Humanizing Language Curriculum Development
Mohammad Khatib, Sadegh Shariati, and Zahrah Masoumpanah, Iran
Dr. Mohammad Khatib is an associate professor of TEFL at Allameh Tabatabaee University, Tehran, Iran.
Sadegh Shariati is currently a Ph.D student. He is also an instructor of TEFL at Farhangiyan University, Khorramabad, Iran. Email: Shariati1352@yahoo.com
Zahrah Masoumpanah is currently a Ph.D student. She is also an instructor of TEFL at Farhangiyan University, Khorramabad, Iran. Email: Zmasoumpanah1356@yahoo.com
Menu
Humanism and education
Humanizing ELT
Humanizing language curriculum development
Humanizing ELT materials
Critical appraisal
Concluding remarks
References
Humanistic psychology is concerned with “the uniqueness, the individuality, and the humanity of each individual” (Lefrancois,1991,p. 136). Stevick (1990, p. 23) refers to five points of emphasis within humanism, which include feelings, social relations, responsibility, intellect and self -actualization. According to Hamachek (1977) cited in Williams and Burden (2001), humanistic education starts with the idea that students are different and it strives to help students become more like themselves and less like each other. Lefrancois ( 1991) states that most humanistic approaches to education share a number of common emphases. Chief among them is greater attention to thinking and feeling than to the acquisition of knowledge. A second common emphasis is on development of notions of self and individual identity. The third major emphasis is on communication. It presents teachers with specific advice on methods of bringing about good teacher-learner relationships on effective human relations, and honest interpersonal communication. A final emphasis shared by most humanistic approaches is the recognition and development of personal values. Beginning with the premise that human beings have a natural potential for learning, Carl Rogers (1969) suggested that significant learning only take place when the subject matter is perceived to be of personal relevance to the learner and when it involves active participation by the learner. He further explains that the learning which is self-initiated and which involves feelings as well as cognition is the most likely to be lasting and pervasive. He believes that under these circumstances, the task of the each local educational system is to develop an educational system which can best meet the needs of individual students as they try to actualize their potentialities in such a way as to achieve the most effective emotional, physiological and intellectual development possible to them.
Humanistic approaches have had a considerable influence on English Language Teaching (ELT) methodology. Earl Stevick has been one of a number of writers who have explored humanistic ideas and techniques in the teaching of languages. In his books, notably his Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways, Stevick (1980) explores how humanistic methods, particularly the Silent Way and Counseling Learning, are realized in the language classroom. Stevick cited in Willam and Burden (1997) saw a need for a humanistic approach to language teaching as a response to what he saw as alienations which were accountable for failure in modern language teaching: alienation of learners from materials, from themselves, from the class and from the teacher. Stevick (1980) recommends that teachers take a serious attention to what goes on inside and between their students. He emphasized that teachers must be attuned to the needs and wants of the learner. He further explains that teacher should enable students to reconcile their performing self and their critical self to provide a harmony between them. This entails paving the ways for students to be engaged in the activities of the classroom. According to Rogers (1969) Stevick (1980, 1990), to humanize English Language Teaching (ELT), language teachers should (1) create a sense of belonging, (2) make the subject relevant to the learner, that is, to personalize language learning (3) involve the whole person, (4) encourage a knowledge of the self, (5) develop personal identity, (6) minimize criticism, (7) encourage self-initiation, self -evaluation and creativity, (8) allow for choice. In order to help language teachers apply the above-mentioned features in his/her teaching, teachers and curriculum developers should develop curriculum and materials which are line with humanistic language teaching.
According to Curtis (1971, p. 1), humanists believe that the function of curriculum is to provide each learner with intrinsically rewarding experience that contribute to personal development. He continued to say that humanizing curriculum should stress the need to personalize education, emphasis must be placed on the needs and interests of individuals, and curricula must be constructed to enable students to actualize their own potentialities. To him, the humanizing curriculum centers on the student, and the teacher helps to plan, guide, and evaluate the individuals rather that to transmit selected facts. As Vygotsky (1986) puts it, teachers and school administrators should recognize that learning happens most effectively when the curriculum connects with student experience and depends on teachers being able to identify the knowledge, skills, and meaningful experiences students bring to the classroom.
