Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 1; January 2000
"Humanistic Language Teaching - A Secondary School Teacher perspective"
Ana Robles, HLT's Secondary Consultant
Page 1 of 2
Whenever I attend a workshop or seminar for EFL teachers I find myself assessing all the activities and ideas presented in terms of my own students. "Wonderful activity, but it would never work with my groups" or, "that I could use", etc.
Humanistic language teaching activities often fall into the first category. I read about Bernard Dufeu's Language Psychodramaturgy (LPD) ( see Teaching Myself, Dufeu OUP, 94) and I wonder how to fit those activities into my 50 minute lesson, 35 students per group frame; or I attend a suggestopedia seminar and imagine (and shudder at the image) what would happen if I were to ask my rowdy groups to walk round the class in a circle, chanting and reciting the text. Even if I find something I can fit into my lessons, I wonder, will my students accept the change in rules? Will they know how to play the new game? Changing a given way of working takes longer than changing the students' level of language knowledge. The fact that specific activities do not translate well into my particular situation is, on the one hand, to be expected, and on the other, not that relevant.
It is to be expected because, as any other school teacher, I work within a frame I can't alter. Timetables, the number of lessons I have with each group, how long those lessons are, the number of students in my groups, the curriculum, the material I can use, whether there is a final, external exam or not, etc. The school frame also determines other more subtle factors like the students' expectations, or the other teachers' expectations. Expectations (or beliefs) about how the language should be taught and expectations about the teacher's and students' role, or about how a 'proper' English lesson should proceed, to name a few. These beliefs and attitudes, very often implicit, rule things like the level of noise I can allow in my lessons, and determine what sort of activities are acceptable in the English classroom and which ones are out-of-bounds. So even if I find a new approach very appealing, I often find myself shaking my head and telling to myself "but it would never work with my groups."
But classroom activities are just a way of putting into practice a certain way of thinking. And it is this way of thinking what I find so attractive. It is not the specific activities that are important but the rationale behind, the conceptual frame that creates those activities, or, also, the set of expectations about what language learning is, how a foreign language is learned and what is acceptable in a foreign language classroom. I do believe that those principles and ideas apply to my students, regardless of the environmental constraints in which we work. But we need to develop adequate activities, activities based on humanistic principles and which, at the same time, fit into our frame. "We" means ourselves, the school teachers, and "develop adequate activities" implies, first, an understanding of what principles we want to apply in our lessons and then, testing, experimenting, trying out different ways of working with our students.
For me questioning myself is the first step in this process of developing the activities I need.
Those are some of the questions I ask myself:
There are many others, naturally. But those here keep cropping up day after day. Asking questions implies being in doubt and in the past I found this continuous uncertainty quite stressful. It is not that I feel more comfortable with it now, but I have come to accept it as a useful tool for my own improvement. And teacher self development is one of the key principles in a humanistic approach.
"We cannot work with others without learning to be in tune with ourselves; we do not leave our personal attitudes and preoccupations behind when we enter our professional world. Our teaching reflects who we are."
Being there, paying attention to the group, working to create the necessary conditions for learning, developing our awareness, they all imply learning new things all the time, about ourselves, about our way of reacting to others, about our capability to keep focused, about our own expectations and boundaries. This sort of learning cannot happen without reflection and without self-examination and, therefore, reflection and self-examination must become part of the teaching-learning process.
The idea of teacher as learner is linked to the other principles of the humanistic approach. Those principles do not make sense in isolation. The fact that teachers are expected to develop their own awareness is the natural consequence of a new concept of what learning is.
In Affect in Language Learning ( ed Jane Arnold, CUP, 1999) Mario Rinvolucri says that "the heart of the humanistic exercise is a personal experience and a group experience in the here and now, which is where the language flows from". His phrase the here and now stresses the difference with 'communicative' exercises. In a communicative activity the main purpose is either rehearsal for the future or/ and putting into practice linguistic points previously studied. In the humanistic exercise the students talk because they have something to say.
And that is much more easily said than done. The "Likes Graph" is an activity I use with my 14-years-old. It is very simple, and very grammatically oriented, and it gives them a safe frame to talk about themselves and their real opinions in a language they don't know well. As they do the activity they usually talk in their mother tongue, interspersed with English words and expressions, and I find that this bridging between the two languages is part of what makes the activity powerful.
| Level: | beginner + |
| Time: | 40 - 50 minutes |
| Purpose: | to learn how different people in the group rate different activities |
| Materials : | a copy per student of the 'likes chart . |
Procedure:
Follow-ups:
Ask them to summarise their impressions in writing.
| We hate | |
| We can't stand | |
| We don't like | |
| We don't mind | |
| We like | |
| We love | |
| We adore |
In the humanistic approach learning becomes an act of expanding our inner world, and it follows that different individuals will do that in different ways. Learning is, then, an active process and one of the students' most important tasks is that of learning to learn effectively and to develop their skills and capacities. It becomes part of the teacher's job to help the student to develop skills and capacities. The teacher provides not only the language, but also activities to foster adequate learning strategies.
Grammar is one of the things that nearly all textbooks explain thoroughly and well. However, I usually ask my students to prepare their own activities. Just reading or listening to an explanation is a very different process to reading and listening and then having to filter the information and to process it and express it in a way that makes sense to them.
When a new structure comes up in a text, I often ask them to use their powers of deduction to try to fill in the "Grammar Card" for that structure. Then I explain and deal with any doubts and fill in any 'holes' left in their reasoning. And then, whenever they write something, I ask them to use their "grammar cards" to check their work before asking for my help.
It is important for them to learn to organise their ideas, to learn to express abstract concepts and to think their way through them. Just listening to me or reading the textbook explanations is not enough. Working in collaboration with their fellow students to fill in the empty frames I provide is one way of fostering that sort of strategic thinking.
