In my first assessed observation as part of this Diploma I suffered massive technology failure. I was using an Interactive Whiteboard connected to a PC. During the course of the lesson, first the speakers and sound-system went down and then the bulb in the projector blew. Obviously, having such technological difficulties has made me reassess my use of technology. So, have I decided, having been burnt by tech, to avoid it at all costs in future? On the contrary, I’ve actually come to the conclusion that it needs to be incorporated into my lessons all the more!

The school I work at is quite technological in comparison to other schools – every classroom has an Interactive Whiteboard, for example, and all the listenings of every coursebook are kept on a shared computer drive so we no longer use CDs. This has led to me being rather proficient at using tech in the classroom. I no longer write on the whiteboard, but instead use a wireless keyboard to type directly onto it, using bold, italics and underline for textual enhancements when needed.

Of course, I have suffered from technological difficulties before, but never to the extent as in my first assessed observed lesson – but I guess that’s Murphy’s Law! I left that class feeling a little disillusioned with using technology in the classroom and I think it would put off many other teachers from relying on it at all in future.

But I think to go down that route and to cut all technology out is to bury your head in the sand. Technology is a fundamental part of life in 2016 and it is not going anywhere. We cannot pretend it does not exist. We rely on technology in our day-day lives so I think it is fair to rely on it in class. It might not always work – but that’s life, and a lesson where a computer fails to play an MP3 is a far more realistic scenario than taking in a cassette.

Some of my colleagues and peers seem to have a difficult relationship with technology. Some seem uncomfortable using technology in the classroom, and this I can understand – not everyone is technologically minded and I am probably more tech-savvy than most. However, some seem to be vehemently anti-technology and this I can’t understand. They refuse to use anything remotely technological and I think this could be a bad sign for a teacher as it shows an unwillingness to learn – and I don’t see how one can be a good teacher if one cannot also be a good learner. This luddism also does not reflect the real world or what our students need for their future.

Take mobile phones. Some of my peers and colleagues refuse to allow students to use their mobile phones in anyway – for a dictionary, for translation, or for any other purposes. This outright ban of technology strikes me as showing a lack of critical thinking. I believe a teacher such as this bans tech not because they’ve thought about it and decided it is not necessary or even harmful to the class but because they haven’t thought about it all and are just removing something they themself are uncomfortable dealing with. If you apply actual critical thought to mobile phones in class you can pretty quickly find ways of incorporating them into the lessons. Whilst some functions of a mobile phone may be inappropriate in class (messaging in the L1 is an example I would find hard to justify) I believe most can be incorporated in some way to aid the learning experience.

Also, and perhaps more crucially, it reflects real life. In the real world, it is highly unlikely that one of our students won’t have access to a mobile phone and won’t be using it to aid their English. To ban it is to make the classroom an even more unreal place than it already is (I am struck by an analogy of learning mathematics. People often joke that in their maths classes at school they were banned from using calculators as “in the real world, you won’t be carrying a calculator in your pocket!” And now all of us carry around (what would be considered back then) supercomputers. However, in positing this analogy, does that mean that I am saying that what we learnt in maths was useless? It seems like a delicate balance…). In short, life does not take place in a Faraday cage – so why should lessons?

In my classes I tend to just use the technology that is available and not really think about it too much. I think that is my flaw. Although I use technology quite a lot, I think that with some more careful consideration and planning, I could make my classroom far more technological. One of my friends (and also a fellow teacher) is extremely tech-savvy. I think perhaps in the new year I will conduct a planning session with her to generate ideas of how to incorporate tech more effectively in my lessons. Also, I notice that the Delta Teacher Development Series has published a few new books concerning the use of tech in the classroom. Our school has a few copies of these books, I plan to also borrow them and see if they can give me further ideas also,

This is something that has been percolating in my mind throughout my time as a teacher, however, I only recently put it into words in my most recent lesson observation.

