point and counterpoint
Popular culture, methods, and context Jeremy Harmer
Introduction
If, as Alastair Pennycook suggests, we ‘need to see English language teaching as located in the domain of popular culture as much as in the domain of applied linguistics’ (Pennycook 1998: 162), then Stephen Bax’s article would seem to be a timely reminder that the social context in which learning takes place is of vital importance to the success of the educational endeavour. Nor would he find many, nowadays, who would argue that an insensitive insistence on a rigid methodology at the expense of classroom and learner realities was a course worth pursuing. Indeed, there are many examples, as I shall show, of teachers understanding how and when their learners’ wants and needs conflict with their own initial understanding, and how, as a result, their teaching has been modified to take account of this. However, I believe the central thrust of Bax’s article—that Communicative Language Teaching ( CL T ) is some monolithic approach which is inappropriately applied around the world to t he detriment of learning, and that therefore it should be downplayed—is essentially flawed in a number of respects. In the first place I do not believe that CL T is a describable phenomenon any more (except in the t he very vaguest ways—e.g. we want students to communicate), nor do I think a ‘communicative-task-based’ ‘communicative-task-based’ approach is widely practised in world terms. Nor am I convinced that the attitude of a few British teachers and trainers is symptomatic of a damaging worldwide trend. However, more fundamentally fundamentally I have a problem with the idea that the learning context is necessarily the first place to start in any educational exchange. Instead, I would argue that methodology is fundamental to the learning of language in classrooms where teachers are working. I cannot imagine how any teacher could operate without taking into such classrooms a set of understandings and beliefs not only about how languages can be and are learnt, but also about how and what teaching is all about—and about the roles of learners and educators. Without beliefs and enthusiasms, teachers become client-satisfiers only—and that is a model which comes out of a di¤erent tradition t radition from that of education, and one that we follow at our peril. The perfect situation, for me, is that of a committed and passionate teacher who has distinct ideas about what he or she can do, and who
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marries these beliefs with a convincing sensitivity to the students’ wants and needs, so that somewhere between them a learning bargain is struck to the benefit of all.
Communicative language teaching and teacher training
The problem with communicative language teaching ( CL T ) is that the term has always meant a multitude of di¤erent things to di¤erent people. Trainers with experience around the world are familiar with significantly di¤erent descriptions given by di¤erent teachers about what they do—all made with the claim that such activities are ‘communicative’. It is true that early exponents of communicative methodology suggested, for example, that if students were involved in communicative events, language learning would somehow happen pretty much by magic, but such claims have been significantly modified over the years. Modern versions of task-based activities certainly include problem-solving and activities to promote creativity, but most of them also allow for a range of language-focused tasks at various stages of the task-based cycle, and these may or may not be ‘traditional’. It is true that dialogue-making, discussion, and role-play are now staples of the western-based classroom, and that various forms of information gap activity (including, for example, jigsaw reading) are widely in use. But that does not add up to an approach, especially when in exactly the same classrooms, students are regularly involved in drill-like activities, grammar discovery activities, or fill-ins, to distinguish between ‘will’ and ‘going to’! Indeed, one of the teachers Stephen Bax quotes, who is undergoing a teacher’s course, complains that his course is ‘basically the PP P method’. Yet the debates of the 1990s about presentation, practice, and production ( PP P ) (see, for example, Harmer 1996 ) complained bitterly, amongst other things, precisely about the anti-communicative nature of controlled practice. Nor are modern coursebooks significantly more communicative than they used to be (if by communicative we mean a methodology based on the students communicating to learn). It is true that they provide opportunities for discussion and other forms of speaking and writing tasks. But almost all of them are still based on a grammatical syllabus largely unchanged from the structural–situational pattern books of the 1950s, or the 1960/70s coursebooks of Louis Alexander. Much of the pronunciation and grammar work in textbooks remains rooted in a structural-situational methodology, and the treatment of reading and listening ranges widely from old-fashioned comprehension tasks to more student-response-type activities. In the area of vocabulary there is significantly more work on collocations and lexical phrases than there used to be, but even so it is diªcult to see how most materials embody a communicative approach, even if parts of them do ask for the performance of communicative tasks. If, on the other hand, Stephen Bax is saying that cultural assumptions are sometimes made, especially by some British, American, or Australian teachers (for example), working in other countries, and that these conflict with local perceptions of education, then he is undoubtedly right. But such teachers are in a tiny minority in the world, and anyway it is not so much CL T (whatever that is) which is to blame, but more likely the Popular culture, methods, and context
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domain of ‘popular culture’ (see Pennycoook above) which provokes some of the more ‘western’ teachers to expect instant participation in discussions and mildly humanistic activities; such activities may well fall outside the tradition of the students they are teaching. But even here, we have to be careful not to fall back on cultural stereotypes of what these traditions are.
