Ma.
Luz C. Vilches*
Ateneo de Manila University,
Philippines
The teaching-learning dynamics in the ELT classroom is a journey
experience. In an ideal world, the
direction this journey takes is towards making the students autonomous learners
so that they can be best prepared to face the ‘real’ and much bigger world
outside the classroom. This goal is
reached if both teacher and learner understand the roles they should
appropriately play in the process. The
secret, therefore, is finding the right track.
The reality of finding the right track is often much more complex,
however. Teachers have their own agenda, informed and sanctioned by syllabuses,
textbooks, and lesson plans, and then translated into actual classroom
instruction procedures. Students, either by force of habit or by an act of
faith, often toe the line. However, at
the end of the day, the general feeling one gets is that students do not seem
to be learning much. This paper will,
thus, explore the nature of the gaps between teaching and learning and how
these may be remedied. Data from an ELT
project in the Philippines will be used.
In so doing, this paper hopes to show the practical responsibilities of
the teacher in a learning-centred classroom for effective learner development
to take place.
In ELT discussions,
the focus on learners and language learning inevitably calls attention to the
corollary issue–teachers and language teaching. In this paper, I would like to take these corollary issues
together and consider the relationship between them as a journey experience.
I chose the journey image because I want
to stress that the teaching-learning situation in the classroom is a dynamic
process. We expect it to be a process
of change–a process of helping learners actualise their potential; a process of
making them progress from one level of awareness to another, and many
others. In an ideal world, the
direction this journey should take is towards developing learner autonomy,
*I wish to gratefully
acknowledge the esteemed support provided by Alan Waters, friend and colleague,
through his very thoughtful feedback on the drafts of this paper.
so that schools will produce graduates who are better
prepared to face the ‘real,’ much bigger and more complex world outside the
classroom. In other words, we want to
produce learners who have ownership of the learning experience, who are willing
to go one mile or two in the journey, not because they have to as mandated by educational structures, but because they
believe that doing so makes for a meaningful experience. In other words, this means that for real
learning to take place, the learners should also take responsibility for their
own learning.
If this is the case, where then does the
teacher figure in this journey?
Teachers would agree perhaps that the teacher’s role is to find the
right track and lead the learners in that direction. The teacher factor,
therefore, is crucial to the success or failure of the learning-teaching
journey in a learner-centred classroom.
What is he or she to do? To borrow the words of Kahlil Gibran, a famous
Lebanese poet (Gibran, 1991: 67),
If he [the teacher] is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the
house of his wisdom, but rather leads
you to the threshold of your mind.
Why
is this so? Gibran continues to
explicate thus:
The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but
he cannot give you his understanding.
The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear
which arrests the rhythm nor the voice
that echoes it.
In other words, no one else can do the
learning except the learner him/herself.
The teacher, then, can only facilitate that learning. We are all familiar, of course, with this
concept of teacher as “facilitator” of learning. It has become a byword in modern approaches to ELT. Its implications for teaching methodology
have also been reflected in Paulo Freire’s (Freire, 1984) definition of true
education as problem-posing, that is, one that recognises the learner’s
potential and capacity for development, one that recognises learning as a
result of a constantly dynamic dialogue between teacher and learner in the
context of the real world.
It is very inspiring, indeed, to hear
these ideals, especially, no doubt, when expressed in poetic language. They mesmerise us and elevate our sense of
dignity as teachers. Whether these ideals
ring true in practice, however, is another story.
The reality of finding the right track
is a much more complex process. For
example, it is not uncommon to find lots of cases, where the teacher starts the
teaching-learning journey with introducing the syllabus and ends it with
finishing the requirements of the syllabus.
In this syllabus-centred approach, it is not uncommon to find learners
thrown off the learning path. Instead
of discovering and developing their potential, they burn their energies
fulfilling the requirements of the syllabus and preparing for exams that often
measure simply how much they have retained from the information they received
within the coverage of the syllabus. In
giving this example, I am not, however, putting down the role of the syllabus
in the teaching-learning process. I am
simply illustrating how such tools as syllabuses, textbooks, lesson plans and
even teachers can become more of a hindrance than a help in advancing the goals
of learning in the classroom. This
happens when we lose sight, often inadvertently, of the reality that these (and
we) are simply tools that should be adapted, modified or changed accordingly in
order to promote learning. We are
courting tragedy when we allow learners to be forced to adapt, modify and
change in order to justify to ourselves and to the system that our tools
work. It is no wonder then, that in
most cases, although so much teaching has been done, not much learning has
actually taken place at the end of the day.
The ultimate concern of this
paper, then, is the teacher factor in the learning process. I wish to argue that before teachers can
guide learners towards greater autonomy, teachers themselves need to experience
this in their own learning. Since this
experience of autonomy does not appear to happen very much, this has to be
considered first before any sensible discussion can be made about effective
learner development in the classroom.
