This article is © Copyright 2000 Pilgrims Ltd. The copyright owners reserve all rights to its reproduction.

Major article 5

What we do well and others could learn from

EFL methodology thinking as a resource in teaching Music
David Cranmer, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Menu

Introduction
Syllabus design
A retreat
Assessment
An innovative and alternative form of assessment
Conclusion
References

Introduction

I have always had the sensation, as a native-speaker teacher of English to speakers of other languages, that many teachers of other subjects in some way look down on my profession.  Because I have never had to sit down and consciously learn what it is I teach, I am somehow a usurper.  In my present situation, as a teacher in a Portuguese state university, this proves to be more than just a sensation, for language teachers (native-speaker or not) by law and practice can never rise above their meagre status of ‘Leitor’, though colleagues teaching other subjects, as a general rule, on gaining their doctorate automatically become junior professors.

It is my view that the profession, particularly but not exclusively among native-speakers, has in some sense sought to ‘compensate’ for a certain ‘inferiority complex’ with regard to the content of what it teaches by placing demands upon itself in pedagogic terms, in particular in two related areas: on the one hand, a demand for discipline and quality; on the other hand, a demand for constant methodological renewal, through the development of an ever greater range of techniques.  And such has been the profession’s response to these demands that a tremendous wealth has been generated over the past 40 years, which has spread worldwide among teachers of English and infiltrated in varying degrees the teaching of other languages.

Like so many colleagues, early in my own career I went through the disciplining process of the Royal Society of Arts diploma and a university postgraduate teaching certificate, sufficient to guarantee a reasonable quality in my teaching.  I suppose I would have gone on further at some point to do an MA in Applied Linguistics, except that I already had a Master’s degree in Music and, in parallel with my English teaching, pursued practical music-making (as a church organist) and musicology as a hobby, eventually, almost against my better judgement, completing my doctorate in this area.  As a result of these two careers, running in tandem, I built up an increasing repertoire of techniques for teaching English, particularly influenced by colleagues involved with Pilgrims, and was in turn able to contribute to ELT, both in general terms because of my ‘creative artistic’ nature and, in particular, by proposing ways in which ‘classical’ music could be used in language teaching.

Something over a year ago, I was approached by the Music Department of my Faculty, with a view to my doing some teaching there, and, following agreement of the department where I was teaching English, I accepted the invitation.  I was to teach two subjects, both relating to the period 1300-1600: History of Music, and Analysis & Theory.  This in itself implied a massive reading programme, such as had never been necessary to teach English, all the more so since I had not done any significant work on this period since my days as an undergraduate – by now the content was half or more forgotten, some I had never understood properly in the first place, there had always been gaps and the rest was out-of-date.  

There was also the subsidiary issue of having to teach in Portuguese, for although, after living in Portugal for more than 20 years, I speak with reasonable ease, like other learners of the language I have always suffered from the terrible lack of reliable dictionaries.  This is aggravated by a paucity of adequate texts in Portuguese on the areas I was to teach, depriving me of models on which to base my own language.  

But most important for the purposes of this article, coming as I was from an ELT background, it was inevitable that I should ask myself not only what I would teach, but all the other wh-questions, in other words, the pedagogic issues: how, how much, when (i.e. the order), which (especially in the selection of musical illustrations) and, most important of all, why?  That I should attach so much importance to these questions already says a great deal of my attitude towards teaching; that I should actually go so far as to frame it concretely in terms of ‘wh-questions’ says still more in terms of where I was coming from.  What follows, then, is an account of some of the pedagogic areas I explored in preparation for the subjects I was to teach and how they worked in practice.  But as you read, please remember that few of the ideas would ever have come to mind, had I not had more than 25 years’ ELT experience behind me.

1. Syllabus design

Within what made sense, given the titles of the subjects I was to teach, I had a completely free hand in the design of my syllabus, the only direct guidance being a single paragraph that my predecessor had written for the Faculty’s website.  However, the departmental system of giving the same teacher the two subjects relating to the same period had an underlying assumption that they would in some sense run parallel, particularly bearing in mind that it was by and large, though not entirely, the same students doing both.

In the case of History of Music I chose a traditional approach of dividing the available number of lessons into themes, ordered more or less chronologically, leaving two lessons, one in the middle of the semester and the final one, for tests.  For Analysis and Theory I chose to be more radical by not following chronology so rigidly, but taking rather something along the lines of a ‘theory into practice’ model, devoting several lessons to theoretical and analytical issues, leading to a test, followed by analysis of a range of pieces of different genres bearing in mind the full range of theories and issues we had already covered, leading to a second test. 

As a result of these choices, while the syllabus and order of lessons in each subject had its own internal coherence, essential for those few students that were doing only one of the two, for those doing just Analysis and Theory there was already an inbuilt element of recycling, since the second part of the semester built upon what had been covered in the first part.  Those doing both subjects underwent three cycles of work on the same repertoire.  It would never have occurred to me to recycle in this way, were it not that recycling is such an essential aspect of ELT practice.  

Nor, I believe, would I have scheduled an extra lesson after the final tests, not only to go through the tests, as do many of my colleagues throughout the Faculty, but also to have a serious discussion with my students on how the lessons had gone, areas for improvement, and so on, something I felt obliged to do in the light of my practice in ELT.  One of the questions I raised was precisely whether the different organisation of the syllabus in the two subjects worked for those doing both, or created confusion.  The students felt it worked.  

2. A Retreat

As chance would have it, the weekend before teaching began I went on a one-day retreat.  It was intended literally as a day for withdrawing from the world, with only a few activities actually organised.  The rest of the time we were free to be alone or to talk with other participants, or even to go shopping in the hypermarket close by.

I decided in advance to spend the day thinking about pedagogy and to take with me a standard ELT methodology book.  The one I had chosen, simply as it was the first I spotted on my shelf, was a genuine classic: “The Teaching of English as an International Language”, edited by Gerry Abbott and Peter Wingard.  What I had in mind was not to read the book as such, but simply to use the contents page as a basic inventory of areas to think about.  And what a treasure trove it proved to be.  What could be more important than considering the setting, the learner and the language (i.e. in my context, the subject matter), the content of chapter 1.  The setting I knew well, but the learners – yes, I did not know very well what to expect and this awareness set me thinking in a much more focused way about what to include in the student profile I always give students to fill in during the first lesson.  And chapter by chapter, here were prompts to set me thinking and taking decisions.

I think the item that had the profoundest effect on me came in chapter 3, with its section on “Some differences between reading and listening comprehension”.  For there is here an important parallel for the musician, the difference between reading the score of a piece and hearing it performed.  While the non-specialist music lover is concerned primarily with listening to performance, the academic tends to concentrate far more on the score.  This is because in order to analyse what a composer has done in a work, it is necessary to identify concrete techniques and gestures which the transience of performed music and the simultaneity of the different voices and/or instruments in performance make much more difficult to pinpoint.  The result can easily be that in analysing the scholar actually forgets to listen, or does so in a very haphazard manner.  

Simply having my attention drawn by the section heading quoted above was sufficient to remind me of this danger and to decide on a clear strategy for balance.  Taking as my starting point that the purpose of analysis should not be as an academic exercise for its own sake, but to enhance our understanding and appreciation of music as listeners, I developed a 5-stage model: listening to the piece without the score, listening to it while following the score, analysing the score, listening while following the score (to recapitulate what we had analysed) and lastly to listen without the score, with a much greater awareness of what was actually going on in the piece.  In the analysis lessons, we did broadly follow this scheme, but I have to confess that lack of time often meant cutting one or more stages – and this is something that I am determined to put right second time round.

3. Assessment

Abbott & Wingard naturally have a chapter on assessment (chapter 7).

