Rethinking AI’s Role in Education: Purpose and Questions

I’ve recently attended an event in which there was very brief talk followed by dinner with other educators. In addition to general conversations about the current educational scenario, the main point was to discuss the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in education. The guest speaker was brief, and he was not there to lecture, but to raise some interesting points as he’s got access to data in both the public and the private sector of primary and secondary education in Brazil. This is not something that we, educators around the globe, haven’t discussed in the past year extensively, and some of the topics that were raised in the follow-up discussion can be easily identified: the need for better teacher education to incorporate new technology, the lack of infra-structure to allow for equitable access in the country, academic dishonesty, and some pointers on how teachers have been using AI effectively in their lessons. All valid points that should be debated more and more often. Yet, there’s one thing that I’ve been doing some thinking about so much that it could be an interesting point to put into writing. It’s been a very long time since I last wrote in this space, and I’m not even sure anyone still follows this blog, but the conversations I was able to have in the comments were always productive and helped me frame my thoughts differently, so here I am again.

The burning question is whether we’re taking the debate where we should take it. We have are witnessing the birth of technology that was able to impress us given how human-like it is. Text generated by ChatGPT back in November 2022 was so impressive because it was easy for us to forget that we were talking to a machine. What was more impressive was the results it got from exams that humans themselves failed. In the beginning the discussions revolved around the death of the English essay, or the fact that now students wouldn’t bother to learn anything – we should, some claimed, ban technology from schools or go back to oral exams and in-class assessments only. To be fair, I guess anything that is so disruptive to well-established practices is prone to causing such fears, and this is not entirely a bad thing. When COVID first appeared, many people (myself included) were overtly cautious until there was a better understanding of how the virus works. When Generative AI made it debut in education, it was still such a new thing with such potential for disruption on well-established practices that such concerns are, in my view, valid to a certain extent.

It is a fact that education takes its time to evolve and catch up to new technology. The picture on the left was taken from a report about the prospects of education in 2030 published by UNESCO (I can’t find the link for the life of me!) and it illustrates well what happens when there’s any disruption in the process. I think this happens because in education we’re working with the most precious thing in people’s lives: their children. No one wants to gamble their children’s future into a fad, and we’ve seen quite few of those in the past 20 years or so. Nevertheless, the fact that Generative AI has caused such an uproar not only in the world of education, makes me think that this is might be something more than a fad. Current uses of AI in education, from individualized learning to materials writing, should be taken more seriously as a viable tool that will soon be part of what we do in schools around the world.

My question is whether the focus is right. Yes, AI can help us do a lot of the things we currently do faster, more effectively, and even improve the current practice. However, is this what we should be doing? Any failing system tries to produce more of what it does when it’s failing. AI helps us analyze more and more data generated from standardized tests. It helps us categorize such data and create what we call an individual learning path to learners so they can perform better in those very same standardized exams. Is this what we want? Shouldn’t we go back to the purpose of school and the world that lies ahead given the technological advances, thoroughly revise them, and try our best to modify what we do? Are we simply substituting old practices with new tools, or even augmenting such practices? Is that all?

This might not be a question all over the world, but in a country as large as Brazil, with all the hurdles to reach all students and teachers, poor infra-structure and connectivity, lack of professional development opportunities, the more we try to promote the old system with new practices, I fear we’re simply adding stress to the system. What is it that will allow students to thrive in the world they will face? Do we accomplish that by shoving content down students’ throats in a such a frantic pace? How can we add rigor, or how can we ensure that we are indeed focusing on learning when there’s absolutely no time to do what needs to be done? In the past few years, a lot has been discussed about what we should add to education, conversations about how implementing this or that will benefit teachers and learners. Very few discussions have been had about what we should cross out, scratch, delete from the curriculum. Perhaps the transformation AI is causing in the world will lead us to a more concerted discussion about what to stop doing as it’s meaningless in today’s world. Do we really want to do more of what we have been doing up to now? It’s taken us thus far, but is it what we need to keep advancing? Perhaps this is the moment in which we can benefit about the advances in the science of learning and focus on what’s best for learning. Maybe AI can lead us to focus on the most important thing in the teaching and learning environment: the relationship between the teacher and the learner. If we ask the right questions, new technologies can help us make learning more human again.

Escolhas, escolas e caminhos

Que horas preciso acordar amanhã? Quantos alarmes vou colocar para tocar? Acordo no primeiro, ou aperto o soneca? O que vou comer no café da manhã? Aliás, terei tempo de tomar café da manhã? E que roupa vou vestir? Será que precisarei levar um casaco ou não? Escolhas. Muitas escolhas, aliás. Escolher faz parte do seu dia quer você queira ou não e só aprendemos a fazer escolhas quando, bem, precisamos fazer escolhas. Ao optarmos pelo restaurante X ao invés da lanchonete Y, por exemplo, estamos pensando ativamente sobre nossas opções, levando em consideração os resultados possíveis e entendemos que essa pequena escolha terá uma consequência que precisaremos lidar, como a conta que precisaremos pagar.

Quando não precisamos fazer escolhas, alguém as faz por nós. E quando alguém faz as escolhas, acabamos perdendo nossa individualidade.

Fazer escolhas exige habilidades essenciais para nossa vida profissional e pessoal, mas você provavelmente conhece pessoas que não têm capacidade ou vontade de decidir. Isso também é normal, é um mecanismo de fuga natural que temos. Quando alguma outra pessoa toma a decisão por mim, eu não preciso me responsabilizar ou carregar alguma culpa caso o resultado daquela decisão não seja satisfatório – posso até mesmo usar o famoso “bom, quem decidiu isso não fui eu”. Já quando eu faço a escolha, não há ninguém mais que eu possa responsabilizar a não ser eu mesmo. Essa capacidade de tomar decisões e fazer escolhas é essencial para o desenvolvimento de liderança, e deveria ser muito bem trabalhada em nosso desenvolvimento cognitivo e emocional, não é mesmo?

 

Sabemos que a hierarquia formal, apesar de ainda existir, sofre por uma grande transformação em muitas indústrias no mercado profissional. Podemos ter um chefe, um diretor, um gerente, mas a liderança não é estática. Um profissional recém-chegado à empresa pode se tornar o líder de um projeto, ou um mesmo projeto pode ter vários líderes diferentes em suas diferentes etapas, de acordo com os pontos fortes de cada um na equipe. Para sermos capazes de conhecermos nossos pontos fortes e fracos, precisamos aprender um pouco mais sobre nós mesmos. Precisamos aprender nossos gostos e vontades, precisamos ser capazes de ponderar o momento de falar e o momento de calar, o momento de criticar e o momento de elogiar. Precisamos aprender a fazer escolhas de uma forma crítica.

