Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 6; November 2001

Listening to Ourselves

By Peter Grundy
University of Durham
Peter.Grundy@durham.ac.uk

How often do we have time, in our busy lives as teachers, to think about the real beliefs that underlie our moment-by-moment actions in the classroom?

Our moment-by-moment actions in the classroom reflect our methodological presuppositions. Yet our methodological presuppositions are a relatively under-explored area in teacher development. In the research literature, moment-by-moment actions in the classroom are held to reflect 'implicit decision making'. This is because our actions result from decisions that we take with little or no conscious awareness of what we are doing - decisions about how to direct our gaze, how to respond to learner behaviour, when to use the board, how to prompt a response, etc. The problem with being interested in our own implicit decision making is that, being virtually automatic, it's largely invisible to us.

My aim in this short article is to suggest a way of opening a window on the methodological presuppositions that underlie our implicit decision making.

My long-standing interest in implicit decision making and methodological presupposition was re-awakened in April by a paper on Cultural Models in the US Writing Classroom: Matches and Mismatches delivered by Mary Jane Curry at the Writing Development in Higher Education Conference at Leicester. In her paper, Curry presented a number of what she termed "tutor's cultural models of students" which she had obtained by recording a series of semi-structured interviews with a teacher. Curry reported how her informant had compared non-native and native speaker students, and had said of the non-native speakers, "they're easier to teach." At this point, I found myself wondering whether Curry's informant was implying that native speakers were difficult to teach, whether being 'easy to teach' was a virtue, and even whether teaching is the principal business of the tutor. I was wondering, in other words, about the set of background beliefs about teaching and learning that the speaker seemed to be conveying by the words he chose.

And when Curry reported the teacher saying of non-native speakers, "They're interested in your presentation," I thought I had a picture of the kind of methodologist he was, one who presupposes that he is to present and asserts that the interest of a particular category of student (the non-native speaker) is aroused by this mode of teaching.

This impression was confirmed by data obtained in another interview with the same informant four months later, when he described non-native speaker students as "a lot of wonderful people who go along with whatever's being presented." Once again the pragmaticist in me noted that the pseudo-cleft structure, whatever's being presented, treated the notion that something was being presented as presupposed and made an assertion about the learner's response to it.

As I listened to Curry presenting her data, I realised that I was doing a number of things:

- I was listening out for presupposition triggers such as definite descriptions (your presentation) and pseudo clefts (whatever's being presented). As a trained pragmaticist, this was relatively easy for me to do. I was doing this because it enabled me to distinguish what was being presupposed as the methodological basis on which this particular teacher proceeded (the acceptance of presentation) from what was being asserted (that learners accept the content of the presentation). Put another way, I was identifying the beliefs which supported his implicit decision making, the beliefs he was not able to question himself precisely because they were presupposed -

- I was also making judgements about the teacher, and most of these judgements were more than merely methodological. That's to say, I was judging him not only as a methodologist but also as a person, and wondering about the qualities of personality that we need to bring to our classrooms -

- And I was thinking about other sources of comparable data: what would happen if we recorded staff meetings and subjected them to this sort of analysis? Could data of this kind be used to help teachers develop self-awareness and exercise more choice over which methodological presuppositions to espouse? And I was wondering whether there might be other categories of ELT professional besides teachers (materials writers perhaps?) from whom to obtain data. And whether such data might reveal where we each stand on the continuum from humane to directive.

- I was thinking too about whether only presupposition triggers might provide insights or whether other linguistic fingerprints could also provide revealing evidence of our implicit methodological beliefs. For example, I noticed how Curry's informant used conceptual metaphors such as go along with in a way which seemed to me to reveal his conception of the roles of teacher and learner.

Curry also shared with us several of the tutor's comments about himself. They were equally revealing, and gave me an idea for an activity. You may well be a step ahead of me at this point and already be thinking creatively about some of the many possibilities opened up by the idea of listening to ourselves. And you will probably have many better ideas than me. Here's my idea anyway.

One way of doing this task is to do it on your own. This makes it easy to organize from a practical point of view and provides you with an opportunity to think about what it reveals in private. Alternatively, you can do it as part of a teacher training or teacher development course, so that what you find out about yourself can be discussed in a supportive setting.

