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Humanistic Language Teaching
A Secondary School Teacher perspective
by Ana Robles, HLT’s Secondary Consultant

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:
What worked and did not work in that lesson? Would my students agree?
What could I have done differently?
How could I have changed the lesson to make it work better?
What does ‘better’ mean in this context?
What in my behaviour, posture, gestures, tone of voice, helped to create this situation?
How else could I have moved and talked, used my voice, my hands?
Where did I focus my attention during the lesson, on the students’ reactions or on my planning and goals?
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. 
In a humanistic approach learning goes both ways. It is not only something the students do, in fact very often it is the teacher who learns the most. In “Teaching Myself” Bernard Dufeu says:
“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 the humanistic approach learning becomes an act of expanding our inner world. As Bernard Dufeu says when he lists the main points of his pedagogy of being, a language is not a subject but a way of expressing our inner world. When language is treated as a subject, both teacher and students leave their selves at the classroom door. But, if language is a way of expressing our inner world, then teachers and students participate in the lesson with their whole beings and expand and change their inner world as, because, they learn the new language. As they learn the language both the students and the teacher learn things about themselves and about each other.                
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.

The likes Chart

Level: beginner +
Time: 40 to 50 m.
Purpose: to learn how different people in the group  rate different activities. 
Materials: a copy per student of the ‘likes chart ‘
Procedure:
Divide the class into groups of four. Tell them they have 10 minutes to discuss what sort of things they like, hate, adore, etc., and then write them down beside the lines on the chart. It is quite unlikely that they will manage to fill all the spaces in that time, therefore,
10 minutes later ask them to get into new groups and gather more ideas to fill their chart. They don’t have just to write but talk about what they share and do not share.
Ask them to get into new groups a third or even a fourth time, depending on how interested they are in the activity and how quickly they fill up the chart. 
While they are working, write the answers to any vocabulary questions they ask you on the blackboard.
Add on the blackboard some model questions like what sort of things do you really hate?
Give them another 10 minutes  to go round the class asking questions and comparing notes with those people whose charts they find more interesting

Follow-ups:
Ask them to summarise their impressions in writing.

The likes chart

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 Error! Reference source not found.s. 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.
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. 
What colour was the English Class? Personal opinion
September																	
October																	
November
																	
December
																	
January
																	
February
																	
March
																	
April
																	
May

June																	

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.  
This is specially true for those of us working with teenagers. Adolescents are trying to establish their boundaries, and any learning becomes a learning about where the boundaries are. Naturally, this is not new, we all have always known that teaching teenagers is not only about teaching English, but also about helping them to develop as persons and that meant keeping discipline and teaching the rules of acceptable behaviour. But at the same time  this part of the job was considered either as the result of a student deficiency or as the result of teacher mismanagement. 
‘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. 

Your Assessment
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.

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.
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.
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.