Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 5; September 02

Third World Famine and EFL Learning

David McAuley, Laos

EFL teaching is not brain research. This may sound an insult, like "It's not rocket science." But that's not the intention. EFL teaching is, literally, not brain research, and few teachers have the time and energy to pursue both topics. However, recent research shows that EFL teachers could profit from paying more attention to brain research, because some of the EFL classroom problems that we routinely attribute to culture may be better explained by researchers on the development of the brain.

I teach English in Vientiane, the capital of the Lao P.D.R. The median per capital income here is about $300 per year, meaning that half the population earns less than that amount. It is one of the poorest countries on earth.

There are some compensations. The students are grateful, even for your least inspired lessons. If you, as an expatriate, try to learn the local language and integrate it into your lessons, your insights are listened to with rapt attention.

In my case, Lao as a Foreign Language material is a little thin on the ground. I decided I would use the national standard second-grade reader as a textbook, reasoning that, if a 7-year-old Lao child is supposed to learn it, then I could probably learn profit from learning it, too. The cultural insights are valuable, too: for example, a Lao child learns a lot about growing rice, even at a tender age.

I thought that the second-grade reader gave me another insight, which I attempted to bring into the classroom. The problem: when my students answered reader comprehension questions after a reading, they invariably assumed that the correct answer would be one that could be copied, word for word, from the text. Questions that required even the most rudimentary higher-order thinking skills (e.g., inducing, deducing) left them completely stumped.

I wasn't completely surprised, then, to find that Lao second-graders show mastery of their classroom reading exclusively through reading comprehension questions which require copying a portion of their assigned reading. In fact, it made complete sense. I told myself that "school culture" was to blame, and that the problem could be remedied through example and instruction. I divided reading comprehension questions into two categories - "copying questions" and "thinking questions" - and modeled the processes needed to arrive at an answer to "thinking questions." Since students had all been exposed to a standard national curriculum, it stood to reason - I thought - that they would respond to instruction on using higher-order thinking skills while reading in a generally uniform way.

I was wrong. Some students understood the new requirements right away. Others were completely clueless. What was going on here?

As I said at the outset, an alternative explanation was put to me, not from fellow teachers or teaching journals, but from some of the Western doctors working here in Vientiane. EFL teachers do not normally have the opportunity to discuss classroom learning problems with medical professionals. Here in Vientiane, though, we have a small and isolated expatriate community, so it is possible to talk not only to other teachers but also to businesspeople, aid workers, and, in this case, doctors. I thank the expatriate doctors of Vientiane, who often abandon lucrative practices in the developed world to assist the world's least fortunate, for the information which follows.

Starting in the year 2000, the World Health Organization called for more study of learning disabilities in developing countries. As a result, some new research has been published on this topic. It has shown that adult learning problems in the developing world may be traced to a variety of childhood "insults" to the brain. The most frequent and serious "insult" is famine, which is still a sadly routine part of life in the world's developing countries. Famine conditions during the critical period of the brain's development, from the second trimester of pregnancy until two years of age, will have lifelong consequences that are not reversed by adequate nutrition later in life, a study said.

Since these studies appear in journals like Ambulatory Child Health and Journal of Nutrition, it is not surprising that this information has not yet made its way into the journals of ESL and EFL teaching, as far as I know. (However, I live in Laos, so my access to these journals is limited.) If and when they are, the knowledge of the effects of famine could have a serious impact not only on developing-world teachers but also for teachers of developing-world students in the developing world, and provokes several serious questions.

Only a few of these questions are: •

• How can schools identify students who are victims of childhood famine? •
• Does childhood famine doom to failure attempts to integrate "constructivist" learning techniques into the language-learning curriculum? •
• Can ESL and EFL teachers direct their teaching to benefit victims of childhood famine? •
• How can national and international organizations get nutrition to people who need it, and eliminate the problem before it starts?

I'd like to see these and related questions given greater attention by the EFL and ESL teaching community. If it is shown that a normal childhood in the world's poorest countries makes it difficult for students to engage in higher-order thinking skills that they need to prosper, then their teachers need to know this. Then they can plan and teach accordingly.