Teaching unplugged

I was first introduced to Dogme through the reading for my class presentation, which you can view here Dogme-29r038k. I have also given a presentation on Dogme for my colleagues at BLC as part of our monthly meeting, some of whom tried it out shortly afterwards and had positive reactions and comments. Therefore, it was high time I tried it out myself for my mixed-nationality Upper-intermediate general English class.

 

Commandment 1

“Teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and students bring to the classroom – ie themselves – and whatever happens to be in the classroom” (Thornbury, 2000: 1).  Due to this being my first Dogme lesson, it was only reasonable that Thornbury’s first commandment set out in his revolutionary one-page paper in March 2000 was the starting point of the lesson. As Dogme is essentially a humanistic approach that centres on learners (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009) and aims to engage them both cognitively and affectively, I drew five concentric circles at the heart of which was each student (“Me”). The concentric circles were serving a semiotic purpose: that of the learner’s centrality in a Dogme lesson.

From the first circle outwards I co-constructed with the students the outer circles, namely their world. To set things in motion, I asked them to write down the name of the person that first came to their mind, the name of their beloved person. With that instruction I hoped that my students would fully engage in interaction with their peers describing their beloved person. I didn’t specify whether I meant their personality, their appearance, their relationship to them or the feelings and emotions towards them because I wanted to empower the students to provide the raw material themselves on which I would subsequently build the lesson. Besides, interaction is what allows language to emerge and it is interactivity that defines a Dogme lesson.

 

Materials light

One of the three core precepts of Dogme is its materials-light approach to teaching which aims to liberate teacher and learners alike from the over-dependency on mass-produced, one-size-fits-all coursebooks. But I decided to take this approach a step further; I wanted to liberate myself and the students from the coursebook both conceptually and physically in order to create the appropriate conditions for a Dogme lesson. Therefore, after introducing our guest – observer, my first move was to ask the students to put away their coursebook and only keep a pen and a notebook. In doing so, I freed “the learning space for the kind of interactive, talk-mediated learning opportunities that are so crucial for language development’ (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009: 12).

This move, I believe, intrigued students who were expecting to use their coursebook and raised their interest in what would follow. In addition, I asked them whether they thought we could have a lesson with no coursebook whatsoever. Their responses were mixed, while one student noted that it depended on me. I returned his remark and reinforced it by saying that it also depended on them. Effectively, I wanted to draw the students’ attention to their vital role in the delivery of the lesson and prepare them for its interactive nature by highlighting the importance of their own voice (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009).

 

Emergent language

Students’ output provides the raw material for subsequent language work. As such, emergent language is another core tenet of Dogme. After working on speaking and producing topic-related lexis, I felt I needed to change the focus of the lesson so I retrieved a language error produced by one of the students (“I pierced my ears” → I had/got my ears pierced), which acted as the springboard for focus on form. In other words, there was a shift from fluency to accuracy in response to a learner error.

The learners provided the raw, unrefined language and, through eliciting, we co-constructed the accurate representation of such input. Meddings & Thornbury (2009) note that it is very motivating to highlight language used in the day’s lesson. What is equally important is the focus on “successful” language usage. This is an alternative, yet quintessential, route that I should keep in mind in future. I shouldn’t only draw on students’ errors; I should also highlight and elaborate on successful language usage. By doing so, not only do I praise and motivate students, but I also model the accurate use of language based on one learner’s input to the benefit of all learners!

However, the focus on emergent language must be coupled with sensitivity and a sense of appropriateness. When asked what the antonym of “get on with sb” is, a student responded “get off with sb”. Following the Dogme philosophy, I should have explained what the colloquial meaning of that phrasal prepositional verb is, which in turn could have led to a lesson on British slang and colloquial language. “See everything [their emphasis] as a language opportunity” is a tip offered by Meddings & Thornbury (2009: 25). Instead, I took into account the new students who were not used to my sense of humour or degree of intimacy with the other students and respected the fact that some students might not be comfortable with such language.

 

Dogme 2.0

Get in a class – what do you see on the students’ desks? Mobile phones.

Ask students to do an exercise and notice the early finishers – what do they do? Checking their mobile phones.

Technology is an inevitable part of our lives nowadays. In a class where mobile phones are not formally banned, they are part of the learners’ presence; they’re, for better or for worse, like an extension of themselves.