I used to think that language and language learning was a creative activity. As speakers of a language, we draw upon a vast resource of vocabulary and structures to express ourselves how we want, in a creative way. When students were working on an activity which focused on production (speaking or writing, for example), I felt that they were ‘creating’.

In my early days of teaching, I eschewed models in these kinds of tasks, not wanting the students to copy something they had seen before, but instead to create something unique that truly came from within. I think this could be seen as a case of taking ‘learner-centredness’ to an illogical extreme. During the CELTA and in my first few years of teaching it was hammered into me that the learners should always (and rightly) be at the centre of the lesson. However, I think this gave me a twisted view of how language and language learning actually works.

My view of this has shifted over the years, and I now believe wholesale in the idea that language is copying.

When students do write me something that is ‘creative’ in the way I had envisaged, it is often full of unnatural constructions. The student may be expressing themselves in a creative way, but it just doesn’t read (or sound, in a spoken task) well (or good).

Writing lessons that I now conduct tend to make extensive use of model texts and the resulting writing may be less ‘creative’ for the student, but the writing appears far more natural to the (native-speaker) reader.

In our methodology session on writing, Barbara warned about the correct use of models, stating that teachers had to be careful with model texts lest it lead to ‘mimicry’. I understand that we do not want students copying word for word an entire text out but, I think, ‘mimicry’ is language – and it’s something that native-speakers also do.

When a native-speaker learns their first language as a child, they mimic what they hear around them. Even as adults, we continue this trend to an extent. When I am visiting old friends from back home, my accent reverts back to being more northern. When a native-speaker is among a particular group of people, they may adapt the cadence vocabulary of the group they are with. More than a few articles in the Guardian demonstrate the middle-class anxiety at mirroring the builders they have in to do the kitchen: ‘Fancy a cuppa, mate?’

I have a lesson that I do with almost all levels that is in some way connected to this. It came from conversations with my colleagues about the basic things students say which, whilst they aren’t grammatically incorrect, scream ‘wrong!’ whenever we hear them.

A good example of this is something I heard over and over from a particular class at B2 (upper-intermediate) level. The class was quite sociable and spent a lot of time outside of class in each others’ company. It was common to hear one student invite another to dine in a restaurant with:

“Do you want to eat something with me?”

Now, there is nothing ‘grammatically incorrect’ about that question and the meaning is pretty clear, but it made my (and my colleagues’) skin crawl. However, it was a sentence they ‘created’ themselves and I guess you could say it is them expressing themselves from within, which is what I really valued at an early stage of my teaching career. But it just doesn’t sound good. So, I taught them the simple phrase, “Do you fancy going out for dinner?” and after that, in class, my skin no longer crawled. The students, too, seemed much happier using this phrase (presumably because it came with the teacher’s approval!). So, here, I noticed that their English sounded much better if they just copied the expression. I also realized that this phrase they had come up with themselves ‘creatively’ (“Do you want to eat something with me?”) wasn’t creative at all – it was copied from their mother-tongue and then translated into English (translated word-for-word back into Spanish, for example, it sounds natural). So even when I felt they were being creative with the language, they weren’t. They were copying what they’d heard before, in their own language.

This, in essence, is reformulation: A student tries to express themselves, the teacher reformulates, the student copies that reformulation. This is about as ‘creative’ as language learning gets.

As native-speakers and teachers of English, my peers and I often try to amuse ourselves by creating unwieldy sentences with as many auxiliary verbs as we can cram into them: “By the end of this year, La Sagrada Familia will have been being built for over 150 years,” or “I would have had to have had it done at some point.” (for a long time I thought this was the winner, with five auxiliary verbs, but it turns out it’s just four as ‘done’ is not the main verb, but a complex object.)

However, the future perfect continuous passive? We just don’t say it.

And language learning seems to be more about that. Not saying what you want to creatively, but saying what people already say.

