Harry Potter’s ‘Monster Book of Monsters’
Over the course of the MA we kept returning to the question: “Textbook – yes or no?” I certainly recognise that in reality textbooks are and will continue to be used by most teachers in most teaching contexts and that many people have to/are happy to ‘work around’ the textbook, even if they do not agree with its overall approach or some of the activities in it. Personally, however, now that I am approaching the end of my course, I have come to the conclusion that textbooks are definitely not for me and that I will try to avoid them and teaching environments in which their use is seen as essential in future. In fact, I had reached that conclusion before I started the ELT Materials module and have therefore found it hard, if not impossible, to engage with discussions about the analysis, evaluation and design of coursebooks. How could I seriously evaluate something that I had already rejected as a concept? How could I imagine designing materials for publishing when I personally do not see the value in any material that exists before the actual teaching situation and most importantly the people in it (not as examples of a group but as unique human beings)?
At the beginning of the module we tried to identify our principles to see what position we were starting from. What I did not realise then but what has become very clear to me now is this: the very core of my beliefs about materials is that they should not be pre-conceived but that instead ideally I see them as evolving through a creative process between the teacher and her students and between students as learning progresses. Consequently for me, as I am not actively teaching at the moment, any design or evaluation of materials without real students in mind constitutes an undertaking of little value. I realise that this is a rather extreme position but then a lot of my own language learning as well as my teaching environments have been quite unusual and have shaped my beliefs about language learning in particular ways. The conclusion I reached is not the result of ‘just’ coming across some interesting theories over the course of my MA but rather of a lifetime of language learning and teaching experiences which have built on each other and have made me form my belief that the deepest language learning, the kind of language learning I am interested in, happens in real social interactions where there is no coursebook in sight. Here are my reflections on these formative experiences.
Living Abroad
My first living abroad experience was when I came to the UK after finishing school in Germany. My aim was to learn the language but also to learn about British culture and to experience something other than formal education (before starting university). And that I certainly did! I became a live-in volunteer for an organisation working with drug addicts and young people with a variety of mental health, behavioural and social problems. My task was to help out in the crèche for children whose parents had come to visit the methadone clinic and to use other services elsewhere on the premises. It was an intense experience for a rather innocent 19-year-old from a middle-class background and certainly showed me life from a different perspective. It also made for interesting language learning! Towards the end of my time there I went for interviews at several universities across southern England which were to decide whether I would be offered a place (imagine a time before IELTS!). I felt completely confident during my interviews, not questioning my fluency in English at any point and was not surprised at all that I got offered a place after each interview (in reality this was not just because of the interview but also on account of my Abitur results). Only in hindsight and especially when I had to write my first ever (only 1000-word!) essay did it occur to me that the language I had learned and used during my gap year was not really appropriate in academic circles. Just goes to show what difference emotions can make!
There is one other important realisation I had about language learning during my time as a volunteer, something that has never left me since: small children make wonderful teachers! They are infinitely patient, repeating things (exactly the same way!) as many times as necessary for the message to get across, without judgment (of your language incompetency at least). They are excellent at miming and gesturing as well as expressing their emotions (they have not learned to hide their emotions yet) which makes communication with them quite straightforward. They are happy to swap teacher/learner roles as the particular situation demands. And when it comes to learning-through-play they are obviously the experts!
As part of my undergraduate degree course I later spent one year living and studying in Naples, Italy. The choice of location again reflects that I was more interested in learning about different expressions of life and humanity than learning ‘proper’ Italian (rumour has it that apparently Neapolitans do not speak ‘proper’ Italian). Compared to living and working with drug addicts, life with the Neapolitans was probably easier overall, although experiencing the omnipresence of the Camorra from the inside presented its own challenges. At the end of my time there, I had gained more knowledge of the language but more importantly I had again learned something new about a different culture, or rather what culture means to different people in different contexts. Coming to Italy as a German from a British university really confused me and the people I came in contact with in Naples: apart from often not knowing what language I was actually speaking and whether it was the right one for my conversation partner, I and the people I interacted with were at times quite unsure what culture to assign to me.
