David Coulson 2013

CAN DOGME CHALLENGE THE COURSEBOOK IN EFL SCHOOLS IN ENGLAND?

INTRODUCTION

The majority of English EFL schools have traditionally used a course book as the
basis for their syllabus design and this has consequently become a prerequisite
when putting together a course. The question 'which course book shall we use?'
in most cases provides the foundation for further planning and organisation of
the course. For many involved in EFL teaching published materials and course
books in particular continue to play a vital and positive role in the day-to-day
teaching of English and it is true to say that up to ten years ago there was no real
viable alternative to the course book. As Bell and Gower said in 1998 'course
books address certain needs of learners and teachers and continue to do so'.
However, it can be said that the culture of dependency which has built up around
course books can be viewed as disempowering for both teachers and students
alike.

In this paper I will specifically examine Dogme teaching and its origins drawing
on Scott Thornbury and Luke Medding's work and subsequent reactions to it and
look at and how the Dogme method can adapt to the technological changes that
have taken place in the 13 years since its inception while still maintaining the
core of its original philosophy and, using a framework developed by Brian
Tomlinson, I will examine the validity of using a combination of Dogme with new
2.0 technologies as an alternative to course books.

I will draw on a research project from Bangalore in India to examine how

teachers' initial reactions to new approaches change over as period of time.
During the course of the essay I will explore the feasibility of expecting this sort
of approach to be adopted by language schools in England and how it could be
set in motion and suggest further areas of research which could be explored in
this field to allow us to understand these possibilities in greater depth.

I will start by explaining Dogme and what it is:

Dogme teaching

In the early part of the new millennium a method called Dogme was
conceptualized by Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings. This new method was
based on the concept of Dogme 95, an avant-garde film making movement which
was started in 1995 by the Danish film directors Lars Von Trier and Thomas
Vinterburg. The essential premise of Dogme 95 was to return to the roots of
filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting and excluding the use
of elaborate effects or technology. (Utterson, A. 2005)

Inspired by this in the year 2000 Scott Thornbury wrote an article entitled 'a
Dogme for EFL' where he advocated transferring these ideas to EFL teaching and
teaching as he termed it ' unplugged'.
This idea of teaching unplugged, to teach without publish textbooks or materials
and focusing on conversational communication between teachers and learners
had as one of its principal objectives to humanize the classroom through a
radical pedagogy of dialogue (Templer, B. 2004) and was based on 10 key
principles. To summarize them these principles basically stated that language
was to be emergent based on interactivity, dialogic processes and scaffolded
conversations and that students would develop their own materials thus
guaranteeing engagement. The learners would be empowered as their own voice,
beliefs and knowledge were give value in the classroom.

The observation was made at the time that too many lessons were 'hijacked by
either materials overload, or by Obsessive Grammar Syndrome (OGS)' and the
need existed to restore teaching to its bare bones ie. just a few chairs, a
blackboard, a teacher and some students whose learning was jointly constructed
out of the talk that evolved in the classroom. As Thornbury said:

'teaching, like talk, should centre on the local and relevant concerns of the people
in the room, not on a remote world of course book characters, nor the contrived
world of grammatical structures'

(Thornbury, S. 2000)

The Bangalore project

At this point I would like to examine a study which was undertaken by N.S
Prabhu in Bangalore, India, the results of which were published in 1987. The
project involved teaching English to a small number of classes in Primary and
Secondary schools in southern India over a period of time varying between one
and three years and was borne out of a:

'strongly-felt pedagogic intuition that the development of competence in a second

language requires not systematization of language inputs or maximization of
planned practice, but rather the creation of conditions in which learners engage in
an effort to cope with communication'

(Prabhu 1987)

Being taught in this way teaches us to 'think on our feet' and fill in the gaps in our
knowledge with our own assumptions based on what we already know which
are subsequently proved correct or incorrect. It is a constant process of
evaluation, re evaluation and evolution at a subconscious level of the mind. As
Prabhu puts it 'we learn without knowing what we are learning'.

