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How do you teach? Why do you teach like that? Who decides what approach (or approaches) you use? How do you know what methodology is best? How influential was your teacher-training course? Why was or wasn't it useful?
What can teachers learn from students may seem like a strange question. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Surely, we should be talking here about what the students can learn from us. But no, today's session is about what we can learn from them, though of course with the goal of doing our jobs better as a result.
Monolingual groups of students tend to have predictable problems with the target language, primarily because of what may be rather negatively termed “first language interference”, or more positively seen as the result of an effective “transfer” strategy. Both terms refer to the differences between the mother tongue (L1) and the target language (L2).
Now, teacher-training being what it is (i.e. based in countries where most teaching takes place in multi-lingual groups and where the teacher does not know the students languages, or at least can not rely on doing so regularly), it is normally assumed that you the teacher know “everything” about the target language while they the learners know “nothing”. Similarities between English and the learner's L1 are ignored, as are significant differences. In multilingual classes, “one size fits all”.
However, for teachers of mono-lingual groups, this is far from being the case. Knowing what your learners do in their own language, explains much of the ease or difficulty they have with English, and so can guide your teaching, and their learning. Asking students to focus on the way their own language works can help them learn the target language by allowing them to recognise similarities and spot troublesome areas of difference.
(WHAT THINGS IN ENGLISH ARE EASY FOR YOUR LEARNERS BECAUSE OF THE SIMILARITY IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE, AND WHAT ARE DIFFICULT BECAUSE OF THE DIFFERENCES?)
But! But! Shouldn't we be teaching communicatively rather than focusing on structure? Isn't it bad to encourage the students to use their own language in the classroom? Well, yes, certainly, in a multilingual group the result would be confusion and the possibility or probability of the teacher and some members of the class being excluded (imagine all the Japanese chatting together about Japanese grammar in Japanese). But no, in a monolingual class, not really, or at least not always. You may prefer to do whatever works best, irrespective of the dogma. What methodology or approach is preferable will depend on the learner's situation and objectives, but understanding the multi-lingual/monolingual distinction and its implications is a starting point.
(CONSIDER WITH YOUR TRAINER WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF USING THE LEARNERS' NATIVE LANGUAGE IN THE CLASSROOM)
In general, you could say that the less the learners need to use English in the classroom, the less it matters if they speak their own language. So, for example, a quick contrastive analysis of future tenses in a B2 exam classes can help clear the air without wasting time. The same approach at A2 is a lost opportunity for much-needed speaking and listening practice.
I learnt most of my Italian by listening to students that I teach. Vocabulary is an obvious area where a knowledgeable teacher can save a lot of time, not necessarily by acting as a walking bilingual dictionary, but by making suggestions as to what a suitable translation might be, or by agreeing to suggestions offered by students. Monitoring student talk during pair or group activities is a good place to start, or simply by asking: “and how do you say 'sore throat' in your language” and waiting to see if they agree on an answer, preferably one you think is correct too. This is not only an effective way of concept checking, it’s an efficient one too, and so has benefits both for teacher and students.
And then there are the things other than language which can be shared and exchanged – culture, attitudes, customs, diet, laws and bureaucracy, work, love, etc. Language learning can be a cultural experience (In Turkey they say: “If you have one language you are one person, if you have two languages you are two people”), and there is no reason that this should be a uni-directional process.
(WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT FROM YOUR STUDENTS RECENTLY?)
Does your 60 or 90 hour group course have a momentum of its own? Is it a saga, with a history of its own, a story of hopes and expectations, of friends and enemies, successes and failures, of moments of laughter and of triumph? Have strangers become friends during your classes? Has trust, and respect, and understanding built up from one lesson to the next? By now, do you all know each other as if you had been friends for years?
Students and teachers are a “what” (teacher/learner fixed roles), but also a “who” (participants in an on-going interaction, a mini-version of life unfolding right there in the classroom). Can discussing Serena's boyfriend problems week after week be justified from a methodological point of view? Well, if it's not boring or intrusive, and if everyone is interested, it may be a fantastic opportunity for language acquisition. In fact, what better use could we make of the time? Conversations of this type are fruitful because motivating and real, but moreover, if done right, this sort of relationship-building (this time it MUST be in English) creates its own “momentum” and can provide hours and hours of the most relevant and authentic language use (not just “practice” but actual “use”) making the lessons of enormous benefit in developing confidence, and communication skills, and strategies, and fluency, and comprehension, and so on. And the students come back for more, lesson after lesson, year after year, because they feel they belong. As we all know, it takes a long time to achieve competency in a foreign language, so maintaining student motivation over time is itself a priority.
(WHO IS YOUR “OLDEST” STUDENT? WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THEM?)
This one is very obvious – your teaching, especially “presentations”, and use of materials such as course books or multimedia resources, will improve if you really value the “feedback loop” between you the “lesson-giver”, and them the “lesson-receivers”. In short, if you can see they all look puzzled, this is a signal to you that something is wrong, and so you make an adjustment. On the other hand, if it all seems too easy, it probably is. Maybe you could make better use of your time doing something more challenging.
(WHAT HAVE YOU “GIVEN UP” TEACHING, AND WHY? WHAT DO YOU DO THAT “ALWAYS WORKS”?)
Economists tell us that if we had a situation of “perfect information” we would all be able to act as rational consumers with no effort and always get the best possible deal (think of the last time you bought a mobile phone or a computer). But, they note, we do not normally live in situations where all relevant information is available to us, and gathering information has a cost. In other words, you are going to make mistakes because you don't know enough, however, much you know, and even though you may be able to find out more, you probably won't have the time or the energy. This is the reason why it's always much easier to use the same text book for the second year running – you already know what works, and what doesn't, and so can make more informed decisions. Change the book if you hate it, you'll gain a better set of material, but you’ll lose the benefit of having more “perfect information”.
A teacher who stays in a foreign country or teaches a particular nationality for more than a few years starts to accumulate invaluable experience with a certain type of students. Being aware of the value of learning from your learners can amplify this effect (make it quicker and stronger) and help us put it to work to benefit our customers (when we might otherwise think we are doing something “wrong”). But to maximise the gains, we need to understand our methodologies well enough to know when to exploit them to the full, and when to abandon them.
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