What teachers believe A problem with the idea that methodology should be put back into second place (at the very most) is that it threatens to damage an essential element of a teacher’s make-up—namely what they believe in, and what they think they are doing as teachers. I am not suggesting, however, that teachers’ beliefs are always right! Wadden and McGovern, for example, describe a practice from the middle ages where making a mistake in grammar meant physical chastisement—but interestingly not by the language instructor, since that might make the student feel negative about the language! (1991: 119). In the lifetime of many readers of this journal corporal punishment has been meted out in a similar fashion for misbehaviour, either for being forgetful, or just plain wrong. Where teachers have behaved in this way, it is clear they did so because they thought, perversely, that it would encourage students to be less lazy, to think harder, be less forgetful, etc. Clearly we have moved on from such a position. However (and this, I suspect, is the core of my argument), if we reverse the situation and think of teachers—such as the writer of this article— who are fiercely opposed to corporal punishment in any form in educational (or any other) contexts, what should such teachers do when confronted with learning contexts where it is both sanctioned and approved of? Should they suddenly, in a fit of cultural empathy, take up the strap or the tawse, the ruler or the cane? If they were to do so it would suggest that their own belief systems did not run very deep! Yet the danger of a first attention to context rather than methodology (I am, of course, exaggerating here) suggests just such an outcome! The point, surely, is that teachers cannot, nor ever should be, merely reactive. The very act of teaching pre-supposes some kind of moral position about the way knowledge and skills are passed on and acquired, and about the relationships that should exist in such an environment. Milton et al. (2000) investigated teachers’ principles and found that most of the subjects of their study wanted a) to make allowances for di¤erences in cultural background, b) thought that creating a positive environment was important, c) felt a need to provide support, especially for new and nervous students, d) wanted the class to bond, and felt it important to cater for individual di¤erences within the class. ‘Overall’, the authors write, ‘there were many similarities between all the teachers in the principles that guided their pedagogic practices, regardless of their teaching circumstance.’ (op.cit: 11). The constant interplay of applied linguistic theory and observed classroom practice attempts to draw us ever closer to a real understanding of exactly how languages are learnt and acquired, so that the work of writers such as Ellis (1994) and Thornbury (1999)—to mix 290
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levels of theory and practice—are written to influence the methodology we bring to language learning. We ignore their challenges and suggestions at our peril, even if due consideration leads us to reject some of what they tell us. Teaching may be a visceral art, but unless it is informed by ideas it is considerably less than it might be. Every teacher, in other words, is the product of their culture, their training, their learning, and their experiences, and this is something to be celebrated, not sanctioned. A belief in the essentially humanistic and communicative nature of language may well pre-dispose certain teachers towards a belief in group participation and learner input rather than relying only on the straightforward transmission of knowledge from instructor to passive instructee. A belief in the micro skills that go to make up a variety of reading experiences may well suggest ideal reading practices for the classroom. We come into a lesson with those beliefs, and with our cultural and individual personality, and it is, to some extent, the gift we o¤er to our students.
What we think about learners
Recent years have seen a reawakening of interest in a measure of individual student di¤erences. We are not all the same, either within a large cultural group, or within a class of 20 or 30 students. Littlewood, for example, is keen to explode the stereotypical picture that many nonAsian teachers have of Asian students (Littlewood 2000). People are individuals as much as they are members of a group. Di¤erent students have di¤erent learning styles. Di¤erent students respond di¤erently to di¤erent stimuli. This is the message we take from work done in such subject areas as Neurolinguistic programming ( NL P ) and Multiple Intelligence ( MI ) theory. There is also a widespread belief that a goal of language teaching is to promote learner autonomy—in other words, that students should take as much responsibility for their learning as teachers do for their teaching. This, of course, is a culturally loaded idea, and is by no means appropriate for all students (see Lee 1998) but it is intended to stress the idea of the student as an active individual, not as a passive group member. Finally, some of our assumptions about the culture of methodologies— especially where such cultures appear to be in conflict with each other— can be misplaced. Flowerdew (1998) shows, for example, the high appropriacy of groupwork with Cantonese students, despite earlier suggestions that this might not be the case.
