Psychology for English teachers May 09 Part Two
From the article “All together now” in Scientific American Mind April/ May 2009Chip Heath and Scott S. Wiltermuth got groups of students to march around the Stanford university campus and tested them against other groups who just strolled together along the same route, and found that the marchers “acted more cooperatively than the strollers did. They also said that they felt more ‘connected’ than the strollers did” in subsequent tests. Similar tests with moving cups and singing along to “O Canada” had the same effect when people were made to move or sing together.
Possible conclusions- some of the more “humanistic” ideas of students doing their own thing and choosing their own ways to learn inside and outside of the classroom could well have the less than humanistic result of damaging class cohesion. The cure? Choral drilling, variations on that like Shadow Reading, starting and stopping activities at the same time together (e.g. timed speaking activities like IELTS and FCE speaking tasks, or rotating roleplays), mingles where they switch partners when they are told to rather than when they feel they are ready, and lots of other seemingly old fashioned stuff. Might I also suggest that this was the real reason for the death of the language lab, rather than any holes in the theory behind the Audio Lingual method that originally lead to its popularity? I’ve always been searching for a reason why my students in London hated it no matter how I used the language lab. I think we can dismiss the idea that it was my fault in any way out of hand…
May 27th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Hi,
Interesting article and one that offers food for thought;
I wonder why as humans we achieve a better understanding of each other and clearer connectivity when told to act in a controlled and assertive manner.
Regards
Gary Graye
http://www.garygray.com
May 28th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Oh, Alex, I gave up trying to implement the humanist approach in the classroom a good while back. Now I just bark my orders at the students and expect 100% compliance. Otherwise, my ‘zero tolerance’ approach threatens physical and psychological torture on the punters!
June 15th, 2009 at 1:21 am
Sorry, I’m a bit late with this comment. But I think it’s relevant, especially as I’m not convinced you can use this marching team-building activity vs strollers in order to dis an approach to methodology in ELT.
I think it depends on how you define Humanistic Language Teaching. I don’t see it as being some kind of competitive teaching with the teacher needing to cater for different competing learner styles – quite the opposite, in fact.
I recently saw something on TV about a school here in Germany which now tests its pupils to discover their more general individual learning tendencies, and then the teaching is designed to cater for these differences. That’s daft, I think – firstly because each individual will have their own unique combination of styles, and secondly because it’s still the question of the teacher attempting to control how another person learns.
If we accept that we all have our unique emotional reactions to everything we experience in life (with our brains deciding “Do I like this or not?”, “Do I think this will be useful for me or not?”, etc), then we have to recognise that individual differences do exist, yes. And learners don’t leave their personalities and their history or experiences at the door of the classroom. In other words, we can’t teach them as if they’re robots. Who they are will indeed make an impact on what and how they learn, and it can’t be ignored.
Rather than having a competitive classroom, I certainly think it’s important to teach in a way which encourages co-operative language learning. This helps in their affective response to the classroom environment. If they like the other learners, and they’re steadily trained to work well together, helping each other, and feeling comfortable to share elements of their own lives when they want to and when its relevant (but not being forced to do so), then I think that’s a good thing. If through specifically designed group activities they learn to identify more about themselves, so that they can help themselves more effectively outside the classroom, then that’s even better.
So in other words, I think that working with the whole person – which requires co-operative learning – can both bring the group together more as a team and leave room for individual differences. But it only works if you’re aiming more for process teaching – when the focus is mainly on the process of learning itself – rather than product teaching, when the teacher attempts the impossible, by placing language into the learners’ heads (an approach to language learning that you’d be hard-pressed to find any worthy modern research results for).
As for audiolingualism: pure product teaching. Sure, the teacher finished each class feeling good. But not much learning took place. It had nothing to do with the process of learning, and everything to do with attempts at that magic trick of moving language from the teacher’s brain to the learners’ brains. There isn’t some special ELT Bluetooth, to my knowledge.
June 15th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Comments always welcome, even years later…
I think we agree on what is silly, just not on our definition of Humanistic Language Learning. I recently read an attempt to explain why The Silent Way, which is very accuracy based and seems to be based on the teacher attempting not to make a connection with the students, was really humanistic. Came down to a belief that humanistic means helping humans reach their real potential, so seems you can define humanistic any way that you like…
For the record, I have learnt a lot from books connected to HLT, e.g. Grammar Games and Knowing Me Knowing You. The reason why I make more negative than positive comments on it here are that it already has its own site in http://www.hltmag.co.uk and that it has become a certain kind of orthodoxy for people who went through the CTEFLA DELTA route around the time I did, and so can’t hurt from being questioned
June 15th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Yes, I think you’re absolutely right about differences within ELT when it comes to defining terms. A lot of the stuff submitted to HLT Mag, for instance, doesn’t strike me as being particularly humanistic, but simply pair/group/triad activities; that’s a typical aspect of HLT, but sufficient in itself to don the HLT cap.
June 15th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Correction to my last comment: ‘sufficient’ (end of first paragraph) should read ‘insufficient’, of course.