I was reading a fellow ELT blogger's thought-provoking entry about assessment that got me thinking about the confines of curricula but also about how I have not seen other somewhat obvious ways the curriculum objectives can be met. It's easy to get a big head because we have degrees and certificates and good English. If students bristle at an assignment or don't like some activities in the class, I've found myself adopting an attitude of "well, I'm the expert. You might want to cram for the IELTS/TOEFL/MELAB/[insert language proficiency test here], but that won't help you in the long run." But sometimes it's good to listen to students and that yields a lot of fruit. One time my students were all slacking on an essay I was having them write, and it was a day for the rough draft and half of them had essays, and the other half didn't, and the rough drafts that were brought to class were not very good. I just asked them point blank: "Okay guys, this is terrible. What's the deal? Why aren't you getting this done?"

They said they were all so busy writing Statements of Purpose/Letters of Intent for graduate schools they were applying to and that they were spending all night filling out applications and writing letters.

Normally, I deploy a tried-and-true lecture/guilt trip to my students about how I did graduate coursework while I was teaching while my wife had just given birth to a baby while I was totally burned out and exhausted while I had to study for a teacher certification test to get my ESL endorsement AND while I was applying for jobs worrying if I would be able to feed my family! "We all have responsibilities outside of this class" and blah blah blah.

But I took a different route and got off my high-horse and said, "Well, a letter of intent is no different than a persuasive essay--probably one of the more high stakes persuasive essays you'll ever have to write! Forget about this other essay. We're writing statements of purpose!"

"Really?"

"Yes."

"What do we do?"

"Print off your statements of purpose and bring them to class tomorrow. We're going to read them and make them better."

I left class that day feeling a little uneasy. What if I've just called their bluff and then they don't do this assignment either? Should I plan a backup lesson? But somehow, something felt right, almost like Harry drinking that vial of Felix Felicis. The next day, every student brought in an essay! I went from a mediocre 50% to a 100% completion rate for the assignment. Students were engaged and asking questions and eager to share and get feedback. No one was off-task or checking their phones. I was really pleased with myself for being so clever but then I stopped and thought about it, and really, I was just listening to the students and giving them what they wanted. They had to learn about persuasion, and they did--they just weren't writing about gun control, or school uniforms, or the death penalty.

Have you ever stopped to listen to your students and come up with a win-win situation in the end? Leave a comment and tell me about it!

-Bill

Occasionally I run into teaching situations where I question my hypotheses about language learning. For example, you might have a student working on writing sentences, and they might produce a grammatical error like a sentence without a verb (which is not technically a sentence). But what do you do if they don't know things like part of speech or a basic understanding of verb phrases, noun phrases, and prepositional phrases? I'm sure some Krashenites would say that students don't need to know all of those terms. All you need is comprehensible input! Input, input, input! Students don't progress? They need better, more comprehensible input!

I'm all about language teaching being communicative and functional, but I feel like sometimes, you have to give them grammar terminology. Ideally, it would be nice to have purely communicative lessons unhindered by curricular constraints that expose students to input they may or may not be developmentally ready to acquire, but when I picture it playing out, I think a lot of students would be frustrated by an endless relay of inductive lessons where they would be required to rely on their wits and reasoning ability to construct real, acquired linguistic knowledge... actually, wait a minute--that sounds really exciting! Okay, but not all students are interested in being interested in uncovering the mysteries of spoken and written language. Many of them have big important concerns looming overhead: What score will they get on the TOEFL/IELTS/TOEIC/[insert language proficiency test here]? What school will they apply to/gain acceptance from? How will they survive the occasional, unpredictable and yet somehow inevitable gastronomic disturbances from unfamiliar local cuisine? No. We need to be systematic and efficient because time is of the essence. With curriculum objectives and outcomes, teachers don't have time for wild grammar goose chases and I-spy-something-that's-a-fragment in the hopes that something clicks and they "get" it!

But then I stop and think about the utilitarian garble that just came out of my head and feel a sudden uneasiness, like I just felt some empathy by crossing into the orbit of another pedagogical philosophy--the intersection of form-focused and pure communicative approaches:

Could we be so focused on efficiency that we don't take the time to reevaluate how we're approaching classroom instruction? Could it be that our curriculum is actually not that confining and alternative and better ways but that we are too sold on how we think language instruction ought to work to consider something new? Do we fear change?

I always come back to this passage from Nassaji and Fotos (2004):

It's still important that it be practical and based on what students need to communicate, but teaching more form-focused lessons is not a waste of time.

Okay, I can go to bed now, but why can't I shake the feeling that Stephen Krashen is hiding under my bed (metaphorically-speaking, of course)?

-Bill