The ESOL Core Curriculum: De-humanising Language Teaching?: Painting by Numbers

Nick Bilbrough, UK

Nick Bilbrough has been involved in language teaching for nearly twenty years and has taught in three continents in a wide range of different contexts. He now runs teacher development courses, specialising in the use of drama and storytelling techniques, at Horizon Language Training, Totnes, Devon, United Kingdom. www.horizonlanguagetraining.co.uk

E-mail: nickbilbrough@yahoo.co.uk, info@horizonlanguagetraining.co.uk

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Painting by numbers
Teaching by numbers

Painting by numbers

Painting by numbers became a popular activity in 1950’s Britain. As a child growing up in the 1970’s, I remember my disappointment at receiving whole books of them as presents from well-meaning aunts and uncles. The basic procedure is that colours are filled into the outline of a picture, according to a number which is written in each space. See the example below.

This wasn’t really my thing when I was little. What invariably happened when I tried to do a picture in this way was that I ended up making a pig’s ear of it; I went over the edges of the section I was supposed to be colouring in, or used the wrong colour, or just got so frustrated with it that I screwed it up and threw it in the bin. I was often left with the feeling that I’d got it wrong – that I’d failed somehow to produce a piece of art.

But is painting by numbers art? There’s nothing creative in any way about the process. There’s a right way of doing it, and a wrong way of doing it. It’s working to the agenda of an externally imposed plan. In my book, none of these attributes have anything to do with art.

Teaching by numbers

And now, more than 30 years later, I’m teaching ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) to a group of adult learners in the UK. I’ve just come out of a great class. We started with a bit of Sc/E3.3b and some Sc/E3.3d. The students then worked in pairs to Ws/E3.1a, and I encouraged them to Ws/E3.2a as much as possible. By pooling their resources they were then able to Rw/E3.1a, and this was all finally put together by getting them to Wt/E3.2a.

If you are not involved with ESOL teaching in the UK the above will make little sense to you. If, on the other hand, you are an ESOL tutor and you’re working with the government’s ESOL core curriculum material, the content of the lesson and the codes used to identify different learner activities will be crystal clear.

Or will it?

A few years ago I attended a training workshop on the ESOL core curriculum at my place of work. Since the centre where I worked had focused more on EFL than ESOL in recent years we welcomed the chance to have some fresh ideas about ESOL teaching. What we got instead was a training session which focused not on the how of teaching, and the strategies and activities that could be used, but rather on ways of recording the teaching and learning that had happened, and that was going to happen. In fact much of the session was taken up with the trainers trying to teach us how to write codes on our lesson plans to represent the activities we would do with the learners.

Here are the meanings for the codes used in my lesson summary above, all taken from the ESOL Core Curriculum.

1. Sc/E3.3b - asking questions to obtain personal or factual information
2. Sc/E3.3d - asking for descriptions of people, places and things
3. Ws/E3.1a - Write using complex sentences
4. Ws/E3.2a - Use basic sentence grammar accurately
5. Rw/E3.1a - Recognise and understand relevant specialist key words
6. Wt/E3.2a - Structure main points of writing in short paragraphs

The writing of the codes seemed to be all that mattered as far as the two trainers were concerned: as if the recording of the lesson on a lesson plan was more important than the lesson itself. Many teachers have a lot of question marks over this approach. I mean, where do you draw the line between (1) and (2)? Who decides what is ‘complex’ in (3), ‘basic’ in (4), and ‘relevant’ in (5)? The learners, the teacher, or the writers of the curriculum? What about if the paragraphs are ‘long’ instead of ‘short’ in (6)? Would this be a completely different code? There must be an infinite number of things that could happen in a language class to promote learning. What do we do if there isn’t a code for what we’d planned to do? Abandon the activity? Writing lesson plans with these codes on is a complete waste of time. For experienced teachers it is a frustrating and patronizing task, straightjacketing their creative energies. For inexperienced teachers it only adds to their overstretched workload of lesson planning, and reinforces the belief that teaching and learning is a linear process, that can be broken down into a list of component parts, like when doing a science experiment. Bizarrely, the codes are often tied to particular levels too. So ‘asking questions to obtain personal or factual information’ is linked to Entry Level 3. Shouldn’t learners at every level be encouraged and helped to do this?

As any experienced language teacher, and any experienced language learner, knows, the human factor is what makes the language classroom a unique place: the fact that different people, at different times will respond to activities in different ways. An activity is defined through its interaction with the learners. There are no codes for this human element in the ESOL Core Curriculum.

And so, I’ve come full circle. I’ve given up painting by numbers, and given up tearing up lesson plans – I just don’t write them any more! That’s not to say that I don’t plan. In fact the more I teach, the more prepared I feel to respond appropriately to the challenges which each class and each learner brings, whether there is a code for what we do in the ESOL Core Curriculum or not.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.