From my own experience from over twenty years of teachin not only English but
also French, Portuguese and Spanish and also my experience of being a language
learner I feel that this is a very important point Prabhu is making. Having been
taught French in school for 7 years by good teachers but with course books I
needed to actually go to France to develop any kind of communication skills or
confidence in the language. As a result of this experience when I studied
Portuguese I only looked at a book to cement knowledge gleaned from
conversations and interactions during the day. I put myself in situations where I
was forced to speak Portuguese and no English. There was and still is a marked
difference in my fluency and confidence in Portuguese when compared to
French.

Working as an English teacher at the same time I began to adapt my discoveries

and began to structure my lessons in order to create meaning focused activities,
and to try to avoid regulation of the development of grammatical competence
and simulations of language behaviour (Prabhu 1987).

The subconscious level of learning has been explored by a number of people

including Lozanov with his concept of Suggestopedia going back to Palmer, who
in 1921 put forward that Knowledge develops subconsciously and it is not just
encountering language that develops our internal systems but actually our
efforts to make sense of the language for the purpose of communication. As
Widdowson (1978:69) says 'we create discourse and commonly bring new rules
into existence by doing so.'

I myself often find that the most effective learning activities are games in my
lessons, which serve the purpose of encouraging students to negotiate for
meaning with each other. Word games such as Taboo and Articulate in which
students have to describe vocabulary to each other and learn to empathize and
find common ground with the listener work very well. Often it is the simplest of
activities that are the most rich in terms of potential for language learning.

During these games and activities students use not only verbal skills but also the
other tools they naturally have at their disposal such as gestures, knowledge of
convention, numeracy and links to their mother tongue. Grammar errors can be
noted by the teacher and explored to the specific communicative needs of the
class at a chosen time thus empowering the teacher and students to make
decisions relevant to their specific class and not decided by an external syllabus
which has no immediate relation to the classes needs.

What we are discussing here is language being free to select itself according to
the requirements of the activity or discourse and the manageability for the
students. The grammar rules make sense when they emerge from our own
language samples which gives a sense of satisfaction and discovery as students
add the learnt structures to what Hall (2011) calls their 'internal syllabus'.

The main focus of the Bangalore project was to develop the preoccupation with
meaning and as a resulting effort to understand and say things among learners. It
avoided pre-selection of language and form-focused activity and allowed
language to emerge. Initially during the project there was unease not only on the
part of the learners but also amongst the teachers as their ideas about what
constituted a classroom were challenged. However over a period of time the
problems began to clarify themselves and a series of exchanges with a perceived
purpose and a clear outcome began to emerge. It is clear that any 'new
perception in pedagogy, implying a different pattern of classroom activity is an
intruder into teachers' mental frames' (Prabhu 1987:99) but this conflict
between the old and the new is always present in any situation of change and is a
key issue to be looked at by any establishment wishing to move away from the
course book.
Another important consideration to emerge from the Bangalore project was
regarding what constitutes a syllabus. During the course of the project the
objective was for teachers who had taught early project classes to make their
experiences available to later teachers of classes with comparable levels or
abilities. The tasks that they had found feasible and had worked well were made
into a list. This list also included the sequence in which the activities were done.
This list was called a 'procedural syllabus' and was used as an indication of what
might be done in the classroom in order to increase what Wright (2005) calls
'learning opportunities', in other words, when learners may learn.

Wright considers the different approaches by describing them as:

Opportunity view V Order view

Within an opportunity perspective of classroom management and syllabus

learners may, according to Wright, be encouraged to take risks with language
and negotiate meanings in classroom discourse. It follows the idea that the brain
is dynamic, what Kramsch (2003) calls the 'interaction continuum'. In this low
structure opportunity classroom the practices and behaviour of teachers and
learners alike will change, providing more opportunities for learner participation
and interaction.

It gives the power back to the teachers and implies that the organization must
trust their teachers to make the right choices. As Van Lier (2000:29) observes
teachers aspire :

'to make the right choice at the right time and we must give them this opportunity
rather than reducing language to a matter of meeting short term needs and
equipping learners with linguistic table manners'.

Prabhu refers to the syllabus as an 'illuminative construct' whereby it is

perceived as a matter of natural 'organic growth' and teaching is directed to
creating conditions which are favourable to the process.

But this creates a problem for course book producers and materials writers as up
to now it has been impossible to evolve a course as you go along. For printed
materials the concept of organic growth has been impossible with the only
solution being to regard books as sourcebooks rather than course books,
something which copyrighting regulations have made very difficult.