What teachers do about it
So now, in response to Stephen Bax’s article, we can look at what many experienced teachers and thinkers have done in response to the essential quandary he poses—how to act when one educational culture comes face-to-face with another. It is true that sometimes teachers express enormous frustration at methods that seem to be foisted upon them. In a well-known posting the Argentinian teacher Pablo Toledo wrote a piece called ‘Howl’ (after the famous poem by Allen Ginsberg) (Toledo 1998). ‘I have seen’, he starts, ‘the best teachers of my generation lying on a classroom floor, their Popular culture, methods, and context
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lessons bleeding, their mind faltering, their methodology scattered over the desks where thirty-odd unmotivated students chatter, work on their homework for other subjects, and make plans for the next weekend.’ The problem lies, he suggests, in the kind of methodology the teachers use, methodology developed ‘in comfy little schools with highly motivated students’. There’s nothing wrong with such methodological ideas, he argues, ‘but they just were not made for our teaching reality, and do not deal with our problems.’ It would seem that he is arguing a case very similar to Stephen Bax. Yet the problem is not with the methodology itself, nor with the ideas that it generates, but rather with how they are amended and adapted to fit the needs of the students who come into contact with them. Pablo Toledo is surely right to argue that the wholesale adoption, for example, of practices from one context into another totally dissimilar one is a mistake. On the contrary, successful methodology arises when teachers and students reach an accommodation between their di¤ering expectations and hunches about what is best for them. Sometimes we are surprised into an understanding of students’ learning preferences. Robert Jones, for example, tells the story of his student Machiko who finally shrugged o¤ her sense of learning failure when she took material which interested her and subjected it to the kind of explication de texte which she felt comfortable with, even though her teacher would not have suggested it himself (Jones 2001). Yet now he was in a position to moderate the teaching methodology he used with her, reaching exactly the kind of accommodation between his beliefs and hers which would benefit both parties. Sometimes teachers and course designers make sensible adjustments to their beliefs and designs when they use them with students from a di¤erent methodological background. Jeremy Jones describes setting up a self access centre in Phnom Penh University, Cambodia. ‘Each self access centre,’ he writes, ‘should know its users, their culture and educational background, and allow this knowledge to influence the design of facilities.’ (Jones 1995: 233). As a result, t he university selfaccess centre he was involved in developing had seating specifically for groups who wished to interact orally as they worked, in contrast to many other centres which, because silence is considered to be at a premium, only cater for students sitting on their own. What Jones seems to be doing here matches my perception of the culture of methodology with a significantly more successful version which sees methodology and context as somehow being in opposition to each other. Jones has a methodological design (the self-access centre) which embodies certain beliefs we all hold about the way learners can access learning for themselves, and then modifies it in light of the context he finds himself faced with. These two strands work in a happy symbiosis, not in some Darwinian struggle for survival. This kind of bargain-making has been best exemplified, for me, in an article by Dilys Thorp, which is still, many years later, highly relevant to this discussion. In her article she argues that ‘it is far too easy to think 292
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that our own ideas as to what constitute ‘good’ learning are universal, and to forget their cultural specificity.’ (Thorp 1991: 117). In this she is agreeing with the central thrust of Stephen Bax’s article, yet her solution to the problem is significantly di¤erent. One of the situations she describes occurs when her students in China are confronted with listening tasks. She wanted them to become accustomed to listening for gist—e.g. not to get hung up on the meaning of every single word. Yet this was an idea they were unfamiliar with. Indeed they wanted to listen to tapes again and again, translating every single word, until finally, they hoped, meaning would emerge. It is worth quoting her response to this situation in full: In listening, where they needed the skill of listening for gist and not every word, and where they wanted to listen time and time again, we gradually weaned them away from this by initially allowing them to listen as often as they liked; but in return—and this was their part of the bargain—they were to concentrate on the gist and answer guided questions. These guided questions moved them away from a sentence-by-sentence analysis towards inferential interpretation of the text. Then, we gradually reduced the number of times they were allowed to listen. This seemed to work: it was a system with which they were happy, and which enabled them to see real improvements in their listening skills (Thorp 1991: 115) It seems to me that it is exactly this kind of bargaining which lies at the heart of appropriate methodology. The teacher does not have to surrender her beliefs, but then neither do the students. Instead they meet somewhere in the middle, the students benefit, and the teacher feels satisfied at a job well done. There is nothing particularly strange about this, nor is it special to teachers from one culture working with students from another. The setting up of a code of conduct at the beginning of a school year, for example, is a common feature of classroom methodology in secondary schools around the world. It involves the making of just such a bargain. Students and their teacher agree what will and will not be permissible behaviour in the class. Although the teacher may have the final say, nevertheless the bargaining nature of such an event—between a teacher and students from, ostensibly, the same culture—gives the code some chance of future success.
