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WHOLE OR HOLE

By Jane Arnold

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.

To get a feel for the type of activity that went on in the experimental group, I'd like to compare two possible language teaching activities.

Activity 1 (a very slightly modified version of an activity in a well-known textbook).

In pairs prepare and present a dialogue for this situation:

A. You have just bought a goldfish and want to know how to take care of it (what and how much to feed it, how to clean the fishbowl, where to keep the bowl, etc.)

B. You are the shopkeeper and an expert on fish.  Give A advice.

Activity 2  I am a person who...

In pairs A speaks for two minutes about him/herself, beginning each sentence with "I am a person who..."  Then B repeats as closely as possible what A has said, beginning each sentence with  "You are a person who..."  Then if the class is very large, each pair makes a circle with 3 other pairs.  Each person will tell the others something about the person he/she has worked with.  (Adapted from Davis and Rinvolucri 1990:42-3) 

If we analyze the two activities according to the four points outlined above, we can easily see that Activity 1 has little personal meaning unless one is of the very small minority that has goldfish.  The students' emotional side is left untouched; it is a totally antiseptic exercise which neither engages the emotions nor provides aesthetic satisfaction nor involves creativity.  There is nothing open, nothing deep.  Even though two students are talking to each other, there is no real communication, and the student in the shopkeeper's role most probably doesn't have the information needed to answer the questions on goldfish correctly.  And there has been nothing to promote a better functioning group.

Activity 2, however, stems very directly from personal meaning. It takes the emotional needs of students into account in several ways.  For example, it reduces anxiety by not having students' speak in front of the whole class and promotes self-esteem by recognizing their experiences as a valid topic for an exercise in the classroom and by not giving them a mechanical, simplistic type of exercise.  Since they are speaking about themselves as real people, not as goldfish sellers or buyers, they are truly interested in what their classmates say and so real communication is established.  Finally, there is a broadening of the interpersonal contact in the activity and the opportunity for supportive connections among group members, which contributes to a positive atmosphere in the classroom.

In the experiment in order to keep language whole, a basically task-based orientation was given to the course.  There was no "open your books to page 42... explain the grammar... do an exercise... correct the exercise", there was no PPP.  There were very diverse activities in the class, most of them closely related to real communication.  For the first half of the year a teacher-prepared booklet of readings and activities was used as the basis for much of the classroom work.  Two main topics were focused on: first, personal development (including learning about learning, learning about the brain, multiple intelligences, speaking in public) and second, ecology and peace.  For the second half of the year students themselves found texts they felt were interesting to include in the second booklet.  In addition to the class activities, students kept a portfolio of their work and a learning journal in which they reflected upon their process of language learning.  In the last part of the year they presented group projects.

Grammar was dealt with principally as it arose in context and from teacher observation of student needs according to their written work.  As they were writing large quantities of English, the corrections on their work provided an effective source of feedback.  Most topics needing review were simply discussed briefly with reference to the mistakes in their written work.  A few were dealt with separately.  For example, to clarify the question of adjective order the teacher put a large poster of Indiana Jones up and asked for adjectives to describe him.  A selection from the most relevant categories was then chosen for students to order in the sentence  Indiana Jones is a(n) ____ ____ _____ _____ ____ man.  Then they are given the general rule -  the more specific the adjective, the closer to the noun - and told to make any changes needed.  The same process is repeated with other nouns that they chose, after giving them now  the more specific rule of order: value, size, age, shape, colour, etc.

Some examples of how the four points were implemented are as follows:

1.	Personal meaning. Multiple Intelligence exercises were used to help learners see how to take advantage of their strong points and  develop the weaker ones.

2.	Feelings and the body. A simple way  to incorporate some movement into the class is to bring in a soft toy, start a group story with the first line, throw the toy  to a student, who has to add a line and toss the toy to someone else.

3.	Real communication. In a visualization exercise learners were asked to develop a dream they have, either for themselves or the world, to experience having that dream come true.  Then in pairs they ask each other about their dreams.