Intensive TESOL Certificate Course
After finishing university (the first time round!) I took a one-month intensive TESOL Certificate course. Before coming to the UK I had spent thirteen years in the German education system which had left me with good to excellent knowledge in three languages – English, French and Latin. However, the teaching methods I encountered on my TEFL course were a bit of a revelation! Language learning was presented as a fun activity, with games forming an integral part of the learning experience and with great emphasis placed on ‘authentic’ materials and ‘realia’. Here the main aim of learning a foreign language was to be able to use it as quickly as possible for ‘real’ communication (as opposed to translation or in order to complete grammar exercises). The German system had obviously eventually lead me to a point were communication was possible but this had happened almost as a by-product and not without me putting a lot of extra effort into creating opportunities for real-life practice myself, i.e. by watching films and listening to music as well as by going on trips abroad. In comparison with the kind of language teaching I had known before, the TEFL method seemed active and lots of fun and I was sold! In hindsight this must have been the time when communicative language teaching (CLT) was at its height and rarely questioned. The teachers on the course exuded that enthusiasm for the ‘method’ and I wanted to become/be that kind of teacher for my students. I wanted my students to think that language learning was fun (I had spent most of my A-level English lessons in a café with friends because I could not stand how boring they were!) and I wanted to create my own materials for them or at least choose authentic materials that were not explicitly created for the language classroom.
Homestay Teaching
Most of my English teaching experience has been in homestay teaching. Here students come to live with their teacher, sharing the teacher’s home, life and family for a few weeks. I work for a private language school that takes care of the bulk of administration but all of the teaching happens in my home. Although my students and I are provided with a coursebook, I have a lot of freedom and choice compared with many other teaching situations. As homestay teaching is mostly one-to-one or two-to-one and takes place in an environment filled with authentic learning materials and opportunities (i.e. home environment), it makes sense that textbooks are not given the central role they hold elsewhere. Many tasks in textbooks are simply not appropriate when there are only one or two students in the classroom, including obviously any group activities but even pair work (if the pair is made up of student and teacher for example). Also students in this kind of scenario expect the course to be much more tailored to their interests and needs (or if these are not clear to the student him/herself this might be the parents’ expectation). Therefore textbooks, in as far as they are used, have to be heavily adapted and supplemented by/substituted with materials the teacher and the student choose for the particular teaching situation. To sum up, textbooks still form part of the courses I teach and grammar exercises are on most students’ wish list – preferably ones they can tick off in a book as they go along. However, the reasons behind this seem to result from an underlying belief of/implicit agreement between everyone involved (students, teachers, parents, school management) that this is just how language teaching/learning is and always has been.
Bringing up Bilingual Children
While my living abroad experiences and homestay teaching taught me about real-life communication and the importance of social interaction and while the TEFL-method showed me that language learning could/should be fun and engaging, watching my children grow up bilingual has given me a great insight into the workings of motivation. If you were to believe some people, learning another language as a child is ‘as easy as pie’, they just ‘pick it up’. In my experience things are a lot more complex than that. In our half-and-half family, where frequently we have English language students staying with us and with me being completely bilingual and possibly more comfortable in English after twenty years of living in the UK, it does not seem to matter how much I stick to speaking German with my children, they mostly respond in English. They are not stupid! They do not see the point in rising to the challenge of speaking German when communication is much quicker and easier for them in English. Of course, I could refuse point-blank to respond to anything they say to me in English. However, anyone who has children of their own knows that there are enough battles to fight on a daily basis – in our case I have decided that this one is not worth adding to the list! So as my children do not seem to ‘pick up’ German just like that, in my role as their ‘teacher’ I have to create contexts for them that activate their intrinsic motivation. I model communication with German-speaking friends and family for my children (when I speak at my children in German, part of the reason they cannot respond is that they are missing the language elements necessary to fill in the other side). I befriend other families in a similar situation, not just because I believe that our children will magically start speaking German with each other (they rarely do) but because it shows them that they are not alone. The underlying message I hope to get across to them is that knowing another language is a real skill that some people have and some don’t, a skill they can and should be proud of. Of course I also try to take my children to Germany as often as possible because I firmly believe that language learning is at its best and most powerful when all the senses become involved (immersive language learning). Through speaking and experiencing German with German speakers in a particular German environment my children start connecting the language with people, places and personal memories that become meaningful to them far beyond linguistic exchange. Recently I have noticed a change in their approach to learning the language: they are starting to be become conscious learners and are getting much better at assessing individual learning opportunities and their longer-term benefits. It’s a work in progress and interesting times lie ahead I’m sure…
MA in TESOL with ICT
So bearing all of these earlier language learning and teaching experiences in mind it is not surprising that, during my MA studies, I have been drawn towards holistic learning theories and teaching approaches that see the learner as a living, breathing, feeling being in a particular life situation with a unique personal history.
