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The Classroom and Language Learning | ||
Tags: School Education | Language Teaching | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Jar-ptitsa Triglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5904 days ago 980 posts - 1006 votes  Speaks: French*, Dutch, German | Message 17 of 33 10 May 2009 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I don't know the research, btu for me it's a very big differnce and I prefer the class with 6 people, or 8. The teacher isn't strict like in ym old school, and for exmple it hasn't to be silence and we can listen music on the iPods. And it's allowed drink in the class, or leave the room as well. I can learn *much* better in this class. GRRR the "A" on ym keyboard doesn't function: I have to hit it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| charlmartell Super Polyglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6250 days ago 286 posts - 298 votes Speaks: French, English, German, Luxembourgish*, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 18 of 33 11 May 2009 at 10:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I have never heard so much crap in my life. It does matter how bad the teacher is, it matters a lot. And I don't know where your "research has shown..." comes from. What research? Your defaitist attitude is unforgivable! Why don't you just get out of teaching and find something you're better suited for? And let someone else with a more positive approach to the whole business of teaching take over. I used to be a teacher myself and always found an enormous difference in attitude and level of achievement according to who had taught the class the previous year. And how they'd been taught! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6017 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 19 of 33 11 May 2009 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
You are completely missing the point of what I'm saying. I am not talking about special needs:
The "normal learners" are the 15 (=60%) who pass but don't learn. Of the successful 5 (=20%), TB says:
That's the distinction I'm making: the 60% "normal learners" fail to learn, and the 20% good learners succeed. Now why do I use kids as an example? Because it is the only broad set we have. Most of us here are in the 20%; ie the majority of successful adult learners were successful school learners. A lot of the remainder were exposed to languages early. We are not normal learners, and this is not because we are some superior breed, but because at some point we were taught how to learn. Furthermore, I mentioned kids crying, because while it's easy to dismiss a frustrated adult as "lazy" or "not really wanting it enough", you can't claim that a crying kid doesn't care!
Haven't I? Well yes, you're probably right, if the point of classes is to teach the student how to learn.
My dad's a retired teacher. When he was teaching, he refused to run "study techniques" classes because he always said that the best way to learn something is to do it: we learn to ride a bike by riding (and falling off); we learn football by kicking a ball until it goes the direction we want it to go. So why shouldn't we learn how to learn by learning? If you teach me a language, it walks me through the process of learning a language. Wouldn't that make it easier to do it a second time? My dad's class pass rates were higher than average.
This is true, but it is also obvious that most people do not know how to.
You can learn without being consciously aware of the process, but you have to have the internal framework. And that is why "lessons on how to learn" are of as little value as anything else in the educational system: learning skills classes give you a conscious knowledge of the "rules" of learning, but they do absolutely nothing to teach you how to apply these rules in "real life". Does that sound familiar? It should do, because it's exactly the same as the majority of complaints about traditional language teaching: it supplies you with conscious knowledge of the grammatical "rules", but doesn't give you the training to carry out a conversation intuitively. If it's such a big problem for learning language, why would it be any better for learning how to learn? Besides: I have never been in a study techniques class that teaches the way I learn, and I'm a successful learner. So can they really be that useful? In fact, I considered every single technique I was given in high school study techniques classes to be at best a waste of time, at worst counter-productive. Before they can teach useful generally applicable techniques, they're going to have to work out what generally applicable techniques exist.
I still think you're putting the cart before the horse there. A well-produced syllabus can take the difficulty out of the initial stages and give you a broad understanding of various features of the language, and the more you know, the more you can infer from a text. Once you've got a basic grounding, all this absorbing can be done soooooooo much more easily. The problem of the classroom isn't that the classroom is inherently bad, it's just that current teaching practice is woefully inadequate. (Case in point: TheBiscuit mentions learning styles. I don't believe in them, and I feel it becomes a distraction to the teacher trying to fill in a checklist of stuff for various styles rather than just taking what works and trying to refine it slowly until everyone understands it.) Edited by Cainntear on 11 May 2009 at 2:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| TheBiscuit Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5929 days ago 532 posts - 619 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Italian Studies: German, Croatian | Message 20 of 33 11 May 2009 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
My attitude is not defeatist. I try everything possible. Every semester I am contantly tweaking things, trying to reinvent the wheel, finding out what does amd doesn't work. I am in no way just going through the motions. I'm just frustrated by the limitations of the classroom set-up.
