Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 3; May 1999
WHOLE OR HOLE
Jane Arnold, editor of Affect in Language Learning
Page 1 of 3
The title of this article might lead you to expect it would be about homophones. Interesting as that might be, what I would like look at is quite a different topic, whose connection with the title I hope will become clear.
No two groups of people will ever be exactly the same. However, an experiment was carried out during the 1997-98 academic year at the University of Seville with two groups of second year students which at the beginning of the course were actually very homogeneous in abilities and in attitudes towards learning English. The experiment was based in part on a belief in the importance of Earl Stevick's (1980:4) statement:
Success (in foreign language learning) depends less on materials, techniques and linguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between people in the classroom.
It was just that - what went on in and between the people in the two groups - which led from very similar beginnings to quite different results.
Some of the entries from different days in the research assistant's journal of observation give a feeling for what went on in the control group which was taught in a traditional manner.
The teacher asks questions and nobody answers; some students are talking to their peers. Many haven't done the exercise to be corrected and so she has to leave it for the next day.
While students work, the teacher is reading something in the book, probably the next exercise. She doesn't move around the class and nobody asks her questions. Now she approaches the first row and walks along slowly but nobody looks at her.
Silence again, people look down. Once in a while the teacher stops and makes a comment. People correct their exercises. Some of them look half-asleep. It is early in the morning and the class is not that exciting.
Less movement, less talking, less laughter and fewer smiles than in the other group. I myself looked at the clock unconsciously. The process is like this: do an exercise, correct it. Not much interaction, just people checking their answers with others next to them. Friends seem to always sit together. In the other group you get to know more people with all the group work.
I caught myself thinking of something else rather than observing the class. It means I'm not that involved in the class either.
Contrast those observations with these made by the same researcher about the experimental group:
When the class finishes, there are are always 4, 5, 6 people around the teacher, talking to her, asking questions. In the other group they make no comments about how much fun the lesson was, how exciting... They just take their things and leave.
The teacher lets students know how pleased she is with them: she tells them that she isn't going to return their compositions yet because she wants to share with someone her enthusiasm after reading them. One day she tells the class she has sent several of their compositions to a well-known English resource book writer, Mario Rinvolucri, and she reads a letter from him commenting on how what they have written is very exciting. (The class is noticeably proud.)
The atmosphere is very relaxed - the teacher creates this atmosphere.
People look interested. They are working on exercises that help them find out about themselves - I think everyone likes that kind of thing. Personal involvement is important in this class.
In a visualization exercise I really felt relaxed and much more easily than I had expected. On the one hand, I wanted to be stay in my role of researcher-observer, but on the other, I wanted to experience an exercise that was totally new for me. I am enjoying these classes a lot.
In this group, due to the type of exercises done since the beginning, people know each other better and don't retreat into their own little groups.
The teacher definitely looks more enthusiastic than in the other class.
People all seem to be working, I'd say 100%. I can see they're working but also having fun and laughing... The teacher walks around and people ask her things.
One group in front of me is organizing themselves in English. This is real progress since I remember that people in this group didn't like this approach in the beginning.
People are smiling. They are always surprised with these exercises. There is always something new in these lessons that makes them exciting. I came here half-asleep myself but I feel so good now. I'm always happy to come to this group - I even forget that I need more sleep.
Sometimes the simplest things are not given the attention they deserve. This research project grew out of a very simple, yet potentially very far-reaching idea. It was hypothesized that intrinsic motivation towards learning English would improve in a holistic classroom. We took "holistic" to mean: first, a class in which the learner is considered as a whole person with a mind, of course, but also with emotions and a body and, second, a class in which the language to be taught is kept "whole" rather than divided up artifically into this or that skill, this tense or that clause. Thus language was considered a meaning-carrying vehicle for real communication, not something to be divided up and studied in context-free grammar exercises.
Some of the implications of a holistic approach which are in accordance with current theory about language learning are the following: (1) personal meaningfulness is essential for deep, permanent learning to occur, (2) students have feelings and bodies which also need to be taken into consideration, (3) real communication (not just artificial information gap exercises) provides a powerful motor for learning, (4) the group dynamic determines to a great degree just how much any teacher can achieve.
We focused specifically on the question of motivation and attitudes because studies in the psychology of learning leave no doubt that without motivation little can be learned (Williams and Burden 1997). If we are not concerned with increasing our learners' motivation, we are like carpenters who expect to make a piece of furniture without a hammer or a saw. Given the clear need for motivation, the real question lies in what is motivating. Obviously, in the groups that we worked with - second-year university students - one important source of motivation is passing the course, getting good grades: extrinsic factors. However, research has shown that intrinsic motivation - involvement with the activity at hand and receiving enjoyment from it - is a much more significant source of learning energy (Brown 1994). On primary and secondary levels, intrinsic motivation would probably be even more significant. It is important for learners to enjoy learning in the present moment, rather than merely to think about how English will be useful for them five years from now. So we wanted to explore the hypothesis that Whole Person Learning and Whole Language Learning could lead to more intrinsically motivated students. What we did was designed specifically for upper intermediate-advanced level students but, taking their particular characteristics into account, the principles would work with any level.
