1.- A
DOGMA FOR EFL
By Scott Thornbury
In
My belief is that it is high time Dogme-type
principles were applied to the classroom. While EFL may seem to have little in
common with Hollywood, it is certainly true that EFL teaching has never been so
copiously resourced. Along with the quantity (I hesitate to use the word variety)
of coursebooks in print, there is an embarrassment of complementary riches in
the form of videos, CD-ROMs, photocopiable resource packs, pull-out word lists,
and even web-sites, not to mention the standard workbook, teacher's book, and
classroom and home study cassettes. Then there is the vast battery of
supplementary materials available, as well as the authentic material easily
downloadable from the Internet or illegally photocopied from more conventional
sources. There are the best-selling self-study grammar books, personal
vocabulary organisers, phrasal verb dictionaries, concordancing software
packages - you name it. But where is the story? Where is the inner life of the
student in all this? Where is real communication? More often as not, it is
buried under an avalanche of photocopies, visual aids, transparencies, MTV
clips and cuisennaire rods. Somewhere in there we lost the plot.
For several years now, my fellow Diploma
teacher trainer, Neil Forrest, and I have been waging war on materials-driven
lessons. The plaintive cry of an ex-student ("Our teacher never talked to
us") cut straight to the quick. Too many observed lessons, we realized,
were being hi-jacked, either by materials overload, or by Obsessive Grammar
Syndrome (OGS). We laid down some rules: if the language lesson didn't include
real language use, then we questioned its usefulness. Photocopies were
proscribed; the OHP was banished. Grammar presentations had to be squeezed into
5 minutes. Real talk, usually relegated to the bookends of the lesson proper,
had to form the lesson core. And the teacher had to talk - not at the students
or even to them - but with them. No posturing was allowed.
What we were developing, I now realise, is a
Dogme school of teaching. Dogme's first "commandment" is that :
Shooting should be done on location. Props and
sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a
location must be chosen where the prop is to be found)
Translated into classroom terms this might
read:
Teaching should be done using only the
resources that teachers and students bring to the classroom - i.e. themselves -
and whatever happens to be in the classroom. If a particular piece of material
is necessary for the lesson, a location must be chosen where that material is
to be found (e.g. library, resource centre, bar, students' club…)
Dogme also proscribes music being played that
is not actually occuring where the scene is being shot. Nor is artificial
lighting allowed. Nor optical work or filters. Nor tripods. In teaching terms,
this rigorous rejection of the non-authentic might mean, for example, that
No recorded listening material should be
introduced into the classroom: the source of all "listening"
activities should be the students and teacher themselves. The only recorded
material that is used should be that made in the classroom itself, e.g.
recording students in pair or group work for later re-play and analysis.
But Dogme is not only about a stripped down ,
technology-free kind of film making. It is also about grounding the experience
of the film (both its making and its viewing) in the real world:
Temporal and geographical alienation are
forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now).
Learning, too, takes place in the
here-and-now. What is learned is what matters. Teaching - like talk - should
centre on the local and relevant concerns of the people in the room, not on the
remote world of coursebook characters, nor the contrived world of grammatical
structures. In the same spirit, Dogme is hostile to "genre movies",
such as westerns, thrillers, and wacky comedies, since genres are another form
of alienation - they map an artificial world on to the real one. Methods in
language teaching - being generalised and simplistic solutions to local and
complex situations - have the same distorting effect as genres. A Dogme school
of teaching would take a dim view of imported methods, whether the Silent Way,
the Natural Approach, the Direct Method, or hard line CLT. No methodological
structures should interfere with, nor inhibit, the free flow of
participant-driven input, output and feedback.
Are these Dogme-like prescriptions just
another method? I hope not. The point is to restore teaching to its pre-method
"state of grace" - when all there was was a room with a few chairs, a
blackboard, a teacher and some students, and where learning was jointly
constructed out of the talk that evolved in that simplest, and most
prototypical of situations. Who, then, will join me and sign a Vow of EFL
Chastity?
© 2011 by Scott Thornbury