P is for Personalization

Childhood tragedy?

In his novel, The Folding Star, Alan Hollinghurst (1994) recounts how the protagonist, a young Englishman recently arrived in a Belgian town, sets himself up as a private English tutor. One of his pupils suffers from asthma, and our hero idly asks him if he knows how he got it.

“I didn’t quite make the story out at first, I was chivvying him and making him repeat words without knowing I was taking him back, like some kinder and wiser analyst, to the scene of a childhood tragedy” (p. 20)

Inadvertently uncovering childhood tragedies is one of the risks of what has come to be known as personalization: “When you personalise language you use it to talk about your knowledge, experience and feelings” (An A-Z of ELT). Personalization has connotations of self-disclosure, even confession. But it hasn’t always been so.

Long ago...

When I first encountered personalization it was of the type: “Write 5 or more true sentences about yourself, friends or relations, using the word ago“.

This is taken verbatim from Kernel Lessons (O’Neill et al. 1971), one of the first coursebooks I taught from. The fact that the sentences had to be ‘true’ was regularly ignored or overlooked by both teacher and students. The point was not to be ‘truthful’ but creative. Creative and accurate.

This little personalization task invariably came at the tail end of a sequence of activities whose rationale was the learning and practice of a pre-selected item of grammar. The personalization was really just a pretext for a little bit of creative practice, as well as serving as a first, tentative step towards translating the language of the classroom into the language of ‘real life’. I don’t recall ever having used these carefully contrived sentences as a conversation starter, and certainly never uncovered any childhood tragedies (that I was aware of). In fact, in Kernel Lessons this ‘transfer exercise’ was relegated to the Homework section of the book, thereby obviating any potentially awkward moments in the classroom.

But very soon personalization was re-invented, not as a form of language practice, but as the context and stimulus for language learning.  Within the humanist paradigm, where the ultimate aim of education is self-actualization, teachers were urged to ground their lessons in the lives, experiences, and feelings of their learners:

In foreign language teaching, we customarily begin with the lives of others, with whom students may not easily identify, and then expect students to transfer the material to their own lives.  However, transfer to the textbook is easier when the content starts with the student himself and then leads into the materials to be learned… Let the students first discover what they can generate on the subject from their own personal thoughts and feelings.  By drawing on their own experiences and reactions, the transfer to the textbook will be more relevant and more apparent.

(Moscowitz, 1978, p. 197)

Personalization, as we have seen, is not without its risks, and it’s arguable whether assuming the role of analyst – wittingly or unwittingly –  isn’t exceeding one’s brief as language instructor.  Yet there is a general acceptance in the profession that these risks are worth taking, and even teachers who don’t susbcribe one hundred percent to a humanist philosophy tend to think that personalization is ‘a good thing’. And, of course, basing the content of the lesson on the experiences, interests, desires and even fears of the people in the room also happens to be a core principle of the Dogme approach.

But, irrespective of whether we think it’s good for them, do learners actually like it? Do they like being quizzed about what they or their relatives were doing 10 days/months/years ago? Do they expect it? Do they see the value of it?

...and far away.

All the more reason, therefore, to ask whether or not the theoretical underpinnings for personalization are well grounded. Hence, I’ve been looking outside the (arguably too narrowly focused) domain of humanistic pedagogy for other sources of validation. Recently, research into the way second language learners are ‘socialized’ into communities of practice has shed new light on the notion of personalization, even if it’s not named as such. Bonny Norton (2000, p. 142), for instance, concluded her study of immigrant women in Canada thus:

Whether or not the identities of the learner are recognised as part of the formal language curriculum, the pedagogy that the teacher adopts in the classroom will nevertheless engage the identities of learners in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways.  It is only by understanding the histories and lived experiences of language learners that the language teacher can create conditions that will facilitate social interaction both in the classroom and in the wider community, and help learners claim the right to speak.

From a related but more ecological perspective, Dwight Atkinson (2010) argues that language learning is a process of adapting to a social-cultural-linguistic environment, in which meaning is distributed throughout the system rather than being locked into individual minds, and that what learners pay attention to – what they notice – is that which is potentially important to their integration and survival:  “What really matters to a person – what is adaptive – is what gets attended” (p. 35). Arguably, by foregrounding ‘what really matters to a person’, personalization both motivates and scaffolds these adaptive processes.

So, how do we accommodate the need for personalization into our classes? And – more importantly – how do we deal with learner resistance to it?

References:

Atkinson, D. (2010) Sociocognition: what it can mean for second language acquisition. In Batstone, R. (ed.) Sociocognitive Perspectives on Language Use and Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hollinghurst, A. (1994). The Folding Star. London: Chatto & Windus.

Moskowitz, G. (1978). Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Language Class. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Norton, B. (2000). Identity and Language Learning: gender, ethnicity and educational change.  London: Longman.

O’Neill, R., Kingsbury, R., & Yeadon, T. (1971). Kernel Lessons Intermediate. London: Longman.

