Text from the learners

Secondary and adult
Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims, UK

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Inner text in the primary school tradition
What has this got to do with my college students?
My eld sister's scar
He had himself cut
Letters
How to personalise external text.

One of my wonderments as I look at the modern language teaching tradition is that so much time and effort goes into presenting the students with external text of all sorts, as much pictorial as verbal. Isn't it amazing that in beginner textbooks the students are offered pictures of the objects they have to learn the words for in the foreign language? Somehow you would think they could at least draw their own pictures on the blackboard and so come to own some little space, some little territory of their very own in the lesson. And yet no, the tradition has it that even the pictures must be supplied to them by greedy capitalists, the same ones who supply gyms with walking machines so people can pay for the privilege of putting one foot in front of the other.

There are, of course, powerful commercial interests that find this view of Modern Language teaching convenient. Such folk make a good living from supplying hectares of picture and language text. And they do this right round the world. The EFL textbook is a staple British export.

Maybe the best place to look for teachers who instinctively appreciate the importance of internal text, text from the students, is in the primary school and infant school tradition. Maria Montessori has this to say about respecting the child's inner text, inner syllabus:

Delight in Walking

"It should be the adult's task to correspond to the needs of the immature creature in his care, to adapt himself to its needs and to renounce his own way of acting.

The higher animals instinctively do something of the sort and adapt themselves to the conditions of their little ones. There is nothing more interesting than what happens when a baby elephant is brought by its mother into the herd. The great mass of huge animals slow their pace to the pace of the little one and when the little one is tired and stops, they all stop.

………….Between the age of a year and a half and two the child can really walk quite a way and can negotiate difficult places, steep rises and stairs. But he walks with a different aim from our own. The grown-up walks to reach an external goal and he goes straight towards it. He has, moreover, his own rhythm of walking, which carries him forward almost mechanically. The small child walks to develop his powers, he is building up his being. He goes slowly. He has neither rhythmic step nor goal. But thins around him attract him and urge him forward. If the adult would be of help, he must renounce his own rhythm and his own aim."*

In the above example the teacher/parent/adult subordinates his own "walking text," to the one that the child naturally collaborates. I offer you the "Montessori walk" as a real experiment that anyone with a small child can try out. Instead of taking an eighteen month old for a walk let him or her take you. You will find that the geography, timing rhythm and feeling of the walk are quite , quite different from a walk governed by you.

* The Secret of Childhood, Maria Montessori, Kajakshetra Publications.

By this stage you may be wondering what toddlers going for walks has to do with the reading problems of your college students. I am suggesting that the normal tyranny of the adult forcing the child to adopt his pace is directly parallel to the normal tyranny of external text in tertiary language teaching.
There is every reason to believe that students learn faster and better from text they feel close to than from text flung at them from outside. At this point it may be helpful to look at some examples taken from the teaching of adults, and in contexts in some ways parallel to your own.

Some 20 years ago my deceased colleague, John Morgan, was invited to work for three months in one of the Universities in Fuzhou, South East China. One day in class* he showed the second year group he was teaching a scar he has and then proceeded to tell the story of how he got it !
He discovered that most of the people in the Fuzhou classroom also had scars and that each scar had its own autobiography. In small groups John's students told each other their scar stories. As homework they were asked to write up either their own story or that of a classmate. Here are a couple of examples just as the students wrote them:

My eld sister is a able woman. She is very diligence, and has a lot of experience of life. She played an important play in our family before. When she was very young she had to prepared foods and make meals for the whole family. Because my mother was in bad condition then. Some times she was lying in bed for a few days. After class my sister had to go home straightly. She had no time to play with other children. She could do all kinds of house works. She was very careful and always payed more attention to the things she was doing. But only one time. When she repared vegetables for a meal she thought about another things and had her finger cut. There was a explosion pain in her finger. She couldn't help bursting into tear. When my eld brother came over. Blood was flowing from her finger to the floor. Of cause she was sent to hospital. The doctor put some powder on the finger and used a bandage to apply it. Also gave her some medicine. Up to mow the big scar is still staying there. Perhaps that is a reminder.

Yesterday morning I heard a story from one of my classmates. He told us a story about a scar on his finger.

When he was a middle school student of 15. He and his fellow students went to a farm to help the peasants there with their summer harvest. Most of them were young and hadn't much experience about farm work.

On that day, they cut rice. His pickle was very sharp. He didn't know how to use it properly. The peasants could, certainly, cut quickly. He wanted to cut more, so he cut quicklier. He thought he could catch with them. Suddenly he dropped his pickle and shouted: "oh dear, I've cut my finger." there was a terrible pain on his finger with the blood dropping down. His face became pale. His teacher put a handkerchief round his finger and quickly sent him to a clinic. After a week, his finger was all right. But there was a scar left as a reminder on his hand.

* This scars class took place on 23-9-82, near the beginning of John's work with the group.