Essa capacidade de fazer escolhas críticas é um dos benefícios do trabalho com o pensamento crítico. Porém, vemos que a escolarização acaba por diminuir cada vez mais, com o avançar dos anos acadêmicos, com a necessidade de uma escolha por parte do indivíduo. Isso se torna muito evidente a partir do ensino fundamental 2 e apenas piora com o passar dos anos, até chegarmos ao ensino médio. Quem toma todas as decisões em sala é o professor, seja por vontade própria ou por imposição da escola. É uma grave crise de confiança na capacidade dos jovens de tomarem uma decisão e, por isso, seria melhor decidirmos por eles.

Decidimos o que precisam e o que não precisam fazer na escola, decidimos que interesses alheios aos acadêmicos são inferiores aos acadêmicos, que não serão capazes de ganhar a vida enquanto artistas ou atletas e que, por isso, devem fazer apenas aquilo que lhes é cobrado: estudar para passar em uma prova (quantos de vocês já ouviram a frase, “você só tem que fazer isso na vida”?). Na maioria das escolas, sequer permite-se que o jovem escolha o horário que pode ir ao banheiro. É o professor quem decide. É o professor quem decide se o aluno pode ou não aprender algo com o colega, se pode ou não sentar em determinado lugar na sala, se pode beber água ou não e, em alguns casos, até mesmo se precisa copiar ou não a matéria do quadro. Todas essas decisões, em uma época de tamanha transformação cognitiva e emocional não pode gerar algo diferente de conflitos, com os jovens não vendo a hora de sair da escola.

Que tal repensar nossa forma de educar? Que tal passar a confiar que os jovens são capazes de fazerem escolhas?

O irônico é que pedimos que esses jovens estejam prontos para decidir o que querem fazer da vida, que saibam o que gostariam de fazer enquanto profissão, que sejam capazes de decidir o presidente do país e que possam escolher onde gostariam de estudar sem ensiná-los a tomar decisões e a fazer escolhas. Não se aprende a fazer escolhas de forma automática e natural apenas com o passar dos anos. Quando a única escolha que exigimos dos jovens é sobre as letras A, B, C, D e E, como podemos esperar que façam qualquer outra escolha de forma racional e consciente?

 

É preciso reimaginar a escola. Reinventar. Repensar objetivos e expectativas em relação à educação. Sem isso, continuaremos a preparar jovens para o mundo em que seus pais entraram no mercado de trabalho, um mundo pré-Internet, antes da revolução que estamos vivendo atualmente. Para que mundo nossos jovens devem ser preparados?

Educação Reflexiva

Apesar de já ter inúmeros textos publicados em inglês sobre educação, resolvi que é o momento de também começar a publicar em português. Portanto, aqui na página (que será reformulada), você agora poderá seguir um blog em inglês e este recém criado blog em português. Como? Bem, basta clicar no link com o título Educação Reflexiva, que será onde os posts em português aparecerão. Já o Doing Some Thinking continuará a ser o nome do blog para os posts em inglês.

Gostaria de iniciar com um convite para você conhecer um pouco mais sobre minhas ideias relacionadas à educação. Sinta-se à vontade para comentar, discordar e dialogar nos comentários. Vamos começar?

Eu acredito que a educação verdadeira não é algo que aprendemos apenas dentro da escola, que hoje temos acesso à inúmeras fontes de informação e que precisamos aprender a usá-las. Se você já passou de sua fase escolar, vai concordar que tudo o que aprendemos na escola não foi suficiente para sua vida profissional. Precisamos aprender constantemente e cada vez mais rápido. As demandas e os problemas que precisamos resolver aparecem em uma velocidade proporcional à velocidade que solucionamos os problemas antigos, e o acesso à informação na ponta de nossos dedos faz com que consigamos resolver problemas antigos cada vez mais rápido. É um ciclo sem fim e que criou novas necessidades para todos.

Acredito que a escola deve ser um local onde devemos nos importar cada vez mais com o COMO aprender do que com O QUE aprender. Mas ainda engatinhamos nesse aspecto, não é mesmo? Ainda vemos um currículo extenso de informações a serem passadas para alunos regurgitarem o pouco que conseguiram memorizar para uma prova sem ser capazes de realizar a mesma prova 3 semanas depois. Será que isso realmente funciona? Será que em um mundo onde aprendemos em qualquer lugar, o ambiente escolar ainda precisa ser uma porta para o passado, onde muitas vezes tecnologias modernas como um celular e a internet são proibidos? Eu acredito que não. Obviamente, trazer essa realidade para a sala de aula gera novos problemas, mas não seria o papel da escola exatamente nos ensinar a resolver problemas?

Acredito também que muito poderia mudar se optássemos por olhar para escolas não como centros de ensino, mas sim como CENTROS DE APRENDIZAGEM. Não parece muita coisa, mas muda exatamente o foco do que é feito na escola. O ato de ensinar foi criado e difundido com base em uma metodologia que permitisse a reprodução em massa em uma época onde o acesso à informação era restrito. Portanto, a importância da figura de um professor que estava lá para transmitir a informação era vital. Hoje, o papel do professor não é mais esse. Hoje podemos nos permitir colocar a APRENDIZAGEM como centro do universo escolar. Diferente do ato de ensinar, o aprender não é linear, não existe em caixinhas separadas e se permite falhar e tentar novamente. Sabemos disso e experimentamos isso em todas as esferas de nossa vida, exceto na vida escolar. Falhar ao tentar tocar uma música no violão é uma etapa do aprendizado. Falhar em uma prova de matemática é um atestado de incompetência. Falhar em ganhar um jogo em uma competição esportiva é natural e um sinal de que você deve, a partir daquele momento, seguir adiante e progredir. Falhar ao obter aprovação em um ano escolar é dizer que você deve começar do início tudo de novo daquele ano, como se todo o seu esforço e aprendizado pudessem e devessem ser jogados fora.

Será que não é hora de, enquanto sociedade, repensarmos o papel da escola e do que temos enquanto objetivo com essa etapa tão importante em nossas vidas? Afinal, o mundo industrial já foi deixado para trás. Quanto tempo ainda vai levar para entendermos que a escola precisa preparar um cidadão diferente?

