointing up or down when using the examples to explain the present tense
3. gesturing back when using the examples to explain the past tense

For the past perfect? Maybe just toss your hands in the air with as much WTF resignation as you can muster. Obviously there are limits to this gesture-based language training but it seems it might be fun and useful when teaching kids and, as Susan Wagner Cook says:

“Gesturing does have one clear benefit. It’s free.”

I hope this gesturing idea doesn’t resemble TPR. For those of you who haven’t laughed your way through some of the wacky language training techniques dreamed up in the disco-ball Seventies, TPR is Total Physical Response and it was (is?) an approach in which students must strictly follow the behavior assigned by the teacher while saying some phrase. Watching a video of a TPR class is a bit like seeing a version of Fully-Dressed Bondage for Beginners: it’s weird and more than a bit creepy. Obedience makes me nauseous.

So let’s keep the TPR at the level of NTPR: Not-at-all Total Physical Response. I like the idea of dance better than domination, don’t you? You have to follow a few steps, but, after that, it’s all your own moves, it’s fun and because of that, it’s easy to remember!

See you - gesturing back with thumb - later.

Share This

Almost everyone I know is an immigrant or the son or daughter of one. Canada and the US are jammed with us; the results are more dynamic and diverse societies. As more and more immigrants arrive, there is a tendency for us to become more noticeable and, around cities such as Vancouver or Toronto or Chicago or Houston, you can hear many languages other than English floating through the air of markets and malls. Immigrant groups quickly reach critical mass and, when we do, we become more assertive of our rights, including the right to speak our own language – at least to each other, face to face, or over the local radio and TV stations.

Do immigrants stop wanting to learn English?

Apparently not. Recent studies in the US have shown that 80% of immigrants try to learn English - and that’s 80% of a big number. If we look first at new immigrants, that is, immigrants in the most recently recorded year, there were about a million to the US and 250,000 to Canada (proportionally a much greater number.) It’s safe to assume that most immigrants within the last 10 years are in need of some English instruction; that’s a total number of 10 million people in North America keen to improve their English.

The reasons why people want to learn the lingo are well-known: to get better jobs; to better support their families; and to fit into society with more ease.

But learning English remains difficult for newcomers. In a study done this year in Salt Lake City, for instance, the top barriers to learning English cited by immigrants were:

• A lack of time
• A lack of child care
• Difficulty, and,
• Fear

What can the development and distribution of personal learning environments (PLE) do to help?

The students I have tutored or taught ranged from wealthy kids of the kind referred to as ‘language tourists’ to aging refugee applicants. They all have two things in common: a cell phone and a computer where they were living. Imagine the relative expense of such gadgets for some of those folks! But both devices are lifelines; the cell phone is a link to someone who can help immediately in a language you understand; the computer is an essential connection to the folks back home. It’s good news for the potential of PLEs because it means the basic hardware is in place.

We don’t have the software yet, but it seems that a PLE would help lower some of those learning barriers.

A lack of time?
A PLE would allow immigrants to slice more language learning into a busy schedule . Gone the 2 or 3 hour class! Who in the world thinks that you can learn English for 120 minutes when a 2-hour movie is as hard on the mind as it is on the butt? PLE time will be measured in single-digit minutes but minutes focused precisely on what the learner chooses.

A lack of child care?
Even when women are holding down a job, they also do most of the child care. And to top it off, they are overwhelmingly the majority in immigrant language classes – sometimes up to 90%. A learning environment on their cell or computer would allow them to quickly grab lesson time and also customize the lesson to suit their interests.

Difficulty?
A tough one for any teaching method or approach or technology. There is no magic claimed by proponents of the learning environment – unlike those old-fashioned souls who want us to believe there is some indefinable ‘magic in the classroom’ - such a sweet idea and one held dearly by teachers. But, unfortunately, there are no magic wands for any methods. Those of us developing PLEs can say one thing: it’s our job to make learning environments easy to use and powerfully effective. Tune in later.

Fear?
There’s better hope for real improvements in fighting the fear of English. On-line language learners can select lessons more easily, cancel and then re-start with something more useful to them. Through social networks they can expand their group to include others and change groups when they want something else. The key is diverse offerings and controls that let the learner walk into their chosen learning environment - and out! That’s autonomy.

Share This