(Proper) writing and blogging
I’ve finally finished the long ago promised Theory and Practice in the Cambridge DELTA Module 2. I did a lot of reading (a lot by my standards, anyway) and a fair bit of pondering, but all the best words on the matter I could find came from comments on TEFLtastic and other blogs. Being a physicist and so not having a clue what you should and shouldn’t put in academic(ish) articles if it’s not mathmatical formulae, I just stuck all those comments straight in. Not sure I’d get in ELTJ doing that- yet. Could it be a wave of the future though??
February 27th, 2010 at 9:08 am
Great work, Alex. I’m glad that it has raised more questions for you than you feel you were able to answer.
February 27th, 2010 at 12:27 pm
Great article and one I can relate to: you can read heaps of academic books yet at the end feel like none of it is actually going to help you or your students in the classroom. More research needs to be conducted by practitioners rather than applied linguists. Maybe the realm of Psychology can help too: more research could be done on what makes a successful language learner, erm, successful. How do they keep themselves motivated? Is it their outgoing personality that has helped them reach an advanced stage? Social factors? Positive thinking?
In a way it is good that there isn’t one prescriptive way of doing things. On the other hand it can lead to confusion. I guess most teachers work in a ‘post-method’ framework, where they mix up a lot of different approaches and hope for the best….
February 28th, 2010 at 6:36 am
A very interesting article – and with excellent references too!
I wonder if, in trying to find out what, how and why we teach what we do, we are missing something obvious. I don’t know what that is, sadly. It did make me wonder though if in searching for a unified theory of teaching, if I can borrow from physics, we aren’t missing a trick – that is, if we can’t explain the same phenomena in different ways, as is done in physics with light as both wave and particle, and that this somehow accounts for the massive differences in theories about the same object.
Your article also made we want to use the word ‘praxis’, not in the Aristotelian sense, but in the Marxist one where theory informs practice and practice informs theory in an unceasing dialectic. At the moment, there seems to be a chasm between them for most teachers. Part of the appeal of Dogme, for me, is that it is a form of praxis, one where theory and practice are in constant interaction. Elsewhere, the job of yoking theory and practice together and of proposing new praxes would seem to fall to that niche group who mediate between teachers who teach students, and researchers at university who last saw a classroom in their childhood – people such as Scott Thornbury and Jeremy Harmer.
February 28th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Alex I really enjoyed your article. Thanks for including some quotes from my blog post on my experience of doing a diploma level qualification. I would say it was by far the hardest of my qualifications so far which seemed the most challenging in terms of joining the bits together.
I would agree with Sputnik that theory/practice is a dialectic – one cannot exist without the other. Even those teachers who claim to be teaching without a theory, or who are negative about ‘theories’ as they are something that exist or emerge from the ivory tower of the university, are still referring to a particular view of the world (upon which theories are based) to guide them in their job/lesson planning/how they deal with students. They are not neutral and theory-less.
I like your list of recommendations which might help to sharpen up the guidance on reading rather than (in my case) feeling it was sort of almost a bad thing to want to read more and explore different ideas in ELT. I read, that’s what I do – in all areas of my life, so there needs to be space for that way of expressing things too! The “yoking” of theory and practice is essential but I think first everyone needs to become aware of how they are already doing that to an extent anyway. It is likely we will be drawn to those who do it in a way that resembles or makes sense to us, or is close to the way we think about teaching theory and practice. That is why is is a constantly changing mosaic.
What I have come to believe a bit later down the line is that keeping an open mind on different ways of looking at this issue means that you will gain the most insight into the options available. Finally, I wanted to recommend to 26 steps the work of Bonny Norton on language and identity which I think is the best contemporary insight into the issue of motivation (she reframes it and calls it investment and considers the whole issue from a social-psychological point of view that attempt to consider all influences on both classroom and student).
February 28th, 2010 at 7:22 pm
Thanks for the recommendation of Bonny Norton, I’ll check it out.
It’s 26 Letters, not steps, BTW! : )
February 28th, 2010 at 8:04 pm
LOL! So sorry! You know what I am reading the 39 Steps at the moment and got confused :) No seriously. I often do this btw, so apologies in advance to all of you for my stupid slips. My poor little addled brain just gets overloaded especially at weekends. Please forgive me 26 letters. Glad you can see the funny side!
February 28th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
I thought it might have something to do with 39 Steps!!
I’ve already had a look at a few excerpts of the Bonny Norton book on Google Books, and I am intrigued….
March 1st, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Bonny’s work is very helpful and critical IMHO. Now back to my novel, the 39 steps!