Teaching unplugged: One teacher's account
Nerina Conte and Scott Thornbury
Nerina Conte teaches English in a private language school in Barcelona. Trained at both Certificate and Diploma level, she has been teaching for 12 years now and teaches both adult and children's classes. A year or so ago, after attending a workshop given by "Dogme ELT" founders Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings, she developed an interest in materials-free teaching. The Dogme philosophy was inspired by the Dogme 95 film-making collective, whose commitment to a pared-down, technology-light cinema, in which the "inner story" of the characters is allowed to emerge, unencumbered by special effects, is expressed in their "Vows of Chastity", the first of which is:
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)
By analogy, Dogme ELT promotes a pedagogy that is unburdened by an excess of materials and technology, and instead is grounded in the local and relevant concerns of the people in the room. The first "vow" of Dogme teaching is:
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…)
To Nerina, an approach that bypassed the artificiality and irrelevance of the course book and that released the "inner story" of the learners, had an intuitive appeal, particularly with regard to the teaching of children. Faced with a new class of eight- to - ten-year-olds, she decided to abandon the course book altogether, and replace it with what she called "scrapbooks". These the children would compile themselves, and each would be an original record of the year's work - a portfolio of texts and illustrations that emerged from their theme-based classroom work. A year on, she talked to Scott Thornbury about this experiment, and the way she plans to adapt it for the year ahead.
SCOTT. So this was 2K, so the age group was….
NERINA. From 8 to10.
SCOTT. And how many?
NERINA. I had 9 last year.
SCOTT. And what level were they?
NERINA. Second or third year English.
SCOTT. Before we go on to talk about what you are doing this year, let's go back to the beginning of last year. So, what motivated you to approach this course in this way, that they do their own material, prepare their own scrapbooks?
NERINA. Material-free teaching: I don't think that students, little kids need books to learn a language, because that's not how children learn languages. I think that they do have their own background, their own experiences, and they can bring these into the classroom. We don't need books with pictures of wardrobes of clothes. We can just use the kids with their own clothes, we can speak about what they wore yesterday, when they play football… We don't need pictures of food because they can tell you what food they eat in Spanish… I've noticed that lots of books tend to be full of activities which do not produce language - colouring-in stuff, match this with that - they tend to be time-filling more than language-producing. And then what I didn't like, most of these books, or at least the ones that I have seen, are reproductions of adult books. They follow the same syllabus. For example, the books I've used don't use the past simple. They focus on present simple, present continuous, possessives, very specific grammar items, but they don't work on the past simple, and as I've noticed even with adults, it's what helps me get through to the students, because I can ask them "What did you do this morning? What did you do Saturday, Sunday? Where did you go?" etc. So I started last year with the past - with dinosaurs!
SCOTT: So when you say you started with the past, essentially you started with a text presumably.You didn't do a full scale presentation of the past simple?
NERINA. No, I brought in stuff on dinosaurs. We worked on dinosaurs, where they lived, what they did, what they ate, and what they were like, and so they got the past simple input through a specific theme and then they wrote a story. What you see here [in the scrapbook] is just the final product. (Unfortunately I didn't collect all the the different exercises I did on scrap paper during the year, but I am doing so this year). And so we went on to talk about themselves: what they were like when they were small, what they ate, what they did, where they lived… And from there we spoke about them now.
SCOTT. [referring to a scrapbook text] So how did they get these verbs down?
NERINA. Because I put the verbs on the blackboard and there were lots of things on the blackboard that they had come up with, describing them. I had spoken about the dinosaurs, I put the words on the blackboard: had, were, lived, and they had to go matching, sorting out what goes with had, what goes with were and what goes with lived - I asked them what those words were in Spanish. Sometimes, if they haven't got enough English to say what they want to say, some tasks I give them to write out in Spanish, and then they try and say it in English and I will help them. So the words that they were given in English, the words that they wanted to use, they would then be able to read them, and say them. Every single child I would do one-to-one: "OK, what does this mean? Read it, say it to me, speak about it…" Then they would have to work in pairs: tell your partner about yourself when you were a child…
SCOTT: Do you give them the blank scrapbook or do they buy it?
NERINA: We buy the books, the notebooks. The Director of Studies sends out a letter to the parents saying: "The kids are not using a book. We will produce our own material". They give us 1.500 ptas for all the materials throughout the year.
SCOTT: Don't they expect the kids to be working with a book? How did you sell the idea to them?
