I wanted to try something different when reflecting on my fifth critical incident. While the critical incident itself happened to me while I was teaching, I had read about collaborative reflection in Mann and Walsh (2017: 178). I thought that engaging in this kind of reflection with a peer may be something useful.
I chose my wife to collaborate with because a) she has a DELTA and b) due to the lockdown it made sense. My partner passed her DELTA in 2003 and was the Academic Manager at Embassy English language school in Hastings. Over the years, she has observed countless teachers, and I value her experience and input.
The critical incident itself didn’t seem too important at the time, but the ensuing discussion I had with my partner about it was quite thought-provoking. While teaching my 1:1 student online, she commented that the language she studies in her English lessons at college is different to the language that British people use in real life. She has mentioned this on several occasions as she struggles to communicate in ‘real life’ situations despite moving up levels at college.
It was something that I hadn’t given much thought to and I didn’t really know how to respond to my student. When I discussed it with my partner, I was surprised that she said she agreed with my student. We discussed how the language we teach in our lessons is pre-determined and very controlled and asked ourselves whether without real-life exposure to the language could learners really achieve fluency.
The more we wrestled with the question, the more we realised that there are so many areas of real-life communication that we don’t teach in our language lessons. For example, the vocabulary used by the younger generations or modern slang words or phrases, although we admitted that we didn’t keep up with these ourselves.
Another area that we thought was not focused on as much as it could be was humorous language. Both of us had encountered some materials based around jokes, but we both agreed that we had rarely seen any material that teaches learners about irony and sarcasm, which are two types of humour that are extremely prevalent in British society.
Salvatore Attardo (2017) discusses the need to recognise and understand the ‘tone of voice’ that is used when people are being ironic or sarcastic and talks about the multifunctional aspect of humour and how it often serves several functions at once. This led us to wonder if it is something that can be taught at all or if it is something that can only be acquired from real-life experience.
My partner had also discussed this issue with other teachers before and they all noted that for certain nationalities sarcasm and irony is more embedded in their culture which makes learning real-life communication, even British humour, in English a lot more accessible to them.
To help me explore the subject more, my partner showed me a book by Widdowson (1978), which discusses teaching English as communication and focuses on language use, which I am currently reading.
Ultimately the discussion did open my eyes to the possibility that the language that we are teaching in the class is indeed different from the language that people actually use. I think this relates back to what we studied in the SLA module and whether or not second language acquisition is viewed from a cognitivist or social viewpoint. Although If I’m being honest, I’m not really sure how to deal with this piece of information and how it might influence my beliefs as a teacher.
Cognitivist and social views of LA – Larsen-Freeman (2007)
- Attardo, S. 2017 Humor in Language, oxford research encyclopedia, linguistics. Oxford University Press USA.
- Larsen-Freeman, D. 2007, “Reflecting on the Cognitive-Social Debate in Second Language Acquisition”, The Modern Language Journal, vol. 91, no. 1, pp. 773-787.
- Mann, S. & Walsh, S. 2017, Reflective practice in English language teaching: research-based principles and practices, Routledge, Abingdon;New York.
- Widdowson, H.G. 1978, Teaching language as communication, Oxford University Press, Oxford (etc.).
