Didáctica

Reflecting on EFL teaching and learning

To Cindy Rauth and Rochelle Keough, admired professors who teach by principles and by love for teaching

Paula Amador
Elizabeth Castro
Fernando Larios
Elena Madrigal
Kenia Ponce  * 

Students and teachers participate in the mysteries of learning and teaching English as a foreign language (efl). A language classroom is a world in itself. There are different kinds of students. Teachers and students have different strategies and styles of teaching and learning. Teachers and students bring different values to the classroom. Students do not like some teachers and teachers do not like some students, especially those who do not show any interest in learning. The challenge we still face as efl teachers is how to teach best.

One book that has rapidly become a classical source for reflecting on issues related to efl is Teaching by Principles. An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy by Douglas Brown (White Plains, N.Y., Pearson Longman, 2007).  Teaching by Principles allows teachers to link their everyday experiences with theory and analysis.  Students’ stories and excuses for not engaging themselves in their own learning can thus become starting points for improving teaching.  Most teachers are familiar with opinions like these: “I do not plan to go to the United States”, “I do not understand English”, “words in English have a different order”, “words in English are pronounced very differently”, or “English is very difficult”.  But experience also shows that it is possible for learners to experience the joy of doing something important and relevant with the English language, to realize that language is not a bunch of words to memorize, tons of grammar rules and activities without sense.

COGNITIVE

1. Automaticity. Processes in foreign language acquisition involve a subconscious, gradual movement from language forms to fluency. It also refers to the fact that, like children, learners should process the target language subconsciously as much as possible. This means that overanalyzing language, thinking too much about its forms, rules and features is worthless in the first phase of learning. Instead, learners have to absorb language though meaningful use rather than through the mastery of unit by unit and piece by piece. In order to help learners, instructors should make students aware about this principle. Moreover, teachers can include in their lesson plans the inductive method for most of the skills and subskills. In this way, students are encouraged to use the language fluently and once they become confident, they will be ready to comprehend accurately its features. Avoiding frustration among students is the teachers’ responsibility.

2. Meaningful learning. Foreign language learning and retention is easier, better and more lasting when students can use it in real life situations. New information should be connected to some extent to the students’ existing knowledge and previous experience. By making these associations, learners create new schemata that eventually will lead toward better long-term retention. Therefore, the teacher has a challenging task: Which material/information should be presented so that all the learners make meaningful connections that are related to their interests, needs, likes, background, career goals, etc.? One way to know this is by doing quick needs analysis at the beginning of the course. The teacher can base his/her lessons on the topics that students take as relevant. In this way, students will have something to say and something to share and still something to discover and learn.

3. The anticipation of reward. Rewards could be reached in a short or long period of time, they could be tangible or not, but they are, no doubt, an essential part of the internal development learners. It has been scientifically proven that human beings behave the way we do because we consciously or unconsciously expect some sort of reward, which can be tangible or abstract and can be expected immediately or in the long-term. We cannot expect less from our students’ behavior. If we include compliments to their progress, like verbal praise, as well as positive feedback in our daily practice, the students will feel more confident.

4. Intrinsic motivation. Rewards are important to determine behavior, but the most significant rewards are those that are inherent to students. What this principle suggests is that we make our students like and learn the language through the connection of their own needs, wants, or desires in life and the language they are learning. One way to achieve this is by including English-speaking cultures, successful life stories, better job opportunities, or scholarships abroad.

5. Strategic Investment. It is the amount of time, effort and attention learners devote to their own learning process.

6. Autonomy. Students’ responsibility in their own learning process is closely related to their success when using foreign language in real life situations.

SOCIOAFFECTIVE

7. Language ego. Language learners develop, naturally, a new identity –a “second-self” as they become better in the second language.

8. Willingness to communicate. Students who continuously attempt to communicate in the target language are more confident and less worried about mistakes. This constant risk-taking in trying out acquired language and the positive response from their teachers give students a sense of achievement.

