Can MI Theory Support Instruction and Assessment in the ESOL Classroom?
Paola Giuliani, Italy
Based in Italy, Paola Giuliani is an experienced EFL teacher and translator. She fell in love with MI theory by chance: on day one of a Pilgrims course for Primary Teachers, some colleagues who were on the MI course run by Bonnie Tsai encouraged her to change courses. That was the beginning of a long-lasting love that not only reshaped her approach to teaching, but also taught her to look at people with new, compassionate eyes. This paper, originally written for her Postgraduate Course in ELT and Applied Linguistics at King’s College, London, is an attempt to introduce MI theory into the British academic discourse.
E-mail: pdgiuliani@libero.it
Menu
Introduction
Linguistic rights
Language assessment
Implementation of MI theory in practice
Criticism of MI
Conclusion
References
This paper will focus on if and how the implementation of a teaching approach in the spirit of Multiple Intelligences theory can effectively support language instruction and help teachers handle the issues at the core of ESOL teaching. In order to carry out my analysis, I will first provide an overview of the general inner and outer issues affecting ESOL; this will be followed by a brief introduction to the AMI study on the effects of the implementation of the theory of Multiple Intelligences developed by Professor Howard Gardner in adult literacy. Thirdly, after illustrating Terri Coustan’s teacher research project on the implementation of the Multiple Intelligence (MI) theory in an American ESOL classroom, I will attempt to link her findings to the general ESOL issues discussed earlier in the paper. Finally, I will draw my conclusions on the effectiveness of MI-informed teaching in the ESOL context. In the next section, I will provide an overview of the inner and outer issues affecting ESOL provision, drawing extensively from Cooke and Simpson (2008).
Migrants moving to an English-speaking country are entitled with two basic linguistic rights, namely the right of maintaining and cultivating their own language/s and that of learning to express themselves in English (Cooke and Simpson, 2008). Unfortunately the provision of ESOL tuition is extremely diverse around the world and influenced by several factors (for a thorough discussion see Cooke and Simpson 2008), the main one being undoubtedly funding. While funding can stem from various sources (regional, local, charities), at a national level it is tightly connected with the political agendas of the parties in power. These, however, often prove contradictory, and the financial resources needed in the long-term are not easily allocated (ibid.). Political agendas not only impact on the actual existence of a ESOL programmes, but also weigh massively on their learning content. In British programmes funded by the Government or by employers, for instance, the factor of learners’ employability is crucial and the subject matter has to include work-related language that may facilitate the training of potential work force (Cooke and Simpson 2008). Another important factor influencing lesson content in the UK, as well as in other countries, is the introduction of citizenship testing and teaching as integral parts of ESOL classes (ibid.). Besides impacting on the ESOL class in terms of learning content, such outer forces often translate into a huge bureaucratic load for ESOL teachers who need to document their professional efforts. In the UK, moreover, teachers are also increasingly subject to audits and inspections aimed at assessing their work and their students’ knowledge: failing to meet the standards required could even lead to a removal of funds (Cooke and Simpson 2008). Norman Fairclough writes about “interviews, official forms, questionnaires, test and examinations, official records, medical examinations, lessons” with “a transistitutional status which allows them to be drawn into - to colonize – a whole variety of institutions” (Fairclough, 1998:176). They are the result of the bureaucratization of discourse, a social phenomenon affecting both ESOL teachers and learners, and turning them into “objects to be ordered, checked, registered, shifted” (Fairclough, 2008:175). One of the side effects of this phenomenon is on teachers’ professional identity: in the UK, for example, even experienced professionals with strong vocational commitment had to retrain to get standardized qualifications (Cooke and Simpson 2008). Another consequence of the bureaucratization of the teaching discourse is that it deprives teachers of the precious preparation time needed to face the challenging needs of their ESOL classes. These will be described generally in the following section.
It is extremely difficult for an ESOL teacher to cater for the needs of her diverse class, usually including people with the most varied cultural backgrounds, study skills and levels of literacy, as well as different personal histories and status (migrants, refugees, asylum seekers etc.); gender, due to some cultural views associated to it, can also become an issue (Cooke and Simpson, 2008). The question of class diversity is possibly the main reason why, as documented by David Bell’s study carried out in the UK (Bell 2007 in Cooke and Simpson 2008:44), ESOL teachers don’t seem to commit exclusively to one teaching method, but rather engage in a “principled pragmatism” approach (Cooke and Simpson 2008:45), where they combine older and newer methods relevant to their teaching context. ESOL teachers often draw their learning material from general EFL textbooks, though the appropriateness and relevance of such content is questionable (Cooke and Simpson 2008). Whatever the materials adopted, however, ESOL teachers should be especially attentive to providing learners with opportunities for oral interaction, both in order to maximize effective language acquisition as well as to provide their learners with the only opportunity they might have to use English. A good way to encourage students’ speaking could be fostering learner’s agency (ibid.); teachers, on the other hand, need to stage beforehand, recognize and allow for students’ initiative in the classroom, as well as be ready to negotiate content with their learners. Cooke and Simpson (2008) highlight how fostering learner-generated content can successfully respond to students’ needs.
Learners’ assessment is also a controversial topic in the ESOL field. Given the very nature and aims of ESOL programmes, it is legitimate to question the effectiveness of formal written and oral testing, in the tradition of Western education. James Simpson’s work (Simpson 2006 in Cooke and Simpson 2008:82-88) has shown how ESOL students experience great difficulty in formal testing, especially in speaking, because they perceive it as alien to their native educational culture. Researchers have also provided evidence of the ambiguous nature of oral testing, arguing that exam interviewers de facto would not only test linguistic correctness, but also pragmatics-related linguistic features non-native speakers are rarely able to master (Cooke and Simpson 2008). However, as long as question of assessment is so tightly linked to funding, the idea of quantifiable knowledge documented by standardized testing will be hard to dismiss.
This overview has attempted to show that the inner and outer issues affecting ESOL are numerous and difficult to solve; yet, it is essential that teachers make their voice heard and attempt to influence public educational policies, as was the case of the Adult Multiple Intelligences Study (Kallenbach and Viens 2002), a report commissioned by the American NCSALL (National Centre for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy), which engaged ten US teachers representative of different adult education backgrounds in hands-on research between December 1996 and June 1998. The main purpose of the AMI study was to improve adult literacy practice in the US through the implementation of the Multiple Intelligences theory, which will be briefly outlined in the following section.
The theory of Multiple Intelligences has been developed by Harvard Professor Howard Gardner. It claims that each individual is gifted not with only one, but rather eight different intelligences: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, bodily-kinaesthetic, and naturalist. Each individual is endowed with her own unique "cocktail" of intelligences, varying in strength and operating in combination. Although when first exposed in the seminal Frames of mind (1983) the theory was meant to contribute in the field of psychology, its potential implications for the teaching practice attracted many American teachers and educators. Gardner argues that the Western educational system recognizes, engages and rewards only the linguistic and the logical-mathematical intelligences, thus not only depriving students of effective learning opportunities, but also of fair and relevant assessment (Gardner 1983). The consequences of such view of intelligence, Gardner claims, are that teachers can choose to ignore the eight intelligences, or they can take responsibility for a revolutionary provision of learning in which not only education is provided in the most appropriate way, but also assessment is seen as “the opportunity to demonstrate skills and understandings in ways that are comfortable”. (Gardner in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:vii ).
Although Gardner claims there is no right, exclusive way to implement the theory, the AMI study co-directors Julie Viens and Silja Kallenbach were able to trace some common salient features in the practice and findings of the teachers involved in the study. Firstly, Viens and Kallenbach (2001:51) note that the idea of a plurality of intelligences was translated by most of them in the provision of a wider range of activities; also, MI-informed learning activities had positive effects on learner’s agency, lesson content and relations of power, as they increased “student initiative and control over the content or direction of the activities”(ibid.). However, other features seemed to imply some forms of teacher and learner resistance (“Implementing MI-informed practices involves teachers taking risks”, “Persistence pays off with MI based-instruction”, ibid.). Using non-traditional materials in the spirit of MI theory in fact leads both teachers and learners to draw from intelligences they are not accustomed to using in class; this can be disorienting, and also perceived as potentially risky in terms of face. Gardner interestingly points out that in the case of learners coming from marginalized communities, this resistance could be ascribed to their internalization of the traditional educational system in the dominant culture; consequently, they might be unwilling to depart from it (Gardner in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:viii).
Some of the themes discussed above also emerged in Terri Coustan’s research project on the implementation of MI theory in an ESOL classroom. Terri is an experienced, certified ESOL teacher and has taught for several years a family literacy program at Rhode Island’s International Institute set in South Providence, Rhode Island, USA, in a urban inner city area. She describes the building where her classroom is set as “comfortable and attractive for both staff and students” thus suggesting a nice educational setting. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in the USA, where ESOL provision is “patchy” and in general totally insufficient to satisfy the needs of slightly less than 40 million learners (Cooke and Simpson 2008:164). Before engaging in the AMI research project, Terri had already taught her class, mainly consisting of Hmong people from Laos, illiterate in their native language, for three years. Terri describes her class as quite diverse, with some struggling to communicate verbally and others finding it hard to read and write.
Despite her commitment, Terri writes she felt she didn’t know much about her students and needed to foster ways for them to become aware of their strengths. Up to then they seemed only to be aware “of the gap between themselves and their children. [… ] of what they do not know” (Coustan in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:64). This led her to join the AMI research project, for which she implemented the theory in two ways: first informally assessing her students’ intelligences and strengths; then developing varied sets of activity options through which they could explore the lesson content, albeit not relying exclusively on their verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences. For example, in the unit “Coming to America” Terri’s students could choose among writing (verbal-linguistic intelligence), drawing a picture (spatial and kinesthetic), building a boat showing the same (kinesthetic and visual-spatial), sequencing stories (verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical), and unscrambling vocabulary words (logical-mathematical, verbal-linguistic, and spatial) (Coustan in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:65). She adds she applied MI theory to traditional materials (books, blackboards, direct teaching, copying and workbook activities) as well as to non-traditional ones (constructing with play dough, using musical melodies, bodily movement, board games, and drama) (Coustan in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:66). Her research data was collected through a combination of tools: surveys, a teacher journal, a weekly dialogue/photo journal containing questions about the students’ engagement as well as her students’ responses, a photograph album, attendance records, lesson plans (Coustan in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:69). She was assisted by a classroom aide who translated and helped her gather more information about the Hmong culture, while feedback and support were provided by a member of school staff as well as the other ESOL teacher involved in the study (Coustan in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:69-70).
Terri attributes to the MI-informed approach she started using in her classroom a positive, significant change in terms of students’ academic progress, meta-cognitive awareness, and learner agency. Her project resulted in seven findings (Coustan 2001 in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:70):
- Student choices revealed their learning strategies and made it possible for limited literacy students to participate more actively.
- Choice-based ESOL activities seemed to foster student assertiveness in school as well as outside of school.
- Students’ academic progress was aided by MI-informed activities.
- Students increased their ability to reflect on their learning with repeated practice.
- Students had difficulty understanding MI theory.
- Choice-based activities and a trusting learning environment led to students taking greater control in class.
- Through choice-based activities in a trusting learning environment, students expanded cultural norms.
- Students work more independently and less in a group.
- Students show increased value of non-traditional classroom.
- Students occasionally acted contrary to culturally defined gender roles in the classroom.
- Students prefer a classroom without their children.
