Why Learn? - A Short Talk about E.S.L. "Teaching Philosophy"

An illustrated talk about E.S.L. teaching practice for İstanbul Şehir University S.E.P.P. Program

Kevin Bush May 18, 2010

Why Learn?

This is my class.

If I’ve learned one cardinal rule in my many years teaching English, it is....

?

Actually, it’s

Don’t Be Boring.

Otherwise, you’ll get this.

Or even this.

If not actually this.

When what you want is this.

Back in America....

In sunny south Florida....

I worked for Stanley Kaplan Test Prep., the first, largest and best known company in its field.

For Kaplan I....

Taught and tutored the SAT, ACT and GRE tests.

As well as the TOEFL.

And was a Kaplan Student Assistant.

(Which means a secretary.)

I started working for Kaplan around the same time

as my friend Ray.

Here’s Ray.

Ray was a phenomenally good teacher, much better than me.

The SAT, the main college entrance exam, is scored on a scale of 400–1600.

Ray was able to get his students’ scores to raise by 200 points,

or 300 points....

A 400-point increase was not unheard of. He won awards for best teacher in our region.

And eventually got so many tutoring students he opened his own business.

Why was Ray so good?

As you might expect, I asked him this question more than once.

He claimed the secret was having a personal relationship with his students.

Essentially, Ray befriended each of his students,

and they studied harder to please him.

The are two kinds of reason for pursuing an activity:

internal and external.

(I’m getting these terms from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue [1984].)

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Studying to please your friend is an especially good external motivation.

Why are students studying English in the S.E.P.P. program?

The motivations are all external. This is for two reasons.

(i) They need to pass in order to attend

your university.

(ii) The motive for learning a new language in an academic context is always external.

A language class in olden days?

We can study

P h i l o s o p h y M e d i c i n e J u r i s p r u d e n c e o r T h e o l o g y because we love the subject.

But who can love a language he does not yet understand?

The question, therefore, of how to get students to do well learning a new language, in important respects amounts to finding the right motivation.

Ideally, we might learn out of necessity, for instance if we live abroad.

Or marry the teacher.

Learning in these contexts is immersive:

the motivation is necessity.

(or love.)

But your students live in İstanbul.

Not London.

Or New York.

And you can’t find them American husbands and wives!

However, at upper levels, we can supply other

motives, like....

Watching English-language movies.

Talking to friends in English.

Or reading a good book.

Even if it’s just a comic book.

But compounding the problem, these things are not fully accessible to beginner and intermediate students.

Learning elementary English in primary school is fun and easy.

Fun, because simple grammar & everyday words pair naturally with the world of childhood.

Easy, because people acquire languages much

faster before puberty.

To be honest, I do not have a ready-made solution to defuse these challenges for university-aged, beginning E.S.L. students. But I do have some ideas....

A. Don’t be boring. Play games and show pictures as much as possible.

B. Guide students step by step.

An appropriate early writing task might be to write a short letter, or make a grocery list.

An appropriate speaking task might be to describe your daily routine.

Part of my job is to find what motivates each student, given proficiency level, age and personality.

Examples of other classroom activities I’ve used, grouped by

language skill and proficiency level:

READING:

• Listing particular items or information.

• Arranging illustrations / paragraphs in order.

• Titling subsections. • Mapping the plot. • Paraphrasing / acting out the text.

LISTENING:

• Choosing the correct picture. • Transcribing details (phone number,

address, messages) • ‘Jigsaw’ tasks, e.g. listening to

different accounts of a crime. • Transcribing a difficult recording as

a group. • A guest speaker (students typically

ask more questions).

SPEAKING:

• Speaking following a formula written on the board.

• Giving Instructions and directions. • Completing others’ sentences in a

silly way. • Structured discussion based on

illustrations. • Pyramid discussion based on a

problem or mystery. • Role-Play based on cards. • Slide-Show Presentations. • Formal Debate.

WRITING:

• Copying from the board. • Writing a shopping list / postcard. • Describing a good friend / keepsake

object. • Relating a (happy, scary, etc.)

childhood memory. • Writing jokes. • Writing / acting a dialogue. • Reviewing a favorite book / film /

restaurant. • Arguing both for and against a

viewpoint. • Writing a persuasive essay.

To summarize so far:

Students will study and learn if well-motivated.

Teaching must be gradual.

The goal might be to play piano like Sviatoslav Richter.

But we all begin by practicing scales.

Finally, a word about content.

What is most important to learn?

Acquiring new language is usually divided into three parts: Lexis, Grammar & Phonology.

(For example, French.)

Of these, without any question, the most important is vocabulary.

Without words, students cannot understand or communicate.

(Above: enough words to survive in America.)

On the other hand, with enough words, grammar is (of course) needed to sound

like a natural speaker, but is not strictly necessary.

One reason I’m in Turkey is to live with my fiancé before we get married.

Here is my fiancé, Merry. As you can see, she’s Filipina.

She also spoke hardly any English when we met 4 years ago. Essentially, she taught herself.

Her vocabulary is excellent. (Partly because English is

an official language in the Philippines.)

But her grammar is awful. Most of our tenses simply don’t exist in Tagalog!

(Tagalog verbs conjugate for aspect and thematic role, not for time.)

How important, really, is the future perfect or the past continuous?

She doesn’t know either, yet very rarely is there a

serious breakdown in communication.

Of course I’m not claiming we should do without grammar in the classroom!

However....

In my (limited) experience, Turkish students are too nervous about grammar.

It gets drilled into them every day at school.

(Although actually, this can be pretty helpful.)

Many are afraid to speak out of a needless fear that somebody

will care if they break a grammatical rule.

On the first day teaching, it should be clear I do not care at all how many times

or how badly they “mess up.”

I care whether they can understand and communicate.

Students need a lot of practice speaking, so they must feel comfortable saying the wrong thing.

Here are some tasks conducive to learning vocabulary:

1. MEMORIZATION.

Students should make a set of vocab flash cards, and add to it every week.

(2) Speaking. Students should speak / write / IM / text in English as often as possible, with whoever will listen to them.

(3) Reading. After a certain minimum proficiency is gained, students should jump into reading, dictionary in hand.

Preferably original texts, preferably slightly above their level, preferably enjoyable.

(4) Word roots. Knowing the most common roots and affixes helps both to recall meanings and (vaguely) understand words not encountered before.

The literary critic and education theorist E.D. Hirsch famously championed a core curriculum because, among other reasons, students learn better

when they have more prior knowledge to ‘peg’ new information to.

In other words, part of learning is building a thick mental context. I believe something similar applies at the higher levels of E.S.L.

as if English were a language invented by machines.

At upper levels, we should not teach content in isolation,

and the cultures from which they come.

Students should be introduced to the connotations of lexis & grammatical structures,

If nothing else, it makes the class more interesting for all concerned.

Learning should be as engaging as possible.

Illustration of a student not being as engaged as possible.

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Let me end with a quote from Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry.

Sidney is discussing why poetry is practically superior to moral philosophy,

but it applies to any good teacher:

“For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into it. Nay, he doth, as if your journey should lie through a fair vineyard, at the very first give you a cluster of grapes, that full of that taste you may long to pass further.”

A good deal of teaching is finding the right motive.

Thanks for your time & consideration!

This slide show was created as a short talk for İstanbul Şehir University, as part of a job interview. I’m putting it on the web so friends and family can see, but perhaps you’ve stumbled onto it. If we don’t know each other, and you want to contact me, please write kmbush40@gmail.com.

(The color theme, by the way, is the school’s colors.)