Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 1; January 2001

Level: lower intermediate to advanced

1. Ask the students, working on their own, to write two questions, according to these criteria:

one question you would not want to be asked and which you would not want to answer.
One question you would really like to find an answer for.

2. Ask the whole class to move around the classroom and show their two questions to other students and find out
a) if the other student would mind answering their first question- the other student must only and answer yes or no.
b) if the other student could give a full answer to their second question.

3. The students go back tot heir seats and give feedback on these points:

• how different people object to different topics
• respecting these differences
• whether they found the answer they were looking for
• whether other people had similar interests
• whether they could help others find the answers they wanted……

How this activity went when I first used it.

The school year had just started and I chose the exercise to help the students to get to know each other , using English. ( Some of them lacked confidence and most of them weren't used to using English to communicate with each other) They were a class of around 20 students, aged 15-16, who should be lower intermediate.

One boy however was older (18/19) and had shown from the very beginning that he couldn't speak or understand English and that the class didn't interest him at all. We had a terrible personal history: his father was in prison and his mother had left him and his brothers; he lived alone with very little money and his brothers were in some institution.

As we mingled he came to me and showed me his two questions, the first one had something to do with his father ( eg: what does your father do?) , and the other one: Why do I hate school?

After answering No to the first question, I started telling him very slowly and in very simple English words what I thought might be the reasons for his feelings about school.

As I was talking to him I began to see a SPARK start to brighten up his eyes, that were usually so dark, sad and angry. When I finished he was staring at me in complete astonishment and he asked me, in Portuguese:
How did you know all that? Are you a witch?

From that moment on his attitude in class was completely different and he really tried to learn something and at times I could feel that the lessons were an oasis in his life, he knew that some one was trying to understand how he felt, that some one cared.

I shall never forget the reward I got for that blessed moment of inter-personal intelligence! The spark in his eyes.

Editorial note: Eduarda is very honest, I think, in this piece, in speaking of her "reward". Central to humanistic teaching is the reward the teacher gets from it. This reward is what ego-feeds humanistic work, which certainly requires a different type of energy when compared with other ways of dealing with the subject-pupil mix. Humanistic teachers, to my mind, are not looney altruists, but people who can see a good deal* when it is on offer.