That's as may be but I refer to those same 5 students that will pass in any class, any system, any teacher and those same 5 students that will fail. The teacher may be able to improve the achievement of the 'pass by being there' majority but that's all. Teachers gladly take the credit if the class has a high pass rate, but do they also take the responsibility for those that failed? Not usually. Those that fail are 'bad learners' according to most teachers. If you look at how the top and bottom 5 perform in other subjects the results are the same which leads me to believe that it doesn't actually matter what is being taught and who is teaching it. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy teaching. I've just reached a point where I'm very frustrated. Edited by TheBiscuit on 11 May 2009 at 4:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6017 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 21 of 33 11 May 2009 at 8:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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TheBiscuit,
You have to ask yourself what you are changing. Are you changing how you are teaching or are you just making changes to the surface details? My dad taught in high schools for years. Educational fads came and went, and at the heart of each philosophy was "motivation" -- each tried to make the subject more "exciting" or more "relevant". He always resisted that -- he maintained that learning is fun, and if the subject isn't inherently interesting, it can't be made interesting; and that if it is interesting, anything you try to change to make it relevant distracts from the core subject, building layers of abstraction that actually obscure what you're trying to learn/teach rather than illuminating. I saw his view echoed once on TV: in the documentary on Michel Thomas's visit to an English inner-city school, the headmaster of the school commented that Thomas had shown her that it was the learning that kids really enjoyed, and that maybe all this other stuff they do to try to make things exciting just get in the way. You've got a hell of a lot more TEFL experience than me, but I went into classes with books that more often than not made me cringe. Teaching staff from a biotech institute about superpowers?!? This was considered "relevant" because of the recent rash of superhero films. Then there was the lesson based on REM's "Everybody Hurts". We were supposed to be "encouraging the kids to talk about their feelings", but one of the kids pointed to the tape recorder and said "emo". Damn straight. And the worst? Let's do a lesson on text-speak! That's hip to the jive, right? Erm... it's not their text-speak, so it's not cool. And it's a horrendous distraction from the core of language teaching. None of these lessons were appreciated, and the students still weren't able to put their words in the right order for a question. "Learning styles" is just another layer of obfuscation that makes learning harder, not easier. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| TheBiscuit Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5929 days ago 532 posts - 619 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Italian Studies: German, Croatian | Message 22 of 33 11 May 2009 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I've tried a lot of things. It always bothered me, right from the start, that in each class there was always a small percentage of successful learners. So I set out to see why and to find out what the teacher's role was in this. I've changed the dynamics of the class, the way I present things (I'll come up with 5 different ways to explain a grammar point for example), the tempo, additional material, deconstruction, games, music, flashcards, skills based lessons, making it fun, motivation, rewarding, even classes on how the memory works and much more. In fact, I'm pretty much out of ideas.
The problem with English in Mexico is that it's somewhat forced on them so there's this pressure to make it more entertaining which is fine but as you say, distracting. I have to ask myself during every class, 'How much learning is really taking place here?' The honest answer is usually very little, though ironically the students feel they learn something if the class is entertaining. I can do 'edutainment' but again what's the connection between what I'm teaching and what they're learning?
I love his method, mainly because it works and it's repeatable, no matter how good or bad the student is, and above all there's a connection between what is being taught and what is being learnt. The prehistoric classroom set-up is no where near that.
Those books are horrendous. They are all the same. The one I use at the moment is British and of course contains 75% culturally irrelevant material. What's worse is the current trend in these books towards the lexical approach. Students are supposed to absorb vocabulary while keeping grammar to a minimum. A good idea in theory but add all the drivel on top of it and both the grammar and the vocab just get lost in it all, and the students retains little or nothing.
Again, more unnecessary decoration. The only use for it I've found is varying the presentation of grammar. This does not mean a student has learnt anything. They may have understood it on an intellectual level but that doesn't mean it's been learnt. I'm more than open to suggestions for your ideal language classroom from the collective wisdom here. Perhaps it could be another thread? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dark_Sunshine Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5771 days ago 340 posts - 357 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 23 of 33 12 May 2009 at 2:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I'm about to take a TEFL/CELTA course and these stories about dodgy English teaching strategies aren't exactly filling me with confidence... any positive stories to relate?
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| Lemus Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6387 days ago 232 posts - 266 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese, Russian, German | Message 24 of 33 12 May 2009 at 3:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I think the problem, at least in the American public school system, is what the goals of the teachers are. At the beginning of the year, the language department decides that every student in Spanish Four, must, for example, know the difference between "por" and "para." Faced with those hyper specific goals that the teacher has to reach, it's no suprise where they will put their effort. Meanwhile, hopelessly broad goals like "increase students appriciation of Spanish-speaking culture" are, of course, neglected because they can't be measured.
So in the end we get a system where the teacher cares little other than who can conjugate to the imperfect subjunctive despite speaking phrases like "yo slepto mucho" in a fourth year Spanish class. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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