My Faculty lays down certain regulations in this respect.  These have to be published in the official government “Diário da República” and, following this formality, have the force of law.  They specify a range of permitted types, but leaving open to the teacher to propose to the students what type is most appropriate.  For both subjects I felt that ‘periodic evaluation’ was broadly the most suitable, allowing a maximum of three ‘points of evaluation’, i.e. tests or assignments, and for various reasons, particularly to maintain the tradition under my predecessor, I preferred tests.  

For both History of Music tests and for the first Analysis & Theory test, I chose to use essentially objective techniques, making use of a range of test types I had learnt from ELT: multiple choice, putting in the correct (in this case chronological) order, matching, true/false correcting the false ones.  The second Analysis & Theory test required the students to analyse two pieces – one sacred, one profane.  As a matter of principal, I insisted for this that we followed the 5-stage model described above, involving listening and not just analysis, only that they, like me, felt that they preferred to omit the final listening, given that they were doing a test.

For the second History of Music test I added a final question, which I had revealed to the students in advance (not a very orthodox thing to do in the Faculty context): “What do you feel you gained from listening to the musical illustrations we heard in class?”  This required the students to reflect in broad terms on an important aspect of our lessons, taking up almost a third of class time, and, of course, all answers had intrinsically to be different.  There is a sense in which a question of this kind opens up a kind of Pandora’s box, revealing not only that certain pieces have had a profound effect on certain individuals, in some cases the same piece on several individuals (Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium, being especially notable), but acting as a kind of invitation to write about all kinds of aspects of what we have done in class, including pedagogy – indeed it was gratifying that the way I had used the musical illustrations was seen by many as just one aspect of a care for pedagogic concerns that surprised them.  (That says a lot for their expectations, doesn’t it?)

4. An innovation and alternative form of assessment

There was one aspect of the learning process I was especially anxious to promote, important in any context, but particularly so with adults at university: critical reflection.  I had often heard colleagues bemoan the lack of this among their students, but at the same time I had never heard reference to any actual means of bringing it about.

Turning once again to my ELT experience, to me, in fact, there seemed a very simple means – the maintenance of a learner diary.  But actually to get students to do this would not, I believed, be straightforward.  In the first place, it would almost certainly be a novelty in their learning experience, and the unknown often generates resistance.  Furthermore, Portuguese university students (and, doubtless, in much of the world) don’t, on the whole, look upon ‘extra work’ as an opportunity, but rather as something to be avoided if at all possible.  I needed to provide an incentive, not merely in terms of the good it would do them, but in the one thing that seriously does motivate, by building it in some way into their assessment.  The question was how to do this in such a way that a) the Faculty regulations would permit, and b) it would indeed lead the students to feel motivated to keep a diary, through its inclusion in assessment, while avoiding the risk of it actually pulling their assessment down if, for any reason they gave up keeping the diary or it went wrong somehow.  

This last point was also important from my point of view, since I had to safeguard myself in relation to the Faculty.  Purely in terms of face validity, I could not risk being seen to be undermining the acquisition of ‘knowledge’ as evaluated through classic tests, by making anything so ‘airy-fairy’ as a diary part of the assessment procedure.  (After all, I could not quote chapter and verse from some high-flying international academic journal to validate my method.)  Let me therefore explain how I was able to deal with these constraints and the methodology I adopted. 

Firstly, I decided that the diary should be limited to only one of the subjects I was teaching – History of Music.  That way I could claim, genuinely, that I was experimenting in the one subject while keeping to something more traditional in the other.  This also avoided the problem of using the same task (the diary) as an element of the assessment in two separate subjects (for those students who were doing both), something that could otherwise have easily been open to objection.  Secondly, I decided that it should be optional, while encouraging as many as possible to take up the option.  In particular, I proposed that the diary should be worth 50% of the total mark for the subject, with the guarantee that in the event of it not receiving as high a mark as the tests, the diary would not be used to lower the overall mark.  In other words, they stood to gain but could not lose.  

With some in the class being evaluated just on tests and others with the diary as well, it meant there were two assessment systems being used simultaneously with the same class.  I found there was no clause forbidding this in the regulations.  It simply meant that while those doing just tests would come under the ‘periodic evaluation’ system, those doing the diary would be under that for ‘continuous evaluation’.

So how did the diary operate in practice?  I proposed to my students that roughly once a fortnight, they should write down thoughts and reflections on what we had covered, especially in the History of Music classes, but also others, particularly my own Analysis & Theory classes.  I also made it clear that they could write about anything else they simply felt they wanted to, irrespective of its direct relevance to my lessons.  One of the students did indeed take up this broader intention.

For a number of reasons, I felt the need to add three main refinements to the basic diary idea:
1.  Each diary entry was to be in the form of an e-mail to my Faculty e-mail address.  By insisting on e-mail, it encouraged those students who had no e-mail account to make arrangements for one at the Faculty and get used to using e-mail.  In this format, I could monitor who was taking up the option.  For reasons of privacy, I felt I did not want my students to have my home e-mail address.
2.  Each diary was to have a final entry, by a given deadline, reflecting on the diary and what they felt they had gained from keeping it.
3.  Taking up a technique I learnt many years ago from Mario Rinvolucri, I let the diary entries function as letters to me (another reason for the e-mail format), to which I replied, commenting where I felt it was useful, correcting any errors and misunderstandings I found my lessons had generated, and answering questions that the students themselves raised.

In the event, of those that chose to do the diary (about 40% of the class), a small number gave up after one or two entries, having lost nothing.  Only one of the students that saw the whole process through did in fact gain one mark out of twenty in the final evaluation, as a result of the diary.  For the remainder I gave the same mark for the diary as they had got in their tests.  It would be dangerous to say simply that the diary and the tests correlated well, though I believe that in fact they did.  But the process I went through in giving marks for the diaries tended to be one of looking at the test marks and seeing whether the diary entries gave me grounds for raising their mark – in other words, it had more to do with my sense of justice than anything truly objective.   Even though, as I have said, only one student gained a mark as a direct result of the diary, there was not, as far as I am aware, any sense of feeling cheated by the others, for they all realised, as I did, that their test marks had already benefited, in some cases considerably, from the work they had put into their diaries.  The diary had simply worked, as was intended, to provide a framework for regular revision, reflection, questioning, and so on – exactly what leads to good marks in tests.

The diary was a highly positive experience for all those that did it.  In what ways this was so, let them speak for themselves in the conclusions they wrote [ I have simply rendered their Portuguesde into English]:

“The idea of sending diaries putting forward queries, and also with our comments on the material covered, pleased me immensely.  It was a new experience for me, which I would not mind repeating.  I admit that sometimes it was difficult to maintain the regularity of the diaries owing to the accumulation of work and the lack of time, but I think I managed to resolve this situation.  I know there were lots of colleagues who at the beginning of the semester decided to send diaries but then gave up.  I think it was because they didn’t manage to do the first one and then time passed by and work mounted up…  When I did the first entry I was uncertain how to do it, but I followed a natural sequence of ideas and I reckon that I succeeded minimally in corresponding to the intended objectives.”  [by a good student]

“ Without a doubt the regularity of the diary brought enormous benefits for a better understanding of the material given in the lessons.  It is a place where the student can raise questions, because they exist.  Maybe some phrase where the ideas aren’t clear and the data need putting in order, it is an experience in methodical work [...], or maybe that question that you wanted to ask but didn’t want to interrupt the class or you simply thought would be too stupid to ask about in class, the diary certainly enables us to clarify a series of questions.” [by a dyslexic student, whose Portuguese grammar is unreliable too and who also sometimes has difficulty in organising a coherent train of thought – he had failed the subject once and diligently kept a diary full of confused notions, which I put right, with the result that he passed clearly this time because his tests were fine]

“The great value of this diary was that it kept the subject constantly in our minds.  We couldn’t store away our notes and study on the eve of the tests, we were always thinking about it.  I remember being seated in an aeroplane and taking advantage of the time to make some notes for the diary.  It has a collateral effect, which is the strangeness of coming to the end of a subject that has been central to my attention.  Nothing that holidays can’t cure.  But I am now at peace with the Renaissance.”  [by a mature student and professional violinist – in another entry he congratulated me on my strictness in administering tests, since he hated all the cheating that he regularly saw: I was only following the rules required by the University of Cambridge (UCLES) exams, yet another bit of ELT coming in handy]

