The Heart of the Matter: Towards a New Methodology for ESOL

Lou Spaventa, US

Kristina Mullamaa has been teaching English and Swedish at the at the Language Centre of Tartu University in Estonia since 1996. In 2006 she defended her doctoral thesis on the profession making of liaison interpreters. Her research interests include cross-cultural issues, motivation and ethics. E-mail: kristina.mullamaa@ut.ee

“For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who it’s namin’”

(Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are Achangin’”)

Last issue of HLT I paid a debt to my past, and that of many humanistically-oriented teachers, when I wrote of the contributions of Caleb Gattegno, Charles Curran, Earl Stevick, Paolo Freire, and Ivan Illich to teaching methodology. I should now like to look towards the future when new teaching methods will be with us, and I should like to speculate on what those methods might include. I will do this by discussing grammar and vocabulary along with the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing,. This is an ‘old’ way of regarding divisions in language teaching methodology; however, it serves us to use it for this discussion. I do think these language skills will be integrated in ways which we have not yet seen.

First of all, to grammar. I believe grammar teaching will incorporate a good deal of pragmatic content as opposed to simple syntactic or generic content. Curricula and textbooks will make use of concrete research results in pragmatics, but will meld this to the generalized insights of Universal Grammar. Thus, the practical will meet the fundamental in ways which will benefit students. Grammar texts will be tailored to the needs of the particular target audience through massive corpora which will generate curricula and syllabi for particular groups - a European French language and culture classroom will be different from an African French language and culture classroom. Contrastive analysis will be revitalized by a more sophisticated, higher level of linguistic and cultural comparison, and thus contribute to teaching methodology. Error analysis will operate above and below a sentence level, making contributions to extended discourse and to phonetic realizations.

Vocabulary instruction will finally benefit from the work of transformational-generative grammarians on the notion of lexicon. Words and phrases will be unpacked with richness and depth. No longer will bilingual texts be content with one to one translation, but the rich variation of thought that occurs in the languages of the world will be realized in the methodology of teaching vocabulary. A simple word such as ‘table‘ will not translate one-to-one in say English to Korean; other realizations of the word will be included, so that the English speaking student of Korean will learn what a traditional Korean notion of ‘table‘ includes. Michael Lewis‘ contributions to the teaching of lexis will also be recognized and incorporated into texts and curricula. Collocations, idioms, and stock phrases, which Lewis already has parsed and which, to some extent, appear in corpora-based dictionaries, will be common tools of methodology. Additionally, further work in register, colloquial language and slang will enable students to learn with more discernment in oral and written language.

Listening methodology will focus on the various intentions of the listener: listening for specific information, listening for the gist of an oral text, listening for the tone of an argument, listening for sociolinguistic differences. Active listening will replace passive listening, so that students will learn to be attentive within the bounds of a particular language and culture, by demonstrating appropriate verbal and non-verbal behaviour. There will be an emphasis on listening strategies. Listening practice will become personalized through small computers with sound sources such as IPods. Students will be able to choose what they listen to for language practice, including content both within the curriculum and outside it. Content will be virtually free to students (For more on ‘free’ content, see Chris Anderson’s book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price).

Speaking will be tailored to the particular needs of the student audience. From the lowest level to the most advanced, speaking methodology will be dependent upon student needs and student goals. In the classroom, ‘old’ techniques such as choral repetition and drills will return in more authentic forms, less bound by procedures and more shaped by affective factors such as community building, providing safe chances for oral practice, and finding one’s voice in the second language. More attention will be paid to non-prosodic elements such as pitch, timbre, stress, syllable timing, and intonation. Emphasis on story-telling, the basic function of all communication, will direct curricula and syllabi-building. Students will learn to speak within the context of the story being told, whether about personal identity or scientific inquiry. Group practice and group instruction will be refined so that various types of groupings for various purposes will become the norm for instruction rather than the whole class facing the instructor.

Reading will move towards electronic media and reading methodology will need to encompass both print and electronic content. Reading communities will become central to student progress as readers. Comprehension activities will move more systematically through stages of understanding from simple comprehension to evaluation. Learning words and collocations will be tied to electronic and corpora-based dictionaries.

Writing instruction will make systematic use of rubrics for evaluating performance and for making decisions about the course of instruction. Instructors will learn to help students move from popular writing systems such as text-messaging to academic instruction. The goals of student writers will be honoured by tying writing practice to particular content such as writing for environmental studies, writing for everyday needs, and writing for personal expression. Multiple models of writing will be available through the Internet for student study.

These imaginings about future methodology have not included contributions that may be come from such areas as neurolinguistic programming, Total Physical Response, Suggestology, poetry, prose and music. Nor has it included the possible contributions of teacher inquiry and reflection. I choose to believe that we, as a community of methodologists and instructors, are going forward and improving the ways in which we teach. I don’t know whether we will reach an Omega point such as Teilhard de Chardin suggests, but I do believe that, as John Lennon once wrote, “It’s getting better all the time.”

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