Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 1; January 2000
"Humanistic Language Teaching - A Secondary School Teacher perspective"
Ana Robles, HLT's Secondary Consultant
Page 2 of 2
Traditionally learning has been considered a left-brain activity, linear, logical, rational. Grammar Cards fits in very well with that traditional vision. However, in a humanistic approach learning is both a left-brain and a right-brain process. Learning becomes not only linear, logical, rational, but also holistic, intuitive, concrete. If there are more ways of learning than one, why use only one? What is more, the different ways of learning are used differently by different students. Each student is unique and has his unique way of learning. The 'old' activities are not necessarily abandoned, but many others are added to engage all the different ways of learning, all the different ways of thinking. This in itself fosters in the students the realisation that there are many ways of learning and that they are all acceptable.
At the beginning of the school year, in the last five minutes of one of our first lessons, I ask my students to tell me what colour they would use to describe the lesson just finished. Then I give each of my students a copy of the "English Class Colours Chart" below.
Over the course of the year each student is asked to record his opinion of the English lessons using colours. We also keep a big communal one on the wall, and at any time in the lesson they can stand up and go and fill the box for that day with the colour they consider appropriate. From time to time I ask them to share their personal "Colours charts" with me and the other students and we talk about the meaning of the different colours and what sort of information the chart gives us.
This sort of activity helps them to think about their experience in a new way. It also brings home the idea that there is no one correct way of doing things, but many and, last, but not least, the realisation that the same 'reality' may have different meanings for different people.
- The different meanings each of us assign to 'reality' will depend on our personal history, our attitudes and our beliefs. When the whole person enters the class, the whole person has to be paid attention to. When learning is a process of expanding our inner world, our inner world, our attitudes, our beliefs, our sense of identity, become as much a part of the lesson as the foreign language grammar and vocabulary.
'I want to teach English, not manners' or 'I wanted to be a teacher not a policeman' are quite common complaints in secondary school teachers' rooms. These complaints highlight the fact that the student's personal development is often not a part of the teaching paradigm.
In the humanistic approach it is accepted that in a language lesson all different kinds of learnings happen. In the case of teenagers this means that as they learn the language they are also learning to relate to others and to themselves. That sort of learning implies changes in the students' attitudes and beliefs. Therefore, attitudes and beliefs become part of the 'curriculum and they have to be worked on.
Working on attitudes is about offering adequate thinking models to the students and also, providing them with opportunities to reflect on those attitudes and beliefs, not once in a while, but in a systematic way.
What have you learnt while doing these tasks?
Were the tasks well designed?, did they help you to learn English?
How could the lessons be improved?
How did you organise your work? Are you satisfied with your work? Why?
How could you improve your work and your learning?
Could you please describe three important moments in your thinking, feeling and learning while doing these tasks?
Could you please describe three bad moments in your experience while doing these tasks?
This work can be done by using questionnaires like the one above from time to time, or via informal conversations. The outcome is that thinking about their learning becomes part of the students' normal process. I usually tell them that they don't have to share their answers with me, the questionnaire is for them, but that I do appreciate their sharing whatever information they think appropriate.
When the development of the student's personality becomes part of the teacher's paradigm it is assumed that, as in any other learning process, 'mistakes' will be made, not because the students or the teacher are 'defective' but because mistakes are the part of the road. Creating an environment where the students can relate to each other and to the teacher with respect and taking measures to stop any inadequate behaviour are now as much a part of the teacher's job as pronunciation or reading.
- The humanistic approach realises that teacher and students form a system in which they are affecting and influencing each other all the time. A classroom is like a trampoline where every small movement affects the whole surface. Therefore classroom dynamics and classroom management become crucial skills, as important as linguistic knowledge. The teacher assesses activities and actions in terms of their effect on the group and not only in terms of their linguistic value. Rapport and awareness become the keys to effective classroom management.
Rapport because the teacher is as powerful as her link to the students and that means understanding the students world and then, respectfully, working to expand this world bit by bit. That includes respecting their expectations about what a good English lesson is. The most fantastic approach will only work if the students are ready to receive it. Humanistic language teaching implies a change in the students' and the teachers' expectations about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable and this change has to be introduced at a pace the group can accept, otherwise we risk losing the group. Awareness of the group's rhythm becomes essential as the same activity will be effective or not depending on when we use it.
In fact, it is not the activity itself that is good or bad, but introducing it at the right time for that particular group.
This means that teachers need to add to their toolkit activities aimed to establish, maintain, change, and re-direct the group's mood. Once again, there is nothing new about that, we have always know that group dynamics were important, and activities like ice-breakers have been around for a long time, but at the same time group dynamics were peripheral to the main aim of the lesson, like the icing on a cake. Now they become important in their own right and we need to enrich our assortment of techniques accordingly.
These are some examples of short activities (no more than 1 or 2 minutes) I use to re-direct and change the group's mood. Brain gym exercises, ice-breakers, language games, or sometimes simply asking a fidgety student to go downstairs and bring me a piece of chalk can do wonders for a stuck group.
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A. Ask the students to think of an English word they particularly like, or a phrase they like and have recently learnt. Tell them to stand up, find someone they have not talked to during the lesson and write their chosen word in the air using their finger, their partner has to 'read' their word aloud. Swap roles and sit back.
B. Use your hands to shape an imaginary object and give it to one of the students. Ask the student to transform the object into something different and give it back to you. Tell the students to pair up and exchange gifts in silence, then talk for a minute about their gifts and their impressions.
C. Ask them to pay attention to their breathing for 1 minute. No talking, no moving, just breathing.
But there are no proven recipes. Knowing when to do what is, once again, a matter of perception. And our perception is triply challenged by the humanistic approach, as it asks from us a triple shift in how we think about the teaching-learning process.
First, it implies a shift in the focus of our attention, from task oriented to people oriented. It is not the language as subject, but the language as expression of our inner world, and that means that people become more important than the language.
Second, we shift the scope of our endeavours, as our students are not only students of the language, but whole human beings, developing all their capabilities, attitudes, self-concept, etc. Third, we shift our goals, as we are not aiming to feed information to passive recipients, but to help our students to express themselves.
For me this triple shift means leaving behind the comfort of well known activities to enter a world of continuous change and self-inquiry. A bit scary, and so rewarding.