One of the modules I really enjoyed was Second Language Acquisition but while the history of SLA was informative, I started taking real notice when we got to the Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition (Block, 2003). Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory in particular resonates with me. I find myself agreeing with the socio-cultural perspective according to which:
[L]earning itself is […] a mediated process. It is mediated partly through learners’ developing use and control of mental tools […]. Importantly, learning is also seen as socially mediated, that is to say, it is dependent on face-to-face interaction and shared processes such as joint problem-solving and discussion, with experts and also with peers. (Mitchel et al, 2013: 222)
Over the course of the MA I have become increasingly interested in the notion of learner identity. I was thrilled to find how it had been studied by a variety of scholars whose work I really admire (Norton, 2000 & 2013; Richards, 2006; Ushioda & Dörnyei, 2009; Ros i Solé et al, 2010; Ushioda, 2011; López-Gopar, 2014; Cummins et al, 2015). While there are differences in their conceptualisations of identity, they share the core belief that language learning is not just about learners internalising a neatly packaged language system which the teacher can simply transfer to her students. Instead it is influenced by and in turn influences a complex network of different internal and external factors – cognitive, emotional, social, political etc. – that have to be examined as a whole in order to address learners’ needs more fully.
In my opinion, that cannot easily be achieved by working from a textbook. I think alternative approaches to learning materials are needed. One which I find particularly fascinating has been termed ‘identity text’ by Jim Cummins and his colleagues (Cummins et al., 2015). In the particular context of a number of language and literacy projects in Canada, teachers and researchers collaborated with the aim of improving literacy skills amongst students from socially marginalised groups through practises of identity affirmation. This was done to counteract identity devaluation, i.e. young people’s experience of having a low value placed on certain aspects of their identity, e.g. their cultural background or home language. Importantly the term ‘identity text’ not only refers to written work but instead teachers encouraged students to draw on their multimodal and multilingual skills, i.e. art, drama and video production were combined with writing in the dominant language and students’ home languages. Here is one of my favourite quotes by a learner who participated in one of these projects. It exemplifies how deeply language learning can be experienced, if the learner is emotionally and socially supported and if language and literacy are seen as connected to the development of the whole person.
“This experience gave me a gift of poetry. I started to develop a passion for poetry during this project. I didn’t know I had this passion. Since this project I have written and shared many pieces of poetry. My identity story is a representation of how I feel, what I think, what I believe to be true …. It is a wonderful feeling to share a talent that others appreciate, understand, and encourage. It’s so important for adults to help young people recognize their gift. Participating in this project was like hearing a collective voice telling me: “We are proud of you. We care about you. You have a future.” […]” (Cummins et al., 2015: 568)
This is the kind of project I want to be involved in! I want to be the kind of teacher that helps her students develop as whole persons with language – their first and any other subsequent one – being understood as a vehicle that moves this development along as well as a tool they can shape to create their ever-changing reality.
