Now, let us operationalize that
capacity for speech production. It is clear that passing the final exam cannot
be our students’ ultimate goal. People do not buy tools, computers or home
devices because of their inherent beauty, but because of their capacity to
solve their problems. Likewise, students take classes to be able to use that
language later on in real life according to their individual needs. That is, your
focus as an ethical and business-savvy teacher alike should be on producing
exactly that: not just teaching to the test, but also making sure your student
will excel in real life. In theory, this does not seem too controversial.
Let us now proceed to take a
look of what happens in a real life situation. What percentage of a typical
week do we use language in audio form (listening and speaking) vs. visually
(reading and writing). In our professional as well as private life. And, when
producing language (speaking and writing), how often do we craft our own
sentences vs. doing something else (complete multiple choice tests, fill in the
blank exercises, odd-man-out, translations, etc.)? Most students will respond
that their daily use in their native language is around 70-80% audio, and that
almost 100% of the time they produce their own sentences. If you compare this
to the last language courses you yourself attended, you will see most probably
a big discrepancy. When asked about their latest courses, students reply that
they did less than 50% audio and very little (maybe 10%) of crafting of their
own sentences.
However, that is what we
should be training for in the classroom already. If we want to set up our
students for success. Because a good training (not only in sports, music or
professional settings) is the one that mimics real life as closely as possible.
There is reason why becoming drivers and pilots need to go through simulators
and practical lessons.
Now we have arrived at a quantifiable
and measurable output indicator for our teaching:
To create in our students the ability to craft their own sentences in
the target language.
Here we can track
· The number of written and spoken sentences
per minute/time unit;
·
The number of mistakes per 100 words;
·
The typical length of a sentence;
·
The number of different sentence patterns a
student can command (main vs. subordinate clauses, questions, etc.)
Everything happening in the
classroom should lead to that outcome. Every classroom activity, every material
you hand out, every home routine, should be geared toward how to make your own
sentences (mostly, in spoken words).
How do we arrive there?
Many of us, and most of our
students, have no clear answer to that. They may say that they will become
fluent by attending lessons, working with the textbook, having a lot of
practice, immerging into the language in a foreign country, or by simulated
immersion at home with the language always in the background.
However, this approach is
too risky, because we rely on too many variables we cannot control: quality- and
quantity-wise. What guarantee do we have that following the textbook is really
the quickest and surest way to speech mastery? What do our students understand
by “practice”?
How can we make sure that they learn how to self-correct?
Before we embark on
discussing concrete techniques, let us break down the underlying elements of
our desired output, that is producing one’s own sentences, and then reverse
engineer it.
Let’s have a look at the
picture below.
At the macro level, we have
a conversation between two or more individuals going on. They may be sitting at
a café, in a meeting or waiting room, at a railway station or talking on the
phone.
Let us now break down this
whole event into different segments horizontally and vertically. For each level
·
an individual needs to have specific
linguistic skills,
·
and faces specific linguistic problems;
·
there are some techniques that offer greater
results than others.
Our job as a teacher will be
·
to make our students aware of those levels
and redirect their attention towards them, especially when they train at home
·
to explain the specific skills necessary for
each level
·
and help students assessing their proficiency
in it,
·
to recommend the most suitable exercises.
On the surface level, we
have an event of a certain duration between x number of people at a certain
time and place.
During that event, we talk
about different topics. Even a job-related conversation contains phases like
introductory small talk and wrapping it up.
To talk about those topics,
we make sentences.
Each sentence is composed of
smaller groups of words/phrases (“at home”, “for you”, “am surprised”).
Each of those work clusters
consists of, logically, words.
Each word consists of
sounds.
(to be continued)
If you want
be notified about the upcoming book or more articles and materials on the
psychology and quality management of language teaching, please subscribe to my mailing list.
If you want
to read more about quality management in language teaching, please check out the
other articles on this blog. If you have not read it yet, I recommend those
on student feedback
questionnaires and on how to standardize
your teaching.
Stay tuned!
Gerhard
About the
GO Method
The GO Method applies research
in psychology as well as principles of quality management to the language
teaching process. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while
being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily
adaptable document templates.
About me
Psychologist and polyglot from
Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the
University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university
lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes,
IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with
representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment