Jul 9, 2013

Quandary

A Quandary



“I am in a quandary and I’m wondering what help or input anyone could provide here.

Last Tuesday I started a new course teaching a group of undergraduates in the Economics faculty at our local university. I am lucky, as this is a group of only 14 students. They are all in their second year and they seem keen and motivated. They all studied English through the school system but have pretty limited communicative skills, which is a very typical situation. I wanted this course to be as student-centred as possible and I felt that we would have the perfect conditions – a small group of motivated and educated individuals. I carried out a needs analysis and it gave the sorts of results that you would expect in such a situation -- they all knew that English would be necessary for them in their lives and careers beyond university but their overriding need was to pass their exams as they could not graduate without having successfully completed the English component of the course.

I explained the benefits of student-centred learning and autonomy and tried to open up the discussion as to how we would carry this project forward. The trouble was that they unanimously shunned the whole concept -- they found it rather intriguing but also rather irrelevant. They explained that they wanted me to decide what to do and they wanted me to take responsibility for guiding them through a defined programme that would lead them ultimately towards achieving their main objective. I explained to them that only they could really know exactly what they wanted -- how could I put myself into all of their shoes? How could I know what interested them most or what would get the best responses from them in terms of their own learning styles? If I was to impose content and modality on them, how fertile and productive would the lessons be?

They politely explained to me that they trusted me - they were sure that I was a good teacher and I would be able to make the right decisions with their needs in mind. I shouldn't worry about ‘imposing’ - that was a completely unnecessary concern, even though they appreciated my good intentions. They were all used to knuckling down and learning and they knew it was a simple fact of life that some subjects were more interesting than others and that some teachers were more interesting than others. Of course, they preferred lessons with teachers who were interesting (and interested) and who made the effort to make boring things a little more appealing.

Their frankness was quite disarming -- basically they told me that I was the expert and that they were happy to be in my hands, especially since I was so obviously interested in doing a good job for them. They were looking forward to their lessons with me and they were looking forward with confidence to positive results and success.
Anyway, as they pointed out, if I wanted to give them autonomy and the freedom to decide how to conduct their course and they had decided to give me the leading role in this, shouldn't I be happy? They had been free to decide to allow me to make the decisions. They assured me that they would be hard-working and attentive and they would contribute as much as I asked them to.

It's a shame they didn't quite get the point -- I'm sure it's down to a very conservative and traditional streak within this culture as well as within their educational system. Nonetheless, this does leave me in a rather difficult position here as I am not used to -- or at least I have never been clearly aware of -- this explicitly declared expectation of me. They all seem bright and intelligent young people so I don't really think they will be like clueless little ducklings just waddling after their mother duck regardless of where she goes.

How can I reconcile my own belief in the advantages and rightness of a student-centred approach with the students’ conscious relinquishing of these rights and responsibilities?”

Actually this is all nonsense – there is no teacher in a quandary, I just invented the whole thing. Yet it does, maybe in a flippant way, focus on the disparity between what students feel they should be doing and what teachers want for them on their behalves.

But how often, even where a teaching programme is not imposed on students and teachers, is there genuine consensus in the classroom? Dissatisfaction with traditional grammar-based instruction, still standard in education systems in many countries of the world, seems pretty general: pretty much wherever you go people complain that they study grammar but they never get to speak. Probably many teachers aren't happy with this either; they would love to be able to give their students a more useful and realistic set of language skills, but more often than not circumstances prevent this.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (this is where physics sounds like poetry) and the last few decades have seen the lingering trend in language teaching to rebel against long-standing academic traditions and against audiolingual language teaching based on behaviourist theory which represented the last monolithic ‘method’, and now largely discarded and discredited. No dominant theory has come to replace it and thus the new ‘method’ is that there is no method. Methods were restrictive and stifling because that is what they had tended to be and, not only did this conflict with the mood of the times, but how effective had they been anyway?

For many modern teachers ‘method’, ‘structure’, and even ‘efficiency’ are ‘bad’ words. For many students ‘unstructured’, ‘unmethodical’ and ‘inefficient’ are equally bad. Does that leave everyone in a quandary?



Mar 24, 2013

A reply to a discussion on Translation in class


Thanks for your interest, Stephen. The age-old debate - personally I tend to steer clear of 'nevers' and 'always' when it comes to what is best in teaching situations - these can vary in many ways and dogma can be a real obstacle. Nonetheless, you need to be guided by ideas about what is most beneficial and effective - that's the point of having teachers.
My own guide (we're talking mono-lingual teaching situations here) is that relying on L1 in the classroom is doing learners a disservice, although it's what a fair number of them ask you to do. It can be a lazy short-cut - I think it probably often is - but there are several good reasons not to translate for convenience. 
One very practical reason (in the case of English mother-tongue teachers) is that it gives an unfair 'advantage' to teachers who know their students' language well, over their colleagues who don't - and some students might think teachers 'better' or 'worse' as a result. I've observed teachers mis-translate words in class - another good reason for the practice to be discouraged. It's also true that while some students want translation, many others dislike it - they find it de-motivating and a waste of valuable time.
From a learning point of view, regular use of translation doesn't do learners a favour - it teaches them a 'shallow' relationship with the new language, and although lessons will seem 'easier' it will make out-of-classroom interaction in the the new language more 'laborious' and stressful. There's also the fact that some things simply don't translate - this applies both for lexis and grammar.
However ........  translating new words can be a lazy shortcut, but refusing to do so can become a very long and circuitous diversion - like eating a kilo of celery to gain just a handful oif calories (I like celery but it's not a good source of energy). Lesson time is limited - a talented and perceptive teacher can often get meaning across economically and effectively - but in many 'no-translation at any cost' classrooms there's a lot of time and frustration before mission is accomplished (often by classmates whispering the translation anyway).
Do I translate? Yes - sometimes. At beginner level with new classes I will use some Italian (when I'm teaching Italian students - or Italian-speaking students, as is the case here), although not to teach the language content but to give little interludes of advice and information about what we are learning. I like to give a brief outline of the course and about what lessons will involve, and maybe to remind students about how things are going from time to time. 
I often point things out about English - unlike some languages it has no genders: "wow, that's easy!" - and what sort of things are difficult and take everyone time to begin to grasp. So, I translate for 'welfare' reasons rather than as a teaching tool. Sometimes students check with you that they have understood something - I acknowledge these 'translation for confirmation' requests, rather than pretend not to understand. 

One other thing  (this is much longer than I'd expected). Translation is a useful skill and I try to do short spontaneous translation activities - with elementary and first-intermediate levels. When we read short dialogues (phone-calls are good), I might also ask for an off-the cuff translation - not word-by-word but just what was said. 
This is a real-life need - it's not unusual to have to report and translate a phone-call or e-mail, or translate for a friend in a social setting. This is a useful and enjoyable translation activity to sprinkle in to lessons. It has to be quick, so accessible content is required.

Feb 25, 2013

Day 1

A good day today -- unless I'm wrong.


This was day one of a teacher-training programme in a new school. When I say a new school, I mean it's going to be a fresh start for them with SpeakYourMind.

The school has been up and successfully running for 20 years and has a good stable stream of clients and a strong local reputation. Why rock the boat? The owner thought that after 20 years he could simply be looking towards another 20 years of the same and then retirement. Was that doing justice to himself and his own potential? Was it doing justice to the business that he might want to pass on? And was it doing justice to his staff who have been very loyal and hard-working over the last few years? He evidently had asked himself these questions and decided that no -- he wasn't ready to settle into a comfortable rut.

A lucky coincidence brought his attention to SpeakYourMind: a new student at his school told him that he had done a really good course in another town where he had spent the last few years – the method had really worked for him and he had made a lot of progress: didn't this school have anything similar to offer? The course was SpeakYourMind and the owner contacted us. After a few exchanges he came over to visit our central office in Verona with a friend from his town who would be able to get a student’s-eye view of things. They both liked it and were impressed and the decision was to go ahead with SpeakYourMind being at the centre of his revitalised school’s new era.



So today saw the school staff’s first real encounter with SpeakYourMind: the owner had prepared them for this in advance so it wasn't totally out of the blue and because they had a good relationship with him they were naturally inclined to trust his intuition on this important decision - or at the least, to approach this change with open minds. So -- how did it go?

Sitting here in my hotel room reflecting on the day, I'd say that things got off to a good start: the teachers had a busy schedule after our training, so feedback has to wait until tomorrow. I think things were far more different than they had anticipated but I think they are impressed by the way things are thought out and the reasoning that has gone into what we propose as an English course -- they like the whole approach that really looks at things from a student’s point of view.

And talking of students – well, they always seem to be our best allies. The students we had today as volunteers did the SpeakYourMind placement test in the morning, which in itself seemed to gain positive response from them -- and then they came back for their first lesson in the afternoon with all the staff observing. Students tend to instinctively get the point of the whole lesson format and quickly see how easy it is to get a lot out of the lesson, and for the teachers to see that positive response goes a long way towards persuading them that there really is something of value inside the course - things that might not be evident on first or even second sight. Thank goodness for the students!

