A Day in the life of an EFL Teacher Educator

Dr. Laxman Gnawali

Associate Professor, Kathmandu University

Former Senior Vice President, NELTA

It was the second lesson on the EFL teaching methodology course for the M Ed in ELT Spring
batch. In the first lesson, participants either shared or adopted a metaphor for a language
classroom (Ha, 2014). They compared the language classroom to a range of things: a bus, a
family, a gardener , a stage, a farm and so on. The discussion on the metaphor somehow led to
the idea that learners differ in several ways; we didn't discuss what the differences were. We
promised we would explore them in the second lesson. It was a thinking task for me as well as
for the participants.

In the second lesson, I decided to use brainstorming as a technique to gather ideas on learner
differences from the participants. Brainstorming would allow everyone to share their original
ideas, and, it also would allow me to think on my feet. I would be able to think of a new idea as I
listened to what the participants were sharing and add on to the discussion.

The Fish Bowl activity (Fish Bowl, 2014) is what I find best for brainstorming. It is not only
useful as a way to get participants to share their ideas but also to demonstrate how they can use
the same technique in their classrooms. So as usual, I set the participants in two concentric
circles: six in the inner and the rest twelve in the outer circle. I gave them instructions how they
would work. The participants in the inner circle would speak briefly discussing how the learners
differed . Once each one had a chance, they could add to what they said or respond to others'
opinions. If someone from the outer circle felt like participating, they had to pat on the back of
one of the inner circle members who would leave the seat. The newcomer then would share their
ideas. This process would go on until everyone had been in the inner circle and done their part.

Today's Fish Bowl activity was more lively and productive than before. The participants tried to
establish that the individual differences exist in the language classrooms (Hurd, 2006) and they
manifest in different ways. One participant talked about the differences in terms of learning
aptitude and another said they have diverse learning styles. Someone mentioned the mother
tongue backgrounds of the learners that the teacher had to deal with. The participants knew about
these differences through different sources: either they had noticed or they had read about or they
had heard from someone. As usual, I sat with my laptop to note down ideas generated during the
discussion. After about 40 minutes, the group was quiet and I thanked the participants for the
inputs, then I read out a summary ideas they had brought about.

In a nutshell, the participants had said learners differ in terms of: a. learning aptitude, b. cultural
and linguistic backgrounds, c. attitude towards language learning, d. ethnicity, e. exposure to the
target language, f. motivation for learning, g. interest in the target language h. gender, i.
economic background, j. distance to the school, k. family background, l. learning aim, m. mental
and physical health condition n. religion, o. learning style, p. personal manner, q. parents’
education, and r. multiple intelligences.

There was nothing left for me to provide input on the issue. In fact, more ideas had been
generated than I had planned to share in the lesson. So, the second half of the lesson was spent
on finding how these participants differed in terms of multiple intelligences. They completed a
multiple intelligences questionnaire and I explained the results. Most participants were in fact
linguistically intelligent but a few others felt they had to walk an extra mile to be a good EFL
teacher.

The class was over. We again had a thinking task for the next class: how to design a lesson that
can cater to the diverse types of learners that we deal with in the EFL classrooms.

References

Ha, H. (2014) Metaphor and Second Language Learning: The State of the Field. The Electronic
Journal for English as a Second Language 18(2).

Hurd, S. (2006). Individual learner differences and distance language learning: an overview.
RTVU ELT Express, 12(4)

Fish Bowl (2014) From http://www.learner.org/workshops/tml/workshop3/teaching2.html.

Accessed on 28/12/2014

Published at http://neltaeltforum.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/482/#more-482