9. The Language-Culture connection. Language and culture are integrated. When students learn a language, they are exposed to different aspects of the culture, such as ways of thinking, values, body distance, etc.

LINGUISTIC

10. The Native language effect. Learners’ native language can facilitate the process of target language acquisition because it helps learners to make inferences about how the new language works. Nevertheless, most of the time these interferences lead learners to make mistakes. As mistakes are more observable, native language is also considered as an interference problem in a foreign language learning process.

11. Interlanguage. Interlanguage causes errors from the part of the learner, which is not wrong. Errors are powerful indicators of the learners’ development and improvement in a foreign language.

12. Communicative competence. Communicative competence is the most important aim of the efl classroom. Language use and fluency are at the top. Communicative competence involves: organizational competence (grammar and discourse), pragmatic competence (functions and sociolinguistics), strategic competence (students as independent learners), and psychomotor skills (pronunciation). Emphasis should also be placed on developing pragmatic discourse, and sociolinguistic and grammatical competence.

As a result of thinking on the three domains Brown proposes, we now present some practical advice for each of them.  It is our way to show that classroom changes can be possible with little effort and huge amounts of creativity.  However, many times evaluation goes against our novel procedures and good will to teach and learn differently.  So, we conclude our reflections with an analysis of what we have been doing in relation to a concluding stage of our teaching practice.  We also introduce the concept of “assessment” as an alternative to traditional evaluation means and, most importantly, as a way to be attentive to our changing students.

Cognitive

The conscious methods and strategies students use to learn the target language better and faster eventually make them autonomous learners. In other words, when a student realizes if he/she is a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner, and uses this information to create ‘ways’ of learning better, he/she is taking responsibility of his/her own progress. However, students do not magically become autonomous.  They have to make a conscious process and the teacher is partially responsible for this to happen. Practical ideas on how to help students monitor and assess their own learning is by giving them a survey on learning style. It is useful because it makes them aware about their preferences, strengths and weaknesses. Also, we can teach them strategies for each foreign language skill. For instance, for listening and reading, we can include getting the main idea or specific details, or scanning and skimming in our lessons. For speaking, we can teach them expressions for asking for clarification or repetition. Also we can teach them study techniques like note taking, and finally we can help them create a plan for achieving personal learning goals.

Socioaffective

It is indisputable that intellectual and linguistic issues do play a role in efl learning at all levels.  However, many students have already had opportunities to develop in these two areas for some years.  By the time they enter our classrooms, they have refined their critical thinking skills and, most importantly perhaps, they have grasped complex linguistic systems, such as their own native language or the Spanish language, or the language of mathematics or chemistry.  As a consequence, it is necessary for teachers to look for insights in the socio-affective and, more specifically, the cultural-linguistic dimension, in order to motivate them to learn English.  It is also a fact that American English is predominant in Mexican classrooms. The negative opinion they might have of the culture of the target language may hinder some cognitive subareas, such as internal motivation or strategic investment.  Unfavorable states of mind and hostile feelings are not our best allies.  Therefore, how can we prevent negative attitudes?

The language-culture connection comes to our rescue to provide answers or arguments to develop as courses progress.  Let us concentrate on three examples and how we could integrate them to our classroom setting.  First, the English language is not only American.  We can then either ask my students to prepare Power Point presentations on countries where English is also a native language.  We can also surprise them with a recording that offers a variation of English.  Second, the United States is a country that shares a history of effort and pain with all nations and its people are as varied as anywhere else.  Lectures, documentaries, or movie shows on “The Trail of Tears” or “Central High School,” for example, may be used to discuss common historical events.  Third, American culture is largely based on independence.  We are almost certain that our students would have a lot to think about when they listen to, read, or watch quotidian stories of independence and freedom.  We might begin with a story about students who do not stand in lines before beginning classes, could use printers on their own, look for books at the library on their own, make photocopies on their own, and pick their own food at the school cafeteria.  We know our students could hardly believe such a story because school life in Mexico is quite different from the one in the US.  Such a discussion would lead us to comment on issues such as the relationship between independence, freedom, and responsibility in social interaction.