Gilchrist (1974, p.1) states that a school system that wants to provide human beings with optimum growth opportunities should take into account the needs and desires of its learners. He believes that a learning environment cannot be functional and alive unless the real problems of living can be discussed in the classroom. Giroux cited in Burke, Adler, and Linker (2008) assert that by avoiding incorporating learners’ experiences into the curriculum, schools resort to a prescriptive curriculum that re-inscribes existing and often inequitable social structures . Gay (2002) states that if teachers see the purpose of school as transformative, they must develop the expertise needed to facilitate the inclusion of personal and culturally relevant experiences in the classroom and seek out those that provide opportunities to scaffold and support instruction . He goes on to say that when life experiences are ignored, dismissed, or devalued, students infer that their personal perspectives and world views are nonessential to their learning experiences. This can be increased when teachers shift to a standardized curriculum while following an externally dictated timeline which has no relation to the students experiences.
According to apple (2004) , when textbooks, classroom instruction, films, television programming, and political figures resemble those within a student’s community, the student’s personal experience and the school’s curriculum appear to be well connected and cogent for the student’s learning process.
Burke et al. (2008, pp. 70-71) recommend some guidelines for achieving a connected, humanized curriculum. As they puts it, policy must reflect local context and avoid a prescriptive and scripted curriculum. Decision-making and accountability must be shared among all the stakeholders. Professional development must reflect local needs. If a humanized curriculum is to be achieved, on-going professional development, which helps teachers develop the skills and knowledge to contextualize curriculum and instruction in meaningful way must reflect the local needs of the learners. Curriculum and assessment must be academically demanding. That is, students will benefit from a curriculum that connects to their world experiences while, at the same time, holds them academically accountable. Curriculum development must shift to the local level. They go on to say that in order to develop a curriculum that reflects the lives of the students and their community, a shift needs to occur from the district level and/or state level to the classroom level. At the classroom level, teachers can make meaningful connections to the local community as the catalyst to move students toward a standardized curriculum. School-community-home collaborations must be forged and sustained. Positive opportunities for interaction among teachers and community members must be emphasized, and curriculum must validate and value the lived experiences of students.
Based on what we have talked about so far, it can be concluded that learner-centered curriculum which is an offspring of the school-based curriculum is a humanized curriculum because as Nunan (1988, p. 23) assert, in seeking to develop a learner-centered curriculum, the curriculum developer should: (1) recognize the wealth of experiences, resources and cultural capital that learners bring to the learning session; (2) take account of the diverse backgrounds of the learners and consider this within any planning of the learning program; (3) tailor resources and activities to make them relevant and useful to the learners. Materials generated by learners can be used, as can authentic resources which will mirror the activities/practices that are related to real life language use; (4) provide learning resources and activities which interest and challenge the learners; (5) ensure learning activities provide opportunities for real-life language use by mirroring real communication; (6) involve learners in negotiating and creating the learning program. Learners can be involved in selecting topics and texts and determining the content and pace of learning. Nunan (1988) states that “one way of typifying curriculum models is the degree to which they allow curriculum development to occur at the local level” (21). To him, a fully centralized curriculum which is devised in a centralized location and then disseminated to a wide range of learning institutions does not take the local factors into account. In fact; he favors de-centralized curricula or school-based curricula which are designed wholly or in part within the teaching institution itself and tries to take learners’ preferences and experiences into account.
Many articles and book chapters have stressed the need for the humanization of language learning materials (Hansen 2011;Masuhara 2006, 2011; Masuhara, Hann, & Tomlinson, 2008; Tomlinson , 2003, 2006,2012; 2013).
Most of these scholars stress the need to help learners to personalize, localize and make meaningful their experience of the target language, as well as the need for materials to be affectively engaging and cater for all learning style preferences. Tomlinson (2003) argues that “language teaching materials need to be humanizing, taking into account learners’ ‘experience of life, their interests and enthusiasms, their views, attitudes and feelings and, above all, their capacity to make meaningful connections in their minds” (p. 162). Gross cited in Tomlinson (2012) claims that we can accelerate and enrich our learning, by engaging the senses, emotions, imagination. Canagarajah cited in Tomlinson (2012) gives examples of the re-writing of textbook comprehension questions so as to elicit localized and personalized responses. Berman cited in Tomlinson (2006) says, “we learn best when we see things as part of a recognized pattern, when our imaginations are aroused, when we make natural associations between one idea and another, and when the information appeals to our senses” (p. 77). Tomlinson (2006, p. 78) advocate a humanistic course book which engages affect through personalized activities and which provides imaging activities, inner voice, kinaesthetic and process activities. Hansen (2011, p. 407) advocates helping the learner to achieve ‘a state in which the mind is optimally relaxed and fully expanded’ and suggests using paintings as texts. Masuhara (2006) and Tomlinson (2003, 2006, 2013) advocate and illustrate multidimensional approaches to language learning in which learners are encouraged to make use of sensory imagery, motor imagery, inner speech, associations, connections and emotions in order to personalize their language-learning experience.
