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"Learning Teaching on an Academic Course"

By Peter Grundy, University of Durham

For the third year running, I've just spent a week of my Christmas vacation writing letters to the 42 students who opt for our English Language Teaching course as one of the twelve finals modules in their Linguistics and English Language degree. At the end of the first term of their continuously assessed course, they write two letters. One is addressed to me and describes their previous language learning experience, which they evaluate in relation to what they have learnt about methodology during the previous term. The other is addressed to one of their former teachers. This letter tells their teacher about the course they are taking at the university and makes some suggestions for possible changes in the teacher's methodology. These letters are the first of the two summative assignments on which the students are assessed.

I'm not going to betray any confidences by telling you how wonderfully moving and how very perceptive the letters are. But it's particularly enjoyable to read the letters of students who are only now discovering things about the teaching they experienced on a daily basis in the past. And I see how the folk tradition of passing teaching techniques from one generation to another is challenged by asking students to evaluate their own learning experiences in this way. As I write back to each student, every single one of my 27,000 words responds directly, not to the form, but to the content of the apprentice writing I'm evaluating - a rare occurrence in the language learning world.

You'll have got the idea by now - loop input. The methods used to teach the course content and even to assess the students provide techniques for them to evaluate as potential teachers themselves. 

In virtually every case, the students' previous language classroom experience has been only as learners. And, as I discover from their letters, it has not usually been a humane experience. Next year some of them will start work as teachers without the benefit of any live teaching practice at all - usually (but not invariably) in classrooms overseas. I want them to go to their jobs with a humane perspective and with the widest possible set of methodological and practical options available to them. The purpose of this short article is to describe one or two of the activities we do in the first term of the course and to invite further suggestions based either on your intuition or on your experience working with students on similar courses. 

The issue: How we can ensure that intending teachers for whom a methodology course in an academic environment serves as the only 'training' they receive do not take as a model their own (frequently demotivating) experience as learners?

The constraints: One two-hour session each week for two terms and then five three-hour sessions in a single week in the third term. In the first term I work on methodology and syllabus design, in the second on skills, language learner levels, activities and materials. In the third term, Paul Davis works on classroom practice - he provides a starter kit of ideas that the students know will work because they've tried them with him.

Given the word limit, I'll describe only some of the ways we work with some of the texts the students are asked to read in the first term of the course. I expect the students to read, not only because it's an academic course taught in a university but also because the students don't know much and ought not to rely only on a biased and partially informed teacher. But I also want them to get the message that even when we are reading academic texts, we can be trying out techniques which we can transfer to the language learning classroom.

So when I want them to read about audiolingualism, for example, I start with a handout listing the 17 "observations" or techniques Diane Larsen-Freeman witnessed in audiolingual classrooms. I ask the students to decide whether each technique has a positive or negative effect on learning or whether, in their opinion, there's no effect one way or the other. I divide the blackboard into 17 squares. (Yes, we are still green here and haven't gone over to the chemical poisons and whiteboards so beloved of business English centres.) Each student writes their verdict on each technique in the appropriate square so that everyone can see at a glance how typical their position is. A discussion follows. And then I ask the students whether they ever got to hold the chalk and write on the board in their language learning classrooms at school. And whether they ever got to see how their opinions compared with those of their classmates. And whether they got to invest something of their own as a basis for a discussion. And how what we've been doing could be adapted for language learning classrooms. In this way, the methodology that underlies what we have done together can be seen to contrast markedly with the audiolingual method which is the content part of our 'lecture'. They can now read Larsen-Freeman's chapter and set the method she describes in a broader context. 

I introduce Richards and Rodgers's chapter on audiolingualism by selecting six extracts which define kernel features of audiolingualism. The class divides into six groups. Each group gets a different extract to study. Each extract appears under the following rubric: "You have just taken over as head of research and development at a private language school. What appears below is an extract from your school's brochure. Your task is to rewrite it, deleting anything you don't agree with and replacing it with more appropriate material." When each group has completed this task, they get to choose the name of a fruit for their group. Then the jigsaw begins - the groups reconstitute as fruit salads, with one of each of the fruits in the salad. The new groups share the different information that each member brings with them. When this is done, I ask the students whether they ever got to delete or re-write anything written in the target language in their language learning experience. And whether they ever did a jigsaw activity. And whether they ever got to choose a name for themselves. And so on. And how they think the things we've being doing could be used in or adapted for a language classroom. Once again, the techniques we have used can be seen to contrast with those described in the text we have been reading. In this way, we're getting two for the price of one - academic knowledge from a text and teaching methodology from our experience.

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.

Letter writing references
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