Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 4; July 02

Combining Approaches- Towards my own way of Teaching

Tony Canadas, Almeria, Spain

I have always thought there is not such a thing as a unique method of teaching. I don't think such a universal method exists. I believe each teacher has the ability to adapt different methods to the purposes he wants to undertake, and specially to the student's needs.

Teaching a language is such a wonderful thing that you cannot be stuck to a single model of teaching.

My own methodology is a combination of different ones such as the Communicative Approach, Community Language Learning and Hummanistic Language Teaching.

First of all what I find very good about the Communicative Approach is the inclusion of the nature of context within language teaching. It is very true that a person can be linguistically competent (he/she may know many verbs, structures and a lot of vocabulary), but if he/she doesn´t adapt his/her way of speaking to the person he/she is talking to, the conversation will be inefficient. Let's illustrate that with an example. Speaker A is in a pub and Speaker B comes in and they both have a conversation without adapting to the other speaker's way of talking:

SPEAKER A: Hi, mate. Fancy a pint?

SPEAKER B: No, thank you. I would rather prefer a glass of whisky and soda.

SPEAKER A: That´ll be more than a tenner, mate. What's wrong with bloody lager?

SPEAKER B: The taste of it has a lack of quality, and there is something very poetic about whisky and soda. It brings back delicious memories of the past.

I always try to teach my students real English, that is the English spoken in the street.We frequently notice that textbook English is artificial and does not have many things in common with the English spoken by native speakers.

Secondly, I also find Community Language Learning very interesting and motivating. The child has to learn in a relaxed and familiar atmosphere. Playing and being friends with the teacher and his/her mates is something essential.

When I was working in a State school I once had a terribly shy student. The first day he came with his mother and was crying desperately because he didn't want to enter the classroom. He did finally come in, despite his sobbing. He didn't speak with any of his classmates for nearly one month and always walked alone in the schoolyard. When the boy spoke to me he had a stammer and got completly stuck for words. When I spoke to his father he told me when he spoke about me it was as if he was mentioning the devil. He had been in another school and missed his friends a lot. Then I thought about the situation and considered the following : What if I spoke naturally with the student and showed myself to be a friend in whom he could trust?. That worked.

When I spoke to him, he saw me in a different light, but he was still distant to the other students, so I decided to do some English teaching games in which he had to interact with the other students. After a month with the student doing cooperative work with his classmates, he became integrated and his family thanked me deeply for what we had achieved together.

This story brings me onto Hummanistic Teaching. I like the students to communicate and interact with each other and I think it is interesting for them to bring part of their life into the classroom. I do many exercises in which they feel free to talk about their ambitions, projects, things they feel worry about,their hobbies, etc. The thought that the teacher must be a fatherly/motherly figure for the students does not mean he/she must let them do what they want, for he/she must always be firm when dealing with problematic situations.

I use a wide range of teaching resources:

A. Story-telling

This can be used with any age group, although the vocabulary should be graded depending on the level at which the pupils are. I was taught these techniques in England by a wonderful storyteller, Mario Rinvolucri.

You tell your students a story that can be whatever you like but it should be something the students will react well to.. I have noticed that most of them are specially interested in ghost stories or alien visits and they pay a lot of attention to them. Once you have told the story(if you are teaching primary school students the best thing to do is illustrate the story with pictures and lots of gestures), they must be asked some questions, first written and then oral about the story.

If you are working with secondary pupils, it is also a good idea to invite the students to tell the story in front of the class.

The stories must be about something that grabs their attention. I have a secondary group who are very interested in ghost stories, so I take advantage of the situation and every two or three days I tell them a ghost story with some exercises afterwards.

B Dramatisation

This has been one of the most rewarding activities in my profession as a teacher. I remember when I was working in Saladares, a State school close to Aguadulce in Almería. I was teaching a second year primary class. Once, we worked with the tale "Snow-white and the seven Dwarfs". They read it and I presented it with pictures and after that we acted it out in class. The children chose their own roles and everyone took part in the presentation.

They felt delighted and were encouraged to keep on trying and doing different things.

There was also a small story in that group. There was an English boy called Leo who had a fatal disease. He had just been given a few years to live.

As he was a native speaker it seemed, at first sight, that he had no need of English classes. So I thought What can I do with this boy?. Then something occured to me. I observed that Leo was a very sensitive boy who used lots of gestures to express himself, so I decided to get him to exploit this ability in class. There was a puppet in the classroom and I decided to revise some of the lesson's grammar and constructions using it. The puppet, Mr.Timothy, asked the children questions and they replied.

Later on I decided Leo could also do it, so he came in front of the class and using the puppet with a witty voice asked his fellows lots of questions and he found he was using his full abilities. He is still alive today.

There was another drama exercise I did with this group. We had a lesson about animals, and there was no way they could memorize them, so I hit on this strategy: I decided to call each boy by the name of an animal. They loved the idea, and in order to reinforce their knowledge, at the beginning of the class I called out the different animal names and they "became" their animal , with the sounds and gestures.
In one case, though, this worked out badly.
I called one of the boys hippopotamus, I had the animal in mind , and some days later the parents rang one of the principals complaining that their child had a complex about being overweight so this animal nickname was hurtful to him. I had to change it to another one!

C. Posters. :

This is one of the most fulfilling areas of work I have found. First of all you ask the students to choose anything they like as the topic for their poster. Then they fill it with half photographs and the other half written information in English. They come up to the front and explain the content of the poster to the whole class and, naturally, the other students can ask them questions.

I did this exercise last year with a secondary group, and we chose the topic of drugs. They wrote many interesting things about how to prevent drug-taking and about rehabilitation, and they looked up a lot of information on the Internet.

This year I am doing the same with three secondary groups. They are doing a freely chosen topic. Some of them are taking advantage of the situation and are writing about"Operación Triunfo", a program currently popular on Spanish television.

Finally, one of the things I find very interesting, is the following statement made by Brian Tomlinson: "We have to do activities which help to make the language learning process a more affective and relevant experience".

Sometimes we find that our textbooks are boring and they do not connect with our students' needs or ways of seeing the world. Then, what I do is to approach the course book in a humanistic frame of mind; so I create exercises with the book notions and aims in mind, but exercises that can connect with the student's own real world.

To achieve this, creativity is a key point, The teacher who is not creative is a mere text book operative and does nothing beyond what is required on the printed page. But we must think we can all, without exception, be creative . The worst situation of all is to believe that you are not.

As Bonnie Tsai says" if you believe you are not creative, you are not going to be creative". So we must explore all possibilities for the students to develop their full potential, and consequently succed in learning the new language.

A thing I have also found very interesting for making the learning experience more motivating has been the inclusion of culture in the learning process. Apart from teaching the language, we must get the students to show some interest in the culture of the language they are learning. This task can be done with posters, photographs, postcards, listening and singing songs, over-head projector, videos that show aspects of culture, of the countryside, etc. If they feel interested in a new culture, they will learn the language more happily.

The final point I want to make, is that teaching is for me the best thing in the world. I can't imagine myself doing anything else. But we profesionals must broaden our horizons by learning from the students' knowledge and experiencies. If we didn't do this, teaching would be lifeless. Teaching is a reciprocal thing, you give and you also take.

I still have to a lot to learn from my students, for you never stop learning from them until the day of your death.