Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the Learning Revolution

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany

According to Sir Ken Robinson, “We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they’re customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education. And it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.” (subtitled in 50 languages)

In Germany and, from my perspective, in many other countries around the globe, SL/FL teachers are put under massive pressure to meet vague and – partially – unconvincing standards, and to conduct tests based on a questionable approach to foreign language education. What do you think about all this?

New Publication: Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching

by Jürgen Kurtz, Justus Liebig University (JLU) Giessen, Germany

This new book, edited by R. Keith Sawyer (Washington State University, St. Louis), takes a fresh look at one of the core issues in education and learning. Focusing on the predictability and unpredictability of learning (and teaching) processes in schools, it raises a number of fundamental questions concerning flexible and creative curriculum and instructional design in the 21st century, providing readers with the know-how as well as the ‘do-how’ necessary to create rich, meaningful, and encouraging learning environments in the age of outcome-orientation and testing. As Keith Sawyer points out on his blog:

“The key idea is that good teaching involves both structures and improvisation, both advance planning and adaptability. Expert teachers know how to use structures (lesson plans, activities, techniques to discipline unruly students) in an improvisational way that’s customized and targeted to each class and each student. This is what “creative teaching” really is: it’s not a flaky, New Age performance artist who mesmerizes the students. It’s an expert with a deep knowledge of the craft of teaching, and of the subject being taught, and an expert who can use that to orchestrate valuable learning activities among the students.”

The book comes at a time when education systems are under massive socio-economic and ideological pressure world-wide, and it would be fatal if all this resulted in what David C. Berliner calls creaticide in the foreword: “With a few notable exceptions, policies designed to improve schools have resulted in a diminution of those classroom activities that are more likely to promote higher levels of thought, problem solving, and creativity in academic areas. It is not that the research community can agree on how to produce higher-order thinking and creative responses among youth. Far from it! But there is remarkable agreement about how not to produce the outcomes we desire. And by constraining what teachers and students can do in classrooms we do just that” (2011: xv).

Chapter 7 of this book focuses on the significance of structure and improvisation in teaching English as a foreign language. Title: “Breaking through the Communicative Cocoon: Improvisation in Secondary School Foreign Language Classrooms.” (Kurtz, 2011: 133-161).

For further details, please click here.

The Tragic History of the Communicative Approach

by Wolfgang Butzkamm, Aachen University (RWTH), Germany

In the seventies a movement called the communicative approach emerged. The term was well chosen and intuitively appealing to all of us. Is there anybody around who prefers teaching non-communicatively?

Communicative activities should be at the centre of foreign language teaching. There is a basic law of learning known to all of us: We learn what we practice, i.e. we learn to communicate by communicating. Make “message-oriented communication” rather than “medium-oriented communication” the focus of the classroom (for this distinction see Butzkamm & Caldwell, The bilingual reform , p. 42ff.). An old mistrust of grammar was revived and a new kind of error tolerance was born. Gone are the days when catched, or she didn’t bought the jeans, were considered a crime against the English language by teachers who were quite unaware of the fact that monolingual English children made the same mistakes on their way to adult grammar. Did such mistakes prevent them from communicating happily? Many other good things can be said in favour of the communicative approach, such as a new emphasis on speech functions, on learners’ needs inside and outside the classroom etc.  And, in fact, it did breathe new life in my teaching.  Nevertheless it “failed to deliver”, as Robert O’Neill wrote in The Guardian in 1999, and is still failing today.

This is because it tragically came with several birth defects, one of which is that it simply ignored the long-standing issue of the role of the mother tongue. So native speakers happily continued teaching monolingually, while others were
generous to a fault in using the pupils’ mother tongue even for message-oriented activities such as organizing the daily life of the classroom, explaining tasks, setting homework, giving feedback on tests etc.. Still others used it hesitantly and sparingly in various ways while feeling guilty about it.

What is badly needed is the knowledge and dissemination of highly effective techniques in which the L1 is essential and indispensable. Teachers need to understand and use sophisticated bilingual techniques alongside monolingual ones, of course. Here are two articles that describe some of these techniques: “Practice Makes Perfect or: How to learn structures“  and “Practice Makes Perfect or: How to learn a dialogue“.

On my website (please click here), you can also see videoclips illustrating bilingual techniques. After all, it is indisputable that mother tongue skills are the very foundation of FL skills. Nevertheless, the communicative philosophy, as I see it, still wants teachers to keep the L1 out of the FL class, i.e. rarely mentions bilingual techniques which can scaffold the learning of an L2 most effectively.  How can you keep something separate from its very foundation?

The “communicative approach” will not die because the term in itself is so attractive. But it will be faltering and ailing unless it openly recognizes its birth defects and remedies them. I’ve mentioned one of these defects, but see O’Neill for others (please click here).

Wolfgang Butzkamm & John A. W. Caldwell (2009). The bilingual reform. A paradigm shift in foreign language teaching. Tübingen: Narr.