This is what to do: record your answers to the following questions relating to a class you've just taught:

! How did you decide what to do with this class?
! How close was what you actually did to what you planned to do?
! How close was what you actually did to what you would have done if you'd had a totally free hand?
! Can you say something about the students' expectations and the extent to which they were fulfilled?
! Focus on a particular sequence from this lesson and talk it through, commenting on the way it went as you go.
! How typical of your teaching in general was this lesson?
! Did the way you worked with this class fit into an overall pattern of any kind?

STOP READING HERE: IF YOU REALLY WANT TO DO THIS TASK PROPERLY, MAKE THE RECORDING NOW BEFORE READING ANY FURTHER. (IF YOU DO READ ON FURTHER WITHOUT MAKING THE RECORDING, YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO DO THIS TASK NATURALLY FOR YOURSELF, ALTHOUGH YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FACILITATE IT AS A TEACHER DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITY FOR COLLEAGUES.)

FINAL WARNING: IF YOU READ EVEN THE NEXT SENTENCE, YOU WILL HAVE PASSED THE POINT OF NO RETURN!

Once you've made the tape, listen to it and try to identify any presupposition triggers (see list below). This will enable you to distinguish between those things that you presume true (presuppositions which do not need to be asserted) and those things whose truth (or falsity) you wish to assert.

One good test for a presupposition is whether it survives negation. So that when Curry's teacher said "They're interested in your presentation", the presupposition that the speaker is presenting survives negation. I.e. "They're not interested in your presentation" also presupposes that the teacher presents, although the assertion that the students are interested in presentation is negated. Similarly, "a lot of wonderful people who go along with whatever's being presented" and "a lot of wonderful people who don't go along with whatever's being presented" have opposite truth values as assertions but both convey the presupposition that something is presented. In other words, an addressee may question assertions, but has to accept presuppositions as unquestioned facts.

We've already identified two presupposition triggers, definite descriptions and pseudo-clefts. Others include

! temporal clauses - thus "When Curry reported that the teacher said X, he meant / didn't mean Y" both presuppose that Curry reported the teacher had said X.

! change of state verbs such as stop, start, begin, continue, take up, cease, etc. all presuppose a state prior to the state now being asserted. Hence the old and not at all funny 'joke' "When did you stop beating your wife?"

! iteratives: "My long-standing interest in methodological presuppositions was re-awakened" presupposes that it had been awake in the past. Other iteratives include again, another, return, repeat, etc.

! implicative verbs - for example manage in "I managed (didn't manage) to finish this article on time" asserts that I did (didn't) finish it on time and presupposes that it wasn't easy to do this.

! sentential subjects and complements of factive predicates such as is interesting - thus "That teachers are implicit decision makers is / isn't interesting" presupposes that teachers are implicit decision makers because be interesting, like regret (but unlike suppose or be probable), is a factive predicate.

Utterances often convey more than a single presupposition. Thus the sentence I wrote earlier, "As I listened to Curry talking about her data, I realised that I was doing a number of things", presupposes

- that I was listening to Curry (temporal clause)
- that there are such things as Curry and her data (definite descriptions)
- that I was doing a number of things (sentential complement of the factive verb realise)
- that I hadn't known that I was doing a number of things before (implicative meaning of realise).

At this point, I hear you say, "OK, Peter, lighten up please!" Yes, I'm sorry about the density of the explanation you've just waded through. What I was trying to convey was that presupposition triggering structures such as those listed above distinguish

(a) what we think uncontroversial in our talk and expect others to agree with

and

(b) what we wish to assert, in the expectation that others may sometimes disagree with us.

When you've listened to yourself carefully enough to identify your methodological presuppositions, it's worth considering whether identification alone is sufficient. After identification, comes evaluation of what we recognize in ourselves. And after evaluation, we next have to decide on any desirable changes in the methodology that underscores our implicit decision making. Finally, we have to think about how we are to achieve these changes.

So Listening to ourselves is only a beginning, a way of getting a first glimpse of who we are in our classrooms.