Linguistic

Our students need valuable language experiences as they learn efl and computers can play an integral part in providing them.  Students need to hear, write, speak, and read language varied, contextualized, and authentic language as much as possible.  It’s completely different to have only a teacher in front of a class, always with the same accent and intonation, than to be exposed to people from different ages, countries, and contexts. Particularly in Mexico, students do not have the chance to speak with native speakers, so technology can help us to provide with real contexts and situations.

Technology is a good resource for us to turn to.  Videos, efl teaching web sites, sites for creating posters are some of the aids teachers and students can use.  Technology can also become a means for creating things with language and not only exposing our students to it in all its richness and complexity.  For example, the use of blogs is a technique we can easily try.  According to Brown, “blogs are easy-to-use, simple web sites where one can quickly write thoughts, opinions, interact with others and get feedback” (203).  The use of blogs would engage students to write and read in order to reflect on their learning. With blogs we can use either controlled or free practice tasks, provide exercises to learn vocabulary with visual clues and in context or just have the chance for expressing feelings about lessons, classroom interaction, or feelings about the language itself. The blogs can be private or public, and students can choose who can or cannot read their blogs. I will use them in writing practice specifically.

Wikis are websites that can be edited by all the members who participate in it.  Wikis promote collaborative work and allow a good organization of information and resources, such as Power Point presentations, videos to discuss, assignments calendars, etc.  Teachers and students share information and they are able to edit it in an easy and effective way.

Evaluation and assessment

Evaluation has always been Achilles’ heel for English teachers. As time goes by and new methods and perspectives on how students must learn arise, we are forced to change our way to evaluate. And by evaluation we mean exams where you are graded and then placed in a performance chart; this never-changing process continues to affect our students today.  Assessment is defined by Brown as “an integral part of the pedagogical process of designing lessons, implementing them, and evaluating their success; without an assessment, we couldn’t determine the attainment of objectives and goals” (443).  In other words, assessment is more inclusive than evaluation since it comprises the subjective idea of “success” for everybody and everything that affects learning and teaching.  In his book, Brown presents about a broad variety of assessments, but let us focus on norm-referenced and criterion-referenced means since we believe they could be a good starting point for the Mexican efl context.

Norm-referenced procedures identify how well the student did according to percentile ranks. In Mexico, norm-referenced tests are widely used by teachers since they are easier to grade and interpret; i.e., they are at the top of the “practicality” value, as Brown calls it.  Norm-referenced tests give you a pretty clear idea of how a student is performing on the basis of closed mechanical types of questions which include filling gaps, changing from once tense to another, circling the right answer. So, when checked, it is easier to grade on a scale. As Brown puts it, “the purpose of [norm-referenced] tests is to place test-takers along a mathematical continuum in rank order, and little else” (467).  However, what these kinds of tests gain in practicality and reliability, they lack in authenticity. Most of the exercises proposed do not have a context or they are very vague. They hardly ever connect with the test-taker.  So, they lack meaning and constitute another factor for poor performance. Another con of this kind of tests is that there is no other washback than a check or cross mark to know if the question was correct or incorrect.  This situation leads students to not being able to learn from their mistakes and it does not assure teachers that students won’t make the mistake again.

To be honest, most of us have relied on this kind of evaluation, many times not by choice of course, but because exams are usually standardized in many language schools and universities in the country. However, as language teaching paradigms have improved and we are willing to change the way we teach, we find it better to let students guide classes as much as possible, we try to teach inductively, and we rely on technology more day after day, our whole perspective of testing and assessment has to change, even when it comes to grading.  We cannot keep on using the same old procedures we have used for ages. It seems that no matter what the teaching trend is, grading is universal and it must be expressed in the same way.