NERINA. When the parents came for the Teachers-Parents Meeting, I showed the scrapbooks to them and I explained the methodology and it was fine by them. I don't know how it will go this year, but I showed the kiddies what a scrapbook is, because they couldn't understand: "What are we going to do with this white book? No lines in it, no pictures in it?" And I showed them one, and they said, "Are we going to do that?" They were really surprised, because when they go home they go home with a book, their own book - OK, with lots of mistakes in it, because that is what they can do - but highly personalised.
SCOTT: The kids see each other's?
NERINA: Oh yes, because they ask each other, they have to speak to each other. His text is three sentences, hers is much longer… This is the good thing about this type of book or method: they produce according to their own level, because it's not our level, and nobody is penalised for not doing all the exercises in the activity book.
SCOTT: Where is the push then? Is it simply in their taking pride in their own work and wanting it to be as good as they possibly can? Is there a competitive element? Trying to keep up with the others?
NERINA: Well, the push is in the fact that kiddies want adults to like what they do: that's fundamental. So they want me to be proud of all of them. And also they see that they can produce orally, for example, interacting with visitors, and - through their scrapbook - producing their own material. It comes from wanting me to be proud of them, but also their awareness of their own progress.
SCOTT. Part of it must have a lot to do with creating a good classroom dynamic. Do you consciously set out to do that, or is it through activities like personalisation that the dynamic develops naturally?
NERINA. It helps, but I try to understand my class. For example, I try to guess who the only children are, because they tend to be disruptive. They're not used to sharing time, and they want all the attention. You have to find out what kind of group they are used to at home, so that you can automatically focus on how to work with them in the classroom. Those are the kids that need to be hugged more, they need more attention.. So I will go and hug them. Because if you just go in there and teach and you forget that they are people with their own problems that they bring into the classroom and you don't understand them, they won't learn, and one of the ways they let you know this is by being disruptive. You kind of have to pay for it. They are trying to tell you something, and you are not listening. That doesn't mean that lots of my kids don't finish in the corner. Sometimes they are really disruptive. At the beginning I say: "OK, to the corner!" By the end of the year, I just look at them and they say "In the corner? and I say "Yes", and they would go and sit there on their own, because they realise that that was the limit, and they had gone beyond the limit.
SCOTT. It sounds as if - to be eligible to teach this age group - you need to be a mother or parent yourself.
NERINA. I think that I've got lots of help from my own children. That's helped me a lot. I've got this little girl this year, for example, she's really lazy. They were all supposed to bring this picture in, and I couldn't start the class because her picture was missing. The others told me: "Sabes que ha dicho, que a ella no le importa nada" [Do you know what she said? That she doesn't care less]. So I said, "This is a team, so we are playing soccer, and there is only one person running after the ball, and the other team has eleven of them running after the ball, who is going to win?" So I said, "We need you. You had better run after the ball with all of us. If you don't, we will lose." And the following lesson she brought in her picture.
SCOTT: Really!
NERINA.Yes, because she felt part of the group. She was saying, "I'm not part of the group. I don't want to be part of this group". And I'm sure she is going to come up with this again. Now she is working, but in two or three days' time she will probably stop working, and I will have to re-motivate her. But if you don't do this, they won't learn English.
SCOTT: Another argument for the use of books is that they save teachers planning timed you think that your planning time has increased by not having a book?
NERINA: No, not at all. One way of saving time is by personalising, by speaking about your own life, bringing in pictures. I started off this year speaking about my pet. My dog's name is Nikita, etc. And later, when I showed them just a list of words that they'd copied from the blackboard, they said "This is about Nikita". And it was. They immediately knew what it was about, so it's really powerful.
SCOTT. Do you think there is a danger of basing everything on the children's own lives and experiences? Their likes and dislikes etc.?
NERINA. No. They love speaking about themselves.
SCOTT. What happens if you get into risky areas? Like if you are doing families, and there had been a recent break-up?
NERINA. Yes, last year I had a problem there. I had a girl, when we were doing jobs, they were supposed to speak about their parents' jobs, and nearly everybody was, "My dad is a businessman, doctor, teacher…" And her dad is a waiter and her mum is a cleaner. And one or two started picking on her, and it was really difficult to support her and make her feel proud, but in the end she was speaking about her uncle who was a truck driver. So, when you speak about the family and some kids are going through a divorce and things like that, that can be dynamite, really difficult.
SCOTT. I suspect that is why some teachers feel more comfortable with a fictitious life with coursebook characters. It protects them when things come up.
