Practice and Consciousness Raising Approach to Teaching and

Learning: A Vehicle to Ultimate One-Teacher One-Learner Model

Mustapha Muhammad Yelwa

mustaphamuhammadyelwa@gmail.com

Brilliant Footsteps Int’l Academy, Sokoto

Scholars have viewed teaching and learning activities as habit formation practices that involve
habituation of mind through correct processes.

In a class with JSS3 Boys, Teacher Adam began the lesson by writing three mathematics
questions on logical reasoning, and asked learners in the class to solve the first problem. After
the first trial, he corrected them by saying “This is how the solution should be.” from that
explicit explanation, fast learners solved the remaining related problems correctly, while the
teacher and some fast leaners assisted more time learners in areas of learning difficulties. For
that reason, one of the members of the class once whispered to me in an unguided conversation,
after an interrogation, that in teacher Adam’s lesson everyone had to write. In essence, every
member of the class had to participate in the discussion, and that is the essence of one-teacher
one-learner model.

As the above anecdote makes clear, the aim of a teacher is not merely to teach their learners to be
able to remember rules of a particular feature, but more importantly they also have to guide the
learners, through activities, to understand those rules and make them able to use those rules in
various ways possible. These activities involve warmers of whichever kind.

In this small annotation we shall first try to say what is meant by practice and consciousness
raising approach to teaching and learning, then answer the question of whether and why it is
suitable, and if so, as teachers, how should we go about it.

Practice and Consciousness Raising

Practice and consciousness raising is a term I have got from applied linguist Rod Ellis in his
book The Study of Second Language Acquisition and his 1991 article, Second Language
Acquisition and Language Pedagogy. This is what is sometimes called a „guided-discovery
approach‟. The teacher doesn‟t tell the students directly what the target feature is, but leads the
student to discover it themselves through befitting activities.

Consciousness Raising (CR) is a straight alternative to practice. Practice has to do with

behaviour formation whereas consciousness raising is essentially concept-forming. In other
words, practice is for improving learners‟ action and activism (by proceduralizing knowledge),
while consciousness raising is for repeated instruction of cognitive structure or competence.
What they have in common is that both involve isolating an aspect of the subject matter for
focused teaching: this means that an instructor must not teach the generality of the subject matter
at hand, rather aspects of it which build to the understanding of the generality of the subject
matter. Practice requires actional attention in performance, consciousness raising calls for
“intellectual effort to understand the target feature” (Ellis, 1992: 233).

Purpose of Practice then Consciousness Raising and How to Go about It

Practice and consciousness raising have different purposes: practice is to be used in initial
teaching, consciousness raising is correcting—it is, in a sense, mediating direct positive
evidence by saying to the learners „Look, this is how it is, or how it should be!‟ Practice is
supposed to improve performance, that is, to enhance implicit knowledge, while consciousness
raising is supposed to improve explicit knowledge of the subject matter. Now explicit knowledge
has generally been assumed by modern methodologists, such as Kreshen, to be of limited use to
the learner: there is no interface between it and implicit knowledge. It can only be put to use in
monitoring. But there has always been a lingering hope that consciousness raising will facilitate
the mastery of implicit knowledge. There is an assumption that each piece of explicit knowledge
has a corresponding piece of implicit knowledge, and that the learners, having accessed this
knowledge in its explicit form, will find connection to its implicit correlate.

Consciousness raising has certain desirable features:

1. It appears to have durability: “once consciousness of a particular feature has been raised
through formal instruction, learners continue to remain aware of the feature and notice it
in subsequent inputs.‟ (Ellis 1992: 238)
2. Another advantage it has is that it is not “developmentally constrained”, which means
that there is no fixed order in which it must be learnt: it can be learnt and taught in any
convenient order.
3. It also promotes noticing.

Advantages of Practice and Consciousness Raising Approach

1. Practice and Consciousness raising makes explicit rules more meaningful and
memorable;
2. The mental effort that is done by the students will ensure their cognitive depth;
3. Students are more actively involved during the teaching and learning process;
4. This approach may satisfy the desire of the students who has good ability in pattern
recognizing and problem solving;
5. This approach prepares the learners to be active or self-assisted learners.

Weakness of the Approach

 1. It makes the learners who are accustomed with explicit rule approach become frustrated,
since they may expect to be given the rules directly.

Conclusion
Practice and Consciousness Raising, like other approaches to teaching and learning, is
axiomatic. As a process-oriented approach, it builds on learning processes, such as habit
formation, induction, inferencing , hypothesis testing, and generalization. It is such an approach
that has the potentialities to spur the inbuilt curiosity of our species to learn at a time when most
children have that innate wonder and quest for knowledge squashed out by mechanized
schooling.

However, it should be kept in mind that there is no teaching strategy or approach without any
weaknesses. For that reason, teacher should equip themselves with various teaching strategies or
approaches, they also should know about the strengths and weaknesses of each strategy or
approach in order to be able to select an appropriate teaching approach or strategy for different
situations, and could anticipate the problems that may be found during the application of a
particular approach.

References
1. Anderson L. W. et al (2001), A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A
Revision of Bloom‟s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Longman, Inc., New York,
2001
2. Ellis R. (1999), The Study of Language Acquisition; Current Issues I Teaching of
Grammar: An SLA Perspective, Tesol Quarterly Vol. 40, No. 1, Teachers of English to
Speakers of other Languages, Inc., 2006.
3. Tr. Adam‟s Saturdays Extramural Mathematics Classes in JSS3 Boys, Brilliant Footsteps
Int‟l Academy, Western Bypass, Sokoto.