“I would like to thank you for all the (extra) time you have shared in my learning.  Sometimes teaching leaves much more than knowledge, it leads to the creation (original or not) of ways of studying, to an increase in interest in material that was not covered, but more than anything to an effort to try and follow a career and be a good professional.  You should consider yourself, therefore, a good example as a musicologist and pedagogue, indeed I feel great admiration for you.  Even though I hadn’t imagined the diary in this form [putting questions which you answered] in the first instance, I began to consider it a ‘typical treatise’, which through a dialogue between pedagogue and disciple, puts information across to the reader.”  [by an exceptional student, from whom such a eulogy is especially gratifying – in the second Analysis & Theory lesson we had looked at a short extract from an English treatise (Thomas Morley’s Plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke, London, Peter Short, 1597) in the classical format of pedagogue explaining to disciple.]

And my own reaction to the diary experience?  I was extremely pleased with what those that did the diary gained, and correspondingly saddened that not more of the class had in fact taken advantage of the opportunity (though even with about a third of the class doing it, answering the entries took up a good deal of my time).  I found that the diary proved to be more flexible than I had foreseen and that I was able to respond to individual need beyond what I had expected (see Abbot & Wingard, chapter 12, part 1), particularly striking where remedial work was required (see Abbot & Wingard, chapter 9), but also important with regard to the exceptionally gifted student, who would not otherwise have got the extra stimulus that is so important at the ‘top end’ too.

I began writing this article some six weeks ago.  At the time of concluding it I am just over two weeks into the new semester, teaching the same two subjects again.  So far I have received more diary entries than at the corresponding point last semester – a promising start.  One of the students in the first lesson told me she was a teacher in the Azores islands and would have to continue teaching there throughout the semester, coming to Lisbon only for tests and exams.  Clearly conscientious, she had been understandably very worried about how she was going to manage.  On learning about the diary, she could scarcely stop still for excitement.  Yes, she could do the necessary reading, get some CDs – I provided her with a select discography – and do some listening, and, most important of all, she could e-mail me systematically with queries.  The diary has straight away provided a simple tool for dealing with the difficulty of her situation.

Conclusion

From what I have written, it should be clear how my years of ELT experience have been an immeasurable asset, coming to a new teaching experience – and there are many more details that I have left out.  The benefits, as perceived by my students, completely unaccustomed to teachers for whom pedagogy is such a priority, have clearly been considerable.  Yet I have done nothing that for me is out of the ordinary – it is just that the profession from which I come makes pedagogic demands of itself that are simply not present in a lot of areas of the teaching profession.  I would be the last to say that I’ve already got my pedagogy right.  There are many more things (from ELT) that I would like to introduce into my lessons – eliciting much more from students, for a start.  I was too scared to introduce too much all at once and too uncertain of my ‘knowledge’ of the content I had to teach to risk techniques that might show up my ignorance too easily (for all that I stress with my students that I also continue to be a student and that they have things to teach me).  As my confidence in the content improves, so I can continue to advance pedagogically.

And seeing the modest success I have already had, the ease with which it was achieved, and the crying need, as made clear from the response of my students, I have found a new mission in life: to be a voice among those that wish to improve pedagogy in higher education.  But none of this would be possible without all that I have learnt from ELT.

Bibliography
Abbott, Gerry & Wingard, Peter (eds.), The Teaching of English as an International Language, Glasgow and London, Collins, 1981.
Rinvolucri, Mario “” in English Language Teaching Journal, Oxford, Oxford University Press, c. 1983, pp. 
Cranmer, David & Laroy, Clement, Musical Openings, Harlow, Longman, 1992.
Cranmer, David, Motivating High Level Learners, Harlow, Longman, 1996; activity 1.3 “The Letter Diary”, pp. 11-12.