The Language Teacher

On "Method"

Pennycook (1989) was not the first to question the "method" concept (see Stem, 1985; Allwright, 1988), but he presented a powerful critique from several angles. Most relevant for this discussion is his claim that there is "little evidence that methods ever reflected classroom reality" (p. 602). He warned of "a close relationship between academic thought and textbook publication, but little between these and the knowledge produced by teachers in their daily practice," (p. 609). Dubin and Olshtain (1987, p. 31) similarly stated that "the teacher population is the most significant factor in determining success of a new syllabus or materials," referring to the need for "a reliable picture of teachers who will implement the programme."

There appears to be a scarcity of research demonstrating the effectiveness of a communicative approach (see Sheen, 1993, p. 13). While "scientific" proof is perhaps an inappropriate goal for research in teaching methodologies and approaches Pennycook warned that "any study that claims teachers are adhering to a certain method, without rigorous definition of that method and classroom observation, is ultimately of little value." (op. cit., p. 606). One of the main problems of providing reliable evidence of teaching methods is the difficulty of constructing such an operational definition. There does appear, however, to be some coherence in descriptions of the classroom roles expected of teachers and students within the communicative approach.

Dubin and Olshtain (op. cit., p. 77) summed up the role of the "communicative teacher" in the following terms: "The teacher is there to guide learners, not to tell them. The teacher's role is recognised as a facilitating one, with learners proceeding according to their own inner capacities, not in a lock-step plan solely of the teacher's creation." Yalden (1987, p. 57) portrayed the role of the teacher in a very similar way: "The teacher is no longer director of the process. Nor are teachers the mere instruments of the expert who provides a method to be implemented in the classroom. They are monitor, counsellor, consultant, orchestrator and animateur." If we are to assess the suitability of a communicative approach for a specific context, it is important to know the extent to which a change of roles constitutes a precondition of success. Brumfit (1979, p. 188) pointed out that a move away from an accuracy based curriculum would "lead us to look more carefully at the role of methodology, the relationship between teacher and pupil." He underlined the need for freedom to interact outside the narrow confines of lock-step teaching. "Not to allow the learner some freedom to use the newly developed skills in unpredictable directions will be to frustrate the very abilities which will be necessary for the most effective response to the predicted needs" (p. 186). We might conclude from these descriptions that a communicative approach is indeed inherently linked to a need for devolved classroom roles.

The assumption that classroom roles can be rapidly dropped and new ones adopted is implicitly built into the approach that was applied to the Gulf context in the seventies and eighties. While such a perspective assumes that classroom roles can be radically modified by training, the research findings lead to an opposite conclusion. Furthermore, Dubin and Olshtain (1986) claimed that program design needs to be rooted in social context, and that course designers build in assumptions about social process into their materials (p. 77). They also, concluded that "the perspective of name-method is basically out of harmony with the intent of professional program design which begins by assessing the total context in which interactional plans are formulated"(p. 65).

The Crescent Course

A major reason for the adoption of a communicative approach in the Gulf State of Qatar was the growing perception that local people needed to acquire practical communication skills in English to deal with the ever increasing interchange with the outside world that had accompanied the oil boom. Although there was a real need for local people who could communicate in English, this need was only expressed in the most general terms and no kind of needs or means analysis was ever carried out by the Ministry of Education.

This coincided with growing disaffection among academics internationally with the kind of audio-lingual approach said to be in use in much of the Arab world. British and European applied-linguists such as Van Ek (1975), Wilkins (1976), Allwright (1976), Johnson (1977), and Widdowson (1978), were moving towards the "progressive" view that language should be taught as communication, and that this required a different pedagogical emphasis.

The communicative course used in the Gulf States since 1976, the Crescent English Course, was said to be designed for the local context, but the functional syllabus upon which it was based bore striking resemblances to the Council of Europe's guidelines for European adult learners. (see Van Ek & Alexander, 1975)

Since the Crescent Course was largely written in Britain by a western publisher, the Crescent project can be seen as an example of the attempted transfer of a British approach into a very different "configuration of social, cultural, economic, political and historical circumstances"(Pennycook, 1989, p. 595).

However, at no point in the early years of the innovation was it considered that the approach itself might be wrong for the setting or that it would be useful to provide course writers with a rigorous description of the current roles of local teachers -- mostly expatriate Arabs -- and an assessment of their readiness and ability to change their classroom roles.

The guidelines in the Crescent Course on the approach to controlling classroom interaction, for instance, were unabiguously critical of "traditional" teacher-fronted interaction, and indicate that the materials were written with the intention of changing typical classroom roles.