(Coustan 2001 in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:83)
Although this is just an example of how MI theory can be implemented in the ESOL classroom, I think Terri’s approach and findings are potentially relevant to address the issues discussed earlier in the paper. Findings 1 and 3, for instance, show that Terri was able to hone academic progress in a very diverse class through the provision of traditional and non-traditional activities which catered for her students’ different intelligences. Among others, she quotes the significant case of Mee, a young illiterate woman - non-verbal at the beginning of the course – who, during a choice activity session set up to revise weekly vocabulary, opted to cut out pictures from the National Geographic, an activity which engaged her kinesthetic, spatial, and linguistic intelligences; when she saw a picture portraying a person falling off from a horse, she placed it on her paper, wrote the word “problem” underneath, and exclaimed “Oh my God, problem!”(Coustan 2001 in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:71). If on the one hand Terri’s approach certainly recalls the idea of a “principled pragmatism” approach discussed earlier in the paper, the influence of MI theory allowed her to observe her students from a totally new perspective and consequently devise a structured set of activities aimed at engaging her students’ combination of intelligences in unprecedented ways. Also, allowing students’ choice ensured even the weakest students some opportunities to produce language, while not relying exclusively on their verbal-linguistic intelligence, but also on other strengths usually neglected in traditional education. Offering choice also meant challenging the relations of power in the classroom, negotiating content, and fostering learner agency, as results from finding 2: by the end of the project not only more students expressed their preferences regarding the activities, but also negotiated their content, suggesting they should be adapted to their specific needs. Lor, for instance, said although she didn’t mind using play dough, she’d rather learn new words during the activity than revising old ones (Coustan 2001 in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:75). One of the most interesting aspects of Terri’s research is the “link between the practice with choice activities in school and a developing assertiveness in school along with an emerging assertiveness outside school” (ibid.), as in the revealing case of Toua, a 38-year-old Hmong man with good literacy skills, who felt he had received an unfair parking ticket; while Terry was way on holiday, he went to court and showed some photos proving that there were no signs, thus persuading the judge to dismiss the ticket. I think this episode takes us back to Gardner’s definition of assessment as “the opportunity to demonstrate skills and understandings in ways that are comfortable”: appropriate, qualitative assessment of students’ progress should allow students to prove they can be capable of producing correct language, but also to act according to pragmatically successful strategies that are relevant to the context where they have come to live. Findings 6 and 7 highlight the importance of a trustful environment, which was built primarily through Terri’s own personal commitment in class and outside class, as well as through the use of relevant learner-generated material as subject matter; for instance, she showed her students four pictures describing some problems they had experienced in class the day before; after discussing them, they eventually decided to create a text about one (Coustan 2001 in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:82). Terri feels that MI-based learning indirectly helped her build this trust, “by responding to student strengths, by affirming the preference of the class, and by respecting the many cultures of the class.” (ibid.). The overall positive classroom climate suggested by the findings above, is however mitigated by the controversial features discussed next.
One of the most criticized aspects of MI theory is its failure to take into account the ideological and social nature of the discourse it embodies. In her critique to Gardner’s verbal-linguistic intelligence, Kathleen Nolan (2004 in Kincheloe 2004:41) points out how a classroom is an ambiguous locus where a learner from a marginalized community, in order to gain access to the dominant discourse, must accept that it frames her own cultural values as inferior. During the project, Terri used a weekly assessment tool to evaluate students’ needs and help them develop the meta-cognitive awareness mentioned in finding 4 (Coustan in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:80); she wonders, however, whether her students actually valued reflection, since her translator had explained that in the Hmong culture even if one excels at something, she must always show herself as very humble. This piece of information leads Terri to conclude that the Hmong native culture is hindering their ability to reflect on their strengths (Coustan in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:79-80). Although Terri might not be aware of this, she is framing her learners’ culture as repressive and inferior. Also, in her description of finding 7 she comments that students spoke and acted in ways that showed they were questionings some aspects of their culture (Coustan in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:83). Unfortunately, Terri doesn’t connect this phenomenon to the assimilation process possibly taking place in her classroom: as a consequence, she is incapable of raising her learners’ awareness about it. For instance, she writes in her log about the gender roles of the Hmong culture, where “the women cook and care for the children while the men build houses and hunt” (Coustan 2001 in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:85), adding that Yer and Lor had started complaining about their husbands in the classroom. She quotes Lor’s description of the new gender roles acquired in US: “He is lazy. He sits and watches TV. I work. I have many children” (ibid.). If on the one hand this certainly proves that her students are questioning their own culture’s traditional roles, as she points out (Coustan in Viens and Kallenbach 2001:85), on the other it is obvious that Terri fails to encourage them to question the American ones, too.
