The Language Teacher
November 1999

Speaking, Understanding, Developing

Julian Edge

Aston University




Of all the activities, tasks and exercises I have experienced in teacher development, either as participant or facilitator, in thirty years of TESOL across a range of national and educational cultures, the one which has regularly been the most powerful is the one I would like to share with you here.

I realise that that sounds a rather overbearing kind of a claim, but from where I stand, itÕs just an honest statement of the way I see things.

The task sounds very simple, and it certainly can be done superficially, but it usually engages people more than you might expect, and it usually opens people up to insights into their own interactions and potential that can be a springboard for further developmental work. The task comes in three parts. This is it:

A: Individual: Read the following story.

In another country, at another time, there was a girl called Lima. Lima's mother died soon after Lima was born. Her father, a very poor man and himself uneducated, made it his main aim in life to make sure that Lima got a good education and so could live a better life than he and her mother had had. To this end, he made every sacrifice and, when Lima graduated from school and won a place at a teachers' college, he was a very proud and happy man.

Lima had lots of fun at college, but did very little work. When the time came for the final examinations, it was clearly going to be impossible for her to pass. Without her teaching certificate, she would not be able to get any kind of job.

The college had a system of personal tutors, to whom students should go if they had a problem. Lima asked her tutor what she should do. This woman said,

" Lima, I have been telling you for three years that you need to work harder. It's too late now, there's nothing to be done."

Lima then went to see one of her lecturers and told him the problem. He said that he would show her the examination papers before the exam if she would go to bed with him. She did so, and passed the examinations.

However, Lima also became pregnant. When her father found out, he threw her out of the house and refused to have anything more to do with her. He said that as far as he was concerned, he did not have a daughter anymore.

Now homeless, penniless and expecting a baby, Lima met a much older man who was a widower with three children. He said that he would be prepared to marry her as long as she stayed at home and looked after his house and the children.

I never heard what happened next.

Now, without talking to anyone else, number the characters from 1 to 5 according to how easy you find it to sympathise with their actions. Number 1 is the character with whom you can most easily sympathise. Do not let anyone else see your sequence.

Lima

Father

Tutor

Lecturer

Widower

B: Small Group/Pair

Sit in a group of three. Read through the instructions and decide who will be Speaker, Understander and Observer. Then carry out the task. If there are just two of you, or if pair-work is more convenient, then work without the Observer.

The Speaker

Tell the Understander what sequence you put the characters in and explain why. Do not speak for more than five minutes. When the Understander repeats your sequence and your reasons back to you, listen carefully to see if you have been properly and fully understood. Make additions or corrections where necessary.

The Understander

Put out of your mind your own sequencing of the characters in the story. Listen carefully to the Speaker. Don't make notes. Concentrate on making the Speaker feel well listened to. Do not show any signs of agreement or disagreement with the Speaker. Your job is to understand what the Speaker has to say as well as you possibly can, leaving your own opinions out of it. To show that you have understood what the Speaker has told you, repeat back to the Speaker his or her sequencing of the characters and the reasoning behind it. This repetition is called reflecting. You don't have to try to use exactly the same words as the Speaker, but you must do your best to capture the exact meanings that you have understood. You can either wait until the Speaker has finished before reflecting, or, if you can't remember that much, come in while the Speaker is talking. The purposes of reflecting are:

The Observer

Pay particular attention to the Understander, noting any non-linguistic communication. Also pay special attention to the Understander's attempts to reflect, noting anything that seems particularly successful or unsuccessful. Remember, it should not be possible for you to tell what the Understander thinks about the Speaker's sequencing and reasons for that sequencing.

After not more than ten minutes, lead a feedback session, contributing the above information and asking for the reactions and contributions of Speaker and Understander. The following questions are central:

Did the Speaker feel well understood? What was this feeling like?

Did the Speaker understand his or her own ideas better after having expressed them?

Did the Speaker's ideas develop at all as they were being expressed?

How did the Understander feel while trying to reflect without revealing his or her own opinions?

How does the Speaker feel about not having heard the opinions of the Understander and Observer?

C: Whole Group

If you are working as part of a larger group of people, get back together now and talk about what happened in the pair/small group activity. Talk especially about what it was like to be in the role of Speaker and Understander.

What's the point of the activity? Well, in one sense, it goes back to the following statement by Carl Rogers (1951/1992: 28):

I would like to propose, as a hypothesis for consideration, that the major barrier to mutual interpersonal communication is our very natural tendency to judge, to evaluate, to approve or disapprove, the statement of the other person, or the other group.