Conclusion
In his article Stephen Bax makes a clear opposition between methodology and context, and suggests that CL T , in particular, has been applied inappropriately in all sorts of situations where a previous concentration on the context in which learning takes place would have lead to better outcomes. I do not agree with this opposition between methodology and context, yet there is much that we do agree about. I share Bax’s distrust of ‘one-size-fits-all’ methodologies. The Silent Way, and the other components of the big four methods of the 1970s and 80s failed, finally, to convince precisely because they suggested that they had got the answer to any question, wherever it came from. Yet they couldn’t all be right! I agree with Bax that the unthinking application of a set of Popular culture, methods, and context
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teaching practices in inappropriate circumstances is foolish and probably counter-productive—though I see little evidence of anything empirically describable as CL T being widely used in this way. Nor do I find draconian prohibitions such as ‘Correcting anything other than written work is explicitly anti-educational’ (Lewis 1997: 193) helpful in discussions about methodology since they suggest a certainty about something which is still (and excitingly) in a state of flux. In this context—and you would expect this, based on previous comments in this piece—I become slightly alarmed by the suggestion that ‘It may be the case that experienced teachers need to be de-skilled: that they need to be taught how to talk rather than to teach.’ (Thornbury 2001: 395). I believe, on the contrary, that is the teacher’s knowledge, experience, and training (together with their personality, interpersonal skills and interest in the students) that he or she brings in triumph to the classroom. What the students bring are their hopes and fears, and their pre-conceptions and sociocultural reality. Somewhere, in discussions between them, methodology and context, as equals, should meet in the way that is most appropriate for all concerned. References Ellis, R. 1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flowerdew, L. 1998. ‘A cultural perspective on groupwork’ ELT Journal 52/4: 323–9. Harmer, J .1996. ‘Is PPP dead?’ Modern English Teacher 5/2: 7–14. Jones, J. 1995. ‘Self-access and culture: retreating from autonomy’. EL T Journal 49/3: 228–34. Jones, R. E. 2001. ‘Machiko’s Breakthrough: a magic classroom moment.’ Humanising Language Teaching at http://www.hltmag.co.uk/jan01/sart10.htm Lee, I. 1998. ‘Supporting greater autonomy in language learning’ EL T Journal 52/4: 282–90. Lewis, M. 1997. Implementing the Lexical Approach. Hove: Language Teaching Publications. Littlewood, W. 2000. ‘Do Asian students really want to listen and obey?’ ELT Journal 54/1: 31–5. Milton, M. A. Thwaite, R. Oliver, B. Hird, and M. Breen. 2000. ‘I do it my way.’ Where do teachers’ principles come from?’ Modern English Teacher 9/2: 7–13. Pennycook, A. 1998. English and the Discourse of Colonialism . London: Routledge. Thornbury, S. 1999. How to Teach Grammar . London: Pearson Education.
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Thornbury, S. 2001. ‘The unbearable lightness of EF L ’. EL T Journal 55/4: 391–6. Thorp, D. 1991. ‘Confused Encounters: di¤ering expectations in the EA P classroom’. ELT Journal 45/2: 108–18. Toledo, P. 1998. ‘Howl’. Posting on ELT News and Views Listserv. Wadden, P. and S. McGovern. 1991 ‘The quandary of negative class participation: coming to terms with misbehaviour in the language classroom’. ELT Journal 45/2: 199–227. .
The author Jeremy Harmer taught in the UK and in Mexico. He has trained teachers, and o¤ered seminars, all over the world. He now teaches and lectures at Anglia Polytechnic University. He has written and co-written a number of coursebooks, supplementary materials, readers, and methodology titles, including How to Teach English (1998), and The Practice of English Language Teaching (3rd edn. 2001). He is the General Editor of the Longman methodology list, and hosts a teacher development website at www.eltforum.com. Email:
[email protected].
Copyright of ELT Journal: English Language Teachers Journal is the property of Oxford University Press / UK and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Copyright of ELT Journal: English Language Teachers Journal is the property of Oxford University Press / UK and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
