HLT Magazine (July 2001)

Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 4; July 2001

Let me open this Issue 4 of 2001, our third year, by offering a warm welcome to the following developments, that add to the strength of the humanistic movement in Education.

My first greeting is to the writing of the Dogme group, that you will find at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dogme . If you drop in on their site you will find over 600 postings.

Here is a very boiled down version of their teaching principles:

Teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and students bring to the classroom.
No recorded listening material should be introduced into the classroom: the source of all "listening" activities should be the people in the classroom.
All the teacher's questions need to be real questions, seeking real information, not " display" questions with only a didactic function.
The teacher must be seated whenever the students are, except when monitoring group or pair work.
Slavish adherence to a given method is unacceptable.
Any pre-planned syllabus of pre-selected and graded items is forbidden,
Topics generated by the students are given priority over any other input.
Grading of students into different levels is disallowed- they need to be free to choose the class they are most comfortable in.
Any testing procedures to be negotiated with the learners
Only teacher evaluation criterion: that they are not boring

( abridged from TEACHING UNPLUGGED, that appeared in it's for teachers Issue 1)

We welcome this new group, led by Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings and wish them every success. HLT welcomes their frontal attack on the Coursebook culture that can shackle the many and sometimes makes a lot of money for the very, very few.

My second greeting is to Aberdeen University in UK which is shortly to set up Master and PHD programmes in chess. These courses, starting in September, will offer places to students who display grand master potential and focus on skills in maths, computing and engineering. The marvellous thing about these courses is that they are in equal measure ludic, practical and demanding of logical mathematical brilliance. If you compare them to most literature courses which require no proven ability in the central skill, creative writing, and turn out people with mediocre critical skills only……..sad for us lot, but bully for Aberdeen University.

My third greeting is to the concept of the Triangular Classroom which was first tried at Cam House Special School in Gloucester, UK and proved to really improve students' focus and concentration. An obvious advantage of this architectural change is that there are many less students buried at the back. OK, so the concept is still the traditional " everyone face the front" configuration, but it is better than many secondary classrooms across the globe. In my view there is little to beat the circle, with the teacher in the circle.
( ELT News, Athens, Greece, reported this experiment, quoting the UK London Times)

My fourth welcome is to Michael Berman's new Story-teller's website: Go to www.thestoryteller.org.uk you will find a new story being added to the site each week.

My fifth welcome is to the Literature Meta-conference " infinite" Londons to be held in Sibiu, Rumania from the 18th to the 21st of October 2001.
This is the outline of the Conference that I have seen:
The event has a double theme: attention to London as a diverse cultural locus, and reflection on the very habit and practice of conference going. The principal focus will be the examination of representation of the metropolis, London, in literature and the arts, but speakers are also expected to devise creative presentation strategies beyond the 20 minute conventional conference paper.
To find out more, contact the British Council in Bucharest, Rumania.
Wouldn't it be marvellous if even 10% of presenters at Tesol International and Iatefl bothered to make sure their own process and that of their listeners was happy and energised!

My sixth greeting is to the TESOL France conference on November 16th and 17th 2001 at which you will be able to work with Bernard Dufeu who wrote Teaching Myself , OUP 94 and who is perhaps Europe's foremost and most in-depth humanistic trainer. Bernard does not crop up all over the place and so this Paris meeting is a real opportunity. To find out more, go to www.wfi.fr/tesol.

And now to introduce some of the goodies in this issue of HLT:

If you go to Major article you will find an open hearted interview with Katie Plumb who has worked with the British Council in Spain , in a Finnish University and in private schools in UK who suddenly found herself teaching M. Languages in a failing UK secondary school. The article deals with the way in which the shock of this new environment shook her faith in humanistic teaching.

Under Short article you will find a powerful piece on teacher honesty with self, by Inger Fong from Sweden and some KEY PICTURES of a Dutch school offered to HLT readers by Karin Hesselink. What a marvellous idea, to go round your school recording the significant-to-you places. Why not try it yourself. The third Short article is by a London teacher outlining how she got free writing going in her group by having a CLASSBOOK in which students write and draw what they want. Often the really simple ideas are the best.

The recipes in Course Outline deal with vocabulary teaching while the classroom ideas you will find in Teachers Resource Book Preview come from Judy Baker's book applying NLP ideas to the EFL classroom. If you go to Old Exercise you have some classroom tips from Ezra Pound, writing 80 years ago on how to get students to write and edit compositions.

The Student Voice this time is that of a trainee on an NLP course, questioning whether you do not soil the beauty of living by over-analysing it. Maybe he has a point.

As you will see by looking at the Table of Contents, this Issue of HLT is a modest one in terms of extent. My apologies to people in the Southern Hemisphere who are working through their winter and to people in places like Thailand who had their main annual vacation in April- May. The Issue is smaller because July-August for Northern Hemisphere people is beach time.

Wait for a bumper Issue in September!

In the first week in June 2001 we had 2050 people come visit the magazine which made us in Pilgrims shout for joy. Over the first five months of 2001 we had been averaging 1,300 visitor sessions per week. There are now nearly 4000 folk on our "subscriber" list.