We are required to express grades quantitatively, meaning you have to give a numerical tangible grade from 5 to 10, 5 being a failing grade and 10 perfection. This is a big problem now because the new education tendencies in Mexico demand that students be evaluated qualitatively; i.e. assessed.  Paradoxically, reports teachers have to fill for students, parents and even for the official records of the educational board must be numerical. For that matter, there has been what Browns calls an expanding acceptance of “alternatives” in classroom-based assessment. The use of portfolios for instance, was one of the first steps towards a new way of testing. However, teachers did not know exactly what to do other than just create a folder where students stuffed their work. Journals were followed and quickly discharged by teachers who did not find them practical at all, to the point which they are rarely used nowadays.

We believe that change must be presented gradually. And that’s exactly what we must do. The best way would be finding balance to include both, norm-referenced and criterion-referenced assessment in our exams: to move a little from the traditional test towards an alternative kind of tests, not sacrificing practicality completely, but complementing it with open ended questions that, in the long term, will allow students to have a better understanding of their performance through appropriate feedback. Why not using, for example, quick, easy drawings for students to assess their own performance?  They could rate themselves in three different categories: a happy face to mean “I know it all, I feel confident about the topic”, a so-so face to mean “I know most of it but I need to study more”, and finally a sad face to express “I do not remember anything”.

As for the grading part, rubrics would come in handy for creating a context where students could see the real use of language in situation-based activities. Perhaps some of the rubrics used in the Common European Framework could be adapted to our teaching situation. We could use them as a base to transform the “new alternatives” of assessment into the numerical one that is required for the education board.

Closing remarks

The elements we have reflected on so far are not isolated.  They are pieces of a larger, fantastic puzzle.  Learners and we teachers are part of it.  Principles can help us make informed choices to improve our everyday practices. This does not mean that the knowledge and the experience that we have about other methods is not useful anymore. On the contrary, we can now highlight the value of theoretical insights about old methods, the post methods and the principles. By doing so, we reflect and analyze the what, why, how, when, and the where of our choices. In this way we are shaping our own approach constantly because it a dynamic method that fits our students’ features and context, our personality, likes and dislikes.

Learning and teaching involve attitudes, opinions, and biases that affect efl study.  We are translators not only of one language into the other, but from one whole culture to another.  That is why we should select and emphasize positive or exemplary cultural issues.  Movies, documentaries, listening passages, and everyday behavior are some of the sources we can think of to promote mutual understanding among the cultures involved in the learning of efl in our classrooms.  Technology can also provide rich contexts. It allows students to become active learners in a one-to-one environment. With technology, teachers incorporate various learning strategies as well as accommodate a variety of learning styles. Blogs, wikis, videos, pod-casts are some of the innumerable resources we can now use.

We can also be creative when we think of evaluation and assessment.  There might be several ways to evaluate our students. Some of them are easier for us to do, some others are more time consuming. But no matter how we decide to evaluate, it has to match perfectly three main aspects. First, we must take into consideration the students’ needs. We have to give them a chance to improve and do better. This improvement can be achieved by the application of new alternatives in assessment which are contextualized and performance-oriented.  Secondly, we have to be able to find a way to transfer such new assessments to the traditional numerical way of assigning grades so that educators, parents, students, and the education department could be satisfied. Third, we have to take into account our own abilities and factual possibilities to implement new ideas without making them burden to our already heavy workload. It might seem a lot of work at first, but all it takes is willingness for our profession.

 *  This paper is a result of the Teacher Training Program we attended at the University of Arkansas during the summer of 2011 as Fulbright grantees.  We hope it reflects the common background, hopes, knowledge and values we have as educators at different levels (from elementary to college) and at various cities of Mexico. We wish to thank Dr. Cynthia Boardman for her valuable comments and insights on core portions of this essay.