The rest of the paper will deal with this topic because finding the
right track in the teaching-learning journey is relevant both for the learner
and the teacher.
1 For details of information see http://acelt.faithweb.com/publish/PELT/pelt.htm
http://acelt.faithweb.com/publish/PELT/pelt.htm
2 The PELT
Project is coordinated by the Ateneo Centre for English Language Teaching
(ACELT) at Ateneo de Manila University together with its UK partner
institution, the Institute for English Language Education (IELE) at Lancaster
University
.
Project Background.
The PELT Project was a 4-year teacher
training project initiated in 1995 through the bilateral cooperation agreement
between the British and Philippine Governments for the benefit of public
secondary school English teaching in the Philippines. Its main aim was to promote learning in the English language
classroom through the training of teachers in specific strategies that answer
major concerns in the teaching-learning process. The Project covered seven
major regions in the country.2
Baseline data for this Project showed,
among other things, that the journey that needed to be undergone at the time in
Philippine public secondary schools was from the ‘Garden of Eden’ of a mainly
ESL situation to the largely uncharted territory of an increasingly mainly EFL
situation. It was hard to believe that
this is so in a country where English is considered one of the two official
languages in education, government, and the media. This disbelief could be seen in the way teachers and textbooks presupposed
a first language approach to ELT. For
example, learners were expected to interact with a reading text often without
giving them enough preparation for reading comprehension.
The Garden of Eden for ESL in the
Philippines, is, unfortunately, now a thing of the past. Teachers and students alike can no longer
rely today on the external linguistic environment to do much of their work for
them. The question thus becomes: what path needs to be trod to take the
children of Israel, as it were, to the new promised land (or at least in its general
direction)?
Like in any journey, we need to know (a)
where we are starting from and (b) where we are intending to go. Then the best route between the two can be
worked out. How is this to be decided?
Not, we would say, by reference to ideology (i.e. adherence to the
communicative approach, because it is seen in the abstract or in some other
context to be a miracle cure, the best thing since sliced bread etc.); rather,
by reference to the realities of the existing situation and its potential for
growth. In other words, the journey
needs to be planned and thought out in terms of developmental/incremental
change, not in terms of change as loss or mere substitution (Marris, 1986).
2 The PELT Project is coordinated by the Ateneo Centre for English
Language Teaching (ACELT) at Ateneo de Manila University together with its UK
partner institution, the Institute for English Language Education
(IELE) at Lancaster University
Still a much bigger question is thus how to help
teachers, learners and everyone concerned, make the journey successful from a
situation where the main focus is teaching
to one where the main focus is learning. This is often attempted by the educational
equivalent of the forced march.
However, teachers are not soldiers or shock-troops and the classroom is
not (or should not be) a battle-ground or Armageddon. For real development in education to occur, it must be allowed to
arise voluntarily from within the hearts and minds of the teachers to the
greatest possible extent (Fullan, 1991).
Guidance needs to be provided, but primarily in order to support the
teacher’s own developmental efforts, not to coerce them. The teachers too have a lot of learning to
do.
The PELT approach to this reality can be
summarised in three steps. First, to
try to help the teachers work out where they were starting from; second, to
show them some of the sights that lay ahead in the direction of the general
potential destination; and third, to help them along the road. This last step
was dependent on their interest and/or feelings about their ability to make the
journey towards these sights.
In practical terms the three steps were
done in the PELT training seminars3 by first of all raising teachers’ awareness about the
main focus of current practice. This
practice can be crudely summarised as follows:
3 Grateful
to Alan Waters, IELE Deputy Director and PELT Lead Consultant, for his valuable
insights and sustained guidance in the design of all the PELT Project
training programmes.
• Level of thinking within the information given: exercises that tap only the basic level skill of
literal comprehension; communication activities which allow learners to pick
out responses from and stick to ideas provided by the material and/or teacher
in the lesson.
• Lessons as
macro-skills based: lessons arranged according to the macro
skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing; activities, often
repetitive, are geared towards the practice of these skills per se.
• Whole
class/frontal channels of communication: class discussion is propelled by the teacher
and ends with the teacher–the teacher asks questions, the students in the big
group are expected to volunteer answers, which are judged as right or wrong
only by the teacher. More often than not, only the intelligent and the brave
risk to respond; the insecure and the indifferent (which often comprise 80% of the class) all sink inevitably into
oblivion!
• Presentation/practice
as mode of language production: this usually takes place in a grammar lesson
where rules are presented and sentence-level drills follow; or this can also
happen in a writing class where models of outlining and paragraph organisation
are presented first; then followed-up with a similar exercise.