 

Do conversation-driven lessons make any sense? – Part 3

“But, quiet, my fair lady. I shall now tell the tale of the brave Sir Dante. This brave knight travelled great lengths to seek his justice and help his king defeat an evil wizard who had overthrown the king and sent the princess far, far away, to a land where no one had ever returned from. But brave Sir Dante was no ordinary knight, and he was certain he was the bravest of the brave knights in the real, and so he was adamant to make the king have his princess back and restore order in the kingdom. If only he’d known the hardships he was going to go through. I will tell you all, if you have time to listen to a fine story. Just bring me some soup and sit next to me…”

We all enjoy a good story, don’t we?

When writing was still a privilege of the few (has it changed, anyhow?), traditions, cultural facts, and knowledge was passed down generation after generation as stories told from the elders to the younglings. They were responsible for keeping the traditions, and for ensuring a people’s culture was not forgotten. Those responsible for maintaining the tradition didn’t do so by the mere repetition of facts – they did so through the artifice of stories. Stories are relevant to the brain, stories make it easier for you to learn, to memorise and reproduce data. Tell someone a good story, and it will stick to their minds as if they were the ones who came up with it.

It’s all related to how we create memory. It’s not just about studying hard and being cold about the facts. If it were so, rote learning was probably going to be the most effective way of learning something. Memory requires a lot of our cognition, but that can only truly be retrievable if it’s accompanied by some sort of emotion. If you want learning to last, your emotions must also have come into play. How many of us vividly remember bedtime stories we were told years and years ago? Is it just because the same stories were repeated over and over again?

If that were the case, we would also probably remember much of what we were taught at school as we are constantly revisiting a concept before going further into it. But why is it that, more often than not, that kind of information doesn’t stick? Why is it that no matter how many times we teach the present perfect, students still make mistakes using it correctly? Why is it that they struggle to use accurate vocabulary after so many lessons and repetitions of it – even when we use personal examples? Why can’t they make it part of their repertoire?

There seems to be a clear difference between being able to teach something and ensuring learning has taken place. If we truly want our learning to be memorable and retrievable, we ought to understand how learning works. From a cognitive perspective, we need to remember that new learning builds on what we already know. If we treat each point in our lessons as independent from other points that had been taught, students will treat any new learning as something that requires its own little box instead of using that to build on what they’d known. But what else?

The other thing we need to remember is that we are likely to remember anything that has triggered an emotional response, be it joy, fear, love, hate or disgust. We don’t need a lot of repetitions of things that make us feel something to learn them. Our emotions help us building learning. The reason why we remember those bedtime stories is not just the repetition, but the feeling we experienced when those stories were being read to us. The feeling of being loved by our parents, the way their soothing voice made us feel, the cuddling, and the feeling that we were so important to someone that they’d dedicate their time just to be with us. This is not part of reason, it’s all in our emotions. But it’s the glue that makes learning stick. The stronger we feel, the easier it is for us to remember things.

And now I ask you to think about the conversations you have with people who truly matter to you. This is not the same as small talk nor work-related subjects. I’m talking about real and relevant conversations about things that truly matter to you. When we have real conversations about things that truly matter to us, we feel that our opinions matter, we are way more focussed on the conversation, and we assimilate a lot more of it. Yes, we are paying closer attention to it, but not just because we have to, but because it makes us feel good. We are gregarious beings, and we are programmed to feel good when others pay attention to what we have to say.

If you think about conversation-driven lessons, teachable moments, and focusing on language that emerges in class, you’re on the right track to have real, meaningful, and relevant conversations in class. It’s much different than simply talking about what the coursebook asked of your students. This is why we usually remember a lot more of the talks we have during the coffee break of sessions than what was said in the session itself. It’s not that the content isn’t important – it’s how the delivery makes us feel.

This is yet one more reason why conversation-driven lessons make sense. They allow learners to feel they are true participants in the process, they feel they belong in the conversation, they feel valued and, consequently, remembering all that was involved in that situation is actually something they want to do. All those feelings are the responsible for creating the emotional trigger we need in a learning environment. We learn better when we feel good. If you want to find out more reasons why conversation-driven lessons make sense, you can read part 1 and part 2. And join the conversation yourself in the comments below!

On Native Speakerism

I’ve learned English as a foreign language. I only travelled abroad to put my English to the test after I’d been teaching it – also as a foreign language – for quite a few years. The large majority of my English teachers were also ‘non-native speakers’ (and I use the inverted commas for the same reason Holliday does) and, to be very honest, this has never been an issue to me nor to the people who were learning the language in my classroom or language institute. If anything, I’m thankful to each and everyone of them, who have inspired me to be the teacher I am today. I’ve never thought any less of them based on their nationality – I’ve always seen them for what they were as professionals: teachers – period.

Photo by João Silas on Unsplash

Bear in mind that this was quite a while ago, and having the chance to listen to ‘native speakers’ was only possible through films and songs on the radio. There was no Internet to help us out – and even buying books in English was quite expensive. This means that listening to a ‘native speaker’ was quite rare, and still, as a student, neither I nor my parents back then felt that I should be learning from someone whose English was their native language. Please, allow me to add that my parents were foreigners themselves.

The label is highly disquieting, but has to be used in order to seek to undo it. Cumbersome though it may be, I therefore continue to place ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’ in inverted commas both to signal ‘so-called’ and to indicate a burden that has to be endured until the issue can be undone.

Holliday, A., in Native-speakerism: Taking the Concept Forward and Achieving Cultural Belief

It was only when I started teaching English that I was introduced to the concept of native speakerism, which is defined by Holliday as “a pervasive ideology within ELT, characterized by the belief that ‘native-speaker’ teachers represent a ‘Western culture’ from which spring the ideals both of the English language and of English language teaching methodology”. The first thing that comes to mind is the use of the -ism suffix, in itself a derogatory. It virtually puts the idea of native speakerism on the same level as other -isms we still see as pervasive in 2017: racism, sexism, chauvinism, and what not. This makes it so heavy that it cannot be taken just as something that should be dismissed out of hand.

