Teacher
Training Considerations
1. Theory to Practice
It’s all very well for me to flippantly
sign off with a line like ‘that requires thought,’ but what kind of thought,
exactly? I’ve previously tried to express these ideas more colloquially on my other blog and that post got picked up by a JET messageboard, which was very
gratifying. However, most commenters seemed to interpret what I was saying
primarily as a call to speak more slowly, and that isn’t the main thrust at
all. How, then, do we frame this in a way that inexperienced teachers can
understand and apply? And, more to the point, why would we want to?
In Sinclair and Coulthard’s original
research on classroom discourse, did they give any indication of the teachers’
levels of experience? Many of the examples presented seem to suggest (at least as
captured on the page) fairly experienced teachers with a relatively firm grasp
of the conventions of classroom discourse, however unconscious that grasp may have
been. I would contend that those conventions represent a pretty specific, specialist
form of discourse and as such they must be learned, and if they must be learned
they can, to some extent, be taught.
Observing more inexperienced teachers in
the classroom it’s become apparent that what I used to talk about in terms of
issues with ‘confidence’ or ‘exerting authority’ are particularly manifest
during boundary transactions: ending activities, gaining student attention,
starting new sections of the class etc. This is perhaps due to the nature of the
ALT industry with a preponderance of (undertrained) staff in their early 20’s
who have never really been in any position of authority over anyone before.
There’s a tendency for them to treat students as equals in a way that there isn’t
perhaps for more seasoned teachers. I’m not sure this is entirely cultural,
either (though that’s probably part of it – there’s more automatic deference in
Japan. Or rather, there are greater assumptions of parity in the Anglosphere).
This means that suggestions to directly
teach discourse strategies to L2 students appear to be skipping over a
significant, crucial, and perhaps more easily attainable step – teaching classroom discourse strategies to
teachers themselves. This, of course, hinges on the assumption that those
strategies as described in the literature are, in fact, effective for promoting
learning, however you choose to define that. Anecdotally I‘d suggest that they’re
effective for creating and reinforcing the teacher-student hierarchy, and thus classroom
discipline (which is not insignificant), but that’s not the same thing.
Regardless, there’s clear scope for application here, I think.
3. Non-Native Teacher
Discourse Strategies
As of this year Japanese senior high school
English lessons are supposed to be conducted entirely (or at least mostly) in
English. Needless to say that in practice this is more of an aspiration than a
realization.*
This section may be a touch confused, as
there are several issues crashing into each other here, most of which stem from
the following question –
Why use English for outer** interactions in
the EFL classroom?
Possible answers include –
l To expose students to as much English as possible
l To model target language
l To model ‘correct’ usage
All of these are subtly different, and I
think that a lot of JTEs get hung up on the last one. Their initial instinct is
to try and make their classroom English as fluent and as native-like as
possible (which we’ll take as ‘correct’ for now, or at least as the perception
of ‘correct’ by most JTEs). But as we saw last time, that’s actively
counterproductive when it comes to lower level learner comprehension (and
Japanese high school students are ALL lower level learners, really).
This creates a negative spiral in terms of
confidence, both for students (because they simply can’t understand) and
teachers (because they can’t make themselves understood). This, of course, is
one of the most significant drawbacks of the native-speaker paradigm. It’s fair
to say that on a day-to-day basis the majority of my Japanese colleagues’
original English interactions (by which I mean purposefully communicative
functions conducted in order to exchange non-predetermined information – so not
the textbooks) are with native speakers (by which I mean me). The paradigm they
were educated and trained under, and the one they continue to be most experienced
with, is that of communication with native speakers.
Unfortunately, when they use English to
communicate to (rarely with) their students, it’s a lingua franca exchange, and
the rules for those are different. Their entire professional lives have been a
search for increasing sophistication and complexity in pursuit of the native
speaker ideal and now, ironically in pursuit of that self-same ideal for their
students, they’re finding that it’s not appropriate. Sadly, many of them are
blaming it on their ‘poor’ levels of English. And, to an extent, it is a problem with their language skills,
but not in the way that they think it is. It doesn’t stem from a deficiency,
but an excess.
I’ll hold it there, because this could very
well descend into a rant about Japanese teacher training practice (or lack
thereof). But the point is that this problem of excess is very, very similar to
the problems faced by native speakers when they first start teaching in the EFL
classroom. The difference being, of course, that the main compensatory strategy
open to non-native speakers (i.e. speak in Japanese), isn’t available to native
speakers, so anyone even vaguely committed to the job*** will have to develop
alternative discourse strategies out of necessity. And thus, if I’m suggesting
that conclusions drawn from spoken discourse analysis may present opportunities
for training new native speaking teachers, the same should (should) also apply for non-native speakers.
The question, as ever, is how. And that, unfortunately, is where I
start to fall down slightly. Answers on a postcard to the usual address please.
*From here on I’ll be using Japanese and
English as exemplars of L1 and L2, respectively.
**It should be noted that I’m not a huge
fan of Willis and Halliday’s Inner/Outer terminology, but we’ll go with it here
for simplicity’s sake.
***There’s a can of worms right there.
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