Dogme has been mistakenly perceived as being against the use of any technology and its advocates have been labelled Neo-luddites by those opposing Dogme. Yet, Dogme is not “anti-materials nor anti-technology per se” (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009: 12). Rather, it opposes the meaningless use of technology in the classroom which deprives learners of the dialogic process and the learning affordances that allow for the co-construction of knowledge and meaning. Dogme welcomes the use of aids and technology that promote interactivity among learners and contribute to learning.

Therefore, I decided to incorporate technology in our lesson and give students a taste of what they can actually achieve with something as common as their phone. As part of a brief recycling – reworking (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009) and round-off task, I asked my students to use their contact list on their phones and playfully locate one person whom they had to describe both in terms of personality traits and appearance. Again, this activity was directly relevant to the learners’ lives, it made use of technology in a productive way that contributed to authentic communication and enabled them to practise the lexis they had recently supplied and been exposed to.

 

Monitoring – My position in the room

Aside from the classroom layout which favoured visual contact among all learners and between the learners and myself, my position in the room was crucial to the progression of the Dogme lesson.

As opposed to a typical EFL lesson consisting of controlled written practice exercises, where the teacher can have a minute to themselves, a Dogme lesson requires quite the contrary. I was carefully but unobtrusively monitoring all discussions taking place in the classroom as I had to keep an eye on the language used. The language that emerged from the students would later inform the open-class discussions (class feedback) and the following stage(s) of my lesson, which it did. Hence, monitoring allowed me to respond to the learners’ communicative and linguistic needs (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009).

 

Below is a picture of the input captured on the board at the end of the lesson.

What next?

When I first heard about Dogme, the materials-light, emergent-language and conversation-driven movement or philosophy, I was rather dubious about its practical applicability for the teacher and the learners and its effectiveness in language learning. But this lesson has been an eye-opening experience in view of the benefits that emerged upon my reflection.

  • Dogme caters to both the synoptic and ectenic learners. In other words, it can meet the expectations of the learners who are happy to go with the flow and primarily practise speaking (focus on fluency) and the learners who prefer a lesson focussed on form and grammar (focus on accuracy). This lesson showed me that a balance between both can be easily attained.
  • There is room for homework. In the last part of my lesson, I asked the students to refer to their photo albums and describe a picture focussing on the feelings of the people featured in that picture. Drawing on the learners’ lives and what they bring to the classroom, homework can take place off coursebooks, as well and provide the stimulus for language production tasks. In this case, the students’ narrative ie the short writing they were asked to do could have taken the form of an audio in which the students would record themselves describing that photo. And the audio would be used for a listening task in the next lesson. The possibilities are there – the learning affordances are real!
  • This first Dogme lesson will form the basis for many Dogme lessons to come. The content of such lessons will be organically provided by the students themselves and their own needs, interests, concerns and questions. Eventually, the Dogme lessons to follow will feature a negotiated syllabus whose “content is subject to the continual process of negotiation and evaluation by the learners and teacher” (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009: 18). This is particularly relevant to my summer classes with teenagers who come to the UK on a language holiday expecting to learn English from an entirely different perspective given that they are at the heart of English language education. Consequently, my first Dogme lesson has only been the beginning.
  • Taking the above point a step further, I can incorporate Dogme lessons into the current curriculum to take place at regular intervals (e.g. once a week). It would be expedient to record a summary of each Dogme lesson, reflect on the strengths and weaknesses and track the learning outcomes and the students’ feedback. Who knows… The Dogme lessons carried out along with the learners’ feedback might eventually lead to an actual Dogway.

 

As Meddings & Thornbury (2009: 25) put it, Dogme “isn’t an all or nothing moment”. The Dogme approach doesn’t need to cover an entire teaching block; it can take place at any time for however long and it can build up on the coursebook tasks taking into account the learners’ input, needs and interests (Meddings & Thornbury, 2003). As far as I’m concerned, Dogme is a state of mind, an attitude to teaching that will underpin my lessons and guide me to deliver a successful and effective learner-centred lesson with Dogme moments enabling me, thus, to experience “another way of being a language teacher” (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009: 21).

 

 

References

  • Meddings, L. d Thornbury, S. (2003), Dogme still able to divide, The Guardian News and Media Limited, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/apr/17/tefl.lukemeddings [accessed on 21 April 2018]
  • Meddings, L. and Thornbury, S. (2009) Teaching unplugged: Dogme in English language teaching. Peaslake, Surrey: Delta
  • Thornbury, S. (2000). A Dogma for EFL. IATEFL Issues, 153(2)

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