Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 6; November 03

Luke Meddings, London, UK

As summer ends and a new term beckons, recent postings on the site have focused on the kind of lessons you can start a course with. Names, both personal and place, are always a good place to start. Mario Rinvolucri, Editor of HLT. has written and spoken on exploring both to good effect. Names are one of the areas we have in common.

Names and basic information about our lives are a great example of compelling linguistic and communicative sources which go under-used.

Exploring what we're called and where we live is a great way of bringing people's feelings and memories into the classroom, thus opening up more emotional windows than the sit-down-with-a-pencil-and-concentrate approach to language learning -which lasts a few seconds for those adults who don't really learn this way at all, a bit longer for those who do.

Just asking someone's name in the conventional way is a) a means of identification and b), if nothing more is asked, a very good way of closing things down and establishing control. Imagine being at a party or someone's house and meeting people for the first time, asking only their name before closing the conversation down and moving on. 'What's your name?' 'George.' 'Thank you.'

Of course a teacher who doesn't ask any more than the name may very well find out more later, but they may not, and why wait - dogme is about people's inner story, and my only caution here is that one shouldn't expect the wholly unexpected. Respect people's individuality, enjoy the detail and the truth of it, and that will be amazing in itself. Of course, people and families are all so peculiar that the mundane will often turn out to be fascinating. One person's routine is the next person's idea of insanity.

So my advice to anyone thinking of starting off a class without props is to imagine it's a party. Ask someone's name, then ask where they live. If it's a multi-national class, don't stop at the country - ask for the city. If you've ever been to the city, ask 'whereabouts' - what a good word to learn. Precise and sociable at the same time. Establish a routine which enables people who've been to that country or city to join in this type of conversation. Get to the district, get to the street - and feel the student grow into the space as a person. Get to the street in good time, obviously - don't make it last as long as the actual journey. If everyone is from the same country, city or even district there's still detail in there, with the scope for greater recognition and comparison, right down to the last bus-stop.

Ask what they do (doesn't work with kids I know, but most of my experience is with adult multi-national classes - try pets). Isn't that the first thing you'd ask meeting someone socially? It took me years to start asking this question routinely at the start of every new class, to every new student who joined over the weeks. Share words and phrases that help with this kind of conversation (as with 'whereabouts?') and encourage the students to use them when they join in. And then instead of a class of intermediate students, you've got a room full of people who know more than each others' names - do write this stuff up on the board, it's much more important than whatever else you need to write, which can go on pieces of paper and be saved up for later display) - and suddenly there are doctors, parents, engineers, fashion students, slackers. People with lives.

I wonder if the key idea here is meeting someone socially. Dogme knockers might say: 'You aren't meeting someone socially. You're meeting someone professionally, in the context of an academic exchange.' I say - well, something like baloney. Language emerges from social exchange. We're meeting socially. That's our little revolution.

Biodata:

Luke Meddings was, until recently, educational co-ordinator of the Lilian Bishop School, London. Now writes for Guardian Unlimited on ELT matters. luke@blinc.tv