One purpose of the activity, then, is to give the Understander the experience of trying to put aside this "natural tendency to judge'." A common initial outcome for the Understander is a sense of frustration, a frustration which arises from not being allowed to take up one's "natural" amount of interactional space. On the other hand, what is on offer is the chance to:

To take a current example, if you were put off by the pomposity of my opening claim about the activity represented above, that evaluation will have got in your way of understanding what I am trying to share with you. If you are able to put aside such feelings, you will be more open to hearing and understanding me.

The point about helping a colleague develop demands a little more comment. Again, the background to it can be captured in a quotation from Rogers (Rogers and Freiberg 1994:288):

One way of assisting individuals to move towards openness to experience is through a relationship in which we are prized as a separate person, in which the experiencing going on within is empathically understood and valued.

Let's continue from that point by shifting our attention to the Speaker. One purpose of the activity is to give the Speaker the experience of expressing their ideas in a situation where they will not have to defend them, but they will have to make them very clear. A common outcome for the Speaker is a sense of frustration, a frustration which arises from not receiving the usual amount of interactive feedback. On the other hand, what is on offer is the chance to learn how to:

So, the translation of this activity into our professional lives goes like this: if instead of thinking about Lima, a teacher is working on how to improve the way they teach pronunciation, or trying to come up with an ethical way of reducing the amount of marking they have to do, some find it useful to have a relationship with a colleague in which that colleague takes on for a while the difficult but highly supportive role of the Understander, while they as Speaker work on their own ideas, based on their own experience, understandings and intentions. I am not putting this forward as speculation, I am reporting from practice.

I have to make it clear that I am not suggesting that we should abandon our exchanges based on evaluation: our discussions, suggestions, arguments, debates and disagreements. I am saying, however, that we can do better than limit ourselves to only that style of exchange, especially when a complementary possibility is available. It may just be that this is an idea whose time is coming around, inasmuch as Deborah Tannen's new book ends with the following plea in the face of the increasingly negatively adversarial culture which she identifies in many aspects of our lives (Tannen 1998:298):

We need to use our imaginations and ingenuity to find different ways to seek truth and gain knowledge, and add them to our arsenal - or, should I say, the ingredients for our stew. It will take creativity to find ways to blunt the most dangerous blades of the argument culture. It's a challenge we must undertake, because our public and private lives are at stake.

I do realise that I am sailing deep waters here in the skiff of a single artificial activity, and that I am carrying very little intellectual ballast. But I guess that, in essence, all "My Share" activities are like that. Writers don't just want to share an activity with you, they want you to share the excitement and the sense of achieving something that they get from the activity. And each activity can only make sense in some kind of framework of shared purpose and values.

The purpose of this work is to enhance the possibilities for individual self-development based on the values of mutual respect, trust and empathy. As well as encouraging individual growth, the work can influence, both directly and indirectly, the spirit of collegiality which exists between two people, or among a group of colleagues, or throughout an institution. The activity I am sharing with you here is an introduction to a form of one-to-one collaboration, but in our work at Aston University we have also developed a form of what we call Group Development which brings together the six full-time members of the Language Studies Unit in regular meetings run on the same principles.

I can't go into all that here. If you wanted to read more about the ideas that inform this activity, you could follow up the references I have given. I lay out the original scheme of teacher development into which this activity fits in Edge 1992a, 1992b. If you try out the activity and think that there might be something in there for you, then talk to other people about it. Get in touch with me, or with the editors of this issue of TLT, or get involved in JALT's teacher development SIG and you will find like-minded people with whom you can develop your own way forward.

References

Edge, J. 1992a. Cooperative Development: Professional Self-Development Through Cooperation With Colleagues. Harlow: Longman.

Edge, J. 1992b. Cooperative development. ELT Journal 46/1: 62-70.

Rogers, C. 1951. Communication: Its blocking and its facilitation. In Teich, N. (Ed.) 1992. Rogerian Perspectives: Collaborative Rhetoric for Oral and Written Communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Pp. 27-34.

Rogers, C. and Freiberg, H. 1994. Freedom to Learn. 3rd. ed. New York: Merrill/Macmillan.

Tannen, D. 1998. The Argument Culture. London: Virago.



All materials on this site are copyright © by JALT and their respective authors.
For more information on JALT, visit the JALT National Website