In reading The Lexical Approach by Lewis and more recently Teaching Lexically by Dellar & Walkley, it seems that this idea is supported by their approaches. They hold that language is stored as lexicalized chunks and these chunks are regurgitated whole, rather than the grammar + words = language paradigm that most EFL coursebooks spout. Indeed, in the section in Teaching Lexically regarding how to teach writing from a lexical standpoint, Dellar & Walkley promote extensive use of model texts and reformulation. The Lexical Approach is something that is becoming increasingly influential on me in the way that I think about language and also the way I think language should be taught, and it seems it supports my basic idea here that learning a language is pure plagiarism.

Perhaps this is something I need to be careful with, however, in the implementation of it into my teaching. As I said before, we don’t want students copying word-for-word texts, we do still want them to express themselves. I guess it’s a delicate balance of plagiarizing certain elements to say what you want to say. Perhaps like the Dadaist cut-up technique popularized by William Burroughs – creating new a text out of an existing one.

 

Post Script: Now, I am aware that parts of language learning can be creative: writing a story, creating a roleplay, etc. and I don’t deny that. However, what I am talking about in this Critical Incident is that the nuts and bolts and the flesh and bones of the language are not creative. You have to replicate what has already been said.

 

Edit: 15.02.17

So, I’ve just started SLA and the question of ‘input’ has been raised. Does language come from just the ‘input’ we give? Is it just copying? Do children just copy what they hear, or is more going on? I have the feeling that as I learn more on SLA, I may come to revise the position I’ve taken here! I will update this post if that should happen. 

About a week ago, I experienced a Critical Incident which made me re-assess my stance on rapport in the classroom.

I recently started a brand-new class at my school – it was a general English class, nine students from a variety of backgrounds at Intermediate (B1) level. All the students were new to the B1 level and for six of the nine students, it would be their first day of studying in the UK (the other three had been here for around a month).

I think starting a new class from scratch is a great opportunity. The students (and the teacher) are in the same boat: it’s all their first day in class together, it’s all their first day at this level, it’s the first time that we all meet each other. In this environment, I’ve found it far easier to create the kind of atmosphere that I think is helpful for language learning.

This time, I decided to try something different with the creation of the class atmosphere. It was something I had tried before now and again, but this time I decided to really focus on it more. It wasn’t rocket science, it was something extremely simple.

After the initial introductions in the first ten minutes of the class, I used a fairly standard and generic “find-someone-who” mingle activity to allow all the students a chance to talk to one another. I explicitly taught them one phrase to help them with this: “Sorry, what’s your name again?”

I’d noticed in previous classes I’d taught that students often don’t bother to learn each others’ names and when completing activities where they have to talk to one another, it led to some (from my point of view, at least) awkward encounters (this is perhaps an example of a previous Critical Incident in my teaching career). I realised that when I am in a situation where I don’t know someone’s name (but I should – if, for example, I meet a friend of a friend and forget their name) then I use that phrase in that situation pretty much 100% of the time. It’s a useful phrase to me, so I assumed it would be a useful phrase to the students.

It was. They used it frequently and by the end of the mingle they were all pretty au-fait with each other and each other’s names.

To consolidate this I used another simple trick. I got the students to self-nominate in group feedback. Student A would tell the class a few interesting things they’d learnt in the mingle, and then choose, by name, another student in the class to tell us about what they had found.

Now, these two techniques are far from revolutionary but the reason why I consider it a Critical Incident is because of what I saw in part of the lesson, and over the course of the rest of that morning’s teaching. Never before have I seen class bond so quickly or so strongly. The initial atmosphere of the room when I walked in at 9am, all nerves and silence, was gone. At mid-morning break they all went to get coffee together and by the end of that break they had all made plans to socialise as a group that night. As I said before, this was about a week ago and I do still consider this class to have one of the best atmospheres I’ve ever taught.