NERINA. Yeah, but kids, they are so sensitive. They can't just speak about the people in the course books, because when they come into the classroom, they are bringing their whole selves in there. So I think it is even more difficult than with adults, because adults can put their mask on. They have learnt to do it. They come in from a hard day's work, or with family problems. But kiddies can't. They want to speak about themselves, about their family, their friends, what they did at the weekend. And they can speak about something that is really a problem. I think they need to, because if the affective barrier is high, they won't learn.
SCOTT. Another criticism about materials-free teaching is that this is all very well in our kind of rather luxurious circumstances, whereby we have small classes of fairly motivated children. Also, we are native-speaker teachers and therefore have more security in terms of being able to deal with the language issues that come up. Do you think that this is just something exclusive to our particular situation?
NERINA.I think that it could be a problem for teachers at high levels, even native-speaker teachers, but I don't think it's a problem for lower levels. I've seen Italian teachers do wonders in a classroom, even though they might not have the knowledge of the language that a native-speaker teacher might have. I think that what is really important here is motivation. If you believe in something, you can do it, and you can go beyond the book. You have to ask yourself: is this my aim or is this just a means?
SCOTT. You are saying that for a lot of teachers, the materials become the aim?
NERINA. The materials become the filter between the teacher and the students when it is supposed to be: "OK, I've got this book and I've got this group - let's see what the group is like and I'll choose such-and-such a book, or I'll adapt the book that I've got". But instead it goes the other way round. This is the danger of the book. I think we grew up with books and we depend on them.
SCOTT. You can't imagine a world without them.
NERINA. I believe in books, I love the smell of paper and ink and all that but it's gone a bit too far.
SCOTT: Publishers seem to be not only producing books, but everything but the kitchen sink, everything that goes with the book, resource books, big books, story books, work books, CD-Roms, web sites, etc. Is this of any use to anybody?
NERINA. When students come and ask for a course, they come to learn English, they don't come to do a book. They want the book as a back-up. I've never heard a student say, "I want to do such-and-such a book".
SCOTT. Getting back to your class, how do you rate their progress?
NERINA. My evaluation was that they were motivated. That's what I was looking for - that they wanted to do things in English. So, one of the last things I did with them, I had a trainee come in to visit me, she wanted to see the lesson and so I said "We can either do a vocabulary revision, which is what I had programmed, or I can use you". So she said , "OK, do so". And so a group stayed in the classroom, and interviewed her and had to write as much as they could about her. The other group went outside and they wrote what they thought she was like. So they said, "She's married, she's got children, she's a teacher". So they came back, and they had to compare the two texts. So it was, "No, she's not married, she can't do this and that…" And then the kids who had the incorrect text had to get the other group to correct their text. Then they had to go to the trainee teacher and she gave her final response: "Yes, that's correct etc".That's what I want them to do.
On the other hand, I asked a colleague of mine who has got my children this year, what she thinks about them, and she said they are weak. She said that they couldn't do an activity that other students of the same level could do. I asked her to show me the activity, and it was an activity on the verb to be: they had to put in the correct subject, etc. So I realised that I had worked on what I thought was good for them, but that I hadn't kept in mind that they are part of a system, and that later on they would be working with other teachers that do discrete-item grammar activities and that they are not trained to do that. So I'm starting to notice that there is a gap in there: you can't just do activities where language is being used as a skill, not as a subject. And I never did that during the year. I did do lots of grammar, but through highly motivated stuff, games and so on, but I never focussed explicitly on things like subject, plural, singular.
SCOTT. So, what are you doing differently this year?
NERINA. What I've decided to do this year is - besides having a scrap book - they've each got a little notebook which is going to be their "work in progress", and this is where I keep a record of all the little exercises we do through the year, and I specify what they are, so that this can be a kind of record for who comes after, to see what kind of exercises they are used to doing. The scrapbook is where they put the final copy of their text, interviews etc.
SCOTT. One final question: in terms of my interest in this, in the Dogme group and so on, has that helped? You say you were motivated a bit by the sessions that you went to, and also that you have been lurking on the website. [www.groups.yahoo.com/group/dogme]. Were you ready to take this step?
NERINA. No, you definitely pushed me. I don't know if I would have done it all the same, but I …
SCOTT. It tallied with your intuitions?
NERINA. I could see it, it was incredible, I could really feel it and see it. I tried it out and I'm so convinced, that I'm doing it again this year. Because after speaking to my colleague, what I've decided is that I'm going to do it again but try to be more complete, so the kiddies have things in their portfolio. I'm expanding it. I don't want to go back to using the book, unless I really do see a book that says this is really worthwhile using.