Humanistic Teaching

An approach to learning English

Chris Hunt

The Wise Hat

I came across a nice article this week by Mike Guest entitled, "Eliminating The Performance Gap". You can get a copy of the article here. The article focuses on reasons why Japanese adults in particular often have a difficult time using English in real life situations. Among the reasons discussed a few caught my eye and I'd like to expand upon them below.

Top of the list is treating English as a test. The proliferation of tests students face from middle school onwards can create an indelible link between English and test taking. Students find it difficult to escape from the idea that their every utterance is being judged. This creates unnecessary pressure and can increase the likelihood that they will over-correct their English into oblivion.

Coupled with the feeling of being tested is over-focusing on mistakes. The more students associate mistakes with outright failure the more this interferes with their language production. Students can become so fearful of making a mistake that they become tongue-tied. The need to be perfect is a powerful inhibitor. This means that teachers need to be extra careful about correction. In most cases it is far better to encourage a mistake riddled stream of consciousness than be jumping in to correct every little mistake. I think the rule of thumb should be to leave well alone unless actual communication is under threat.

When I first started teaching adults I often used to ask them how picky they wanted me to be. The aim was to give students some choice as to their method of instruction and to get them thinking about their own learning styles. I rarely do this now. Invariably students would want me to pick up on every mistake without heed to the negative consequences for their fluency skills. Basically, they weren't in a position to make an informed choice. So, now I am much more circumspect. As a yardstick for intervening I often use my parents and tell the students when I think my parents wouldn't understand. My focus is not on accuracy but on meaning. When I do feel I need to focus more on correct form I will deliberately structure the lesson so that it is clear that this is what I am doing. For Junior high school students and high school students I even go as far as to deliberately use the term "School English". I'll tell them what I feel is acceptable to native speakers but not useful for their school tests. The basic idea is to make regular communication the norm and "classroom mode" (as Mike Guest terms it) the exception. Actually he suggests that in formal classes because students are in classroom mode asking questions such as "What did you do on the weekend?" can be "jarring and awkward". But if that is the case then I think it important to make time for particular activities where it isn't. Students need to practise chatting if it is to be natural.

I won't name the very first language school I worked at in Japan because it doesn't deserve any publicity. Actually I've no idea if it still exists but it did have an interesting method. Students could come half an hour before their class and stay up to half an hour after it and chat in the lounge. Classroom time was strictly regulated and devoted to dictation where students would take turns speaking on topics chosen by themselves and the teacher would write down what they said and help massage the result into natural English. One of the first tasks I was given when I started work was to find ways to encourage students to make use of their lounge time. Many of them tended to arrive on time and disappear quickly after class and despite the class being built around students producing English, fluency was generally low. I remember in particular a couple of elderly ladies who could produce incredibly dense and convoluted texts that were somehow grammatically correct but could hardly string two words together out of class. They never ever did use the lounge and their real time use of English never did improve. But for those who did stay and chat there generally was improvement in their ability to use English naturally.

The way I revitalised the lounge was nothing special but indicates what can be done easily. I made sure that it didn't look like a waiting room. I made a small display area and brought in different objects that were changed on a regular basis. We started organising mini parties after the last class and managed to get students from different classes mixing together through using English. The lounge had a very strict "no Japanese" approach though I think what was much more important was banning the use of dictionaries. This forced students to stop looking up "perfect words" and learn how to convey meaning however they could.

The skills of circumlocution, negotiating meaning and repairing communication breakdowns are particularly difficult for Japanese students to acquire, I think because of the over emphasis on studying English rather than doing it. In this respect the title I chose for this week's entry is far from best. "Improving Performance" is the language of study, the words of a teacher when what most Japanese students need more of is non-teaching. So next week I'll try again with more focus on doing and a more appropriate title.Let me know if you can think of one.

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My thoughts are as followed:
Suggested Title: "Improving on Performance" OR "The Improvements Before and After Performance"

Feedback on the article: Interesting topic. I am very interested in better understanding the role performance plays in language learning. The idea of the chat lounge as a place where students can chit chat can be beneficial... as long as it provides students with the opportunity to use language to convey meanings they wish to convey. What role (if any)does performance have in this is what needs to be better understood. Thanks for an interesting read.

Anon | June 9, 2009 8:37 AM

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