Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 3; September 04

Plan for a 4 day humanistic teaching course

Mario Rinvolucri
Pilgrims

In her book THE TEACHER, Sylvia Ashton Warner describes how she took over a reception class of mainly Maori 5 year olds. The New Zealand educational authorities had provided her with the "Janet and John" readers from UK. She realised that these texts were hopeless for her situation, so she put them in a dusty cupboard. To get the children to start reading she asked each one to give her a word he found really important. This she wrote down on a large piece of card, which the child took home. If he came back next day able to read it without hesitation, she filed it in his folder. If not, she tore the word up. In this way, over the weeks, each child built up a growing number of words they could read, words that were significant to them.

Ashton Warner's approach is to place her learners in the centre, to make them the protagonists of their own learning. She enters their world rather than hoping they will enter hers. She expresses wonderment at the extraordinary achievements of each child. She learns them, while they learn to read the words.

For me, Ashton Warner's book is a simple expression of the essence of humanistic teaching and she is basically playing the same music as Carl Rogers, Paulo Freire and Earl Stevick, some of the "fathers" of humanistic language teaching.
Our four day programme belongs in the area of humanistic language teaching.

What follows is a look at the content of this four day programme:

Day 1 am

We will start with exercises that gradually warm us up. The idea of warm-up is normal in many disciplines, eg sports training, singing etc. Language teachers have traditionally perhaps under-estimated its importance. The warm-up is as important for the trainer as for the participants. Gradually we will find ourselves coming together as a group.

In the second half of the morning we will do some more depth-seeking exercises that will involve us more personally, activities which are drawn from communications training.

These exercises will have a direct bearing on how we can improve the way we currently communicate with students and with colleagues.

Day 1 pm
Grammar

This second session will be on grammar teaching and how to make it varied and interesting. We will explore some of the Silent Way activities derived from the work of Caleb Gattegno. These invite the students to discover grammar patterns for themselves with the teacher as a non-interfering guide. This sounds easy but for some teachers the standing back and taking a back seat does not come that easy. These ways of working are cognitively and linguistically focused.

Since young learners cannot sit still all day we will look at exercises which have the students up and moving, while working on specific grammatical structures. There are some students who can only learn by doing, the very kinaesthetic ones. These boys, and they are usually boys, risk becoming drop-outs, and at least in UK, some of them end up in jail.

Emotive or affective activities are a powerful way to get the students practising specific structures. Some students prefer these to the cognitive work mentioned above.

Finally, we will look at ways of getting the students to realise that meaning and grammar are strongly interlocked.

This is a massive amount to tackle in one afternoon!

Day 2 am
Creative writing

There are colleagues who have the students do really interesting oral work but then set dry as dust tasks when it come to writing. My aim in this session is to show colleagues how to create a "culture of writing" in their classes, something that is, in a way, part of the zeitgeist, with all the texting and emailing teenagers do anyway. We will look at a series of ingenious frames that get people communicating with each other by way of the screen or of the written page.

Day 2 pm
Person-focused, interactive listening

The coursebook tapes are very useful but they need to be complemented by times when the students listen to a flesh and blood speaker there in front of them. Maybe you will sometimes tell your class a story, maybe sometimes a personal anecdote. This session will show you techniques to make such story-telling more varied, more lively. In this session we will also explore the area of empathetic listening, where you "listen" to the body posture, the gestures, the overall music as well as to the words of the speaker.

If you and I listen to a text, do we end up with the same text in our heads? The answer is an emphatic NO! We will explore how perception and inner schemata influence what goes on when we listen to a text. In this context we may find ourselves questioning traditional "Comprehension questions".

Day 3 am
Classroom activities inspired by Neuro-Linguistic-Programming

This session will open with a short introduction to NLP and then we will dive into practical exercises. Typically, the students work on their own, introspectively, and then tell other students what they have discovered. The areas dealt with are aspects of their own process, say, for example, day-dreaming. Students are often fascinated to discover just how they themselves day dream and how their process differs from that of other people.

The student thinks through something they have not yet explored in Mother Tongue and they then express what they find in the target language. This kind of exercise can gradually reduce the foreignness of English.

Finding out small new things about themselves in English modifies how they feel about the language.

Day 3 pm
Humanising your Coursebook

The course book is central to much of our teaching and in this session we will look at ways of personalising it and making it less "third person". The techniques I will demonstrate do not depend, mostly, on the texts in the coursebook being of gripping interest to the students. We will look at ways of dealing with the reading passages, the listenings and with vocabulary.

Day 4 am
Multiple Intelligences for the EFL classroom

Howard Gardner suggests, in his book FRAMES OF MIND, that we "live" in seven basic intelligences and these are:

• linguistic
• logical-mathematical
• spatial
• musical
• kinaesthetic
• intrapersonal
• interpersonal

This is a revolutionary view, since, traditionally, we think of intelligence being linguistic and logical-mathematical. Think how most intelligence tests have limited themselves to the two at the head of the list!

Gardner's message to us is that language can be taught in ways that draw on all seven intelligences, and that we do not need to confine ourselves to the linguistic one when teaching English.

We will do practical exercises that invite students to work through a particular intelligence, or more often, a combination of intelligences.

Day 4 pm
Ways of getting feedback

In this last session we will do some looking back over the course and we will use several feedback elicitation techniques.

We will evaluate the course.

The above is my plan/fantasy for this course as I write, now, in early May. I know, from experience, that groups have their own needs and that plans have to be modified in the light of participant needs.

See some of you in June!