Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 5; August 1999

"Learning Teaching on an Academic Course"

Peter Grundy, University of Durham

Page 2 of 2

Another text that we pass across is Bernard Spolsky's Conditions for Second Language Learning. Spolsky kindly begins his book with a list of the 74 conditions which he believes are involved in successful second language learning and which he treats more elaborately in the main body of the book. As a homework task, each student identifies two conditions that they agree with and one that they think is a bit iffy. They copy each out on a separate half-sheet of paper and write a short comment under each explaining why they agree or disagree with it. When they come to class, they blu-tack each condition-plus-comment to the wall at the appropriate place in the sequence of 74 conditions. Then they do a walk-about reading the verdicts of their classmates before we have a discussion about conditions that have attracted comment. Once again I have questions for the students: Did they ever use the walls like this when they were learning a language at school? What alternatives are there to blu-tacking papers to the wall? What activities would work well using this technique? Could we think of activities in which things were blu-tacked and then moved to a new place? Did they ever get to comment on a text in this way at school? How useful is this technique as an introduction to a considerable book? How important was having a choice about the conditions to write about? How does the technique encourage careful reading?

We do other things with the other texts we read:

• Simple things like learner presentations to the class - but I only allow one OHT per presentation with 20-point minimum size characters. Then we discuss how boring it can be to have to listen to poorly directed student presentations.

• We treat seminal extracts from Dell Hymes's paper On Communicative Competence as a scrambled text. Then we discuss the conditions under which scrambling texts can be either a valuable or a valueless activity.

• We introduce ourselves to David Nunan's work on product and process syllabuses with a single sheet handout in which the students can read down the page or across it. The task is to grade each of the ten quotations on the handout on a seven-point scale from comment to opinion. (Quotations that are 100% comment score 1; quotations that are 100% opinion score 7; those that are a bit of each get an appropriate score between 1 and 7.) This leads to a discussion of whether we were more engaged in the process of reading, of taking information off the page, or more engaged with the product, understanding the content of Nunan's argument. Typically, the kind of person we are determines which is dominant - although the context of our work also plays a part: I suppose that if we knew we were about to have a test on the text, product-oriented reading would be uppermost for all of us. (If you send me a sae, I'll send you a copy of the handout.)

I choose ten separate one-page extracts from the work of Pennycook, Holliday and Phillipson. Each student gets to read just one of them, and then races around exchanging the information he/she has just come by with as many other students as time allows. The purpose is to write a three-line summary of each of the other nine pages based on information gleaned from classmates. On the basis of these summaries, each student will choose six of the other nine pages to take home and study. After this activity, we discuss the classroom management issues that arise, as well as ways of making a task seem worthwhile and rewarding.

Thank you for reading this far. My word limit is already exhausted, so if you want to know what the second assignment is, you can find out (and view the course outline) at http://www.dur.ac.uk/Linguistics/syllabi/elt.html. You'll also find references there to the texts mentioned in this article.

Your ideas and suggestions are very welcome. Any sent to me at peter.grundy@durham.ac.uk will be acknowledged and edited into a concise bundle to be distributed to all who send in a suggestion - and of course to my 42 ELT course students. And if Mario agrees, maybe posted on this site too.

P.S. Another idea: This one I've tried out this year with the MA Methodology course.

The problem: How can you make a 'continuously assessed' course continuously assessed?

One solution: The students keep a learner diary in which they write about the issues raised in each class. Later they edit down their diary to a portfolio which they submit for assessment. I respond with an edited version of my diary, which includes my response statement to their diary. Working in this way, we find out something about learner diaries and portfolio assessment from our own experience of it. The outline for this course can be viewed at http://www.dur.ac.uk/Linguistics/syllabi/methma.html.

Rinvolucri M 1983, Writing to your students ELTJ 37.4, 16-21

Rinvolucri M 1995, Language students as letter writers ELTJ 49.2, 152-9