Lecture listening in an ethnographic perspective - Malcom Benson

Learning is capable of being seen as a specific and developed culture.

Introduction: on the nature of ethnographic understanding.

Learning as a culture has its own structures, contexts, rituals, universals, significant
symbols, roles, status makers, patterns of behaviour, beliefs, values, assumptions,
attitudes, and even the allocation of praise and blame (together with the consequent
rewards and punishments) just like the larger entities known as cultures. And as with
fully-grown cultures, it is open to ethnographic description and analysis.

The lecture: some critical features.

Listening to lectures is a major part of the culture of learning, as any student will attest.
It is one of the learning channels available to students, some others being reading,
interaction with other students, and discussions with the teacher.

A) A lecture is a “performance”, one usually given special status by attendance being

“compulsory”
There are two important ways in which speech may be a performance:
- The artistic side seen as a specially marked way of speaking, one that sets up or
represents a special interpretive frame within which the act of speaking is understood.
In this sense of performance, the act of speaking is put on display, objectified, lifted out
to a degree from its contextual surroundings, and opened up to scrutiny by an
audience.
While all of the above applies to performances whose aim may be to entertain, amuse
or persuade, at least some applies to the giving of lectures. Within the lecture hall, the
words used become the material of the proceedings, they take on “public” attributes, no
longer being the words of a private individual.
This is recognizably the special public language of the lecture hall, with its mistakes, its
repetitions, its pauses for writing the main ideas, and even its dramatic flourishes.
Importantly, it is accountable language.
- That attendance at lectures is compulsory, is related to their being performances. Not
merely does a performance require an audience, but the ethnographer soon realizes
that factors other than the transmission of information must be at work; this is evident
from the fact that the same body of knowledge could far more easily be given to
students in the form of a reading assignment or a handout. The real reason for
attendance at being compulsory is that the lecturer by his/her performance is proof that
the problems confronting the class are solvable, that the ideas are graspable; the
audience literally gain access both to the speaker and to his/her ideas. A performance
where the main goal is to establish contact with students who are being initiated into a
world in which problems are solvable, and where relations can be established with a
person that has been there may serve to increase global semantic and pragmatic unity
and to introduce a variety of mutually reinforcing interpretive frames. The lecturer
overtly or covertly reveals attitudes towards the content and also indicates the level of
detail at which the material should be viewed by the students.

B) A lecture is organized along two axes: the first is the structural one of the university,
the department, and the lecturer; the second is that of its relationship to the rest of the
course.
Any lecturer is the product of an immense amount of vertical planning and organization.
There are three levels of administrative goals, those of the department, the course, and
the teacher.
Neither the departmental level goals not the course level goals give the student much
clear guidance. At the third level, the teacher’s course outline did not specify any goals,
but for instance, named the books to be used, outlined her expectations of the
students, etc. What finally occurred in the class was the product of elaborate structural
planning, and in a very specific sense the information, attitudes, views, and so forth
that constituted the lecture content were delivered. When we look at the horizontal axis
of a lecture course, we see that each lecture builds on the previous one, is a free-
standing speech event with its own interior structure, and anticipates the next. In this
sense, learning is additive, moving on from lecture to lecture, often keeping pace with a
book or books, and with the written work proceeding in the background.

C) A lecture is also organized vis á vis the other learning channels, and students
usually have personal preferences among these channels.
The different channels can be reading, writing, listening, speaking, interaction, exams
and being lectured.

D) A lecture takes place in specific contexts of time and place

In the ethnographic view, the historical period in which a lecture, or course of lectures,
is given is of great importance. So too is the location (country, institution). These may
have determining influences on what occurs, not only in terms of behavioral norms and
the relative status of the participants, but also in terms of expectations, attitudes,
learning styles, and the outcomes of learning.