Yet, there’s something discomforting in the mere idea of the superiority of the native speaker when it comes to teaching a foreign language that goes way beyond the usage of the term in itself. It is something that makes me wonder about the widespread use of the term and the binary view that this sort of debate usually brings about. It’s as if there’s no room for further discussion on a matter that should be discussed and better understood. If we talk openly about it and understand its roots, it might be easier to find a way to show people just how wrong they have been. It’s 2017 and we still see cases of racism taking place almost on a daily basis – an issue that has been thoroughly discussed. But some people just fail to see other people as individuals that ought to be respected for who they are and the way they are – these people still classify other people as, well, others. When there’s a distinction between ourselves and the others, the cultural bias will be there for years (decades?) to come and nothing will change. Discussions on any topic should never begin with an attack to the person – this is the way to ensure that you won’t have a fruitful discussion at all. So where should we begin?

English Teachers

As I said before, I’d never even considered thinking less of teachers of English from this or that nationality until I became a teacher myself and heard such prejudice from some of my colleagues. In all honesty, that never made me question the competence of my teachers, but it somehow made me question my own competence to teach the language. One thing that I noticed quickly, though, was how much the very same teachers who complained about such a distinction (prejudice?) valued ‘native speakers’ themselves when they were to spend their hard earned money on their professional development. As Thornbury wrote:

Ironically,  it is typically native-speakers who are the ones doing the hand-wringing: there is a dominant discourse trope in a lot of current ‘critical’ theory that consists of native-speaker academics condemning the pervasiveness of native-speakerism, while urging those who are oppressed by it to fling it off and assert their own legitimate identities as users, and hence owners, of global English. It’s as if the poison and the antidote are being administered by the same hand).

Thornbury, S., in N is for Native Speakerism

I must say that I know quite a few ‘native speakers’ who heavily oppose to the idea that the mere fact that your passport is enough to grant you your teaching qualification. They tend to value ‘non-native speakers’ when they attend conferences in countries where English is taught as a foreign language much more enthusiastically than those teachers from that very same country. I myself have already overheard a conversation in a conference I was speaking that was exactly like this:

Teacher A: So, which workshop are you going to attend now?

Teacher B: Oh, I’m going to see this gringo‘s talk – Henrick Oprea. It’s better than attending a session presented by a Brazilian, I suppose.

That interaction illustrates that, unfortunately, the idea of native speakerism is spread exactly by some of those who are on the receiving end of the prejudice and should be the ones fighting it.

Have we, teachers of English as a foreign language who happen not to have been born in an English speaking world, got so little self-esteem? Could it also be a matter of taking our peers for granted in a way that we believe they can’t add anything to our practice, which is why we have a natural inclination to praise the foreigner? Whatever it is, it seems to me that even though we have to discuss the matter a lot further, more often than not we fall prey to the trap of the us versus them argument, which does more harm than good to finding a solution to this whole debate.

In addition to the world of conferences, we still see many ‘non-native speakers’ criticising their peers on their command of the language, their accent, and limited vocabulary. These are not learners, but teachers who say it openly (except to the person they’re talking about) to anyone who might want to hear it. This, obviously, resonates with students, which takes me to the second point.

The clientele

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” This is a law of propaganda, but it seems to have perpetrated our world of language teaching and learning. It is not uncommon, nowadays, for one to hear things such as, “you can only learn a foreign language if you travel to a country where the language is spoken,” and “find yourself a native speaker to teach you as they know the nuances of the language in a way that no non-native could ever grasp.” The thing here is that students have been told these things by so many people now that they merely reproduce these words and end up believing them. This has also got to do with the fact that we are all experts in finding something to put the blame on instead of acknowledging we haven’t done our share.

We all know that learning a foreign language is nothing to be made light of. Learning involves effort, and not all students are willing to go the extra mile to actually learn a foreign language. Instead of conceding that they’ve been failing to do what it takes to learn, it’s easier (and part of our self-protection instinct) to give in to what people who might not have a clue of what they’re saying and repeating it to themselves: “I can’t learn English in Brazil/Russia/Japan because it is only possible for anyone to learn a language if one lives for a while in a country where that language is spoken” and “I need to find myself a native speaker to teach me.”

This doesn’t happen only in the world of ELT – we’re not that special. This is how the human brain functions. The issue here is that we (‘non-native speakers’) do let these things happen by putting ourselves in a position of inferiority and allowing our students to see it. Some teachers, despite their training and education, believe that the only reason why they can teach the language is because they’ve spent some time abroad to truly learn it.

In a country where language teaching is not seen as education, business people look at ELT as any other business, and they’re in it for the profit. If their target audience believes that learning from ‘native speakers’ is best, they’ll da whatever they need to do to give their clients what they want. If students praise ‘native speakers’ as teachers, this is what business owners will go after. More often than not, owners aren’t educators like teachers. Many of them couldn’t care less about training or education – they’re interested in attracting students, making a profit no matter what, and that’s it.

Isn’t it time we started reaching out to students, then, instead of criticising school owners for doing what they are in the business for? Wouldn’t this allow students to see that they’ve been led to believe in myths and, consequently, help them make better choices when it comes to learning English?

The Approaches and Methods

When we consider the approaches and methods for teaching English to students of other languages, we can’t help but notice that we’ve got a whole bunch of ideas and practices that have been developed for an ESL (English as a Second Language) environment simply imported to an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) environment. This has a huge impact in the way that we teach. For instance, up till recently, L1 was considered taboo in an EFL setting. Why? Because according to the principles of CLT (among others), one needs to learn a language by being spoken to and only using the target language. This makes perfect sense in a multi-lingual learning environment where it’s virtually impossible to require that an English teacher speak all the different languages their learners speak.

The fact that this has been transferred to an EFL setting, where classes tend to be for students who share the same L1, has also helped spreading the concept that EFL classes only work if no L1 is ever used. Let’s face it, such a view of language teaching certainly is beneficial to those who are proficient in the target language and contribute to spread the belief that one’s command of the language is the only indicator of success in teaching that language. Although I strongly believe that English teachers should constantly work on their language, this doesn’t mean that it is the only (not even the best) indicator of successful teaching.

We can go back to the part of the English teachers and add that it is extremely hard for a ‘non-native speaker’ to have their peers listening to their way of teaching, or to write an sell a book on methodology, for instance. English teachers still resort (almost exclusively) to books written by ‘native speakers’ to base and justify their practices. How can we expect to change the game when we deem our very own non-native speakers SLA researchers less important (or even less knowledgeable) than those from abroad? Isn’t it time we also did something about this as well?

