Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 7; November 1999

"The Real World and the Classroom"

John Morgan (UK)

Page 1 of 2

Some time ago, I read in a newspaper (The Guardian, 23 June 1987) of how an offender appeared before the magistrates charged with breaking a probation order. A condition of the order had been attendance at group sessions, and the young man had not been attending. His solicitor explained to the magistrates that during one session his client had been asked to roleplay an apple, and this he had been unable and unwilling to do. Doubtless there had been good reasons for asking people to take part in this roleplay, but his client had not understood them, and had walked out. The magistrate gently explained that a probation order was to be observed, and the offender paid for his failure to understand with 140 hours of Community Service.

This account touched me deeply, as not long before I had asked some teachers on an in-service course to do something very similar. I placed a chair in the middle of the group and asked one of the teachers to take off her shoe and put it on the chair. I asked the other members of the group to put questions to the shoe, which the shoe's owner then answered on its behalf. A description of that activity might well be "She was asked to roleplay a shoe."

Now I had my reasons for asking the group to do this exercise, and I shall return to them later, but for the moment let us take the stark absurdity of that description as an expression of the gulf perceived between the "Real World" (where people do not pretend to be shoes or apples) and the World of the Classroom (where apparently they do).

To treat these worlds as different is part and parcel of our professional experience and practice. In the 1960s we taught English by the Direct Method. I would, for example, come into the classroom with a box of fruit and lay them out on my desk. I would pick up an apple and say slowly and clearly, "This is an apple", then hand it to a student and ask, "What is that?", pointing at the apple. If the student had understood, and had remembered the sounds a-pp-le, she would say, "This is an apple". If she showed she had not understood, by remaining silent or by producing some other response, I would repeat the procedure with another student. If things went well, by the end of the class the students would be taking and giving one another pieces of fruit and producing exchanges of increasing complexity: "Is that an apple or a banana?", "It's a banana", "Give me the banana, please!" In this way they practised and gained facility with the forms of English structures, and with a subset of English vocabulary, and with the sounds of the language.

Seen as a social event, what we were doing was hardly dramatic (although the social "hidden agenda" of the participants was often expressed in complex and subtle ways through these exchanges), but as a means to an end it worked well enough. None of us was under the slightest misapprehension that our world of question and answer, apples and bananas, was the Real World, though elements of that world were necessarily present. We were practising for the Real World - our class was a rehearsal.

It was, however, inevitable that the learner's willing "suspension of reality" should at some point break down. There is, after all, a limit to how long one is prepared to function in a world of rehearsal. After one or two hundred hours of it one begins to hanker after performance, and as the novelty of the language itself wore off, all but the most dedicated, Skinnerian learners would start to lose motivation. We needed a different classroom reality, which would capture something of the performance element in the Real World, the satisfaction of conveying needed information, of accomplishing worthwhile tasks, and of genuinely influencing the behaviour of others through language.

So we put the banana in a bag. Drills became guessing games; exercises became tasks. To stress that a foreign language could be used to do things, we introduced group and project work. The language we taught was itself different - we were no longer content with the manipulation of structures but demanded "authenticity" and "meaningful expression". In short, we found ourselves constructing, with the collusion of our students, an increasingly complex model or analogue of the Real World. Thus, in 1969, one of my intermediate classes wrote and produced a ten-minute "classroom documentary" on the Moon walk of the US astronauts, based on three weeks' research in magazines, newspaper accounts, and a transcript of the actual conversations between Mission Control and Apollo. In 1972 a colleague in Cambridge got his beginners' class, armed with notebooks and portable cassette recorders, to interview local residents on their attitudes to foreigners. From the data collected, and the insights they had gained, they improvised roleplays in the classroom. About that time my own class was taking over the kitchen to test out practically their comprehension of recipes.

Through these and other structured events (inside and outside the classroom) we attempted to create realistic opportunities for achievement in our little world of learning, whilst maintaining the safe, compre- hensible frame of classroom and syllabus. And, to a large extent, it worked. Our students maintained their motivation, classes became more lively and at the same time more challenging. We took pleasure in planning our lessons, in preparing materials that would engage our students' attention. They found satisfaction in completing the tasks we set, in solving problems, and in discovering something of the power that even a partial competence in a second language can bestow.

But "realistic" is not "real", and life is neither safe nor tidily structured. Insofar as we succeeded in our aims, it was because we all, learners, teachers and coursebook writers, tacitly agreed to exclude from our world of language learning sizeable chunks of dangerous, untidy experience. We set limits, for example, to the form and content of our interaction, avoiding contacts that might complicate relationships and "interfere with learning". (Such contacts continued to take place, of course, but not within the frame we recognised as The Classroom.) Pair and group work was tightly task-oriented, with jigsaw reading and listening, and carefully prepared situations where the members faced one another in clear, even stereotypical, roles, rather than as the complex, changing individuals they "really" were. If a discussion took place, it would be to discuss a project or a scheme of work, or to explore an agreed theme (usually related to reading and composition work), conducted along formal lines with a chairman (usually the teacher) to ensure order and equality.

In these activities over-personal contributions would be internally censored out. I shall never forget the catastrophe that occurred when, in an advanced discussion class on the then topical theme of abortion, one member talked of an abortion she herself had had. Not only were we unable to cope with such a gross breach of our tacitly-agreed rules, we also lacked any procedure to handle our own feelings of shock and embarrassment. The remainder of that class was largely silence and teacher-talk.

Such lapses apart, though, my classroom of the 1970s was a workable model, and admirably suited to the new functional-notional schemata that had begun to filter through to us. The idea that a language-learning syllabus could be constructed from the nuts and bolts of practical communicative acts, rather than the abstract concepts of grammar, was exciting, and gave philosophical justification to the work we wanted to do.

It was, however, precisely in our emphasis on "language as communication" that we began to open up the cracks in our carefully constructed class- room reality. The simulated information-gap activities (in which, for example, two students would be given different partial accounts of the same fictional event, and would then through dialogue produce a full account) began to seem hollow in comparison with the gap present when, say, the same two people exchanged information about their own lives. We pushed increasingly in the direction of "realism" and "personal reality" and in so doing broke many of the tacit rules of the "normal" classroom.