However we have been constantly running the risk of reducing the likelihood of
teachers' growth from the experience of teaching. Care should be taken not to
assume that materials are, or should be, made out to be superior to what
teachers and students can produce themselves.

It could be said that many teacher produced materials in the past have not been
of a high quality but if we can facilitate a situation where we can guarantee that
self-produced materials can conform to certain quality standards which could
not be guaranteed in the past then it is time to give the power back to the
teachers and students and not the materials developers. That time has come.
Dogme 2.0

The rejection of published materials and modern technology made Dogme the
target of criticism by many language teachers, especially because its vow of
chastity encourages an 'all or nothing' approach (Hall 2011) whereas it was
believed by many that dipping into Dogme principles would allow the teacher to
choose resources according to a particular lesson.

The initial rejection of technology was later modified by Luke Meddings (2009),
who said that the rejection of technology was not of all technology per se but of
technologies which did not adhere to the principles of Dogme. The changes in
technology since 2000 call for a reevaluation of dogme in terms of the new
technologies available in the era of web 2.0.

This so called Dogme 2.0, a name introduced by Howard Vickers (2011) in his
article 'Dogme 2.0: what teaching 2.0 can learn from Dogme ELT', could in my
opinion provide a challenge to the course book in EFL schools.

Web 2.0 and its interactive tools provide the perfect accompaniment to Dogme to
stimulate learning for the new 'digital native' (Prensky 2001) generation as the
flexibility of the available technology enables teachers to organically evolve
courses to the needs of their students through a knowledge base of available
resources.

According to Vickers , the internet now has an enormous range of content (audio,
video, images, text and applications) and is increasingly becoming more
interactive and social. There is a vast amount of language learning material
available online. The material is up-to date, interactive and very real.

Vickers states that when looking for guidance on how to use the internet in place
of a textbook, the Dogme ELT movement has provided a real inspiration and he
puts forward that using 2.0 applications could take the dogme ELT principles
further than teaching without technology does. Web 2.0 technologies actually
serve to cement the founding principles of Dogme as it is more interactive,
knowledge can be co constructed by a lot more people on the internet and
materials can be reedited by students to reflect their own voice.

In the next section of my essay I will use a framework developed by Brian

Tomlinson to evaluate the potential of dogme 2.0 when compared with course
books.
MATERIALS

There are, according to Brian Tomlinson in his book 'Materials development in

language teaching'(Tomlinson, B 2011), a number of properties good teaching
materials must possess. I would like to examine these one by one.

Materials should achieve impact

As Tomlinson says this is when the learner's curiosity, interest and attention are
attracted. Conventionally this has been done by course books through the use of
visuals, pictures and attractive layouts. However, materials which provoke
curiosity, interest and attention can be produced in other ways including by the
students themselves and with the help of the latest technologies can be made
more relevant and localised to the students' actual needs. As Tomlinson says the
writer needs to know 'as much about the target learners and about what is likely
to attract their attention'- this cannot be done in course books produced on a
large scale. Using websites for students to participate in activities such as
shopping, researching holidays or trips, or looking for unusual information will
provide interesting and useful activities for the learners.

Materials should help learners to feel at ease

From personal experience having worked as a language teacher for over twenty
years teaching a range of anguages I feel that this point is one of the most
important aspects of running a successful class or course. The idea the creation
of an atmosphere where the students feel relaxed and willing to try to produce
language without he fear of making errors is essential to the process of language
acquisition. Dogme lends itself to creating this type of atmosphere with its accent
on informality.

As Tomlinson says students are 'more at ease with texts and illustrations they
can relate to their own culture than they are with those which appear not to be
culturally akin to them. (Tomlinson 2011)

If feeling at ease, as Tomlinson says, can also be achieved through a 'voice' which
is relaxed and supportive, through materials which relate the world of the book
to the world of the learner and through the absence of activities which could
threaten self-esteem and cause humiliation then this cannot be guaranteed by a
course book. The nature of the course book is to be anonymous so that it can
translate seamlessly into different cultures. A course book in itself is a product of
companies who need to sell to make a profit and therefore cannot be rooted in
one culture or another thereby restricting other potential markets. We have
experimented with many different course books in my school looking for
something which would fulfil the criteria above but have always found to be
lacking in certain areas. A course book in itself is incompatible with a learner
centred approach and is artificial, having little interest in relevance.