• Telling or
input-driven: this often happens in discussion of reading
texts where the teacher ends up telling the learners information that they
ought to look for, etc. After raising teachers’ awareness about the current
practice, they were then shown how these behaviours could be refined and
developed by the addition of practices such as the following:
- Level
of thinking beyond the information given:
exercises that challenge the learners’ inferential and evaluative
abilities; ‘extension’ questions, i.e. those which ask the learners to consider
further implications of information; communication activities which ask the
learners to use ideas of their own, etc.
- Lessons
as task-based: a lesson that is
cohesively structured towards a meaningful task (a problem to solve) which
challenges the learners to decide on the appropriate linguistic tool and
content knowledge required to fulfill this task; the activities are arranged in
gradual progression of complexity, each one leading to another– all in view of
preparing the learner to carry out the culminating task as successfully as
possible.
- Pair
and group work as mode of interaction: discussions are done in small groups
where appropriate; learners are challenged to express themselves and work out a
problem through collaborative effort; they build confidence in sharing what
they know and asking help for what they do not and finally learning how to make
decisions and take responsibility for these.
- Discourse
level production: in a grammar
class, e.g., learners go beyond sentence-level practice through producing a
communicative task that is meaningful and where learners use in context the
appropriate grammar called for.
- Learners
discovering knowledge: through meaningful practice and communication tasks,
learners discover rules of grammar or reflect on processes of arriving at
solutions to problems.
After having gone through
these two steps, the teachers were, finally, given the opportunity to choose
one of the areas to investigate further back in their teaching. They were supported in this by a follow-up
action plan, devised in collaboration with the trainers during the seminar and
executed afterwards with the support of the school ELT management. This action plan acted as their personal
‘route map’ for the journey ahead, and the trainers and ELT managers assist as
‘tour guides’.
Clearly, the statement the project team
wanted to make in all this is that, for an educational change process in the
classroom to occur, a change process in the teacher has first to take
place. The teaching-learning gap in the
classroom can be bridged if the teacher is willing to be a learner again. That is why, in the PELT model of teacher
training, the seminar is considered simply as the trigger to teacher
learning. For true learning to occur,
it has to be sustained through guided reflection on actual classroom experience
as a spin-off from what has been learned in the seminar. We recognise, of course, that since the
classroom is part of a bigger
educational context, a chain of compatible and synchronised changes needs to
occur ultimately in the other areas of the entire system in order to support
and sustain the change that we want to happen in the classroom.
To summarise the journey we
have done so far in this paper, there are three points I want to make. First, the goal of teaching is greater
learner autonomy. The role of the
teacher in this context, therefore, is to guide learners towards this
goal. In order to do so, teachers
themselves must experience autonomy in their own learning. Unfortunately, current practice seems to
show that this experience is found wanting. The second point is that there is a
gap between teaching and learning in the ELT classroom. Current practice seems to show that there is
more emphasis on teaching than learning.
This leads me to my third point, that is, that the remedy for this gap
is not necessarily the substitution of what is currently familiar with an
innovation which promises to be an all-cure formula to the problem. Instead the secret is to build on the
strengths of what is already there and plan for evolutionary change. This
involves mapping out the journey in terms of the most suitable starting point
(i.e. where people currently actually are), the possible destination, and
providing a clear route-map, tourist guides and plenty of chances to pursue
individual interests on the way. Only
in this way can we find the right track to the teaching-learning journey.
References
Freire, P. 1984. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Gibran, K. 1991. The
Prophet. London: Mandarin Paperbacks.
Fullan, M. 1991. The
New Meaning of Educational Change.
London: Cassell.
Marris, P. 1986. Loss
and Change. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
PELT Project Information
Sheets, Ateneo Centre for English Language Teaching, Ateneo de Manila University.
Also see http://acelt.faithweb.com/publish/PELT/ p elt.htm
Vilches, Ma. Luz. C. 1999.
The Johari Window of the Language Classroom:
Potential Zones for Innovation. In Education Via Language.
Manila: Language Education Council of the Philippines and
Language Study and Research Centre, Inc.
Vilches, M.L.C. 2000. Promoting language learning in secondary
English language teaching: The PELT Project Experience.
Philippine Journal of Linguistics,
31 (2): 107-113.
Vilches, Ma. Luz. 2002.
Task-based language teaching: The Case
Of En 10 (forthcoming in The RELC Journal).
Waters, A. & Vilches,
M.L.C. 1998. Foundation building and potential
realising: The PELT Project ELT paradigm (or the learning cake). The
ACELT Journal, 2 ( 1):
Waters, A. & Vilches, M.L.C. 2000. Integrating teacher learning: the school- based follow- up development activity. ELT Journal, 54 (2):