Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 1; January 2000

"The Bible as an effective source of teaching materials"

by Debora Pamplona, Universidade Federal do Ceara, Brazil

In a secularised world such as this we live in, you may be wondering why an article that has this title is ever in an ELT magazine. Maybe you pressed the wrong keys in your keyboard and ended up in another site! No, you didn't. Somehow I'm starting to get used to the strange faces people make when I start telling them what this is all about. Relax, it's not about religion. It's not about the Bible. It's really about teaching English.

How the idea was conceived

I'm a member of an evangelical Christian church in Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil and I'm also an English teacher at the Universidade Federal do Ceara. My "brothers and sisters" (as we call each other in Christian communities) kept asking me to teach them English. After some reluctance - my day was busy enough already - I got together with a group of about 12 and started to teach them from the regular textbook I used at the university. After a few classes I realised that the material I was using wasn't suitable for the group, because they had quite a specific purpose in mind - they would ask me to translate Bible verses into English, to write the lyrics of gospel songs, and to teach them Bible-related vocabulary which had to do with their daily lives. The textbook as well as the contents of that course didn't fulfil their expectation and that was a general feeling. Meanwhile, I was attending an M.A. course at the State University of Ceara and it was time to hand in my project for qualification, so, after some reflection upon the experience I've just described, I started to write the first draft of the idea this article is about - teaching English from the Bible.

I had already carried out extensive work on the use of authentic materials for teaching English, so it was easy to figure out that the Bible was a perfect source of authentic materials, since it contained different types of texts - stories (parables, biographies), poems (the psalms), dialogues and proverbs, which are certainly included among the most celebrated literary records of human history. Then I realised that biblical texts, just like any other text, could well be used for teaching a language. Finally, I decided to investigate how a group of evangelical Christians would benefit from a material specially developed to teach them English from the biblical texts which they know so well in their mother tongue (in our case, Portuguese).

Theoretical Background

The research was based on three theories:

a) The Schema Theory - originally a theory applied to reading, it emphasises the fact that "the reader brings information, knowledge, emotion, experience, and culture to the printed word" (Brown: 1994). It introduces the concept of schema or frame, blocks of background knowledge stored in the memory which, when activated, may intervene positively in the learning process. In the case of Christians, their schemata are the biblical texts in their mother tongue, which serve as a connection between what they already know and what they will learn in English.

b) ESP (English for Specific Purposes) - ESP can be summarised as the teaching that takes into account individual needs or interests. It differs from General English (GE) in that it involves a more strict set of aims according to the group to be taught. In the case of this church group, they had other needs that regular textbooks could not cover. For instance, when talking about daily routines, they needed to know how to say pray or go to church, lexical items which are part of their lives but which are never included in GE textbooks.

c) The use of authentic materials for teaching EFL - defined as texts that have been designed for native users with no pedagogical intentions in the mind of the author, authentic materials intend to bring the outside world into the language classroom. Instead of making up characters and dialogues, the material developed in this research used the very people described in the Bible, their dialogues, and their experiences, from where the language was taught. They did not have to learn about the people, but could really concentrate on the language they used. A contemporary version of the Bible was used - the New International Version - to guarantee the authenticity of the language as well as of the information conveyed.

How the experiment was conducted

Step 1. Needs Analysis
The first decision I had to make was related to the learners' actual needs. From the experience described above, I knew that they wanted to learn English for the following reasons:
a) as a tool for personal and/or professional development
b) to be able to read the Bible in English
c) to understand the lyrics of gospel songs in English
d) to share their faith with foreign "brothers and sisters"
e) to prepare for trans-cultural missions

The above list gave me an idea of where to start in the needs analysis, a necessary component in any ESP programme, and decided that I would design a material that:
a) covered the four skills
b) used only biblical texts in its contents
c) developed communicative abilities in the learners
d) would be appropriate for the beginning level (for this experiment)

With those principles in mind, a communicative syllabus was designed for twelve lessons divided into three units of four lessons each, which were linked by a wider frame: unit 1 was about personal information, unit 2 was about descriptions, and unit three was about routines. The grammar topics as well as the language functions covered derived from a list of the 20 first grammar topics and functions taken from four different textbooks (Take 1, Look Ahead 1, New Interchange 1, American Blueprint 1). As for the reading skill, I used the reading strategies, which are important for beginners, such as skimming, scanning, reading for main ideas, or finding cognates. The writing skill was also developed, according to the main topics covered. The only skill not fully covered was listening because of lack of materials on the market and financial resources to develop tapes appropriate for this project. However, in the speaking activities, listening was informally covered (although not under the heading "listening") in the information gap exercises, for example.

Step 2. Materials design
Bearing that in mind, I set out to develop the material. The lessons always started with a task-based presentation in which the learners had to use their previous knowledge of the Bible in order to do the task. For example, to teach introductions, I used the dialogue in which God introduces himself to Moses talking from a burning bush, saying: "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." (Exodus 3). The task was to say the names of the people involved in this dialogue, which was illustrated. Above the illustration was a box with the names Moses - God - Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Because this is a widely known passage, the learners had no difficulty in figuring out who the characters were, not just from the dialogue, but from the picture, and from the names in the box. After this task, the learners were ready to be exposed to introductions.

The grammar topic of this lesson was I am and are you and the lexical items were names in the Bible. The reading skill taught in this lesson was scanning, when they were given the text in which Jesus describes himself as the good shepherd. In this text, there are a lot of sentences that start with I am, which the learners, after a pre-reading activity, would try to find. Every lesson also contained a section called Bible Search, a success-oriented exploratory task, and in this one they were to search names of God in the Bible, given the references. In every two or three lessons, I taught them a song in English (mostly songs that have been translated into Portuguese) whose words had some of the structures or vocabulary they had been learning.

There were also consolidation exercises to be done as homework. They were basically grammar and vocabulary exercises, such as gap-fills or transformation, one page for each lesson. Basically all of the sentences or dialogues used in these exercises were Bible verses. For example, in lesson 1, the following dialogue was used:

I have always enjoyed developing my own teaching materials, but one thing I disliked was to have to make up sentences for exercises. I didn't have this problem when designing these lessons. I just did a search in the computer Bible and the sentences would just pop up! Sometimes it was hard to decide which dialogues or verses to use.

Step 3. The application of the material

I put up a sign in the church announcing that I would be teaching a 30-hour experimental English course with a new method. Nine brothers and sisters signed up. Each one was given a copy of the material in a booklet-format along with a Bible in English. The classes met four times a week for one hour a day. The learners were all beginners - seven of them had had some contact with English either a long time ago or for a short period of time and one of these had been taking an English course at another institution for 6 months. The other two were genuine beginners and had never studied English before. None of them had ever had any contact with English related to the Bible.

Step 4. Evaluation