To my mind these two texts have a whiff of reality about them. These students are talking and then writing about things of concern to them, about their loved ones, their own past, their own experience. At a technical level they are allowing the reality and depth of the message to rub off on the foreign language medium. Maybe I need to go into this more and try to be a little clearer. When the first student writes: "there was a explosion pain in her finger" she is expressing something powerful and felt through the medium of English, not through her native Chinese. By expressing meaningful things, deeply felt things, in the foreign code, she gives that code a different, more real status in her own mind, it becomes a little less alien, odd, distant. She comes to own the language a bit more. By using them in this way she deepens her feeling for the English words 'pain' and 'explosion'. how can a language student really come to integrate a language into his unconscious being unless she uses it to speak and write about things of genuine concern?

The point I am making is very simple and stares us in the face as a profession.

The point that John Morgan's Fuzhou students make for me is that person-centred 'humanistic' techniques are not a 1970's Californian fashion useful for titivating the palates of language students from the Latin American and European bourgeoisies. In the Fuzhou situation John was working with mostly first generation intellectuals from a rural background. The 'scars' trigger works as well with them as with the sons and daughters of Zurich bankers in private language schools in the UK. Some things are universal.

A very natural way of generating normal, natural and felt text is by writing letters to your students. This became one of my stock procedures through the 1980ies. I learnt it from the writing of a brilliant primary school teacher, Herbert Kohl who was faced with the problem of trying to get 10-11 year-old Puerto Rican kids in New York to write in English. They came from homes where nobody much wrote in either Spanish, Spanglish or English. Kohl though, knew that if they did not learn some writing skills they would never get beyond emptying New York dustcarts. He tried every methodological trick he knew to get the kids writing. The only thing he found really worked was to write them individual letters; the rule was that in each letter he would give the child some piece of information about himself the child did not yet have. The child in his reply, had to do the same.

Around 1981 I decided to try out the Kohl idea with adult students and found it brought me a new kind of contact with my students. Time- consuming yes, but totally worth the effort.

At this point let me pause and listen to the practical objections I can hear coming from you:

"My classes are much too big…….."
"It wouldn't work in this culture….."
"My students need to learn technical English……"

Can I ask you to put these powerful objections on ice for a moment and join me in enjoying some of the letter texts. I want to show you examples from two correspondences, as I have found people will write to me about a variety of topic areas and in radically different modes.

Here is a letter from a 19 year-old Neapolitan student of computer science. This text came about half-way through our exchange of letters:

Saturday, 25th August 1981

Dear Mario

All computer languages are divided into two groups: machine oriented and problem oriented languages. The former ones are those languages which were born in a strict relation to a specific type of computers. The advantages of using them are no waste of time for their compilation and optimisation of run-times and memory-storage. The better ones are high-level languages which can be easily used by more because they have a complex syntactic structure similar to that of human languages and so more can also easily learn them.

When we want to run a program written in FORTRAN, for example, we have to ask the computer to translate it into its own machine language: we can do this, simply asking it to execute the 'translating program of FORTRAN' that is what we call 'FORTRAN compiler' whose data are our FORTRAN program, obviously. So, if the program is written in PL/1, we need the PL/1 compiler. PL/1 does not require a different type of computer but only its own translating program: the PL/1 compiler.

In my studies I have only learnt FORTRAN and a little of COBOL just because computing is one of the several branches of electronic engineering and I am only at have only attended the first two out of five years which is the duration of this degree course. To become competent with each language I have to study it for two or three months doing many exercises, anyway.

The studies I'd like most to efford are about the project of computers because these programs are quite interesting and extremely complicated: they exploit the highest capabilities of the computer. Their logical structure is based upon the results of the latest researches in this field, so full of fascination for me.

Hardware is now at its best and no radical changes can be rationally foreseen even though our present computers can be surely made less expensive and faster; on the contrary, software is now developing itself to achieve new important and revolutionary aims.

As for the accusation to computer people of throwing people out of their job, I think it's false because computing is a science, and science cannot be linked to ethics: science is knowledge and knowledge is always good; its use depends on people; so computer people do not throw people out of their jobs; they simply suggest methods for solving some problems.

We sometimes make the standard of life better and prevent human beings from doing boring and repetitive works with no intellectual contents.

In a world where computers are going to have a more and more relevant role, more has to learn how to live with them, without thinking to the thinking-machine as a rival: in such a world more is going to get new important and more interesting jobs.

Computer people do not throw people out of their jobs: it's managers who decide to reduce the number of workers and employees because of the present economic difficulties throughout the world. Man has not yet realized that computers have really caused a new industrial and social revolution quite more effective than those of the past centuries: it's up to him to think to a new world quite different from Huxley's 'brave new world'.