Many articles have criticized commercially published course books for being not humanistic. According to Tomlinson (2006, p. 79), one of the main reasons why global course books are not normally humanistic is that in trying to cater for everybody they end up engaging nobody. In fact, they have to make sure that their content and approach is not unsuitable for any type of learner, that their choice of topics and texts does not disadvantage any learners. Tomlinson (2013, p. 141) state that most of the course books need humanizing because they do not engage the learners and because they do not manage to connect with the learners’ lives and because they do not sufficiently take into account the resources of the learner as a human being. He continued to say that many course books concentrated on the linguistic and analytical aspects of language learning and failed to tap the human being’s potential for multidimensional processing. That is, they made insufficient use of the learners’ ability to learn through doing things physically, to learn through feeling emotion, to learn through experiencing things in the mind and to learn through connection with their prior experience. Arnold and Brown cited in Tomlinson(2012) believe that we need to add ‘the affective domain’ to ‘the effective language teaching going on in the classroom’ in order to make language learning more humanistic, and Tomlinson (2003p. 6) says that ‘most course books make little attempt to achieve affective engagement and they present learners with bland texts and activities in which the learners remain neutral without their emotions being engaged. Masuhara et al. (2008,p.310) are critical of course books for not making enough use of (1) engaging and extensive reading and listening texts, (2) the developmental opportunities offered by extensive writing (3) the resources of the mind by stimulating multi-dimensional mental responses which are at the same time sensory, cognitive and affective, and (4) opportunities to stimulate the imagination of learners.
Tomlinson ( 2003, 2006, 2013) state that in order to humanize a published course book is for the teacher to replace sections of it with more humanistic materials which involve the learners in gaining and reflecting on experience or the teacher can adapt the course book by adding activities which invite the learners to think, feel, and do as intelligent human beings. In fact; teachers needs to personalize and localize the materials and to relate them in different ways to needs and learning style preferences of individual learners. This can help to achieve the relevance and connectivity found to promote language acquisition, to help learners to relate the materials to previous experience and to facilitate the use of mental imaging and inner speech.
Tomlinson (2003, 2006, 2013) proposed eight ways for developing course book which are more humanistic by (1) writing in large and varied team, (2) using a text-driven approach, (3) using a multi-dimensional approach which is based on principles that using affect, mental imagery and inner speech is what we do during effective and durable learning, (4) taking to the learners by chatting to the learners casually in the same way that good teachers do and trying to achieve personal contact with them by revealing their own preferences, interests and opinions, (5)using literature, (6) varying the unit focus, (7) connecting to the learners’ views and opinions, (8) providing text-free generalizable activities which can be used with texts selected by the learner from a resource pack of materials, from library, from the internet or from their own resource, including awareness activities. On the whole, as Tomlinson (2013) says, “the aim of humanizing materials is to develop materials which are locally relevant and which engage the learners personally in both local and global topics salient to their lives”( p. 153) .
Few scholars have criticized humanized curriculum . Burke et al. (2008) quote some unnamed critics of humanistic curriculum who say humanists appraise their methods, techniques and experiences instead of appraising them in terms of consequences for learners. They continued to say that humanists are not concerned enough about the experiences of the individual students in the classroom because although they say that curriculum is individualistic, every student in a given classroom is actually exposed to the same stimuli.
What we think the weak points of humanistic curriculum are is that first of all due to the fact that humanistic curriculum relies on teachers’ ability to create and select materials appropriate to the learners expressed needs, teachers often find it difficult to make a balance among competing needs and interests of the learners. Second, those learners who are learning based on a localized and more culturally relevant curriculum may not be successful in a different social and economic situation. In fact, he may not cope with life in multicultural situations.
To conclude, according to Curtis (1971, p. 2 ), a fruitful approach to humanistic curriculum includes focusing on the physical and emotional needs of the learners and attempting to design learning experiences that will help fulfill these needs. He continued to say that curriculum objectives and activities should match emotional issues that are salient at particular stages of learners’ life and humanistic curriculum should respond to the learners’ concern about the meaning of life. Curtis adds that a humanistic curriculum demands an emotional relationship between students and teacher. The teacher must provide warmth and nurture emotion while continuing to function as a resource center. He or she should present materials and create challenging situations to facilitate learning. Tomlinson (2013) is optimistic about the future of humanistic materials by hoping materials developers to develop (1) more personalized and localized materials; (2) more respect for the learners’ intelligence, experience and communicative competence; (3) more affectively engaging content; (4) more opportunities for learners with experiential and especially kinaesthetic learning style preferences; (5) more attempts to engage the learner in the language learning process as an experienced, intelligent and interesting individual ; (6) more attempts to use multidimensional approaches to language learning.
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