This paper has attempted to show that although teaching practice inspired by MI theory is not helpful in addressing structural ESOL issues such as funding and quantitative assessment, it can provide ESOL teachers with a thorough theoretical frame to inform and complement the principled pragmatism approach in a more varied, solid and thorough fashion. MI theory can also provide teachers with a framework to support observation of students’ strengths, thus leading to the provision of traditional and non-traditional materials that can foster language production; in fact such approach encourages teachers to draw from the emerging intelligences learners are naturally endowed with, rather than relying solely on those traditionally associated with Western academic success. Terri Coustan’s class project proved than an MI-informed approach is helpful in promoting learner agency, learner-generated content, and problem-solving skills; the AMI study supported her findings, showing that the teachers/researchers involved tended to provide their learners with extremely diverse activities aimed at conveying varied content. However, it is legitimate to doubt the appropriateness of MI instruction when the issue of final assessment is so crucial as to effectively condition both content and teaching method, as in citizenship testing preparation classes. Also, learners could resist non-traditional activities, perceiving them as inappropriate or anyway undermining their sense of belonging to the mainstream educational practice. Teachers, on their part, could resist the approach as it implies questioning old practices, their well-known strengths, and possibly their professional identity. Unpaid preparation time is also an issue, considering the bureaucratic load ESOL teachers are generally exposed to.
Teachers with a “professional vision” (Cooke and Simpson 2008:134-135) operating in progressive contexts could and should inspire their ESOL practice to MI theory; persistence will reward them and their students, too. However, their work will be truly successful only if they are capable of raising learners’ awareness of the dangers of assimilation, as well as of the cultural relativity of the approach used in class.
Bell, J.S. 2007. “Do teachers think that methods are dead?”. ELT Journal. 61/2:135-143.
Coustan, Terri D. 2001. “What impact do ESOL activities informed by the MI theory have on student engagement and learning strategies? How do prior cultural learning and experiences shape students’ reaction to and participation in ESOL activities informed by the MI theory?” in Viens and Kallenbach (Eds.) 2001. Available online at
www.ncsall.net/fileadmin/resources/research/op_kallen3.pdf
Cooke, M. and J. Simpson. 2008. ESOL: A Critical Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gardner, H. 1983. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic books.
Nolan, Kathleen. 2004. “The Power of Language: A Critique of the Assumptions and Pedagogical Implications of Howard Gardner's Concept of Linguistic Intelligence” in Kincheloe, Joe L. (ed.) 2004:31-48.
Kallenbach, S. and J. Viens. 2002. “Open to interpretation: Multiple Intelligences Theory in Adult Literacy Education”.
www.ncsall.net/fileadmin/resources /research/report21.pdf
Kincheloe, Joe L. (ed.) 2004. Multiple Intelligences Reconsidered. New York: Lang.
Simpson, J. 2006. “Differing expectations in the assessment of the speaking skills of ESOL learners”. Linguistic and Education. 17/I:40-55.
Viens, J. and S. Kallenbach (Eds.). 2001. Multiple Intelligences in Practice: Teacher Research Reports from the Adult Multiple Intelligences Study. NCSALL Occasional Paper. Available online at www.ncsall.net/fileadmin /resources/research/op_kallen0.pdf
Viens, J. and S. Kellenbach. 2004. Multiple Intelligence and Adult Literacy: A Resource Book for Practitioners. New York: Teachers College Press.
Please check the Teaching English Through Multiple Intelligences course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the How the Motivate your Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.
|
