Teacher Expectations: Creating or killing a one-to-one learning environment

Adult business
Sharon Hartle, Verona, Italy

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When I first thought about writing this article I wanted to put together a "recipe for success" when teaching one-to-one. To do this I had decided to model myself on an NLP approach by taking one student as a model of excellence, extracting the ingredients that went to make him or her so successful as a learner and to then apply that to other learners. I soon, however, came up against an objection to this; many of the teachers working both privately and for language schools, here in Verona, reacted rather dismissively saying things such as "Oh, yes but he's really good! Now if you had X it would be a different story!" This made me sit down and think again and I decided that the problem is really the idea of "success" because as soon as people talk about a recipe for success there is also an unexpressed implication of failure. I decided, therefore, to look at one of my students who is not naturally autonomous as a learner, and who has a lot of difficulty in various areas. This might lead people to consider him as not being a successful learner but to do so would help neither the teacher or the student, and, in fact, could lead to a frustrating environment being created in the classroom. The ultimate consequence of this would probably be that the student would become discouraged and de-motivated and would give up, concluding that English is "difficult" or that he is "not good" at languages. This, however is not true, and although he does have difficulties he is by no means a failure, and has, in fact, made a lot of progress in his English, which he enjoys using and is motivated to work on.

One-to-one teaching is an area which is perhaps not adequately catered for either on training courses or in coursebooks. Teachers begin their professional careers with lots of ideas of what to do with groups but not so many ideas of how to work with individual learners. Teachers find it difficult to adapt group activities to one-to-one situations. Making comments such as " I can't use that coursebook because I can't do the pairwork and monitor at the same time!" Of course, it's difficult to take part in pairwork if you have a class of twenty students to monitor, or even six or eight, but when there is just one person it is perfectly possible, and taking part in the pairwork activities with the student is extremely useful for the teacher, who can get the feel of what it is like to be doing the activity. It is, of course, invaluable for the learner, who is interacting with a native speaker and being exposed, therefore, to a lot more "natural language input" than would be possible in a group situation.

Of course, it is easier, in a group situation to "escape" from personal differences with learners or personality clashes and this becomes much more difficult in one-to-one situations, and both teachers and learners have expectations about each other which may not be met. If this happens there will inevitably be stress and tension in the lesson. This, in fact, is the crux of the matter, and makes it all the more imperative for the teacher and the learner to respect each other, if a positive learning environment is going to be created.

Obviously, a beginner cannot be expected to write like a latter day Shakespeare, but at times, this, to a greater or lesser extent, would seem to be what some teachers expect of learners. By looking at the case study of the middle-aged Italian student mentioned above, who I shall call Marco, the role expectations and attitude play in one-to-one lessons will become a little clearer and perhaps help us to look again at the way we act and react in lessons.

- Marco needs time to think things through when he meets new language or when he has to understand the instructions for a task. In fact, he will often sit for up to 30 seconds or more, a long time in a one-to-one lesson, thinking, before he hazards an answer or begins to do an activity.
- He finds it difficult to remember vocabulary that he has just met or from a lesson that he did a week previously.
- He does not notice structure, language patterns etc. automatically, and is not particularly interested in form so he will often forget these things even after they have been clarified or worked on.
- He panics when he listens to spoken English on cassettes or videos.

These things may cause the teacher to feel frustrated and below we will look more closely at what happens when the teacher reacts to some of these things. In fact, these "weaknesses" can provide the opportunity both to give support to the student and, at the same time, to extend his skills work, but the key to doing this lies in the way the teacher reacts and what is expected or not expected of the learner. When feeling reassured and approved of, by the teacher, he works well, at his own pace, but if he feels disapproval or frustration, particularly when listening, then it all becomes even more difficult for him and his reaction is to clam up. Over the past three years, in fact, there has been a gradual but marked improvement in Marco's use of form, listening ability and he now uses a much wider range of vocabulary. For this reason he cannot be considered to be a failure at all. He learns at his own pace, and in his own way, and this must be respected. How, then, can we respect Marco's learning styles and use his "weaknesses" to create learning opportunities?

Marco has problems remembering vocabulary so vocabulary can be recycled at the beginning of the lesson. He may not remember the items but if they are presented as a jigsaw we can gradually give him hints to help him, by adding more letters, and at the same time the teacher can give a definition, which means that he is also working on his listening skills, without the psychologically frightening element of the cassette. One example of this was in the lesson following a first lesson with the "Headway Pre-Intermediate Video episode "The Village". In the previous lesson various vocabulary items had been clarified including "Commuter". Eight of these were then displayed in jigsaw form like this:
c _ _ _ _ _ _ _
and the teacher gave definitions ( oral rather than written so as to develop his listening skills) such as

"This is someone who lives in one place but travels every day to another town, you remember, like we saw in the video last week, where people lived in the village but travelled to London to work."

A lot of lip service is paid to the idea of respecting learning styles, but do we actually do this when we are in class? Teachers are human beings with their own emotions and insecurities, and a one-to-one lesson is an interaction between two individuals. As a result we may have the best intentions in the world but here is an example of what might have happened in the above lesson.

