BEHIND THE CLASS

Behind the Class On the appointed day, at the appointed time, you walk into class, chat with your classmates, one or two jokes, the teacher arrives, roll call and the class begins. You are told to open the book on page number so and so, and to discuss over the three questions which start the lesson, and then to read the text that follows, and answer the questions on it. You read in pairs, you comment with your partner, you even disagree sometimes.... But, have you ever wondered what lies behind all this activity? What makes the teacher tell you to get together in pairs or trios? Why you start every unit with a pair-work “speaking” and then go on into a reading comprehension exercise? Why then you yourselves, in pairs again, work on gapped examples to deduce a grammar rule? All this activity is determined neither by the official programme nor by the book in your hands, and even less by your teacher; till certain extent it is determined by the authors, who, before writing the book you are using, considered and adhered to one of the approaches in teaching a foreign language. We can say that, in the whole process, first there is an approach to a subject (English in this case); then, there come the authors of books, who choose, or believe they choose, an approach; as a result, the books themselves; and finally you and your teacher. Therefore, what actually lies behind every little thing you do in class is not the teacher, it is not the book, it’s the approach. The approach? What is an approach? If we go to the dictionary (I have Merriam-Webster handy) and are not happy with the first definition, we go down to the next (as it should always be done) and we find this one, both simple and applicable in our case: a way of dealing with something: a way of doing or thinking about something. For us, it will be the way in which as many English words as possible will be implanted in your mind together with the grammar that rules them and the sounds to produce them orally. I needn’t tell you how many English class-books there are, you know it from experience; nor how many authors; nor how many editors, all of them laying before your eyes (and the teachers’) all this colourful material that will apparently infuse your brain with English by just looking at it, or, by some osmosis process through your fingertips, at the end of the course will have you speaking English like Meryl Streep or Liam Neeson in whatever accent you may want to. But the fact is that, since the beginning of the twentieth century, behind this menagerie of books, authors, editors, there are only two different approaches to English teaching, which have their bases on two psychological movements: behaviourism and cognitivism. Behaviourism (behaviour/conduct) appeared in the first half of the twentieth century and reached the top of its influence on linguistics in the 30’s and 40’s when Leonard Bloomfield developed structural linguistics. As you must have expected, structuralism pervaded the field of English teaching from Skinner on (1950’s), and reached its heyday in the 60’s and 70’s to wane in the 80’s.   The behaviourists posed that the process of learning was a process of conditioning. Therefore, under its influence, the structuralists proposed that the learner should be conditioned, i.e. exposed to the repetition of a series of related stimulus-response exercises that led to language habits, attaining which the learner had actually learnt. Needless to say that repetition was the key to the process of learning. For this, there was quite a repertoire of exercises or, rather (not to mistake them for the grammar-translation ones), oral drills (repetition, substitution, conversion, completion drills, etc), which in class were carried out as quickly as possible, individually, in duos, in whole groups, without giving the student time to think. Allow me here a personal digression that will not only exemplify the technique but make it visual as well. In Brazil, I myself was fortunate enough to attend a training course on the use of Alexander’s First Things First. There was the teacher and some ten or twelve students who followed his instructions to the T, i.e., repeating. The alternate repetition performances of individual students and then duos and then trios and choruses and the ebbing and flowing of the voices, plus the fact that the teacher and some of the students were Afro-Brazilian, made one feel as at a Gospel session. (Perhaps this quick repetition technique plus the historical fact that there were no efficient ways of taking sound to class made the myth of the native English teacher.) But this is not what you do in class, and so we will have to have a look into the other school in psychology: cognitivism. Cognitivism (from co- + gnoscere: to come to know), on the other hand, believes in the natural ability of the mind to acquire language, knowledge and thought. It proposes the idea that the learning process involves both understanding new experiences and relating them to the other experiences already acquired. Thus, the acquisition of knowledge is a mental process rather than a mechanical one, as posed by behaviourism/structuralism. In the late 50’s, the latter had their counterpart in linguistics, with Noam Chomsky and his transformational generative approach to study a language. According to this school the acquisition of a language was not the result of repetition, imitation, stimuli, responses, but of creativity, the natural creativity of the human mind. And this view of learning has gradually come to take the place of behaviourism/structuralism. And here we are back at the beginning. Based on cognitivism and transformationalism, and aiming at communication, rather than at language itself as the behaviourists and structuralists did, what is done in a classroom nowadays is absolutely different from what was done in the 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s: students do not repeat nor transform predetermined sentences, but speak to one another, communicate. Bearing this in mind, in class you are paired to exchange ideas on some given questions or statements, and paired to read a text and try to help one another with the meaning of new words, and also paired to deduce the grammar point of the lesson. It can be said, here, that cognitivism/transformationalism is student-centred (attends to the student’s needs), whereas behaviourism/structuralism was/is language centred (attends to the language itself). To wind up, we must admit that learning and teaching English nowadays is much more enjoyable (books full of colours, different activities, and even a variety of voices when it comes to listening). But, in my opinion, there is still a question to be answered: is it more effective? But this is another story. ♣