At this point, I should probably stress that I can’t be sure that had I not applied these techniques the results wouldn’t have been the same. Perhaps they would have bonded naturally, perhaps that’s what they bring to the picture. I think that’s certainly true to an extent – I definitely didn’t change their personalities. But I feel confident in asserting that I helped them along the way, that I sped up that process noticeably and that I ensured that no student was left behind or left out of this process.

I came away from this experience really thinking about what had happened. It made me think about the nature of rapport and the relationships between the people in a classroom, which I will go into in more detail later on in this post.

First, how would others have seen this “Critical Incident” of mine?

• The students
  I’m not sure the students would have noticed that these techniques I applied helped with their developing strong bonds with each other! I think they would have come out of lesson thinking that they had a good time, that their classmates were nice and friendly and that they learnt a couple of new phrases. I’m not sure they would have seen my hand guiding them towards a good social relationship with each other.
• My colleagues & other teachers
  Well, this would vary from teacher to teacher. There are some teachers I know (perhaps more newly-qualified ones) who would find these techniques really helpful in a “why-didn’t-I-think-of-that” way. Other teachers (perhaps more experienced or more focused on sociolinguistics) would say “Of course that’s beneficial. Duh!”
  Still other teachers would disagree with me on whether the techniques had any effect at all. And one teacher I know of (a very structured grammarian-style teacher who has no time for rapport and is totally uninterested in relationships in the classroom) would probably say “it doesn’t matter.”
• My DOS
  My DOS actually did come to see me about this class a little later on – once she had received the students feedback for their first week. It was probably the most positive first-week feedback I had ever received. “I don’t know what you’re doing,” she said, “but keep doing it!”

So, what did I learn from this Critical Incident? Well, it’s hard to say what I’ve actually learnt, but the incident did make me think quite a lot about rapport, relationships between people in the classroom and specifically my attitude towards and my beliefs about rapport and how these beliefs have changed as I have developed as a teacher. To explain:

When I started teaching six and a half years ago, fresh from the CELTA, rapport was a big part of my teaching. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, I had a lot more in common with my students back then. I was 22 and 95% of the students in my classes at that time were 20-25. They were learning English, and I was learning to teach. We may have been from different sociocultural backgrounds, but I had a greater sense that we were in the same boat – or, at least, similar boats. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it was a crutch. I didn’t feel confident in my teaching or in my knowledge of the language – but if the students liked me, then we could laugh off what I didn’t know and it wouldn’t become a problem.

As I became more confident and comfortable in my teaching and the language I was teaching, I made less effort bonding with students. I became regarded by my students as more of a “serious” teacher, who might not be the most “fun” and “entertaining”, but knew what he was talking about. Of course, I took pride in this – I was happy for students to want to be in my class because they thought I was “good”, not just because they liked me. There were other factors in this change in my attitude aside from my increasing confidence, of course. I was getting older and more socially distant from the students. I was beginning to see ELT as my career rather than just a fun job for the summer. I was becoming a more focused and confident individual in general.

My whole attitude to rapport changed, then. I didn’t see it as important. For me, what was important was teaching well and learners learning. If they liked me or not, they were going to learn – that’s how I saw it. Then I realised my concept of “rapport” was actually quite limited. Look at how I’ve referred to it in the past three paragraphs:

• “…if the students liked me, then we could laugh off what I didn’t know…”
• “I was happy for students to want to be in my class because they thought I was “good”, not just because they liked me.”
• “If they liked me or not, they were going to learn…”

My concept of rapport was students liking the teacher. And to be more specific than that, it’s students liking the teacher in a social way. That’s very limiting. The British Council defines rapport as “the relationship between the teacher and the learners.” (from here). So my attitude to rapport did change – but not in the way I thought. It was still important, but I started building a different kind of rapport, based not on how socially similar the students and I were, but instead based on factors more linked to my profession and teacher identity (realising this would be perhaps another example of a Critical Incident).

Where, then, does this Critical Incident come in? In my description of the Critical Incident I talk about encouraging the students to build bonds with one another, but not to build bonds with me.

