Using the raw materials: A “dogme” approach to teaching language

Scott Thornbury & Luke Meddings

(This article first appeared in Modern English Teacher)

A while back Scott wrote an article called ‘A Dogma for EFL’ in which he questioned the value of materials-driven teaching, and in which he invited language teachers, trainers and writers to adopt a ‘poor’ pedagogy - a pedagogy unburdened by a surfeit of materials and technology, a pedagogy grounded instead in the local and relevant concerns of the people in the room.

By analogy, Scott invoked the principles (and name) of the Dogme 95 film collective, whose intention was to rid film-making of an obsessive concern for technique and to rehabilitate a cinema which foregrounds the story, and the inner life of the characters. To this end, the Dogme film-makers drew up a “vow of chastity”. Scott argued that a similar leanness and rigour might usefully inform current language teaching practice. Not because materials and technology are intrinsically bad, but because they are largely redundant and because they may have blinded us to “the story” - that is, the necessary conditions for language learning. Where, for example, is the learner’s ownership of the process? Where is engagement? Where is talk? More often as not, learning opportunities are suffocated by a weight of photocopies, visual aids, OHP transparencies, MTV video clips, board games, CD-Roms, not to mention the ubiquitous course book and all its add-ons. Somewhere in there we may have lost the plot.

In a similar spirit to the Dogme filmaking collective, and in order to challenge the reigning materials-driven orthodoxy, Scott suggested that the first vow of “Dogme ELT” should be that “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”.

Teaching, in other words, should be driven by, and based in, the content that is supplied by the people in the room. This requires of the teacher the capacity to react to, and shape, the language that emerges from the shared need to communicate. Unsurprisingly, therefore, a question that has often been put to “dogme” teachers is: How exactly to you react to - and shape - this emergent “raw material”?

For example, in a posting to the dogme discussion group (www.groups.yahoo.com/group/dogme) Dan Humm asked: "What do the people in this group do with the information we gather? Information gathering (known more humanely as listening) is a central feature of this method but what is the next stage? How do we make exercises, drills, board the words, role-plays etc.? In short how do we make a lesson from the material we receive?"

Here is how we attempted to answer Dan's question:

First of all, it's important to emphasise that dogme is not about materials-free activities (like warmers and fillers) but it is about materials-light teaching. That is, it's about designing and managing whole lessons that are primarily based on the language that emerges out of the communicative needs, interests, desires of the people in the room. So, the implication of Dan's question is: having got some emergent language, how do you fashion a lesson (ie. coherent sequence of activities) out of it?

Let's start at sentence level (or utterance level) with a concrete e.g.. A student, in answer to the question, "What are your plans for next month" says "Next month, I plan go to San Francisco for sightseeing".

Immediately the teacher has the option of focusing on the content ("Oh yeah, have you ever been before? etc) or on the form - by correcting, by eliciting a self-correction or a peer-correction - or on both meaning and form together, by asking for clarification ("You what?) or through a recast ("Oh you're planning to go to San Francisco to do some sightseeing?). Or the teacher stores this away by, for example, making a “back of the envelope” note of it, or s/he could even be recording the student. At some point, either sooner or later, the teacher has the option of retrieving this sentence. It could go up on the board; it may come up in a transcription of the recording.

At this point (of retrieval) there are lots of ways to go. Here are some options:

• Save the boarding of it until more errors of a similar type (either relating to futurity or to non-use of to-infinitive ("for sightseeing") have emerged. Put them up together and ask learners in pairs/groups to correct them, and to justify their corrections by reference to rules. Elicit substitutions (I'm planning to go to ___ to ___). Ask learners to write as many as they can in X minutes. Drill some of these for fluid pronunciation if necessary.
• If no more errors of the same type come up, put it up, anyway, as part of a selection of varied errors, and follow more or less the same procedure.
• Ask learners (individually or in pairs) to translate the corrected sentences into their L1, clean the board, and then get them to translate the sentences back into English.
• Ask them to reconstruct from memory the part of the conversation that elicted the targeted sentence, and to write it, incorporating their corrections. (If the conversation has been recorded, you can play back the section to refresh their memories).
• Re-enact the conversation with the student who produced the mistake. Organise pairs of learners do this (i.e. role play it).
• Ask them to write a new conversation, but incorporating some of the corrected sentences. Practise and perform.
• Ask learners to test each other on the sentence corrections: if a monolingual class: How do you say [L1 version]? If multilingual: "Andreas said ... Can you improve that?"

So far we have been talking about isolated (and non-standard) sentences. Suppose, however, the teacher had responded to "Next month, I plan go to San Francisco for sightseeing" with the "Oh yeah, and have you been there before?" option, and had gone on to elicit a chunk of talk about this student's planned trip to the city. The teacher then wants to "capture" this emergent language and use it as a focus for language work. Some ways of doing this might be:

• Ask learners in pairs/groups to reconstruct the chunk of conversation, writing down what they can remember. Monitor, correct, collect errors and problems, for boarding and plenary discussion.
• Or, ask Andreas to come up to the front and say, "OK let's have that chat again. You lot listen, and see if you can improve it". Re-run the conversation, but signal pause, rewind, when you want to involve the others. Keep a running transcription of the conversation on the board, if you can. Use this for further, open class, study later on.
• Extract some useful functional, chunk-type language from the reconstructed conversation: "Oh yeah. Ever been before? How long for?" etc. Board this - ask the rest of the class in pairs to have (real) conversations starting "What are your plans for next month?" and ask them to incorporate these chunks if and where appropriate. Re-run some of these conversations, e.g. performance style up the front of the class, or record one or two. Ask them to write them up for homework.
• Extract relevant grammar points and encourage learners to write their own "grammar reference" for the lesson - with examples. They can do the same with vocabulary. This then goes into their notebooks.
• Ask them in pairs/groups to design a test based on the above (e.g. gap fills, jumbled sentences etc). They then exchnage tests, do them, and then send them back for marking.
• Ask students to write a summary of the lesson (in narrative form) for the Absent Student.
• Take Andreas's conversational chunk and reformulate it as a letter, say, on to the board, with the rest of the class helping. "Next month I plan to go to San Francisco. etc" Or leave the room and let them do this, leaving half the board free for your reformulation of the class text when you return.
• Role play the conversation as if you were a TV interviewer - you could record it at same time. Go back and look at the strengths, weaknesses.
• Ask them to do the same to you - then they attempt to reconstruct the interview from memory (writing).
• Ask students to prepare questions to ask Andreas about his trip. (Meanwhile he anticipates these and writes possible answers). Collect these questions for later study and analysis. They then practise them in similar conversations with each other in pairs. Role play various stages of Andrea's trip (travel agent, customs, hotel, police station etc).
• Role play the conversation they will have when Andreas gets back ("How was your trip...?"

The important thing, I think, is to capture text, whether sentences, bits of talk or whole conversations, and then put this captured text to work, improving it, rehearsing it, performing it, re-formulating it in another mode (speech to writing, writing to speech) or register (formal, public or informal, private). And there must be some focused attention on the language - but not just on the weaknesses, also on the strengths. And there must be some kind of summarising activity, for the record.

This is what is meant by a reactive focus on learner language - one in which the learners’ language is as much the process as the product of instruction. In the next issue we will look at ways that such a learner-driven approach can be reconciled with the use of course books.