H is for Humanistic approaches

Crescent City Books, New Orleans

While attending the annual TESOL Conference in New Orleans last week, I took some time out (as is my wont!) to look for books.  In this second-hand bookshop in the French quarter (left), I came across a copy of Gertrude Moscowitz’s classic text on humanistic teaching techniques, Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Language Class (1978) – a title that clearly evokes the ethos of the period, but which, in these more hard-bitten times, elicits not a little gentle mockery, or even, dare I say, derision.

This book was a core text in our Diploma (now DELTA) library back in the ’80s, and even then many of its suggested activities were rated as having a high ‘cringe factor’. Here’s one, taken more or less at random:

I LIKE YOU BECAUSE…

The students are told that there are many positive qualities about others that we are aware of but often do not take the time to express.  Tell students that today they will have the opportunity to let each other know what some of these positive thoughts and feelings are.  Instruct the students to tell the partner they are facing some positive things they like or feel about each other.  After about a minute, have the students move to a new partner and continue the process until each student speaks with a number of different students.

(p.80)

While appreciating the good intentions of an activity like this, most experienced teachers will be alert to its potential problems and risks. First of all, will the students have the necessary language to do the task? If not, what kind of preparation will they need? What is the intended outcome of the task – an oral or written report, or just a general sense of well-being?  More importantly, perhaps, will they know each other well enough to find things to say? Will they be both cognizant of, and comfortable with, the aims of the activity? What happens if a student is unable – or reluctant – to voice a positive sentiment? What impact will the learner’s cultural background have on the task? And what is the teacher’s role in all this?

Even this one taster is enough, I think, to indicate the assumptions on which the book (and humanistic teaching in general) is based. These are spelled out in the introduction:

• For learning to be significant, feelings must be recognised and put to use.
• Human beings want to actualise their potential.
• Having healthy relationships with other classmates is more conducive to learning.
• Learning more about oneself is a motivating factor in learning.
• Increasing one’s self-esteem enhances learning.

(p. 18)

While we might accept that these claims are self-evident, we may be less inclined, nowadays, to construct a pedagogy around them. Nevertheless, as I revisited this book, I couldn’t help but be struck by the fundamental soundness of many of the principles on which it is based – principles that are somewhat obscured by its relentlessly upbeat and touch-feely tone.  Take these statements, for example:

Connect the content with the students’ lives

By connecting the content with the students’ lives, you are focusing on what students know rather than what they are ignorant of.  From the learner’s standpoint, there is quite a psychological difference in dealing with what is familiar to him rather than what is unknown. …

Use students’ responses in the lesson

As the exercises you develop take form, plan to make use of the responses of students.  Have the students note similarities and differences in each other’s reactions or experiences and refer to them in processing the activity.  Since the students will be sharing of themselves, utilise what they share by asking the class questions relating to what has been exchanged in the interaction. …

Yours students have ideas, too

Don’t overlook an important resource of ideas for humanistic techniques.  Who can tell you what interests them better than your students themselves?…  Bringing the students’ lives to the content brings life to the content!

(pp. 197-200)

“Bringing the students’ lives to the content brings life to the content” might well be a Dogme slogan. Certainly, the notion of incorporating learners’ contributions into the fabric of the lesson – not merely as personalization, but as the core content –  is a mainstay of the Dogme philosophy. This makes me wonder to what extent I was – consciously or unconsciously – influenced by the ‘humanistic turn’, as popularized by Moscowitz and others, in the development of my own philosophy of teaching.

And it also makes me wonder if it’s not time to put aside some of our postmodern cynicism and to re-visit these seminal texts in search of the good sense that they have to offer.

Reference:

Moskowitz, G. 1978. Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Language Class. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

S is for (Earl) Stevick

In a comment on my previous blog post, Diarmuid Fogarty suggested, if ever I get tired of the A-Z format, I might simply go through the book titles on my bookshelves and write a blog post per book. As it happens, when Diarmuid wrote that, I was already planning to focus on a book that had been a key influence on my development as a teacher, a copy of which – second-hand but in mint condition –  I’d recently managed to unearth, courtesy Amazon.

The book is Earl Stevick’s Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways, published by Newbury House in 1980. This was the first book on ELT I read of my own volition. (I’d of course read at least a couple of books on the intensive Diploma course I’d recently completed at IH London).  For some obscure reason, Stevick’s book was available in the bookshop of the International House affiliate I was in charge of, in Alexandria, Egypt, in the early eighties.  I either borrowed it, or bought it for the school (I’ve never had a copy of my own until now).

ILI Alexandria: with some of the locally-recruited staff, circa 1981

The book made a profound impression on me, at a stage of my development as a teacher and teacher educator (I was supervising a dozen newly-recruited teachers at the time) where I had already begun to question some of the ‘givens’ that underpinned my initial training five years earlier. For instance, I was no longer sure that a methodology of elicit-and-repeat would ever result in conversational fluency. Nor was I comfortable with a methodology that reduced learners to the role of passive consumers of ‘grammar mcnuggets’ . But I still hadn’t fully grasped the critical role that affect plays in learning – language learning not least. Learning, for me, was still  a purely cognitive process. By opening my eyes to the emotional and attitudinal dimension of learning, under the umbrella of humanistic learning theory, Stevick’s book marked a milestone in my professional development.