By the way before leaving Canterbury, I'm going to buy some 'cassette + book' kit to get better in listening comprehension. Could you suggest some titles to me

Yours

Ciro

In this correspondence my principle was the same as that in the 'Montessori walk'; I made it my task to follow the movement of Ciro's thought and to write him letters about the areas he seemed interested in and at the level and depth that seemed to leave him comfortable. In his first letter Ciro made it clear in a number of indirect ways that he did not want to discuss areas like family and relationships with me.

Ciro lives in a totally different world to Naoko who wrote me the letter below towards the end of the second month on a three month intensive course leading up to the Cambridge proficiency exam. This was letter 15 out of a correspondence that totalled 19 letters in each direction.

Dear Mario,

Thank you for your letter. I like very much reading letters. You said in the last letter that mostly Western people don't pay too much attention to things like mirroring which we did. I think it is true. I don't know if you could see during your stay in Japan that Japanese people always pay attention to the others and now I feel that is too much. We care the others too much. On the other hand we are afraid how people see or understand us.

Now some friends of mine feel nervous and they talk to me a lot about their problem. Even though it is a very small problem for me, for them it is very big. I can advice them something, but I don't know if it the best way for them. I think it is better than nothing. It is a human nature that when people have somebody to talk to they feel safety, even though the problem isn't solved.

On Saturday I walked around many shops to buy a formal dress for the Xmas party which will be held at Newnham College by the Anglo-Japanese society. For me it is the first time to go to that kind of party which we have to wear formal dress. I've bought one and I'm looking forward it.

We have only three weeks left till the exam. The time flies, I think this expression is really right. I can't believe that I am going back to Japan. I often think my future now. Last night I spoke to Italian boy and he said he didn't make any plans, think a lot of his future and so on. I said to him that I hadn't any plans for my future before, but now it's time to think. He couldn't agree with me. It may be different culture. It's nice to listen many people's opinion.

What did you do this week-end? Did you have enough time to play with Bruno?

Goodnight,

N

What I hope I have managed to do in these last few pages is to offer you documentation of ways in which students can be brought to produce text of their own which is genuinely worth reading and which incidentally makes the teacher's life less tedious. There is no way I can teach with energy if what my students produce bores me out of my head. If their production does this, then it is often my own fault.

In the preceding pages I have attempted to make a strong case for drawing internal text from students and I certainly believe this to be a major, simple and commonsensical teaching strategy. In my own teaching, though, I so of course also find myself presenting the students with external text.

The problem is how to personalise the text, how to get the students into it, how to link it to their own knowledge and experience.

I would now like to share with you one practical way of domesticating external text and making students really burrow their own way into it.

Let's look at a word-graphing as a pre-reading device for getting students to pre-explore a text and to 'want' to then read it.

Can I ask you to stop reading and actually do the exercise below, so that you come to understand it as an experience rather as a hollow lesson plan?

You will notice that the graph below has two axes: POLITICS and NUCLEAR PHYSICS.

Let's take the word/ name Einstein. Do you feel that this name belongs more to politics or to nuclear physics? In a way Einstein has to belong to both spheres of human thought and the graph allows you to express this double belonging very clearly. In my subjective view Einstein belongs fiercely to the field of nuclear physics and secondarily to that of politics, so I can express this by placing Einstein in an appropriate place on my graph.

P
O
L
I
T
I (1)
C
S
______________________________
NUCLEAR PHYSICS

He is right along the horizontal axis but only a third of the way up the vertical one.

Can I now ask you to place the following words and phrases on the graph below:

1. Tritium
2. To underestimate
3. Radioactive dust
4. Freedom of information Act
5. Radio active pollution
6. Environmental research
7. To release uranium

P
O
L
I
T
I
C
S
_______________________________
NUCLEAR PHYSICS

In a language class you would now be invited to turn to your neighbour and explain why you have graphed the words the way you have.

Following this conversation the group would be invited to read the text the words were taken from:

Radioactive pollution 'underestimated by six times'

A plant that produces uranium for the nuclear weapons programme in the US has discharged six times as much radioactive dust into the environment since 1951 as the Department of Energy has admitted, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, which obtained the documents, estimates that the Feed Materials Production Centre, near Fernald, Ohio, released between 270 and 1400 tonnes of uranium between 1951 and 1985.
Uranium from the plant powers reactors that produce plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons. The estimates of pollution are crucial to a lawsuit filed by residents of the Fernald area against the former operator of the plant. The residents claim that releases of radioactivity from the plant have damaged their health.

New Scientist 13/ 5/ 89

By "graphing" your keywords you burrowed into your perception and associations with some of the words in the text. In a way you activated and prepared your relevant inner schemata to intermingle with the ideas from the text, when you came to read it. Graphing is an excellent way of marinating and preparing to eat and digest over-there text, cold text, external text. Try it with your students.
You find many more such reading exercises in John Morgan's Vocabulary, OUP, revised edition 2004.

Please check the Creative Methodology For The Classroom course at Pilgrims website.