Conclusion

We can’t substitute one kind of prejudice for another. Instead, we ought to shed some light on the matter of native speakerism and help people see this from the perspective that truly should matter: if you want to be a teacher, you should learn how to teach. It all comes down to this, after all. Your nationality shouldn’t matter at all. ‘Native speakers’ can be outstanding teachers, and so can ‘non-native speakers’. At the end of the day, it is how much you’ve helped your learners that matters. A lot has already been written about the benefits and the drawbacks that each one of them bring to the table. However, how does ELT benefit from trying to find a winner in this discussion? ‘Non-native speakers’ sometimes brag about the fact that linguists have already stated that ‘non-native speakers’ are better teachers in a world where English has become a global language in which non-native speakers far outnumber native speakers. How helpful is that, honestly? Where do we draw the line there?

To my mind, the discussion is only valid on account of the prejudice it entails. Just like any kind of prejudice, we ought to discuss this matter once it’s been brought to our attention. However, if you ask me, the world would be a much nicer place to live in if we just understood that a teacher is a teacher and that’s that. There’s no such thing as where you’re from defining whether or not you should get the job. If you’re a teacher, and if you have the necessary qualifications, that’s what counts towards hiring, for instance. But I’m not that naïve, obviously. If we still see cases of racism, sexism, prejudice against LGBTQ+, prejudice against women in the world, it’s not just by saying that this shouldn’t happen that it will cease – I wish words had that power. In the meantime, we could benefit from it if we also avoided fighting prejudice with hatred. A teacher is a teacher. That’s how it should be. And notice I haven’t even said that an English teacher is an English teacher – but that’s something for another post.

Phew! Quite a long post and against all the best practices of blogging, but it hardly barely scratches the surface of such a complex topic. If you’ve made it to the end, add your comment so that we can think further about the topic.

A will or a whim?

Photo by Amaury Salas on Unsplash

We are all able to learn what we want to learn and we will stay at it as long as it takes until we’ve developed our skills, or amassed as much knowledge as we want to. Regardless of lessons, if we want to learn, we will. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. We’ll manage to find the book that we need, to talk to the people we need to talk to, and eventually it will all fall into place. This doesn’t mean we will know all we want to. Learning involves effort, and the desire to be able to do something alone doesn’t necessarily entails a clear view of what is needed to develop a certain skill. For instance, one might wish to play the guitar as well as Eric Clapton, but this very one might not be willing to dedicate him or herself as many hours a day to learn how to do that. This, actually, is a good way to differentiate a will from a whim.

In days gone by, there was very little students could choose to learn from for the mere fact that there was very little available to them in terms of sheer amount of information. Students relied on what they could get from their peers, teachers, and parents. This meant that it was much harder for them to truly know what they wanted to learn. Just the same, it was very easy for teachers to decide what was important for students to learn. However, the funny thing is that teachers themselves have always had very little say in what they may choose or not to teach – in most cases, they ought to abide by a pre-established curriculum and just make sure all is dealt with. That means that it isn’t even what teachers consider important for students to learn that we bring into the classroom – it is what other people once considered relevant, be them the textbook writer or the curriculum designer. Would teachers also choose to teach their students different things if they were made to reflect upon the kind of impact and responsibility they have on the building of a citizen?

Currently, information is everywhere, and so is the possibility for learning. Schools, teachers, students, and even parents have already realised that learning takes many forms. Why is it that we still fight the need for a major shift in the way that we approach teaching, which is the one element in the teaching-learning dichotomy that we can control? Is it just fear of change and failure? Have we just reached the point in which our culture of tests and failures have made us fear necessary change?

In detriment of all the advances and the myriad possibilities in the hands of those with a mobile-Internet combo, we still choose to take the easy way out and walk into obsolescence little by little. We still choose to take the path of least resistance, the one that will cause us less trouble and inquiries from students, parents and teachers alike. We seem to wilfully ignore the fact that humans are capable to learn what they want to learn. We ignore that access to information has made it less and less relevant for us to tell people what they want to learn. We still insist on teaching what we want others to learn. And we choose to be blissfully ignorant to the fact that teachers are a lot more relevant than they might want to be in any learning scenario simply by choosing not to take advantage of all the opportunities out there to teach in a much more meaningful manner. We talk a lot about changing education – but for many this is just a whim, it’s not a will. What do you think?

Accountability: the teacher and the learner

On my last post, I suggested that the best way to focus on students’ learning is by focusing on teaching. The rationale behind this is that we can’t control someone else’s actions or thoughts, but we can control our own. This means that if we pay attention to what we can actually do in order to make learning more effective, we’ll end up being a lot more helpful to our learners than by trying out many different techniques and methods just because they are (or have become) mainstream. We still can’t fully understand how we learn, what really happens in our brains apart from the synapses and all the wiring in the brain. We may come to the point in which data, not guesses (even educated ones), will be the driving force behind our actions. However, until then, we might be better off by thinking and reflecting on our teaching practices and on what happens in our classrooms, with our learners, than by trying out the next big thing. The first thing teachers should learn is that what they do matters. If teachers don’t believe this, they’re in the wrong place. But just how much does it really matter? How can we measure educational success? Neil Mercer says that,

The educational success students achieve is only partly under their own control, and only partly under the control of their teachers. This is where the sociocultural concept of ‘scaffolding’ … is useful. The essence of this concept, as developed by Bruner (1986), Wood (1988) and others, is that an effective teacher provides the kind of intellectual support which enables learners to make intellectual achievements they would never accomplish alone; and one way they do so is by using dialogue to guide and support the development of understanding. (Neil Mercer – Language for teaching a language)

Scaffolding is what allows learners to grow. But each learner may need a different kind of scaffolding. Can you figure it out? | Photo on Flickr by Anthony Shemmans

Apparently, the concept of conversation-driven lessons and scaffolding goes a long way. But who would have argued against that? It is not hard to think about our own learning experiences, the ones in which we had a good teacher by our side. This, by the way, is one of the topics that sparks teachers’ interest in training sessions – reflecting about their own learning experiences. When we think about our own learning experiences, when we have the benefit of hindsight, it’s a lot easier to see what has truly made a difference and what was only fun. How many  are able to think back of a funny teacher whose teaching didn’t really stick, or a funny teacher whose lessons are so ingrained that you find it hard to separate the person from the classes? It’s not humour that is the defining factor for successful or unsuccessful teachers. At the end of the day, what truly matters is how much effort and attention you’ve put into that lesson of yours, and how thoughtful you’d been when planning the lesson for those specific learners. What matters is how often you reflected on the activities that you tried out in classes and the effect these activities had on each one of those students sitting there in front of you – or next to you if you’re that lucky.