Most recently I have discovered mobile learning. I think it is especially promising when it recognises mobile devices as personal to the user (personalisation of features and use), as forming an integral part of the ways in which the user communicates (through call function and SMS but more importantly perhaps by giving the user access to social networks) and as a means to capture life as it happens. Pegrum nicely summarises the benefits of using mobile devices for language learning:
[L]earners shift between contexts that feed directly into their unfolding learning. […] In the classroom or the schoolyard, as well as on excursions and outings, mobile devices support situated learning, as students receive or seek information from online sources, peers and mentors to inform their interactions with their contexts, and as they use their devise to make and share multimedia records of their contextualised learning experiences. (Pegrum, 2014: 19)
My newest discovery in this context is a book called The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies (Farman ed., 2014). It is a collection of essays aimed at making the reader reimagine the potential of the mobile phone as quintessentially a tool that we can use to tell our stories in ever new, personal, situated and creative ways. So far I have read one about dancers using Twitter to communicate ideas for dance improvisations remotely to each other. Their Tweets become embodied, situated and transformed into a new text code and improvisation continues across time and space. How fascinating!
Conclusion
I realise that for many people – students and teachers – language learning is just a means to an end, the next test to be passed to move to the next level in their educational or professional development. For them working from and with a coursebook might be just what is needed giving them a physical record of completed tasks to make their progress visible and tangible. They are unlikely to be interested in the kind of projects I would like to be involved in (create?). However, like in my case, for some ‘learners’ language learning and personal development become inseparable over time. While they/we might be in the minority, I think nowadays a combination of interconnecting global forces have resulted in huge numbers of individuals moving country, often for long periods of time or permanently, for various reasons – economic, educational, personal or to escape war or persecution. This trend and resulting implications are outlined fittingly by Viljo Kohonen (Kohonen et al, 2014: 8/9)
The globalisation of the capital markets and the increased mobility of work force, students and specialists will increase cross-cultural contacts. In Europe, the current integration processes are moving the whole continent towards a multilingual and multicultural political and economic union. Contacts are facilitated enormously by the new information technology. It will make vast amounts of information services readily available to more and more people through international networks. The developments will create new demands for global communication and tolerance for intercultural diversity [my emphasis].
Maybe the main reason why I have decided to share the story of my language learning and teaching development is that it might contribute towards raising people’s awareness of the realities/possibilities that exist. Without listening and observing closely as a teacher you might miss the signs that tell you about these possibilities. Especially with my young learners I like to keep that thought at the back of my mind, because at their age everything is potential. When you work with this age group you do not want to close doors prematurely for them before their existence has been discovered by them. If you are lucky you might even be the one to help them make the discovery…
Harry Potter “The Prisoner of Azkaban” – the book that might make me change my mind…
References:
Block, D. (2003) The social turn in second language acquisition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Cummins, J., Hu, S., Markus, P., et al. (2015) “Identity Texts and Academic Achievement: Connecting the Dots in Multilingual School Contexts”, TESOL Quarterly, 49 (3) p. 27.
Farman, J. ed. (2014), The mobile story: narrative practices with locative technologies. New York & Oxford: Routledge
Lopez-Gopar, M. E. (2014) “Teaching English Critically to Mexican Children”, ELT Journal, 68 (3) p. 11.
Kohonen, V., Jaatinen, R., Kaikkonen, P., et al. (2014, 2nd ed.) Experiential Learning in Foreign Language Education, Harlow, England: Longman.
Mitchel, R., Myles, F. and Marsden E. (2013, 3rd edition) Second language learning theories. Abingdon: Routledge
Norton, B. (2000) Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change, Harlow: Longman.
Norton, B. (2013) Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation, 2. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Pegrum, M. (2014) Mobile Learning: Languages, Literacies and Cultures, New Language Learning and Teaching Environments, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Richards, K. (2006) “‘Being the Teacher’: Identity and Classroom Conversation”, Applied Linguistics, 27 (1) pp. 51-77.
Ros i Sole, C., Calic, J. and Neijmann, D. (2010) “A Social and Self-Reflective Approach to Mall”, ReCALL, 22 (1) pp. 39-52.
Ushioda, E. and Dörnyei, Z. n. (2009) Motivation, Language Identity and the L2 Self, Second Language Acquisition (Clevedon, England), Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
