by Mike Groves

What follows is a transcript from the start of a recent lesson. It was at a private language school, and involved an intermediate level class, working towards PET. I feel that it exemplifies one of the faults of modern EFL methodology.

T: (Walking in) Good afternoon.
SS: (Indistinguishable—sounds of people taking off coats, etc)
T: How are you?
SS: (Indistinguishable—a mobile phone rings)
T: Please turn off your mobiles.
SS: Sorry.
T: How are you?
SS: (Some voices are indistinguishable, others say: Fine, OK, Great)
T: (Louder) How are you?
SS: Fine. You?
T: I’m fine, thanks—now let’s begin.

There are many faults with this approach. I will approach them in turn, using bullet points. I use this approach with purpose, since I will be presenting this paper at various conferences around the world in the next few months, and hoping to set up a web forum of my ideas, so it makes the transition to PowerPoint much easier.

Dictating students’ agenda
By walking into the students’ “space” and immediately demanding an assessment-driven overview of the learners’ state of mind, the teacher is immediately placing himself (I will use the male pronoun in this article, because, generally speaking, this attitude is male-gender-orientated) in the position of authority. He is assuming that he is somehow different from the group, above and separate from it, not a part of it. While he may know, in somewhat generalized terms, more about the content of the lesson, he does not allow the students to drive the interaction. Such teacher-student distinctions are to be discouraged. This is, naturally, how the students view things too: they do not wish the “so called teacher” to be in any way different for them.

The mobile phone
The teacher should not have asked the student to turn off her mobile phone. (Since women are so much better at communicating on an emotional level, I will use the female pronoun here). In addition, he is dictating power in this interaction. He should have asked her to explain the situation, the reason for the call, and as many adjectives to describe the person calling possible. After all, according to Dogme, we should bring the experiencers’ lives into the classroom.

Cultural Dis-awareness
This is a crucial point. By saying “Good afternoon”, the EIL-usage-facilitator is not just perpetuating the sense of “afternoon”—in a European Concept—which is important even when one (in the non-gender-specific sense) is teaching in Europe. He is not simply unaware of the students’ needs, he is deliberately dis-aware. At no point does he query the fact that some language-acquisition-subjects may have travelled recently, being subject to jetlag. Nor does he take into account that some may be university students, for whom 3.30 in the “post-noonal period” is only 2 hours after breakfast.

Questioning the group
It is at this point that one becomes really disexasperated. How many times have we learned that questioning a group advantages one section, those willing to answer? We also need to include those in the dis-group-focussed cohort so that their opinions are also valued. A better interaction would have included a question to all of the language-acquitionees about their state of consciousness, for example “How are you all [my italicisations], especially Sara whose boyfriend left her last week? Please tell us how you are progressing.” This develops an atmosphere of mutual trustuality, especially in the first week of a course.

Teacher Centred-itionism
The key fault here is that teacher decides when to take the experiential language hour forward, by simply brutally forcing the start of the lesson on the learners before they are ready. Such start-timeism should have been thrown out by Dogme, because after all, if we bring anything into the lesson that doesn’t come from the learner, we are obviously failing our language-hobbits. Any experienced language teacher will be able to tell you that their experience and imagination can keep any session going for hours! We should wait until they (my partner’s italics thanks Jan!) are ready to start, and then, and then only then should we activate the class (Internationally Understood Lingua Franca Familiarisation Experiential Experience).

Conclusion
When I non-judgementally-observed-in-a-developmental-framework I would have much preferred to see something like the following exchange:

T: (Enters the room)
SS: Greetings—how are you feeling?
T: (Silence)
SS: Thank you for your consideration—I was up a bit late last night, and still feel a bit woozy. I appreciate the chance to express my discomnfort.
T: (Notes down: Woozy is a bit of a female/EFL thing to say—remind them later that cos of that kebab kebab, the turtle is touching cloth is much more real world)
SS: Are you ready to start now?
T: Let’s contemplate a moment more.
T: Thank you for asking. Ready I am. Now let us start with a question. Who is more foolish, the fool, or the fool that follows him?