November 2, 2012 by Willy Cardoso
Today I felt the oh-no moment I imagine many of my students have felt. The moment at the beginning of a lesson when the teacher happily announces the topic of the day. In my lesson it was:
Today we’re going to talk about fairy tales.
It turned out not to be something bad after all, but here is what I’ve puzzled over:
- Teachers in general, myself included, tend to pick topics they know something about and/or enjoy discussing.
- This happens more often when they don’t know much about the students, which was the case in my Spanish lesson; it was only the second lesson.
- Or they pick topics/materials that they already used before in order to make their work more economical. This way it is easier to anticipate problems and to direct students to focus on what the teacher thinks the problem is.
For example, I didn’t know in the beginning that the whole fairy tale thing was to in fact contextualize past tenses. The teacher, of course, knew that, but didn’t say it in advance; she only led us to focus on the grammar after we read the text and were okay with the meanings in it. [this is generally good practice as far as I know]
This, on a surface level, is good and is what one could call an inductive approach, which aims at clarifying meaning before form, which aims first at some sort of communication (in this case, understanding a text), then an autonomous analysis of the grammar in question and hopefully some inference before being introduced to its formal rules.
On the other hand, the teacher had already pre-selected the grammar we were going to focus on, and was ready to show us on the screen tables on how to conjugate the past tenses in Spanish (which was useful). Now, there is nothing super bad about this, in fact, if I were a mere observer in that lesson, I would say it was a very good lesson, and as a student, I can also say it was a good lesson. If, let’s say, this was a CELTA lesson, it would be given a pass, or a good pass (even though there was no drilling of the target language!! 😉 just kidding)
Now, here comes the BUT, as you would imagine.
While, according to the activity, I was trying to spot the verbs in the past form, in the fairy tale text, and to inductively categorize them, or group them… I had some insights and started to scribble some notes, which are as follows:
After working a little on the past tenses, which I’m far from mastering, I caught myself asking the teacher about why in one sentence it was Le pregunté quién era (I asked her who she was) and in the other it was La dejé seguir su camino (I let her go/follow her way). Being both ‘her’ after a verb, why one was la and the other le. Well, it doesn’t matter here that the point was about direct and indirect objects (or not, I’m still not sure); but what it matters is that – and every teacher should expect this – my question was off-topic.
Now, was it really off-topic? For me, no it wasn’t. Because I know learning is messy and non-linear and how on earth can I give my students a text (unsurprisingly full of language!!), and expect them to microscopically pay attention to one single linguistic feature of this text, which I have chosen god knows why, and ignore the others?
In sum, from this reflection I had while the other students were doing the grammar exercise, I stated in my notepad:
Students will notice different things regardless of what the directions say. Some students will smother their curiosity for the sake of completing the task at hand, some others will not. The teacher should not make a priori judgments on those who did not complete the task, for example, by thinking either that they didn’t understand it or that they already knew it. The fact might be that other things caught their attention, and that at that moment they are ready (because they are curious) to learn something other than the pre-selected. The teacher’s difficult job now is to decide whether to engage with the student in something unexpected and singular to his/her learning or to bring him/her back to the main point, the one where supposedly everyone else is.
[sorry, I clearly did not have time to write this paragraph in the lesson, I wrote it now, two days later, but the feeling is the same; just more polished]
To credit the teacher, she did answer my doubts, albeit briefly, and said we would see the le vs la thing in another lesson. And noticing that I spent some time doing something else, she did ask me if I understood the past tenses, if I had seen them before, how difficult I thought they were, and she also gave us a website to practice them and the chance to write a composition as homework. So, again, the teacher was doing her job alright.
Well then, off I went to finish the task of highlighting the verbs in the past and matching them with their functions. Unsurprisingly though, I couldn’t finish it since I spent some time reflecting on my learning, writing about it, and answering a classmate on why I was writing in English in the middle of the Spanish lesson.
Again, I wrote some notes that went something like this:
Time on task varies greatly among students, not only because of ‘mixed-abilities’ or ‘levels’, which mostly considers output (i.e. what one can produce/say/write), but also because students’ noticing, level of analysis and engagement with the text and the language development it affords will vary greatly.
What I’m trying to say here, is that language schools, mainly, group students based on what they can say in the foreign language. Notice that this has nothing to do with how good a learner they are, how autonomous they are, how motivated they are, how much time they need to understand something new, etc.
All in all, the modern way of talking about learning and learners, i.e. autonomy and learner-centeredness (etc), has mainly given rise to an unnecessary abundance of pair-work, information-gap activities, lots of chatting in the lesson without correction, gimmicks to disguise pre-selected target language, among other communicative frills, in the expense of giving students a text to work from and… well, and that is it.
Give me a text you know well, and just sit there and wait for me to ask you questions, be resourceful to direct me to further practice, correct me when I make a mistake, ask me intelligent questions that will make me think beyond ‘scanning the text for information’. In sum, forget teaching, focus on learning. [oh, it’s been ages I haven’t used this phrase!]
I ain’t no easy student, I tell you. Wanna be my teacher?
But, we have to make sure students understand the language.
Yes and No. You don’t have to make sure they understand what you want them to understand. You have to make sure, absolutely sure, that they learn something out of it. Whatever they learn, it’s actually, and I’m sorry for the reality check, out of your control.