There are two "problem areas in Marco's behaviour patterns which can trigger negative reactions in the teacher:

a) His silence: it can be unnerving when learners sit in silence, and although teachers cannot read minds and do not know what is going on in the learner's head, they often try to. Either they leap in too quickly supplying the answer and not giving the learner enough time to think or they suffer becoming more and more frustrated whilst the learner thinks, going through an internal monologue similar to this: "He can't understand. That means you, the teacher, haven't been clear enough. That is impossible after you've done everything you were taught to do on your Celta course, and everyone else understands so he must be stupid!" It obviously would not be articulated quite as clearly as this, but teachers often feel under pressure and as though we are being judged, so this is a fairly natural process to go through.

b) Not remembering: here the teacher sets out to go over the vocabulary from the previous lesson quickly before going on to something new. That vocabulary was "dealt with" in detail in the previous lesson and the learner should remember it. When he cannot remember it, or finds it difficult the teacher's internal monologue might go something like this: "How on earth can you not remember "commuter"? You asked me what it meant last week, and we talked about different types of commuters for ages, and then it can up in the video several times, as well as in our discussion. I can remember every single example, and your should too, otherwise it means the lesson didn't work because that was one of the main items of target language. Of course, the lesson worked. Other people have no trouble remembering words like this so you must be stupid!"

In both cases the teacher, at some level of consciousness, reaches the conclusion that Marco is stupid and begins to have to hide feelings of frustration. Little is expected of him and the lesson is seen as a marathon to "get through" somehow until the next student an hour later. In this way a frustrating learning environment is built up and the learner will probably become discouraged and abandon his lessons. There are two considerations to make here therefore:
- It is important to be aware of and cater for different learning styles, and not just pay lip service to the idea of learning styles. Silence is very important for this learner - it is not an embarrassed, "panic-stricken" silence because he does not know the answer, so it is detrimental to leap in and give him an answer before he has thought things through. It is important to show that it is good for him to do this and that the teacher is perfectly willing to give him the time he needs, whilst being prepared to help when necessary or when he asks for help.
- It is not always easy to shift the focus from ourselves as teachers, and this often happens at a "deep" level of consciousness, which we are not immediately aware of. ( see the internal monologue above). If, on the other hand, we can shift our focus to the individual's learning process, we can really give them more credit for learning in their own individual ways rather than focusing on our perceived shortcomings as teachers because the learner is not reacting in the way we expect them too or learning exactly what we wanted them to learn, when we wanted them to.

Marco makes quite slow progress, but he does make progress and as was said above. Over the three years he has been doing lessons he has learned how to work enthusiastically outside class, becoming more autonomous, after being guided in how to do this ( suggestions such as writing diaries, sending e-mails, recording vocabulary in different ways, reading and writing have all been received enthusiastically and put into practice). He travels a lot and is not afraid to use the English he knows when abroad, and he is very conscientious about doing homework, writing and building up a dossier of his written work on his computer, which he reviews from time to time for language analysis revision ( after, of course, the work has been corrected and used in class). Initially he was not very enthusiastic about homework, but as English became something that he enjoyed more, and saw as something important in his life, he became more interested in doing homework too. The homework he does is generally a preparation for a task which will be done in the next lesson, so he sees it as being crucial to what will happen in class. Teachers always need to be prepared for learners who do not do their homework, a situation which can be solved in various ways, by allowing them time in class, or by having alternatives to do if no homework is forthcoming. At first, Marco looked on homework as something tiresome and rather mechanical, which it can be if it is merely a matter of mechanical exercises which are then corrected before the "real work" of the lesson begins. As time went by, however, he saw that this work done outside class was actually saving time in the lessons as well as helping him to improve his level of English, and here is an example of how the work he did autonomously was then integrated into the lesson referred to above ( after the first "village" video lesson).

After watching the video in class and discussing the ways in which that particular village had changed, Marco was asked to do a project, preparing a presentation on an area of his own town that has changed dramatically over the years. He researched this using the Internet and with the help of his sister, a journalist, who provided him with photographs as well. Then in class he did a fascinating presentation, where really interesting communication took place. I interacted by asking questions about things I was interested in, as I know the area well myself, and afterwards I walked around this area seeing a whole new world as I went!. As a piece of communication it was very effective, and it was useful as a springboard for language work as well.

The presentation showed that there was some confusion between the usage of the simple past tense for events happening at a specific time in the past . One error, for example, which is similar to several others, was:

" A lot of things have changed in this area, where I have lived for ten years from 1960 - 1970"

Learning is a positive experience for Marco and for me, the teacher, when he is encouraged and his strengths are recognized, even though the weaknesses are still worked on. To do this I need to "really focus" on his learning styles rather than my "teaching" and how successful or not I may be. In many training courses teachers learn that failing to achieve their aims in a lesson is a major crime, and that is a message which, unfortunately, stays with us for a long time. Recent second language acquisition research, however, confirms that learners do not necessarily learn what we aim to teach them, so our aims have to change somewhat too.

We should be thinking more about ways in which we can expose the learner to new language, we should look at the learner's problems and help them in a supportive way to work on these things and finally we should really respect the individual learning styles and focus on what the learner does in class rather than what we think we should be doing and how "good" our own performance is. When what happens in a lesson is perceived by both the teacher and the learner as being important, serious and enjoyable as well, and the individuals involved in the lesson respect each other and communicate with each other, there is the best possible environment for learning to take place.

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