E) A lecture relies on the norms and rules of the temporary speaking and listening
community that is called class.
The social norms of a lecture class specify who can take part, what the role
relationships are, what kind of content is admissible, in what order information can be
introduced, and what speech etiquette applies.
These behavioral norms work on both general and particular levels, with the latter
being indicated in the form of class rules which are very quickly apparent to the
students.
Other norms refer to the status or roles of the participants. In university classes, the
roles teacher and student provide powerful behavioural frameworks which both
constrain and liberate those involved. The teacher is constrained in terms of language,
presentation of content, and in a variety of sociolinguistic ways. However, generally
speaking the teacher us free to treat the topic in any preferred manner, using any
appropriate methodology, and relinquishing the floor only at will. The student role, while
constraining certain behaviors, such as taking the floor, also liberates by removing a
variety of intellectual and social obligations. Norms such as these are by no means the
same across cultures.

F) A lecture activates the principles and values and goals which guide the members of
the speech community.
The norms of classroom behavior are the product of a variety of principles and values
held by each participating member, and in practice translated into goals. These values
may be investigated in several ways and the ethnographer is likely to be impressed by
the variety that exists even in a relatively small and homogenous group.
The conceptions of the teacher’s role reflected a social aspect of cognition. The
teacher’s role was that of facilitator or a guide. The role of facilitator was seen as
enabling students to study by providing them with an adequate framework, stimulating
lectures, objectives, requirements and deadlines, plus the opportunity for classroom
interaction. The notion of guide focused on the teacher’s experience and the fact that
she had been there before.
The way L1 students experience lectures finds three different kinds of motivation:
extrinsic, intrinsic and vicarious.
Motivation and strategies are intimately linked. To know that a student is deeply
interested in a subject helps to explain occurrences of question-asking, extensive
reading in the area, careful note-taking during lectures, and so forth. Such strategies
have been described as conscious learning decisions that students make or
social/affective strategies.

G) A lecture makes linguistic and cognitive demands on the listener.

The ESL student as becoming socialized or acculturated into the learning culture,
discovers through interaction the structures, values, norms, and procedures of that
culture, which may or may not have parallels in his/her educational system.
Freedle separates the learning od simple facts from the learning of complex systems of
ideas, and then states that the latter cannot be handled by such limited conceptions as
short- and long-term memory. He then goes on to argue for an apparatus that will
select those parts of the old knowledge system which need alteration (substitution,
addition, or subtraction of semantic relations) in the light of semantic and pragmatic
decisions. The cognitive side of listening to lectures, therefore, becomes, one in which
alterations are made to existing constructs, rather than one in which totally new ideas
must be comprehended. In this view, strategies (linguistic, cognitive, social) can be
used to cope with the learning culture. Strategies thus represent the upper, often
observable and sometimes teachable layer of learning culture which also contains a
lower, hidden layer of unspoken values, assumptions and beliefs.
For the ESL student, prior exposure both to the skills and strategies aspect, the
observable and teachable side, and to the learning culture, the hidden dimension are
vital. Regarding listening, the skills and strategies that come from intensive training are
a necessary but not sufficient part of the exposure. Consequently, a possible way that
language teachers can help is by providing adequate opportunities for content learning.
This gives exposure to the learning culture by providing an introduction to the way
knowledge is made available, how it is to be selected, recorded, and integrated with
existing knowledge.

H) A lecture is patterned into certain classes of communication acts which are

recognized by the participants and are capable of being described.
A lecture or series of lectures is a culturally organized form of discourse aimed at the
production of culturally constituted meaning. All students need cultural knowledge and
access to the necessary interpretive strategies. In the case of ESL students, not only
the language forms (vocabulary, syntax, etc) but also the underlying cultural grammar
and interpretative strategies may be initially unknown.

I) A lecture allows for a specific range of events to occur.

A lecture, or course of lectures, is made up of a range of specific events which
themselves are part of the culture of learning. Learning is assumed to be polysemic.

Conclusion: Ethnography and ESL

The ethnographer can be in the role of explorer and revolutionary as well.
Explorer, because the process of doing ethnography may necessitate the description of
previously undocumented areas of experience; moreover, it may involve the
ethnographer in a variety of disciplines which purists would argue are unconnected.
And possibly revolutionary, because ethnographic findings may not lend support to
conventional wisdom.
Ethnographic research can contribute to our understanding of the culture of learning as
follows:
- Accurate grounded description of what is occurring in lecture classes
- Analysis of the described events.