Well, exactly. I’d thought before about my rapport with the students – at first social, now more professional – but I’ve never really given much thought to the students building rapport with each other. I’ve always focused on how the students relate to me and just assumed that their relationships with each other will take of themselves. And often they do – but sometimes they don’t.

In order to create a good classroom environment for learning, is it not as important to get the students to bond with each other as it is for them to develop a good relationship with the teacher? Do we do this in the classroom? The answer for me is yes and no. I pay lip service to it with a few “get-to-know-your-partner” activities or “find-someone-who” mingles, but do I really place much value on it? Honestly, no.

This Critical Incident showed me that with a little push in an area I don’t normally even think about, I can achieve great results. And the class that plays well together learns well together.

I have a TE710 Methodology session on Classroom Management on Thursday. Perhaps we will explore some of these ideas then. I hope so, because as I do have an understanding of how rapport can work between the teacher and the students (as it is defined by the British Council) (we were explicitly taught about rapport back on my CELTA), I had never really stopped to consider rapport between students. Perhaps it is something I should read into.

 

UPDATE: 19.10.16
So, this entry ended with… “Perhaps it is something I should read into.”

Well, now I have. But first, I talked about it.

I was talking with a friend and colleague (who recently completed the MA TESOL) about my TESOL Dip and I gave her a quick run-down of this post, my first critical incident. We had an interesting discussion about how to create a good atmosphere in class and she lent me a book she recommended, “Classroom Dynamics” by Jill Hadfield (Oxford University Press 1992).

“Just read the introduction,” my friend said.

So I did.

And, obviously, I’m not the first one to think about the ideas I explored in the above post. The introduction of this book lays out in a more in depth (yet probably more concise!) way a lot of the thoughts and feelings I dealt with in my Critical Incident. I’m sure we’ve all had that experience of reading something and seeing your own thoughts written in front of you, but better-written (and thought-out). That’s how I felt reading the introduction of this book.

As I read, I thought about taking some quotations to illustrate this update I’m writing now, but by the time I finished it, I realised I would probably end up quoting the entire thing! So instead of a few choice quotations, I just recommend the reader (whoever you are!) to read that introduction in its entirety.

“Classroom Dynamics” is a resource book, so it’s full of activities to help “form the group”, “establish trust”, create “a sense of belonging” and more. I look forward to trying some of them out. I’m glad this book is out there as it isn’t something that is thought about that much – even in the introduction, Hadfield says “very little material exists to… improve relations and atmosphere within a group.”

It’s good that something is out there to help us deal with this. I think too often teachers wash their hands of the responsibility of the atmosphere in the classroom. “There is a good atmosphere in class X, but in class Y it’s just horrible!”, they (we!) say. “It is.” Fact. Nothing we can do about it. That’s the way it is.

Wrong. I think (hope!) we can do something about it.

This is something I never really expected to think about and, as I mentioned before, I’m glad it’s come up, and I look forward to exploring it further. At the school I work, we do regular Teacher Development sessions and I occasionally lead one or two – usually teacher-focused (for example, “Teaching Sentence Structure”, “Teaching With Film & Video”, “Teaching Vocabulary”, “Teaching X”, “Teaching Y”….) – it would be interesting to do more research into this and to create a TD session from what I find to help other teachers (as it’s certainly opened my eyes!).

The friend who put me on to this book also said I should look into “Co-Operative Learning”. Lo and behold, that’s the name of one of the chapters of the key reading for my Classroom Management seminar tomorrow as part of the Methodology module. Sometimes the planets align and it all falls into place.

I imagine this won’t be the last update to this Critical Incident – what I read for tomorrow’s session and, indeed, what we do in tomorrow’s session will doubtless lead to more thoughts on this idea.

 

UPDATE 2: 04.12.16

This Critical Incident actually became something I developed as my Statement of Relevance. You can read my SOR here.