4.	Group dynamics. In very large groups such as these learners seldom have the change to get to know each other well and thus are less likely to take linguistic risks in the class. To improve this situation, for one activity learners were grouped according to their zodiac signs and asked to try to find out things they have in common, then given a text on their sign to work with together.  Afterwards, they were assigned to prepare for the following class a short talk about anything that interested them to give in the same group of people they had been working with. One student commented in her journal: "The most interesting thing has been that though most of us find it difficult to talk in front of the whole class, it was rather easy to to it in a small group.  Therefore, we could realize we are able to do it.  I think it gave us self-confidence.  It also let us know each other a bit more".

The results of the experiment were very satisfactory.  The experimental group had a statistically signficant improvement with respect to the control group in motivation and also in seeing the class as fun, which would indicate that there was an increase in intrinsic motivation, the most effective type of motivation.

Another interesting statistic is that the last days of class in May - in a non-required-attendance situation - in the control group about 40% of the class was present; in the experimental group, even with exam pressures, 80% of the students were there, even though the activities - presentations of their classmates' projects - would have no direct effect on their exam preparation or their grades.

As for the gains in language competence during the year, the experimental group did slightly, though not significantly better on standard final exams.  Three things are especially interesting to consider here. First, if students in the experimental group maintain their level motivation towards learning, there might be important long-term performance gains in the future, should the increased desire to learn that developed in the class carry beyond it.  Second, if the experimental group did slightly better on traditional exams - listening comprehension, dictation, grammar - without having spent class time on formal listening exercises and dictations and little time on isolated grammar work, this would provide support for theories that class time can be used more effectively than doing grammar exercises and practising exam material.  Third, while the control group was doing traditional exercises, though not achieving superior results on traditional tests, they didn't learn other things that the experimental group did.  Some of the most significant things they missed out on are opportunities to develop the following:

•	self-confidence and self-esteem
•	creativity
•	how to work autonomously
•	speaking in public
•	how to reflect on their own learning process
•	an extraordinarily strong and supportive group feeling
•	getting to know not only their classmates but also themselves better
•	a vision of a new paradigm of education

The latter is especially important because several students expressed the opinion that the atmosphere, structure and activities in the class were going to be a model for them some day when they become teachers.

Information of this nature - much less quantifiable but extremely revealing - came from their portfolios, learning journals and interviews held after exams had been graded.  Their comments in their written material were gratifying, many of them even moving. The creativity of the students was especially evident in their group projects.  The teacher was truly amazed at the involvement of the students in their projects and the work that went into them.  Facilitating the students to take a much more active role in the class meant that they became "self-motivators who are supported by their classroom community" (Reid 1999:306).

Last but in no way least, for classroom learning to be successful, it is essential for the teacher to be committed to teaching and to enjoy the experience herself.  Not only are learners' feelings important in the language teaching process.  As teachers it is our pleasant duty to enjoy ourselves too.  A motivated teacher is a motivating teacher.  The teacher in this experiment commented the following:

1.	During one entire year there was never a class of the experimental group that she wasn't excited about.

2.	Preparation, after the brief  initial  planning, was no more difficult that preparing classes with a new textbook; often it was easier.  In a sense there was more work, as correcting student portfolios and journals was time-consuming, but she felt it was interesting and worthwhile work, and it helped her to get to know the 75 students who were an active part of the group.

3.	The prevailing feeling among students and teacher the last day of class was that of a parting of friends.

4.	She decided to continue this type of teaching with both of her groups this year.

My conclusion about this project, not set in scientific language but not less convincing or true than pages and pages of statistics, is that if we do not deal with the whole learner and work with the language at least to some extent in its whole, non-disected, meaning-carrying form, we are going to create a large hole in our effectiveness that is very difficult indeed to fill.

References
Brown, H. D. 1994. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (Third edition). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Davis, P. and M. Rinvolucri.  1990.  The Confidence Book. Harlow: Pilgrims Longman.

Reid, J. 1999.  Affect in the classroom: problems, politics, and pragmatics. In J. Arnold (ed.) Affect in Language Learning.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stevick, E. 1980.  Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Williams, M. and R. Burden. 1997.  Pyschology for Language Teachers.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

My thanks to Sara García for her dedicated work on this project and for permission to use comments from her journal of observations.

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Jane Arnold teaches in the English Language Department at the University of Seville.  Working in the area of affective language learning and humanistic language teaching has provided her with a way to combine her personal and professional interests.  She has published Affect in Language Learning with Cambridge University Press and can be reached at arnold@cica.es.