Damon, another teacher whose classroom we studied, had taught in Japan for some years before taking a position in the IEP while he completed his master’s degree in the United States. Damon was teaching a low-intermediate reading class. In one class, Damon was leading his students through a general-knowledge quiz about what to do in particular driving situations.
Teacher: OK, so the first one: [reads from the book] “Every time you turn on your windshield wipers you should also turn on your headlights.” What do you think? True or false?
Student 1: False.
Teacher: False? Anybody else? M. says false. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you think. OK? P. says false. Only two of you are going to answer? Tell me what you think. I don’t care. You can be wrong. Or you can be right. Or it doesn’t matter. When it rains, do y—ah, let me ask you this: when it rains, do you turn on your headlights?
Student 2: Yeah.
Teacher: Yeah?
Student 2: Yeah.
Student 3: Sure.
[…]
[Teacher and class work through the second question]
Teacher: Next one. [Reads from the book] “If you think you’re going to run head on into another vehicle, it is better to drive off the road than to crash.” Right, so you’re in a bad situation; you think you’re going to run on, head on into someone or something; it’s better to drive off the road than to crash. What do you think? True or false? Who thinks it—
Student 4: Highway?
Teacher: Yeah, drive off the highway, don’t have the crash. It’s better to drive off the highway? Who thinks it’s true? One. Two. Three. Only three? Who thinks it’s false? One. [Students laugh]
Teacher: [laughing] You guys! Last one. You can, it doesn’t matter, just saysomething. (class of 4/1/96; B.Johnston et al., 1998, p. 173)
In this passage, Damon is struggling to get his students to respond to the items of the quiz. In analyzing the extract, my colleagues and I were partiularly struck by the complex and contradictory moral messages encoded in what Damon says to his students. It seemed to us that the passage reveals a certain moral paradox at the heart of communicative language teaching regarding the nature and purpose of student participation.
One of the most basic underlying tenets of communicative language teaching is that language is not merely a set of forms (words, grammatical structures, etc.) but is used for something: to convey information, maintain relationships, and act in and on the social world (Finocchiaro & Brumfit, 1983; Halliday, 1978). In all of these ends, the substance of what is said is the important thing. In the context of Damon’s class, this means that the students’ opinion about the right answer is most important—more important, for example, than forming that opinion in a grammatically faultless way. Thus, Damon urges his students: “Tell me what you think. Tell me what you think.” The message that the individual learner has to convey is paramount; in the language of communicative teaching, the classroom is meaning centered and learner centered (Finocchiaro & Brumfit, 1983; Nunan, 1988). Yet there is also another side to this. Much communicative teaching involves games or relatively trivial topics—for many people, the driving quiz Damon is using might fit into the latter category. There is a sense that the content of the class is in fact not important and that it is simply engagement with the language that matters. Indeed, second language acquisition scholarship has shown that fluency can be achieved only by actually speaking and that it is important to maximize the time that each student has for production—hence the widespread use of pair work in communicative language teaching, which multiplies the opportunities each student has to produce the language (Brown, 1994). In light of this, it is pedagogically important to urge the students to produce as much language as possible. Damon does this by saying: “Just say anything,” implying that it is the making of language that matters, not its content. Yet these two values are incompatible. On the one hand, what learners have to say is the most important thing; on the other hand, it is irrelevant, and mere production is what matters. Yet both values stem from the same goal: to make the language learning process
more effective. This is the paradox that underlies Damon’s struggle in the previous passage. At one level he is urging the students to make their contributions individual and meaning based: “Tell me what you think. Tell me what you think.” The moral message implicit here is that he wants communication of ideas: that is, the teacher-student relation is paramount. Yet simultaneously he is sending the message that the most important thing is simply to practice fluency: “Just say something.” Here, the moral subtext is that the students have a moral duty—based on the assumption of participation, another part of the curricular substructure—to participate, and that this participation is in fact in their best interests, because it is the most effective way for them to achieve their goal of learning English. The moral dilemma is captured when Damon says: “I don’t care. You can be wrong. Or you can be right. Or it doesn’t matter.” The phrase “I don’t care” in particular encapsulates the ambiguity: It can mean both “I will accept any answer” and yet also “I
am indifferent to what you say,” both of which meanings impinge on the teacher-student relation.
It is this paradox and this ambiguity that Damon is wrestling with in the extract quoted earlier; one could also argue that the same paradox contributes to his students’ unwillingness to participate. In any case, the double meaning of participation in language classrooms is not Damon’s problem alone but a complex and contradictory moral issue all of us face in our teaching. This is perhaps the most fundamental moral dilemma at the heart of the curricular substructure of the communicative classroom.
How do you find this interesting method?