Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 7; November 1999

"The Real World and the Classroom"

John Morgan (UK)

Page 2 of 2

It was on a summer course that I first realised that the world my students and I were constructing was radically different from the simple analogue I had assumed. I had a class of ten middle-aged adults, mainly teachers from Italy and Spain. Their English was good but lacking in fluency, and I was unwilling to make them work through exercises that they might see as mere repetition of previous learning. I decided to structure each session as a conversation class, but within a "game frame" that would give linguistic shape and at the same time ensure equal turn- taking. For the fourth of these sessions, which was to focus on the language of moral evaluation and belief, I asked them each to choose an imaginary crime and, in role as criminal, recount it to the others. Then, when everyone had done this, the group became a jury that was to reach agreement on penalties for each "criminal". I believed that in the course of this they would be nudged into using appropriate language, and would also have a task that was in itself challenging and involving - the two paramount criteria. The added roleplay element - associating each member directly with a specific crime - would help concentration and heighten participation.

Towards the end of the activity, one of the group broke down in tears. Half in, half out of role (it was not at first clear whether she was "really" affected or just a good actress) the group closed to comfort her. After a while, we discovered the reason for her distress while everyone else had, as asked, chosen imaginary events, she had presented an actual crime she believed she had committed, a road accident in which a pedestrian had been killed.

This time, we were able to cope with both her and our own disturbed feelings: we simply allowed her to talk. The road accident was only one of many things that she had a need to express. She told us about her son, her doubts about her work (she was a teacher), her lack of confidence in speaking English. I had the impression she was talking directly about these things for the very first time. On our part, we were glad that we had been able to provide her with something she evidently needed, and grateful for her trust.

This was communication of an altogether different order from what I had come to expect in the classroom: from the elements of our own lives, of a foreign language, of game and fantasy, and above all of a deep-seated need to communicate, we had created something that was real in its own terms, neither rehearsal nor simulation.

After that, I began to see the classroom not as an analogue of some "Real World", but as a valid, if local and temporary, reality built from the subjective realities of the group members (not excluding myself), where skills (e.g. language), awareness (of self and others), and creativity could grow. Sometimes the elements of this reality are clear and readily expressed - a simple exchange of ideas will serve to give them substance. At other times they lie frustratingly beneath the surface until triggered by a thought or an event, or until the mood, or the tolerance, or the mutual trust within the group, permits their expression. Sometimes the really important things - the internal doubts and fears and fantasies, for example, that inhibit learning or speaking the foreign language - are buried so deep that quite elaborate or extreme measures are needed to bring them to light, to "lay the ghost" and permit learning to take place.

The techniques or "frames" available to the teacher in helping to develop classroom reality are many and various. Some are familiar and correspond to day-to-day activities and procedures, or to activities carried over from more traditional language-teaching: a dialogue, a "free conversa- tion", an exchange of letters, a role-played encounter. Others are more remote, less overtly "realistic" - a mime, a symbolic enactment, a guided fantasy, word association games and so on. Sometimes the immediate aim is language production, sometimes the creation of a mood within which pro- duction can take place, sometimes neither. Thus, at the beginning of a language course, I regularly ask the learners to join me at the black- board. I write up a couple of structure words ("you", "I", "are", "can", etc) on the blackboard, then stand back and invite them to play a game with the following rules:

• anyone may go to the blackboard and write ONE word
• OR they may take the board pointer and SILENTLY tap out a sentence from the words on the board
• they may do this as often as they like but must allow at least one other person to take a turn before they return

As the exercise develops, the blackboard is filled with words and the learners tap out and read sentences formed from them. Sometimes the sentences they form chain together in dialogue, sometimes they offer comments on some matter of individual or common concern, sometimes (not only with beginners and elementary learners) they are conscious experi- mentation with the structures of the language. Because the exercise is carried out in silence, there is no pressure to speak, to reveal oral weakness; the pace of the exercise is typically slow, permitting time for reflexion and response; because the teacher has retreated (correction is either absent or self-administered), the learners have a clear space within which to work and experiment; the teacher also has time and space to observe, and to find out the learners' current concerns and knowledge.

On the formal level, such an exercise is patently un-"realistic": our mental picture of normal, social behaviour does not include such events. The underlying processes, however, are intensely real.

Which brings me back to apples and shoes.

I do not know the purpose, in the example quoted, of "roleplaying an apple", but in the case of my training group, I was demonstrating a technique to enable communication where participants are inhibited by lack of linguistic, or imaginative, or social confidence. As with the use of glove puppets in talking with children, it interposes a protective mask or filter between the speakers. In this case, it enabled a very shy teacher, who was terrified of revealing what she saw as her poor English to fellow-professionals, both to express herself and to become part of the group.