Web 2.0 activities, on the other hand fulfil this as learners do not feel exposed
and feel that the information they are studying is relevant. Editing Wikipedia
articles together is the type of activity that can satisfy this criteria

Materials should help learners to develop confidence

Tomlinson argues that the majority of materials' writers try to achieve

confidence amongst learners through simplification, that is, making exercises
deliberately manageable which only succeeds in diminishing the learners. As this
has no relation to the unsimplified English the learners are in contact with in
every other environment except the controlled classroom an illusion is created
which only serves to reduce confidence as the learner knows that they are being
treated with 'kid-gloves'.

I would argue that the whole idea of using course books to systematize language
could equally be viewed in this way, as learners subconsciously know that they
are being protected from real exposure. The course books present what purports
to be real English but the learners know that this is not true. One of the main
complaints I hear from students in my role both as a teacher and as Director of
Studies is that the learners don't feel prepared for real English interactions.
Students feel lost by the spontaneity in English the moment they leave the
controlled school environment. The spontaneity lacking in classes which work
systematically is in contrast to a class which works on the principles of Dogme.
The essence of Dogme prepares students for the spontaneity and
unpredictability of English encountered in their normal everyday interactions,
both for students studying in England but, perhaps more pertinently, for
students studying in their home countries. The use of new 2.0 technologies to
supplement this concept will allow students to encounter this and thereby
prepare themselves for actually using their English.

One of the main problems may be linked to the original concept of studying
language as a school subject in formal education rather than a life skill or ability.
In fact the clue comes from the Portuguese word for school subject 'disciplina'.
Subjects in formal education must adhere to the need to prove levels and
proficiency through exams and testing. This system clearly works for subjects
such as Maths and Science in which absolute accuracy is essential. However, for
languages it is counterproductive as it actually reduces the capacity to learn.
Course books were originally written with these principles in mind i.e reducing
the reproduction of language to an evaluation tool. Consequently all spontaneity
and unpredictability in reproduction may be seen as a risk to gaining the
required mark and may fall outside the boundaries required for a successful
pass. Tomlinson argues that although pressure can stimulate some types of
language learners, the majority of them benefit from feeling at ease and that
opportunities for language learning are lost when learners feel anxious,
uncomfortable or tense.

What is being taught should be perceived by learners as relevant and useful

'perception of relevance and utility can also be achieved by relating teaching

points to interesting and challenging classroom tasks and by presenting them in
ways which could facilitate the achievement of the task outcomes desired by the
learners.'

(Tomlinson 2011)

This can only work if the tasks are begun first and the teaching is provided in
response to the discovered needs. This, as `Tomlinson says, is much more
difficult for the materials writer' and attempts to resolve this in a course book
context. However, without a course book and with the help of the relevant
technology this becomes relatively simple as it is easy to react quickly to
discovered needs. In this way new teachers should be taught to recognize these
needs and to match them to the appropriate technology and activities. Programs
such as Google Maps or other similar programs using GPS allow students to
study material relevant to their own particular area. The majority of apps are
now linked to GPS and students can use their own location. Localising content
makes it relevant and useful to the learners.

Materials should provide the learners with opportunities to use the target
language to achieve communicative purposes

Tomlinson argues that students shouldn't just practice language in situations

controlled by the teacher and the materials but must be used in communication
where activities can stimulate them into 'pushed output' (Swain 1985)

As Ellis says 'we need to recognise that teaching intended as formal instruction
does more than teach a specific item: it also exposes learners to features which
are not the focus of the lesson' (Ellis 1990)

It is these features which are not the focus of the lesson that in my initial training
as a French teacher in 1993 we were told not to explore and it was only one tutor
who asked the question

'If it starts snowing outside your lesson, what do you do ?

'Ignore it or change the lesson to incorporate it?'

