Kevin's teens class

About three months ago I was about to start a class with a group of twelve fifteen year olds here in Barcelona. For the previous four months we had been struggling through the coursebook and it had been difficult for me to motivate the students using the book or other materials.

I must say at this point that before I became an English teacher I had worked as a youth worker for six years in my home town of Aberdeen in Scotland. The philosophy in that job had very much been about listening to young people and responding to their needs. Imposing materials on a class of young learners in an English class went against the grain but I suppose I thought "Well, they wantto do the First Certificate next year so they have to knuckle down and get on with it."

Anyway, I was trying to get attention at the beginning of the aforementioned class but two of the girls were so deeply engrossed in a conversation in Catalan that it was proving even more difficult than usual. Finally, I said to these two girls that if their conversation was really that interesting they should tell the rest of the students, in English, what they were talking about. One of the girls proceeded to tell the class about a girl at her school who was wreaking havoc by telling lies about people and generally being very destructive. The rest of the students listened with good attention then asked questions, made suggestions and the conversation developed for the next twenty minutes or so.

Taking advantage of the unusally good attention being shown, I asked the students how they felt about the activities we did in class. A really frank discussion ensued. One thing that came across very clearly was that they felt that a lot of the speaking activities we did were a waste of time. I explained the theory that students need to develop fluency by speaking in pairs or small groups and that during the present discussion some of the class hadn't spoken. "Yes, but look how much listening we'vedone today!", somebody said. At one point I got up from my chair to start the lesson I had planned but the conversation kept on coming and in the end we spoke for the whole hour and fifteen minutes of class time. At the end of the class one student came up to me and congratulated me on a brilliant lesson and several students asked me if we could do this kind of speaking again.

However, I did feel guilty that we had spent the whole lesson speaking instead of getting on with the book. This, despite the fact that the students had made a great deal of effort to communicate in English and had listened with more attention than ever before. There was also some interesting if haphazard correction and language input coming from students and teacher alike.

After hearing about the dogme ideas I didn't feel guilty anymore.