Taking a Walk in the Learners’ Shoes – A Guest Post by David Dodgson

 It is my greatest pleasure to introduce the first guest blogger of Box of Chocolates  in 2011. David Dodgson is a British English teacher who lives and teaches young learners in Ankara, Turkey. I was very fortunate to get to know Dave through Twitter (his handle is @davedodgson) and the blogosphere and immediately liked his views on teaching and enjoyed sharing and interacting with him. We had a great “time working on a “joint post” for one of the Dogme Challenges, where we shared our voices in a real conversation online, discussing the topic. I follow his blog Reflections of a Teacher and Learner and always enjoy his posts, be they activities / lessons he’s done or reflections on teaching and life. He is very active in online PD with his blog, twitter, #ELTChat, presenting, etc. A great educator and person who I’m proud to call a friend. 

 

With you... David Dodgson! (aka @davedodgson)

 

 

One of the blogging highlights of last year for me was sharing my voice with Cecilia for a collaborative post so what better way to start the new year than with a guest post? Now, I’d like to say this is done in the spirit of sharing ideas and cross-continental collaboration but the truth is, I foolishly entered a bet with our Brazilian friend and promptly lost so here I am. :p

 

 Anyway, onto the post: the last ELTchat of 2010 focused on the importance and benefits for English teachers of learning another language and I’d like to expand on some of the points raised in that session here. The discussion mainly focused on two strands – how being the student of a language can assist us in seeing things from the learner’s point of view and whether or not learning and knowing their L1 can be of help.

 

At first glance, it would seem my experience of learning Turkish wouldn’t help me much as a teacher. Apart from a 4 week course some 10 years ago, I’ve never had any classroom instruction. I’ve also never worked with a coursebook, done any written or oral assignments or prepared for any tests. I basically learned everything I know from a total immersion situation and it was a long process. I didn’t actually learn much in the first two years as I was surrounded by other imported teachers and all the Turks I knew were students who wanted to practice English whether meeting in or out of school. It was only after I got married and settled here that I really statred to go beyond basic functional language. In a sense I was lucky that my wife’s family didn’t know much English – I was forced to develop my Turkish to communicate better with them (and free my wife from translation duty!). Now, while not fully fluent, I’m able to understand 99% of what I hear and communicate 99% of what I want to say.

 

So, how has this learning process helped me as a teacher in the classroom? Although I wasn’t‘formally’ taught, I believe the experience has been beneficial. I appreciate the feelings of doubt, confusion and panic that can arise when faced with lots of new language. Conversely, I also know how far you can get with just a little language (as well as lots of scaffolding and gesturing!) and this helps in encouraging my students to open up and give them the belief that they can communicate whatever thier level. There are also some personal learning strategies that I can highlight for my students. For example, upon learning (or ‘noticing’) a new word, I always look out for further examples of it in use, try to use it myself, and ask questions if I see it used in a different or unexpected way. And so, I always encourage my students to be on the look out for new words, find examples of their use and run their self-formed hypotheses by me.

 

While I fully agree that learning a language has generic benefits in this way, I found myself very much disagreeing with the notion that knowing your students’ L1 helps during the chat session. Before I explain why I should clear something up: I’m not saying that a teacher working and living in a foreign country doesn’t need to learn the local language. Far from it, I believe that anyone who stays in a foriegn country should make an effort to learn the language. I just find the claim that knowing their L1 makes the teaching and learning process easier debatable. After all, as I mentioned above, in the first two years I was here, I didn’t know much Turkish, certainly not at the level my students were learning English at. I never in anyway felt disadvantaged by not knowing their language.

 

Some people argue it’s useful to know where the L1 transfer issues come from, especially for vocabulary and pronunciation. However, I find such issues to be minor and easily highlighted. For instance, Turkish people often confuse open/switch on and close/switch off when speaking English as there is only one word for each in their own language. I’ve always found with time and repeated exposure, this kind of problem sorts itself out. Another often quoted example is “there are no perfect tenses in my students’ L1 so they find present perfect difficult”.While that may be true, it is also true that many learners of English around the world find perfect tenses difficult, even those who have an equivalent in their L1. (This discussion reminds me of natural order hypothesis, a theory which posits that language learners acquire and automise grammatical structures in more or less the same order regardless of their linguistic background).

