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The Real World and the Classroom

By John Morgan (UK)

A dozen years ago I read in a Newspaper  (The Guardian, 23rd of June 1987) of how an offender appeared before the magistrates  charged with breaking a probation order.  A condition of the order had been attendance at group sessions, and the young man had not been attending.  His solicitor explained to the magistrates that during one session his client had been asked to role-play an apple, and this he had been unable and unwilling to do.  Doubtless there had been good reasons for asking people to take part in this role-play,  but his client had not understood them, and had walked out.  The magistrate gently explained that a probation order was to be observed, and the offender paid for his failure to understand with 140 hours of Community Service.

This account touched me deeply, as not long before I had asked some teachers on an in-service course to do something very similar.  I placed a chair in the middle of the group and asked one of the teachers to take off her shoe and put it on the chair.  I asked the other members of the group to put questions to the shoe, which the shoe’s owner then answered on its behalf.  A description of that activity might well be “She was asked to role-play a shoe.”

Now I had my reasons for asking the group to do this exercise, and I shall return to them later, but for the moment let us take the stark absurdity of that description as an expression of the gulf perceived between the “Real World” (where people do not pretend to be shoes or apples) and the World of the Classroom (where apparently they do).

To treat these worlds as different is part and parcel of our professional experience and practice. In the 1960s we taught English by the Direct Method.  I would, for example, come into the classroom with a box of fruit and lay them out on my desk.  I would pick up an apple and say slowly and clearly, “This is an apple”, then hand it to a student and ask, “What is that?”, pointing at the apple.  If the student had understood, and had remembered the sounds a-pp-le, she would say, “This is an apple”.  If she showed she had not understood, by remaining silent or by producing some other response, I would repeat the procedure with another student.  If things went well, by the end of the class the students would be taking and giving one another pieces of fruit and producing exchanges of increasing complexity:  “Is that an apple or a banana?”, “It’s a banana”, “Give me the banana, please!”  In  this way they practised and gained facility with the forms of English structures, and with a subset of English vocabulary, and with the sounds of the language.

Seen as a social event, what we were doing was hardly dramatic (although the social “hidden agenda” of the participants was often expressed in complex and subtle ways through these exchanges), but as a means to an end it worked well enough. None of us was under the slightest misapprehension that our world of question and answer, apples and bananas, was the Real World, though elements of that world were necessarily present. We were practising for the Real World - our class was a rehearsal.

It was, however, inevitable that the learner’s willing “suspension of reality” should at some point break down.  There is, after all, a limit to how long one is prepared to function in a world of rehearsal.  After one or two hundred hours of it one begins to hanker after performance, and as the novelty of the language itself wore off, all but the most dedicated, Skinnerian learners would start to lose motivation.

We needed a different classroom reality, which would capture something of the performance element in the Real World, the satisfaction of conveying needed information, of accomplishing worthwhile tasks, and of genuinely influencing the behaviour of others through language.

So we put the banana in a bag.  Drills became guessing games; exercises became tasks.  To stress that a foreign language could be used to do things, we introduced group and project work. The language we taught was itself different - we were no longer content with the manipulation of structures but demanded “authenticity” and “meaningful expression”.  In short, we found ourselves constructing, with the collusion of our students, an increasingly complex model or analogue of the Real World. Thus, in 1969, one of my intermediate classes wrote and produced a ten-minute “classroom documentary” on the Moon walk of the US astronauts, based on three weeks’ research in magazines, newspaper accounts, and a transcript of the actual conversations between Mission Control and Apollo.  In 1972 a colleague in Cambridge got his beginner’s class, armed with notebooks and portable cassette recorders, to interview local residents on their attitudes to foreigners.  From the data collected, and the insights they had gained, they improvised role-plays in the classroom.  About that time my own class was taking over the kitchen to test out practically their comprehension of recipes. Through these and other structured events (inside and outside the classroom) we attempted to create realistic opportunities for achievement in our little world of learning, whilst maintaining the safe, comprehensible frame of classroom and syllabus. And, to a large extent, it worked.  Our students maintained their motivation, classes became more lively and at the same time more challenging. We took pleasure in planning our lessons, in preparing materials that would engage our students’ attention. They found satisfaction in completing the task we set, in solving problems, and in discovering something of the power that even a partial competence in a second language can bestow.

But “realistic” is not “real”, and life is neither safe nor tidily structured.  Insofar as we succeeded in our aims, it was because we all, learners, teachers and coursebook writers, tacitly agreed to exclude from our world of language learning sizeable chunks of dangerous, untidy experience. We set limits, for example, to the form and content of our interaction, avoiding contacts that might complicate relation-ships and “interfere with learning”. (Such contacts continued to take place, of course, but not within the frame we recognised as The Classroom.)  Pair and group work was tightly task-oriented, with jigsaw reading and listening, and carefully prepared situations where the members faced one another in clear, even stereotypical, roles, rather than as the complex, changing individuals they “really” were.  If a discussion took place, it would be to discuss a project or a scheme of work, or to explore an agreed theme (usually related to reading and composition work), conducted along formal lines with a chairman (usually the teacher) to ensure order and equality.

In these activities over-personal contributions would be internally censored out. I shall never forget the catastrophe that occurred when, in an advanced discussion class on the then topical theme of abortion, one member talked of an abortion she herself had had. Not only were we unable to cope with such a gross breach of our tacitly-agreed rules, we also lacked any procedure to handle our own feelings of shock and embarrassment.  The remainder of that class was largely silence and teacher-talk.

Such lapses apart, though, my classroom of the 1970s was a workable model, and admirably suited to the new functional-notional schemata that had begun to filter through to us.  The idea that a language-learning syllabus could be constructed from the nuts and bolts of practical communicative acts, rather than the abstract concepts of grammar, was exciting, and gave philosophical justification to the work we wanted to do.

It was, however, precisely in our emphasis on “language as communication” that we began to open up the cracks in our carefully constructed classroom reality. The simulated information gap activities (in which, for example, two students would be given different partial accounts of the same fictional event, and would then through dialogue produce a full account) began to seem hollow in comparison with the gap present when, say, the same two people exchanged information about their own lives. We pushed increasingly in the direction of “realism” and “personal reality” and in so doing broke many of the tacit rules of the “normal” classroom.

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 role-play 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 sort 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 conversation”, 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 production 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 experimentation 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 reflection 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 “role-playing 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.