Jan 30, 2013

Desirable Difficulties ... interesting stuff!


New information in small nibbles rather than full mouthfuls, variety (interleaving) rather than topic-based lessons, spacing, retrieval, ‘low-stake quizzing’ …


It's interesting to see how the work of Prof Robert Bjork at the learning and forgetting lab at UCLA throws into question traditional paradigms -- and the findings seem to sit neatly with what we've been doing in the development of SpeakYourMind. Interesting food for thought - and more for the drawing board.

http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research.html

Jan 9, 2013

more on motivation (final part)

So where does a teacher not have control? There are the unpredictable personal factors: you can't control what kind of mood a student walks into the classroom with -- it wasn't your fault he just had an argument at work. Of course you have influence once they are in the classroom and you make decisions as to how to deal with that situation.
On a more permanent level, where the teacher usually has no control is more to do with organisational aspects of courses and it is these that can make a teacher's life so difficult in how they limit the potential of the teacher’s skills, experience and talent, and can ultimately erode the teacher's motivation and sense of self efficacy. I’m talking primarily of class-size and class streaming.

Earlier we looked at modality -- if the modality of learning is to respond to most learners’ needs and preferences, by which we mean a primarily speaking-based lesson format, large groups are pretty much destined to impair the potential of lessons in providing interest and motivation. When groups go beyond a certain number, say more than 12-15, teachers have to bend over backwards and resort to a variety of strategies to keep people talking and communicating.

Under CLT, pair-work has become a stalwart of lesson procedure and this can work well - or it can become tedious, dispiriting and of little use. Many students don’t like spending more than a limited time with a peer when they have a real teacher in the classroom. Nonetheless, pair-work has become orthodox practice -- it's bad if you don't do it – but it is more useful and valid as a class management strategy than as a teaching strategy.
Working on projects or tasks in groups is another common form of activity that has been imported from other teaching situations and where it in line with the idea of developing teamwork skills and learner autonomy. But whether this is within the remit of an English course for adult learners is open to question, especially where developing speaking skills is the declared priority and where lesson-time is very limited.


So where the teacher has limited influence over motivation is in creating workable conditions for successful and relevant learning – this is where the school has the key role. With large classes, teachers and students are left pretty much to make the best they can of things, but whatever happens there will be little room for useful speaking for the majority of students.

Well prepared, well organised and enthusiastic teachers will be able to offer interesting enough lessons for all - and very challenging and productive lessons for a few. Poorly prepared and unenthusiastic teachers will sit back and watch as their students proceed with the tasks that have been issued them. The ‘good’ students will do as much as they can in their own time and they will be able to bring that useful learning into their lessons with them. Those who have no time or no inclination will just float along with the current that isn't moving very fast if anywhere at all.
In many situations (public education), large class-size is a simple fact of life, so speaking will always have little space and students will have little real benefit in terms of improving communication skills. However, for private schools class size is a decision they can make. Clearly there are financial implications. In situations where there is little competition, schools are free to fill classes with paying students and make a hefty earning -- on the other hand they might decide, responsibly, to limit class size for students’ (and teachers’) benefit and be willing to accept lower margins on earning.

So it is very likely that students will be happier and therefore more motivated in a small group. But it's not just down to numbers. A large group of students all at similar levels and with similar aptitudes is more likely to be a useful context for learning than a small group of students who are very poorly matched -- this is basically setting up a class for failure and frustration. Again for very many teachers, having to deal with mixed ability or mixed level classes is a fact of life but it needn't be like that. Schools too often tend to pass the buck and present teachers with largely unworkable conditions, the idea being that if they are trained teachers it's their job to sort things out. Forming well-graded and well-streamed groups of students involves far more hard work for a school than bunging people together out of convenience. The thing is that most people are used to mixed ability groups, because that's what happens at primary school and secondary school, so even students tend to accept this as simply being ‘normal’ and tend not to complain too much. Again the result here is that much of the teacher's time and effort is spent simply managing lessons rather than getting on with good focused teaching -- often teachers become events organisers or entertainers more than anything else.
Very often placement testing is a perfunctory ritual: standardised multiple-choice tests, often online for convenience again, and, maybe, a brief and superficial oral test. More often than not the outcome of this test is pretty predictable with students ending up in one of the catch-all nets: elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate or advanced. I don't know how many people I've met who have been stuck in a constant loop of intermediate courses.

The school then has the primary role in establishing the right conditions for good learning and the right conditions for student motivation to remain intact. So here could be the list of key components which can allow motivation the highest likelihood of survival:

• Workability of conditions
• Skill and intuition of teacher
• Appropriateness of method
• Relevance of content