Earl Stevick

Early in the book, citing his own much-quoted dictum that “success depends less on materials, techniques, and linguistic analysis, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom,” Stevick adds that he has been able “to pursue this principle more deeply, and at the same time to practice it more broadly, than before”.  As a result, he continues, “I have begun to suspect that the most important aspect of ‘what goes on’ is the presence or absence of harmony — it is the parts working with, or against, one another.  How such a thing may happen within and between the people in a language course is the subject of this book” (p.5).

In successive chapters, he describes his own quest for harmony in teaching, recounting how he had experienced, both as a student and as a teacher, such humanistic methods as The Silent Way, Community Language Learning, and Suggestopedia. For me, the realisation that success is more likely when the learner “is learning as a whole person, with body, mind, and emotions in harmony with one another” (p. 11) precipitated a major restructuring of my self-image as a teacher.

In order to capture something of the significance of this discovery, I drew up a series of ‘resolutions’ that were intended to set a new agenda for my teaching. Each resolution was based on a key ‘principle’, and elaborated in terms of its practical applications.  For example:

RESOLUTION	PRINCIPLE	METHOD
1.    Find out what the students want/need.	Learning increases in proportion to relevance.	“Pre-course” chat; sts write, conduct, collate results of their own survey; individuals choose thematic (lexical) areas to research and re–present to class; individual projects…
2.    Allow the students to bring their own interests, enthusiasms into the class, into the way the lessons are structured.	Learning increases in proportion to personal investment.	Use only materials with which there is a chance of generating discussion, argument; have sts bring things they have read (news) or heard; “show & tell” — photos, souvenirs, etc

Some of my resolutions (click to enlarge)

There were 17 resolutions in all, and I still have the original typewritten document, which, photocopied and distributed to my teachers, became a focus for discussion at our regular meetings. Our communal attempts to realise these ideals formed the platform on which all my later thinking about teaching was constructed.

I have read a lot of books on ELT since then, but none has had anything like such a profound impact, not just on my thinking, but on my actual classroom practice. This post is my tribute to its author: Earl Stevick – a great scholar, humanist and guide.

And (because it’s customary to end on a question): Do you have a ‘book that changed your life’?

K is for Krashen

Stephen Krashen

From the outset it was decided that there would be no entries in the A-Z that would be dedicated to specific individuals, such as Chomsky or Halliday. Instead, the relevant content associated with the great and good of ELT would be gathered under thematic entries such as universal grammar (in the case of Chomsky) or register (Halliday), and individual names would be relegated to an index at the back. The knowledge base of ELT practitioners, after all, comprises a network of ideas, not names.

Nevertheless, one in-house reviewer criticised what he or she considered an inordinate number of references in the text to the work of Stephen Krashen. It’s true – a quick count shows that Krashen is referenced in at least nine entries (such as affect, comprehension, input etc) compared to, say, Chomsky (7) and Halliday (3). Is this an accurate reflection (the reviewer asked) of Krashen’s status, relative to other influential theoreticians in the field?

This criticism led me to wonder if – like many teachers of my generation – I hadn’t been unduly influenced by the radicalism of a scholar whose major theoretical constructs – e.g. the monitor model, the input hypothesis, the affective filter etc – have subsequently been substantially revised or even discredited.

As a teacher formed in the twilight phase of audiolingualism (see D is for Drilling), I found Krashen’s outright dismissal of the value of productive practice or of error correction, and his case for bathing the learners in a sea of comprehensible input, immediately attractive – all the more so because of the feisty way in which these ideas were argued. (A much-copied Horizon video on language acquisition, which included extracts from a lecture of Krashen’s, was a staple on teacher training courses in the 80s and 90s.)

Doubts started to surface when I found that – as a second language learner who had recently moved to Spain – the silent period I was enjoying seemed indefinitely prolonged, and although my comprehension of Spanish had developed apace, this never translated into fluent production.  (Krashen, of course, would have argued that my affective filter was set too high). Hence, Merrill Swain’s case for the value of forced output prompted a reappraisal, on my part, of Krashen’s input hypothesis, although too late to kick-start my fossilised B2 Spanish.

More recently, however, the pendulum might seem to be swinging back. The advent of the so-called usage-based theories of language acquisition, argued by the likes of Michael Tomasello and Nick Ellis among others, which foreground the effect on the neural ‘stuff’ of massive exposure to patterned input, would seem to vindicate at least some aspects of Krashen’s input hypothesis – i.e. that exposure triggers acquisition.

Krashen himself seems to have distanced himself from SLA theorising (although not conceding in the least to the barrage of criticisms his views have attracted). His main preoccupation now is the development of first language literacy, where he is a vociferous advocate of whole language approaches, entirely consistent with his scepticism about the value of learning as opposed to acquisition.

The question remains, though: is the influence of Krashen overrated? Or, more specifically, have I overrated it in the A-Z?