“Teacherese”

 

December 5, 2012 · by fslatheoriesmaucaldasb2012 · in Personal Reflections. ·

 

MY (E)MERGING THEORY: RUBIK-CUBE SHAPED TESOL “TEACHERESE”

Orlando Chaves

  Professional teaching is nurtured by both experience (craftsmanship being its product) and study (professional knowledge being its product). To begin, let me straightly state my very first principle for teaching: Teaching is shaped by one’s views of the subject matter, its learning, and the teaching itself. Accordingly, language teaching, in general, including particularly the teaching of L2 and TESOL, is rooted on the teacher’s view on language, language learning, and (language) teaching.
My view of the language is that it is a bio-psycho-social-historical thinking and communication device product of evolution and rooted deeply into animal cognition and the communication of living beings. It is a human universal innate faculty that is realized in a particular communication code –a language-, which is developed and learned within a particular cultural group. A language is in turn real-ized in speech or tongue, which real-izes itself in geographic and social varieties (dialects and accents, acro-, meso-, and basi-lects). A language is a system of systems that cover formal (phonetic, phonologic, morphologic, syntactic, and semantic structures) and functional aspects (sociolinguistic, and pragmatic functioning of the language). Speech varieties are actualized, according to individual ways of expression or idiolect, in the form of register in particular communicative situations. It should be apparent that my view is not just juxtaposition of linguistic views that have developed historically, but an attempt of reconciling them in a unitary conceptual body.
Furthermore, my view of learning has followed the same aggregationist-synthetic procedure. Learning starts with perception, goes to sensation, to attention, to linking to prior schemata, to reflection, to consciousness, to abstraction. It begins as something purely biological in the individual, a matter of paced maturation and development, triggered and fueled by social interaction and individual activity. That is to say, learning has biological and social roots and –like language- despite being an individual reality it is also a social and cultural fact. Behaviorism, innatism, interactionism and a social-cultural perspective do not oppose so much in my view; rather, they complement each other, each underlining a particular aspect the other views do not probably highlight that much. Learning takes all what those theories have stated about it. It takes an individual with all his cognition, emotions, and personality; it also takes a context that situates the matter for learning and provides meaning and sense to it, and it takes a process of action and interaction, to construct it too. Language learning, as any other learning, follows those patterns.
Language learning is a mainly practical process. It is like learning how to walk, or how to drive a bicycle, a motorcycle or a car; it is like learning how to swim; you can be instructed but all you really need is practice; instruction, in practical learning, will never be enough. Simple imitation will never lead to real learning; only real practice will make real, understanding and enduring learning. However, in the case of F/SL, learning can also be theoretically grounded, i.e. in this case formal instruction is central, especially in the case of foreign languages. As language is made for thinking and communication, a second or foreign language will only be learnt from comprehension and use. Practical, in “practical learning”, means individual and social action: comprehension and communication. “Practical” implies knowledge, skill, ability, competence, too.
Finally, my view of teaching. Teachers can be born, but they have to be made; teaching has evolved –like the rest of human knowledge- from an intuitive and empiricist practice into a professional knowledgeable and reflective expertise. Teaching requires pedagogy (a sense of principles and goals, foundations and teleology of education), didactics (as know-how of teaching) and methodology/methods (as skill in classroom communication and conduction).
To conclude, my view of language teaching. It is grounded on the aforementioned views about language, language learning, and teaching. It is a principled or professional practice that does not claim universal validity, for languages, individuals, situations, and classrooms vary. There is only one language, THE language, but many realizations of it, languages; there is only one Human Being, but innumerable persons. I don’t teach what cannot be taught because it is innate, the language; I teach a language. Language teaching must be practical, i.e., communicative, as languages are practical devices for thinking and communication. My students at school are not linguistics students, they are language learners; I do not teach the description of the language; I teach through and for communication. Language teaching is meaning-centered, for you cannot learn anything you don’t understand. It means rote repetition and drilling are out of question. Comprehensive reading and listening, lots of meaningful i+1 input, lots of ZDP interactive practice, lots of productive effort, lots of self-, peer-, and teacher-corrective feedback. The secret, if any, to language learning is lots of sustained willing (conscious or not) effort, which is attainable if adequate motivation is present. In the (language) classroom, it means that motivating topics, activities, materials and classroom arrangements draw students’ interest, which begets their willing and engaged action that leads to learning, while reducing disruptive behaviors due to boredom or lack of interest or comprehension.

To close, I wished to say that I have come up with a more or less consolidated personal theory of S/FL teaching, for which I am indebted to so many authors from so many schools of thought through history that it would take really long to list here. Mine is just an amalgamated remake of concepts I have been inherited. I have given this emerging personal perspective the form of a Rubik cube. First a cube has six sides. You can think of each side as one facet of learning (individual and social cognitive, affective, personality, intelligence factors). Each side can in turn be seen as made up of various constituents: cognition embeds reflection, analysis, synthesis, perception… The emotional side can include a variety of feelings and emotions from negative to positive ones like anxiety, inhibition, risk-taking, It means each of the six sides of the cube are composite, complex.   From a different perspective, the three axes can represent the basic dimensions involved in language and learning: let’s make the vertical axis the biological bases, while the horizontal left-to-right or across axis represents society (including culture and history in it) and the horizontal bottom-to-front or depth axis represents the individual, the learner. Other aspects can be considered in the cube: corner points, edges, diagonal lines, respectively representing the confluence of adjacent aspects and cross-sectional aspects within and across the sides and side components. The complexity of a cube like the one representing this perspective can be illustrated by means of the illustrations accompanying the text here (taken from Google images, all of them). It is noteworthy to say that I like the Rubik cube this perspective implies a number of combinations present simultaneously at different moments. My idea is not to “solve” the puzzle by means of a solution in which each side is of a uniform color. Instead, I want to emphasize the complexity that having any given combination on each side implies when referring it to language learning and teaching.

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