This is one of the most important lessons I’ve learnt as a teacher. Being a teacher means caring about the time and effort your students are putting in by being there in front of you. I may not be the sole responsible for their learning, but I can’t shun the responsibility of being partly responsible for their learning. When this thought dawns on new teachers, they stop asking questions such as, “but why would I do that when most students just don’t seem to care?” or “why don’t they learn it if I taught them?” We do what we do because we are aware of our role and we are to be held accountable for all the things we choose to do in a class. And if students don’t seem to learn what you’ve taught them, perhaps it’s time you started reflecting a bit more about what you could do to help them instead of asking questions you can’t possibly answer.

Being accountable for what we do also means coming to terms with our own shortcomings. This is the moment you start thinking about developing and becoming a better professional. Accountability can do many things for you – one of them is helping you decide what kind of a teacher you want to be. Are you the kind that looks for excuses elsewhere, or are you able to look into your own world and find out what’s wrong? Are you capable of teaching the same subject differently to better help each group of learners, or will you simply do things the way you’ve always done and blame students for their not learning as effectively? Being a teacher means being on the move. How far are you willing to go?

*Neil Mercer – Language for teaching a language – in English Language Teaching in its Social Context

How do you focus on your students’ learning?

Lately, it’s become mainstream to state that we should focus on students’ learning. By saying that, we account for the obvious expected outcome of a teaching & learning environment – students’ learning. Currently, with all the debate on the impact of technology in the lives of children everywhere, it’s pretty obvious that we’re more likely to read and witness the promotion of change in education by the advent of technology. If used properly, it allows us to put students’ on the driver’s seat of their learning. We can get them to actually do things instead of just passively absorb content from the teacher or their course books.

Out of focus: It’s very easy to lose focus of the big picture when we stand too close to what we want to prove.

There is also the idea of multiple intelligences and how it can be applied in the classroom given that we’re able to cater for different learning styles much more easily now that we’ve got access to the wonders of the myriad gadgets that are now part and parcel of a number of students’ school materials. And let’s not forget that criticism to tests as a means of assessment abound, and the notion that tests don’t teach is widespread. The main problem with this is that it seems to make a lot of sense. But why would this be a problem?

To begin with, in education we are dealing with the brain – something we don’t really know much about. In a recent National Geographic article about the brain, Professor Lichtman of Harvard University makes clear how little we have advanced in brain research by telling us that he usually introduces his course about the brain by asking students, “if understanding everything we need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked?” The answer? 3 inches. When we think about how little we know, and we take into account the idea of intuitive heuristics, whose essence is described by Daniel Kahneman in the following very short sentence:

When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. (Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow)

It might just be that the difficult question we’re facing these days is exactly the one that Sir Ken Robinson asked in one of his TED Talks. “How do we educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21st Century given that we can’t anticipate the economy will look like at the end of next week?” Whether you like it or not, school and its purpose has to go through some serious revision. Another highly acclaimed advocate for change in education, Professor Sugata Mitra, tells us a story of where present day schooling comes from and what its early-day purposes were. He’s got a very strong opinion when he states that schools are outdated in the world we currently live in and the urgent need for change. And I don’t think we can argue against this point – the current system of education doesn’t suit the world we live in anymore. Hence, our need for change.

This might be exactly the difficult question we have to answer: how do we change our current educational system to cater for the needs of our present day society? The truth is that there’s no simple answer, but I’d argue that a lot of it involves a better understanding of how we learn. If we are unable to proper answer this question, very little will actually change. On the bright side, many qualified people have something to say about it, and not only about where we should be headed, but also a couple of things in relation to all the changes we’ve been experiencing as a society, with connectedness all around us. However, all that glitters is not gold, and before we actually buy into this or that idea, we should investigate further. It is likely that we may be supporting something that has little evidence of being true.

If we’re going to move forward, we will have to admit that a one-size-fits-all model of education is doomed to fail the majority of students and teachers. Let’s also admit that while we have plenty of beliefs, dogma, and rhetoric about how to prepare students for the future, we have little solid information about how to do this successfully. We have no idea about whether to limit or encourage their access to social networking, computer games, television and other forms of media. In the absence of real data, teachers and administrators rely on popular books by nonscientists who generally misinterpret the little data that do exist. The bottom line is that we don’t know if these activities are hurting their cognitive and interpersonal development or better preparing them for the world ahead. (Louis Cozolino – The Social Neuroscience of Education)

Let’s have a closer look at this sentence: “In the absence of real data, teachers and administrators rely on popular books by nonscientists who generally misinterpret the little data that do exist.” The truth is that we, as human beings, have a natural tendency to rely on our intuition rather than analyze a problem and give it as much time and effort as it deserves, as Daniel Kahneman states in his book (Thinking Fast and Slow). This is why we end up going with the flow and failing to further look into a point and give it the consideration it deserves. For instance, how many teachers blindly accept the theory of multiple intelligences as being true without actually having read about it? Is it just because the way that people sell it makes sense? Is it because it helps us with the self-esteem of learners who struggle at school? How about delving into this issue by reading this article, which starts by saying that:

This article reviews evidence for multiple intelligences theory, the Mozart effect theory, and emotional intelligence theory and argues that despite their wide currency in education these theories lack adequate empirical support and should not be the basis for educational practice. Each theory is compared to theory counterparts in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuro- science that have better empirical support. The article considers possible reasons for the appeal of these 3 theories and concludes with a brief rationale for examining theories of cognition in the light of cognitive neuroscience research findings. (Lynn Waterhouse – Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review)

Or perhaps this passage from this other article (which leads you to the article shared above) might also be of interest:

It is fair to say that among academic scholars who study intelligence there is very little acceptance of Gardner’s theory due to a lack of empirical evidence for it. A critical review of the topic by Lynn Waterhouse in 2006 found no published studies at all that supported the validity of the theory. Even though Gardner first made his theory public in 1983, the first empirical study to test the theory was not published until 23 years later (Visser, et al., 2006a) and the results were not supportive. Multiple intelligences theory can hardly be described as scientifically generative. (Scott McGreal – The illusory theory of multiple intelligences)

What we should take into account in order to move forward is that all that we currently know about our practice may be proven wrong in the near future as research into how we learn develops. What we should understand as educators is that there’s no simple or single answer (at least not yet) to how we learn best. This is the reason why we must never cease to learn. This is why we should take things that might seem to make sense with a pinch of salt and consider that we might as well be trying really hard to validate an opinion. What if Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences makes sense because we strive to make better connections with our learners? This is a major factor of motivation for us, humans, and this could be what leads to improvement when we claim to make use of activities that cater for different intelligences. What if this all happens when we hold conversations with our learners and, owing to this, we’re able to boost their attention and interest, thus making learning more effective? The bottom line, though, is that it doesn’t really matter. If the theory, as the articles suggest, is not valid or only good on paper, or if it is really true and valid, makes little difference at the end of the day for practical purposes.