This possibility of diverting from the lesson's track is the central stance of dogme
making the focus emerge from the conversation or environment of the lesson.
This turns the whole concept on its head and makes what were originally
distractions become an integral part of the teaching material of the lesson.
Would it not be accurate to state that this kind of exposure to language is much
more akin to what the learners will actually encounter outside the classroom and
that it is a way of ensuring that learners are ready to acquire the points being
taught if managed in the correct way give that each group of learners is different
from another and the homogenized 'one-size-fits-all' method that the
conventional course book advocates from my experience does not always work
with learners. Even when it does work it functions in a sterile, controlled manner
which, despite the fact that many learners may be used to it, is usually lacking in
many areas. Activities where students have to interact online to solve problems
or tasks with students in other classrooms and cross-cultural fact-finding
activities with students from other countries are examples of the types of activity
students can do.

Materials should take into account that learners differ in learning styles and
affective attitudes

Tomlinson puts forward that studial learners (who are actually in a minority) are
at an advantage given that teaching and testing of foreign languages is based
around this model and coursebooks reveal a tendency to favour learners with a
preference for this style.

According to Tomlinson styles that need to be catered for in language learning

materials include:

Visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, studial, experiential, analytic, global, dependent

and independent.

One can see from this list that studial and dependent learners, those who would
be more likely to need and benefit directly from a course book based course
constitute make up only 2 of the various different learning styles, whereas the
type of emergent language developed from a Dogme style of teaching would be
much more closely related to the other learning styles. The problem here stems
from the very beginning of a teachers career at the training stage.

The majority of teacher training programs are set up with course book as the
base from which everything else evolves. I myself teach on CELTA courses as
blended learning speaker but have noted how in the teacher training parts a
teacher will be give a section of a book to prepare and teach for their evaluations.

From the very start the teacher is being trained to be course book dependent and
not to think independently. Many times I have been asked what to do with a
certain section of a course book, my immediate reaction is to tell them to throw it
away, rather like Sylvia Ashton-Warner in her article 'the roaring in the
chimney'.

The reason for this course book dependency is to provide support for novice
teachers but in my experience this only serves to reduce confidence, as they are
terrified of what to do if the course book is removed. It can be argued that
introducing novice teachers to a Dogme style approach at this training stage
would not be possible. However, a conversation between the teacher and the
students after the lesson and sometimes leads to a lot more learning than
actually occurred in the lesson. In the lesson the teacher sticks rigidly to the
course book and feels protected by it.

Consequently when they qualify and are employed they will continue to rely on
the course book and use it as a crutch in their lessons. Generally only after a
couple of years do they feel brave enough to start to move away from it. This
begs the question of whether the role of the course book is actually more to
protect the teacher from encountering difficult situations than to benefit
language acquisition and if this is the case, shouldn't we train our teachers to
think more independently from the very beginning and consider and notice the
individual needs of the students. Arming them with a knowledge of exercises or
technology to use in certain situations will make a more complete teacher. The
idea of the teacher as all-knowing and unquestionable just doesn't ring true in
today's society. If a teacher doesn't know something why can't they just discover
this together with the students, something which in my experience leads to a
much more profound learning experience than just being told something or
reading from a textbook.

The course book is a distraction from the real learning which is occurring
through the student's interaction with the teacher and their fellow students as
well as their surroundings in whichever environment they find themselves in
and web 2.0 and consequently Dogme 2.0 can provide this environment.

Conclusion

Once a paradigm has been established it is difficult, impossible even, for those
working within it to conceive of any other rationale until a 'crisis' prompts a
scientific revolution. Crises develop when tensions develop within a paradigm
caused by discoveries or inconsistencies that the paradigm cannot adequately
explain. This leads to the eventual replacement of one paradigm by another.

(Hall 2011:80)

In this paper I have aimed to explore the possibility of a Dogme 2.0 approach
challenging the dominance of the course book in EFL schools in England,
something which will be difficult for Directors of Studies to implement due to
economic and administrative constraints. However, many schools are already
beginning to implement a movement away from course books and it is a question
of implementing these changes gradually.

What is certain is that 'teachers must be prepared for new ways of structuring
tasks, establishing exchanges, guiding and monitoring interactions and
evaluating performance' (Hall, G 2011:34)

Changes at the grass roots level of teacher-training in order to equip new

teachers with an internal library of which technologies and activities to use in
given situations would accelerate the move but that appears to be a fair way off.
What is sure is that technology will continue to evolve in the web 2.0 era and we
have to evolve with it.

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