Learning Circle Task Session 1

Group members: Peggy, Sunny, Mata, Hiroki, Aziz and James

Within the group, Peggy, Mata, Hiroki and Aziz had considered their experiences learning English at school in Taiwan, Greece, Japan and Kuwait respectively. Sunny was reflecting on her time learning English at a private language school in New Zealand and I had thought about my experience learning German as a foreign language at university in Germany.

As you would expect from the above information, we brought vastly different experiences to our discussion. In fact, there were many more differences than similarities between how we were taught so it was quite difficult to pinpoint the three most noticeable areas of difference. We tried to do this as a group, though, and felt that the following areas were most significant:

·         The role of the teacher and students, and interaction patterns

We had three different situations with regard to teacher and student roles. The first was that of Peggy and Hiroki, who said that  the teacher was a figure of authority, and the students simply the teacher’s (passive) audience. Mata and Aziz, on the other hand, felt that, while lessons and activities were mostly teacher-centred, the teacher was an approachable source of knowledge. Sunny and I had experienced a more communicative approach where the teacher established situations that were likely to promote communication and he/she acted as an adviser and communicator. The students were communicators and negotiators of meaning.

Peggy, Hiro and Aziz experienced classrooms in which there was individual student-teacher interaction, but no or almost no peer interaction, while the other half of the group were in classrooms in which the student-teacher interaction varied according to the role that the teacher was playing and where there was lots of pair and group interaction amongst students.

·         The characteristics of the teaching/learning process

There were three different sets of characteristics. Sunny and I had been in lessons where the goal was to enable students to better communicate in the target language, and this was achieved through activities, such as role plays and student presentations, that had a real communicative purpose. Student talking time, or output, was maximised and authentic materials were often used by the teacher to helps students understand how language is really used.

Hiro, Peggy and, to a certain extent Aziz, had experienced lessons that were delivered in their L1. Lexis was usually presented at the start of lessons, out of context, with the aim of aiding comprehension for later classroom activities. There was a deductive approach to grammar teaching in their classes and the rules that they had been presented were then applied to written gap-fill exercises.

Mata felt that her teacher had taken an eclectic approach to language teaching. Dictation and tests played a large role in recycling language that students had recently studied. Grammar was taught inductively, and equally students were encouraged to think about the meaning of lexis by deducing its meaning from context.

·         The language skills that were emphasized

There was a clear divide here with half of the group having had no, or virtually no, focus on the skills of speaking and listening. Instead more emphasis was given to reading and writing in the target language. The other half of the group felt that emphasis was given to all four skills. Within this framework it was felt that the function of language was given prominence over the form. Students were also exposed to nonverbal behaviour as a tool for communication.

As I have already stated, it was quite hard to find key similarities in our experiences. However, the majority of the group felt that their teacher’s main goal was to ensure that students passed end of year exams. There was also a similarity in the way that culture was viewed in the different classrooms. For most of the group there was a cultural focus on American and/or British society, though in one case culture did not feature at all and in another the local culture was studied in English.