It is only by trying to learn more about how we learn that we can adapt our teaching and ensure that we’re able to focus on our students’ learning. We don’t focus on students’ learning by playing games with them; we play games with them because we may have learned somewhere that this fosters their learning. The same end result, but with a different starting point. It is only by focussing on our teaching that we will be able to come up with strategies that will facilitate learning. In order to focus on their students’ learning, teachers must first and foremost focus on their teaching – but do so in the right way. Focussing on your teaching means understanding that learning is the expected outcome of each and every little thing you do in class. It doesn’t matter if you do so by using summative or formative assessment. What matters is whether or not you have mastered the tools you have chosen to use so as to enable learning to take place. Tests, for example, can be effective, as this study has demonstrated, but it’s all a matter of how you deal with them. The key difference in any learning setting is the teacher, and teaching isn’t simply being able to provide information to your students.

In my view, the best way to focus on your students’ learning is coming to terms with the fact that we still know very little about how we really learn something – what we’ve learnt to do is constantly reflect on our practices and experiences. This is what truly makes the difference. We must always keep an open eye for new theories, research and practice. We should be able to critically reflect on these and reach a conclusion so that we can focus on learning. Yet, we ought to understand that we cannot control someone else’s actions and thoughts. We can only control our own actions, and this is why we have to focus on what we do if we hope to help our learners. If you want to focus on your students’ learning, how about really focussing on your teaching first? Let’s talk a bit about teachers’ accountability, shall we? Maybe a possible continuation for this post.

Working with discrete vocabulary items

It’s a given that learning words in isolation is not particularly helpful when it comes to learning a foreign language. Words rarely appear in isolation when we communicate, and ELT has come a long way from the days in which vocabulary appeared as single words in a vocabulary box to the presentation of manageable language chunks. Nowadays, I don’t think it takes a lot of convincing to persuade teachers about the benefits of chunks, meaningfulness and personalisation of vocabulary. However, is there any occasion in which presenting language items out of a context can be helpful? Maybe yes, and this activity is likely to come in handy should you be forced to teach words in isolation, or in case you just feel like doing so from time to time.

Suppose you’d like your students to learn how to properly use a dictionary. What if you write a bunch of words on the board – connected to a topic of study if you use a course book, or simply random words to start a lesson – and ask them to work on the meaning of these words? Then, you get them to discuss their opinion with a partner and see if they agree or not. At this stage, give them some chunks of language (on slips of paper) to express their opinion, agree and disagree, and ask about someone’s opinion. After they’ve finished discussing, elicit from the pairs / small groups what their definitions were. Don’t tell them if they were right or wrong just yet. Instead, get them to open their dictionaries and check if their guesses were right.

Eat humble pie – There is just way too much information in a good learner’s dictionary for students to focus only on meaning. Who’s to blame when they don’t see it? | Source: Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

Most students will probably stop at the definition of the word, which is the least import piece of information a good learner’s dictionary has. Unfortunately, most students are oblivious to the plethora of information they may obtain from their dictionaries. Teachers who fail to teach students how to properly use a dictionary are also failing in one of their most important objectives: making him or herself less and less needed for providing information. So, once you get your students to check the meaning of the words, it’s time to move onto the next stage – getting them to come up with original sentences using those words they’d just checked.

Should they be struggling with their sentences, or if they happen to fail to produce accurate sentences, point them to the examples of usage in the dictionary. Have them read the example sentences and ask them to focus on the words in bold (when applicable), or the sentences which have a brief explanation of a chunk in parentheses (also, when applicable).

After having read the examples in the dictionary, ask them to correct their sentences on their own. They will hopefully be able to notice some patterns of usage from the dictionary sentences and transfer these to their own sentences. Make sure you monitor accordingly and direct their attention to certain important collocations, such as ADJECTIVE + PREPOSITION, or VERB + PREPOSITION. Write their sentences on the board, or on paper, or on any other device you may use in your teaching context, and try to keep a record of the sentences they have come up with.

The focus of such an activity is not for them to learn the discrete vocabulary item per se, but they are likely to remember some of the words you have presented anyway. To make it more meaningful and a lot more relevant, you can choose these words from songs which are trending in your country at the moment (particularly good for teenagers), words and phrases from sitcoms, series and movies, or just using the news as a source. The possibilities are endless.

Finally, you should show your learners that this is the kind of procedure they could follow when they come across unknown words from reading passages in class. This is something they could do when reading more actively in order to study English and not “simply” reading for content. Needless to say, this kind of reading is very time consuming, so it’s important that you tell them to use this strategy only for one or two paragraphs of the text.

I do believe that by doing so you’ll be helping your learners think more about the language, noticing more, and, most importantly, even though you’re teaching them words in isolation, it’s easy to see that you’ve done a lot more than just teaching the words. This is likely to make their learning more memorable and, consequently, more effective. This is just one of the ideas that I use with my learners when dealing with words “in isolation”, or when we have a quick vocabulary challenge as a warmer. Get them to work on words from songs, for instance. You’ll be surprised how often it will dawn on them that they didn’t really understand what it was that they were singing before.

How about coming up with a twist to override the system when you’re pushed into doing something you don’t think that would be so effective, such as presenting vocabulary lists from students’ course books? I bet you’ll have a lot more fun – and they will learn a lot more.

Do conversation-driven lessons make any sense? (Part 2)

Language is quite a complex system – one which we try to organise according rules and norms. One of the common ways for us to think about such organisation is prescriptively, the way many of us were taught a second or a foreign language. If we look at what David Crystal says about prescriptivism, we will see that it “is the view that one variety of the language has an inherently higher value than others, and this ought to be imposed on the whole of the speech community. The view is related especially in relation to grammar and vocabulary, and frequently with reference to pronunciation.” And here we have the three pillars of what we learn when we study a language. If we don’t learn vocabulary, we won’t be able to get our message across as other speakers of the target language won’t know what we’re saying. However, if we only know the vocabulary of a language and lack any understanding of what glues the pieces together, a.k.a. grammar, we’re likely to be unable to convey more complex thoughts and communicate something that may require further, more complex thinking. Finally, there is pronunciation, which is not the same as accent. Pronunciation is needed should you want to speak to other user of the language you’re learning. But why teach a language prescriptively? In a nutshell, it is much easier to teach something that has a fixed structure, and to a certain extent, there seems to be some logic in saying that it is easier to learn something that has a rigid structure.

