Pre-emptive or responsive
which route to take?
Fernando Guarany
BRAZ-TESOL Rio Grande do Norte
All images © Mat Wright
Webinar | [Link] | 18 September, 2016
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“If you wish to converse with me . . .”
Pre-emptive
(adj.) designed or having the power to deter or
prevent an anticipated situation or occurrence.
(tending to hinder)
Responsive
(adj.) readily reacting or replying to people or events
or stimuli; showing emotion.
(alert and aware)
[Link]
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Either… or? Black or white?
Image credits: [Link]
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What do you think?
A language lesson should normally be based on the
presentation and practice of previously selected and
prepared teaching points. These teaching points are
bits of the target language, to be taught and
correspondingly learned. Within this framework, we
can tell if a lesson has been successful by measuring
the extent to which students actually learn the
teaching points.
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Pre-emptive teaching is dead. . . Or is it?
In Sweden in the mid-1960s we British Centre teachers took it
for granted (it did correspond to our experiences as school
language learners ourselves, and it was what our teacher
trainers had taught us) that a language lesson would normally
be based on the presentation and practice of previously
selected and prepared teaching points. These teaching points
would be bits of the target language, to be taught and
correspondingly, we all hoped, learned. Within this framework,
we could tell if a lesson had been successful by measuring the
extent to which students had actually learned the teaching
points. In my retirement, I still see around me a disturbing
amount of evidence that this view of classroom language
learning and teaching is very much alive, even dominant,
indeed if not in word.”
(Allwright, D., 2005)
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The table of contents from a famous course book
Oxenden, C., Latham-Koenig, C., Seligson, P. New English File Elementary. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 2013
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Lesson planning
A lesson aim
“By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
Form statements in indirect speech. Recognize the
differences between direct and indirect speech. Ask
important information. Incorporate questioning
techniques. Use listening skills to answer complex
questions. Use adjectives to describe people, times
or events.”
[Link]
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Pre-emptive teaching is not dead
“Little seems to have changed since the mid-
1990s. However imaginatively mainstream
textbooks are designed, they still revolve
around the basic idea that units should consist
of particular things, quite narrowly conceived,
to be taught in a particular order, in particular
lessons.
(Allwright, D., 2005)
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Where does the pre-emptive approach come from?
Input > Output > Intake (?)
Do learners learn what teachers teach?
Image: [Link]
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Where does the pre-emptive approach come from?
Testing
“the teacher can decide in advance that the
lesson will be considered successfully
completed if X percent of the students can
perform the objectives X percent of the
time,”… (this level should normally be fairly
high, e.g., 80–100%)”
(Celce-Murcia & Gorman, 1979 p. 296, cited in Allwright, D., 2005)
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Where does the pre-emptive approach come from?
CZS
Image: [Link]
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What hinders responsive teaching?
• The excessive use of (published) materials;
• Students;
• The institution (and the DoS);
• Parents;
• Lack of experience (or confidence);
• Command (or understanding) of L2;
• The nature of PRESET training;
• Your mind-set, beliefs and views on language teaching;
• (Your) (attitude to) lesson planning
What!? No planning?
“I see planning as crucial to language teaching and learning, but planning
for richness of opportunity and especially for understanding, not planning
to determine highly specific learning outcomes.”
(Allwright, D., 2005)
“I suggest that teachers look to the expressive arts for principles and
structures for lesson design. Such a perspective may harmonize with
their learners' expectations, as borne out by a student survey of lesson
metaphors. Good lessons, I conclude, share features with, among other
art forms, good films. They have plot, theme, rhythm, flow, and the sense
of an ending.”
(Thornbury, S., 1998)
Another way of planning?
[Link]
How can you teach more responsively
• Make space (e.g.: by assigning certain activities for homework rather
than doing them in class);
• Devolve responsibility to learners;
• Adopt creative activities that foster language production (e.g.: group
letter, tale dictation);
• Explicitly praise learners when they ask questions and contribute to
the class. Encourage learners to co-construct the lesson;
• Seize spontaneous communication events as they happen (e.g.: at
the beginning of the lesson as learners arrive) and run with the
conversation (see Meddings, L., & Thornbury, S., 2009, p.:9);
• Embrace TBLT (see Wicking, P., 2010) and Dogme principles.
TBLT and Dogme
“…task-based learning does offer a serious challenge to any narrow view
of the teaching point as the prime planning unit for language lessons.”
(Allwright, D., 2005)
Dogme ELT (aka Teaching Unplugged)
Materials-light
Conversation-driven
Focus on emergent language
Closing Considerations
“We all know that we must expect learners to learn less than
has been explicitly taught, but we typically pay less attention
to the more interesting phenomenon that learners can also
learn more than has been explicitly taught.”
“We cannot . . . sensibly measure the overall success of a
lesson simply in terms of the percentage of teaching points
successfully learned because the learners may have learned
little from the teaching points and a lot from everything else
that happened in the lesson.”
“. . . what [learners] can and might learn from a lesson is . . .
potentially, and perhaps normally, much richer than
just the sum total of . . . teaching points.”
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Closing Considerations
“. . . if a learner asks a question that the teacher has not
foreseen, the teacher’s response may contain something
potentially useful to many members of the class and
not just to the original questioner.”
“Slimani (1987) showed that Algerian university-level learners’
immediate postlesson claims about what they had learned
from a given lesson (Slimani’s uptake) did not correlate
sensibly with any of the expected indicators. Learners more
frequently claimed to have learned a point when a learner had
raised it for teacher treatment than when the teacher raised it
as a teaching point . . . Learners who raised topics for such
treatment were themselves not significantly more likely to
report that they had learned anything from the episode. It was
predominantly other learners who made such claims.”
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Closing Considerations
“I would not expect or want anyone to abandon teaching
points altogether, but I would hope people might consider how
helpful it might be to downgrade the teaching point as a
central concern and to think instead in terms of learning
opportunities, planning for richness of experiences, and
planning by teachers and learners, for teachers and learners,
to deepen their understandings of language learning and of
life in the language classroom. I know that I am already asking
a lot, but it could also be fun.”
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A good teacher . . .
“A good teacher cannot be fixed in a routine… During
teaching, each moment requires a sensitive mind that is
constantly changing and constantly adapting.”
a) Paulo Freire
b) Buzz Lightyear
c) Bruce Lee
d) Dick Allwright
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A good teacher . . .
“A good teacher cannot be fixed in a routine… During
teaching, each moment requires a sensitive mind that is
constantly changing and constantly adapting.”
Bruce Lee
[Link]
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Can one travel two roads at the same time?
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Thank you.
Fernando Guarany
fernando@[Link]
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