 

So, when a language teacher is also a language learner, it helps in the sense that we can empathise with our students more. We can understand better their struggles, needs and feelings and give them the benefit of our experience. While knowing our learners’ L1 may offer some immediate benefits for quick translation or clarification, I don’t think it makes a huge difference. As long as you are a dedicated teacher with your students’ best interest at heart, you’ll be fine. 😉

Scaffolding, Maps and Possible Routes

This post is my response to the Dogme Blog Challenge #3 (“The Scaffolding”) proposed by Karenne Sylvester. You can read my previous Dogme Challenge posts here (for #1) or here (for #2). Here’s the quote for this week’s challenge:

 

“The teacher’s primary function, apart from promoting the kind of classroom dynamic conducive to a dialogic and emergent pedagogy, is to optimize language learning affordances, by directing attention to features of the emergent language; learning can be mediated through talk, especially talk that is shaped and supported (i.e. scaffolded) by the teacher. “

~ Luke Meddings & Scott Thornbury, Teaching Unplugged, Delta Teacher Development Series, 2009.

Which of these two is the teacher? Which is the student?

The term “scaffolding” was first used refering to learning by a cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruner, in the 50’s. He used it to describe how children learn and develop language with the help of their parents. How parents naturally help children find the ways to communicate orally when they’re struggling with it. Scaffolding is a temporary arrangement – the scaffold is there only until the child is able to successfully communicate what he/she wanted on his/her own.

When we bring the concept to the classroom, scaffolding means that teachers should not “spoon-feed” their students, but rather give them just what is necessary for the student to reach the desired communication (by the student) effectively, on his/her own. The learner has to be in charge and responsible for his/her own learning – not only about what to learn (the emergent learning), or the how to do it, but for the learning process itself. We’re way past the time of  teachers as almighty possessors of all knowledge who kindly give the knowledge to their students. As I mentioned in a previous post, teaches these days are more of facilitators, guides in the learner’s path to assimilating a new language (or at least we should be).

 

 

 

 

When I think about the role of teachers today I see us as the ones who have a map in our hands, a map to get to effectively using English (in my case) to communicate. Of course the way there has many possible stops (functions), and a wide choice of roads to get to the same place. The teacher is the one who chooses what he believes is the best road for each student (or group of students). Some routes are more fun, some are faster than others; just as some students are in a hurry to get to their final destination and others prefer to take their time and enjoy the view.  The teacher then points the student in the right direction for the road, show the road, and may even give a few steps along the learner on the road chosen but ultimately lets him/her go on alone – after he sees the path. The teacher’s job then is to keep an eye (from a distance) on the learner, just to make sure he/she doesn’t get lost along the way, and to stay at an arm’s length for when the learner wants to go somewhere else.

 

 

 

Where is Present Perfectville again?

 

So, I think I understand scaffolding language learning. But how do I do it? There are many ways.

• Doing an activity with a text that has the desired language in it and work with it in a way the student notices it, by asking questions that will direct the student there.
• Doing some vocabulary work prior to an activity where the learners will most likely need that vocabulary to properly express themselves.  
• Providing models of intended language before expecting students to do it (sometimes without actually teliing them that ).
• Giving learners positive feedback at every new step they take (self-confidence is a must for real learning).

 

I could go on and on. And maybe I got it all wrong, and that’s not what scaffolding is about. And I would love to hear how you scaffold! 🙂

 

For more great posts on the Dogme Blog Challenge #3, you should read:

Mike Harrison’s “How do you scaffold?”

David Warr’s “For those who know…”

Nick Jaworski’s “Dogme in the mind of a Teacher”

Henrick Oprea’s “Scaffolding”

Sabrina de Vita’s “Dogme with Young Learners”