There’s no fool-proof sequence that will allow you to jump head first in the sea of conversation | Photo on Flickr by Felipe Skroski

Perhaps we mistake learning a language for learning any repetitive process, which leads to the belief that a structural sequence will make things easier. Yet, memorising processes and formulas is actually more difficult than really thinking about them. But we don’t follow this pattern simply because we don’t want to uncover a more effective way – we constantly repeat the processes we’ve gone through in life simply because, well, it’s worked for us. How can we claim that something that has worked for (many of) us won’t work for students when we ourselves are living proof of the success of the current system? But let’s not forget that most people who managed to succeed did so because they were so interested in the subject that they’ve actually chosen it as a career. This is not true for most language students, who may not be motivated enough to go beyond the basic rules that prescriptive grammar teaches. Thus, they are unable to grasp the subtleties of everything they’ve learned and how it overlaps with new content instead of simply add to it; they have a hard time thinking about language more abstractly. I believe that motivation has a major role in learning per se. As Jeremy Harmer said, “one of the main tasks for teachers is to provoke interest and involvement in the subject even when students are not initially interested in it.” However, Harmer reminds us that motivation comes from within, and we can only hope that our actions and words will lead students to start prioritising the subject we’re trying to teach them.

How have we been teaching them? We think of the least expensive way to teach and learn something – following guidelines and rules. In language teaching, this takes us back to prescriptivism, which makes it easier for teachers to judge right from wrong and allows students to have something to hopelessly cling to when they try to make sense of something that they simply can’t for lack of the development of an ability to look at language from a more holistic perspective. Such need for rules is a double-edged sword as students, after a certain stage, will be unable to find them as neatly written as they have grown used to. At this stage, they can only stop grappling with the understanding of language if they’ve developed the ability to think about language more as an organism – one which does have its rules and regulations, but one where these rules and regulations should be a bit less prescriptive and a tad more descriptive – if even that. By thinking so hard about the language, students end up making it harder for them to acquire the fluency level they initially hope to achieve.

If we consider what Daniel Kahneman says about this, we realise the problem lies with the laziness of our brain. Kahneman tells us that there are two systems in our brains. Roughly speaking, System 1 is the intuitive response, the system that doesn’t really think about the events; it takes into account the experiences we’ve been through to respond to external stimulus. System 2 is where thought really takes place. This is the system that rationally validates our actions. We fool ourselves by thinking that we’re much more likely to use our System 2. We aren’t, and this passage should show you why he states this:

The defining features of System 2 … is that its operations are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluctance to invest more effort than is strictly necessary. As a consequence, the thoughts and actions that System 2 believes it has chosen are often guided by the figure of at the center of the story, System 1. However, there are vital tasks that only system 2 can perform because they require effort and acts of self-control in which the intuitions and impulses of System 1 are overcome.

By focusing on prescriptive rules, we’re getting our students to focus their attention and effort on rules that should allow them to tell right from wrong regarding their speech. What happens when you are put in a stressful situation? Instead of thinking about the rules you have learned through grammar exercises, learners tend to lose the capacity to let their monitor system, as Krashen calls it, regulate what they’re saying. Stress is an indication of a threat, so their brains will instinctively respond to this by putting their System 1 in charge. We’ll then see two kinds of students: those who don’t care about what others might think of them and will speak freely, without worrying much about proper language, and those who will simply be unable to carry out a basic conversation because they are unsure if they should use the simple present or the present continuous, or if they should use the word good or fine. I’m pretty sure most EFL teachers have had the chance to work with both kinds of learners, and my personal experience is that adults lean towards the latter.

This is where a conversation-driven lesson might help, yet again. If we encourage our students to engage in an effortful activity in class that is not simply related to answering grammar questions on a sheet of paper, we might just end up fostering their ability to allocate less energy to the daunting act of speaking through practice. As Kahneman says:

As you become more skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. […] A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs.

When we think about skills in language learning, we usually list four: reading, writing, listening and speaking. By practising speaking more frequently, you should be able to develop the three pillars of a language (grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation) for this skill in particular. This means you won’t need to make a lot of effort to both understand what happens in the process of having a conversation and trying to get your message across. You can now focus on the message, which will already require a lot from memory. As Kahneman says, “effort is required to maintain simultaneously in memory several ideas that require separate actions, or that need to be combined according to a rule.” I cannot help but think that there’s a lot more into play in an exchange of ideas between two people than grammar rules and vocabulary.

When we have a conversation with others, we need to focus on both the verbal and non-verbal cues if we are to fully understand the message. We need to be able to understand sarcasm and irony, for instance. We need to listen to what our interlocutor says and then respond. This involves a lot of effort. As teachers, we need to show our learners that they are capable of doing such things in their L1 already, and that this ability can and should be transferred to their L2 self. However, if we insist on getting them to focus on rules without actually getting them to put the rules into use, it’ll be harder for their System 2 to realise that not all that is involved in having a conversation should require so much attention and effort. By focussing on discrete items of the language, we end up teaching our learners a tendency to focus on rules instead of putting the rules into use in order to communicate. As a result, the former takes precedence over the latter and most learners freeze when they need to hold a conversation with a native speaker.

This is not the same as saying we should focus on fluency rather than accuracy. I strongly believe accuracy is paramount to the development of fluency. What I question is the way we’ve been trying to get our students to learn. It seems we’ve been repeating what has been done for the past 20 or 30 years because either because it’s easier to explain logically the steps we’re taking (first we learn this, and then we move to that, once that has been mastered, we’ll then step forward to that other topic on our list) or because this is how some highly motivated individuals have managed to learn. It may even be very logical, but who said that there’s no structure or rationale in conversation-driven lessons? And, as I said previously, there’s a huge gulf between a conversation-driven lesson and a simple conversation. If we consider the way our brains work, conversation-driven lessons might actually be a lot more logical than a structural curriculum.

Sources:

• David Crystal – The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
• Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Jeremy Harmer – How to teach English