Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 4; July 02

Bending Rules

The Heart of the Matter

Lou Spaventa, Califonia, USA

In this third column, I would like to explore the meaning of the word when, as in when we teach. First I will look at when in terms of its referent, which is time. Then I will look at when as it occurs in the classroom. The point I want to make is that the when of teaching is a social construction, which may or may not resonate with the learning that a learner does.

Philippe Aries in Centuries of Childhood (1962) tells us that childhood is a concept that had to be invented, that it arose along with the urban middle classes and the school as a commonplace of public life. Where once most Europeans thought of the child as a sort of incomplete, imperfect adult, who was able to share in family labor in limited ways, the child became eventually became conceived of differently, not as a small adult, but as a different creature altogether. What does this have to do with when we teach? The answer is obvious. As schools became vehicles for bourgeois advancement in society, childhood had to be rethought. The child had to need schooling, and had to need it during a specific period in his or her life. That period was childhood. Nowadays, we take it for granted that kids should be in schools, and we also accept the need for "lifelong" education. To say that another way, it is a good thing to go to school throughout one's whole life.

Many of us who teach ESOL teach traditional students of 6 to 18 years old or thereabouts. Others teach young adults, and a smaller number teach mature and older adults. But one thing is clear, we teach across the life cycle in schools. Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society ( 1971) challenged our notion that learning must take place in schools when we are at a certain age. He thought that learning could be a more contingent and personal proposition where modern communications could put a potential learner together with a potential teacher in order for them to work out a way to learn and teach. For Illich, the when of teaching was when the learner needed to learn. I don't believe there is a school anywhere on the face of the earth that does or would elect to operate on that basis. Why? Because schools are bureaucratic structures with institutionalized rationales for organizing themselves a certain way, largely based on economic considerations, and thus, we have the classroom period. How long is it? Forty-five or fifty-five minutes? An hour and a half? Maybe two hours? When does it occur? Every day? On Monday, Wednesday and Friday? On Tuesday and Thursday? (This is certainly the model in U.S. higher education.)

The conclusion I draw from how we organize time in schools is that it has little if anything to do with student learning. It is not reasonable to expect a group of ten to a hundred people – a small ESL classroom in the U.K., an EFL Japanese university classroom – to proceed along a similar learning path to arrive at a similar point in their learning at the end of a preconceived period of time. Human beings don't work that way. Some may indeed progress step by orderly lesson step. Others, perhaps most, will take one step forward, two back, then a great leap forward (sorry Mao!), and then perhaps stand in one place for quite a while, apparently not doing any learning. We all have different learning triggers that go off at different times. Caleb Gattegno (1972) often talked about the future orientation of learning; that what we experience today may not become ours until some time in the future. For my own part, I clearly see how some ideas I once rejected I later embraced and used, including teaching methods. Isn't it possible then, that the student who shows up in class every day, but seems not to be learning is going about it in a different way? How willing are we to believe in the forward nature of learning?

In the classroom, we use time in various ways. Some of us, benighted souls, lecture, even when teaching ESOL. Some of us make sure the student gets more "air time" than the instructor so the student can practice the language. Some of us plan our curriculum so that it unfolds at what we think is a reasonable rate for students to master.

Some of us create an "organic syllabus" (Larsen-Freeman, 2000) that responds to the particular needs of a particular group of learners at a particular time in their learning history. Part of how we are judged by our supervisors is according to how well we use time in the classroom and over the period of the course.

In second language learning theory, there is a position which holds that a learner cannot be taught language that is beyond his or her current learning challenge (Pienemann, 1989). Sascha Felix (1981), in an article about German high school learners of English, claimed that teacher insistence on correct responses from learners slowed down learning because such a demand for correctness was far beyond the developmental level of the student learners. Lev Vygotsky's (1986) "zone of proximal development," which is essentially the basis for Stephen Krashen's (1983) famous i + 1, has been used to create a "scaffolding theory" (Lantoff and Appel, 1994) for second language learning which relies upon the social context of the lesson for individual learning.

The question of when it is appropriate to teach and when you know that a student is ready and receptive to new information or new experience has by no means been answered. Even John Dewey's (1997) theory of experiential learning presumes the question of when without specifying it. We really don't know how to answer the question of when in our ESOL classrooms. We do the best we can by observing our students as closely as we can, getting to know the way that they seem to learn, so we can provide them with what they need. But we can be sure that what Carlos needs when he needs it is not identical to what Conchita needs at that same time. Thus we teach in a conundrum. We organize ourselves, we believe, to efficiently use classroom time, but we are faced with the reality that people learn differently and at different rates. For the most part, we measure them all with the same yardstick. Pass or fail? Certificate or not? There must be a better way, and I think finding that better way is one of the biggest challenges to education in this new millennium. We hope that, with Einstein, we can grope our way towards an answer, and as that answer materializes, schooling, teaching and learning will change because we have considered the question of when do we teach.

Aries, Phillipe. (1962) Centuries of Childhood. New York, Vintage Books.
Dewey, John. (1997) Experience and Education, Reprint edition. New York, Scribner.
Felix, Sascha. ( 1981 ) "The Effect of Formal Instruction on Second Language Acquisition" in Language Learning, Vol.31, No.1.
Gattegno, Caleb. (1972) lecture. MAT Program. The School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont.
Illich, Ivan. (1971) Deschooling Society. New York, Harper-Collins.
Krashen, S. & Terrell, T. (1983) The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom. Hayward, CA, Alemany Press.
Lantoff, J.P., & Appel, G. eds. (1994) Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language
Research. Norwood, NJ, Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Larsen-Freeman, Diane. (2000) personal communication, SMAT Program, The School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont.
Vygotsky, Lev. (1986) Thought and Language: Revised Edition. Cambridge, MIT Press.