The typical classroom with its fixed rows of desks, with the teacher traditionally positioned at the front of the class confronting rows of children, does not allow communication to take place easily. These materials encourage alternatives to this arrangement. (Crescent Book 7, teacher's book, p. 5)

While Arab teachers do not ever seem to have adopted the new approach wholeheartedly even in the early years, by 1981 the suitability of the Course in the Qatari context was beginning to be questioned by outside specialists. In his report for the British Council, Early (1981) concluded that after four years of using Crescent in Qatari schools there were dear signs that it was ill adapted to its environment. He also pointed out that the course itself was only one element of innovation and stated that,

there is bound to be a limit to the extent to which the substantive characteristics of the general educational and cultural context can be modified by the teacher training programmes and the public relations work which go hand in hand with the introduction of new kinds of materials. (Part 2, p. 1)

Nevertheless, although Early advocated a more "ecologically sensitive" approach to innovation, it was never formally suggested that a detailed description of local language teaching was needed, nor was any such description carried out. Only anecdotal descriptive information concerning the roles of teachers and the interaction between teachers and students is to be found, and it is based on unstructured observation of classes. In spite of Early's report, teachers' classroom behaviour was contrasted with the behaviours that would be required to teach the new course effectively. The conclusion was that more training was needed to change the attitudes and behaviour of either reluctant or incompetent teachers. There is, however, no basis in research for such a negative characterisation of teachers' behaviours because no independent or neutral description was available to assess the purposes and outcomes of pre-Crescent teacher-student interaction. Once a new course was introduced, all aspects of previous behaviour of teachers seem to have been rejected because that behaviour was incompatible with the roles prescribed by the new approach.

Examining Method-in-Use

The author's research project was designed to provide a description of the "method-in-use" of local teachers in the Crescent Course. The aim was to describe the roles that teachers and students were actually adopting before making suggestions for curriculum development. At the same time the description would provide an assessment of the extent to which classroom roles had actually become compatible with the roles outlined above for "communicative" teaching.

It was decided that no reliable conclusions should be drawn from unstructured observation of classes, particularly as an important aim was to describe the actual approach teachers were using. However, recording, analysing, and interpreting lessons to provide an adequate description of regular features of language teachers' behaviour is a lengthy process.

Prior to starting the project, I had spent two and a half years teaching Crescent myself and one year working in testing and teacher training with local teachers. After piloting and extensive classroom observation, 11 lessons were recorded and analysed in detail. To avoid prejudging the classroom behaviour of local teachers, a pre-pedagogical model combining discourse analysis and analysis of turn-taking was used. By pre-pedagogical, I simply mean that no pedagogical categories were used in the initial analysis. The aim of using this technique was to focus on the interaction between students and teachers as it was regularly enacted in the classroom and to infer typical roles from the analysis. Only then would the suitability of a pedagogical approach be considered.

The data was first examined for its own intrinsic qualities and then the roles adopted by teachers and students were compared to those normally associated with the communicative approach. The detailed description provided interesting results about what teachers were doing and not just in comparison to communicative methodology. A few relevant features of the research findings will be briefly summarized below.

Learner Discourse Initiation

Initiation of discourse by students is one stated aim of communicative methodology. Rather than simply providing responses to teachers, students are supposed to adopt roles through which they can structure interaction. However, when the discourse was analysed, it was strikingly clear that students hardly initiated any exchanges at all, even in so-called functional lessons. Only about 1% of all exchange initiations were actually produced by students. In addition, further qualitative analysis showed that most initiations that were produced by students were not produced in the planned interaction but in incidental interaction about lesson procedure. So, the tenor of the instructional discourse was rarely affected by student initiation as the following brief text sample illustrates (see Figure 1).

An analysis of the data in terms of turn-taking also indicated that there was no opportunity for self selection by students in any lesson recorded or observed. In fact, on average there was less than one student self-selection per lesson. Furthermore, in the few lessons in which pairwork was carried out, it was always under strict teacher control, normally with two students standing to perform in front of the whole class.

The rather surprising conclusion of the research was that after 15 years of using a communicative course, supported by a 10 year teacher training project, the so-called communicative approach was not actually being enacted in any way; so absolutely no conclusions could be drawn about communicative teaching, per se.

This result did not mean that no identifiable approach was being used. In general, teachers spent a lot of time in detailed reconstruction of text with students, often, but not always, in a rather literal and repetitive manner. This method is similar in some respects to what Marton (1988) called a "reconstructive approach." One conclusion of the research project was that it would be more useful to build on the actual approach being used by the teachers, than to continue pushing an approach they were never likely to adopt. In many ways, the introduction of an incompatible methodology was counterproductive as it accompanied attempts to eradicate "non-communicative" techniques that teachers were more comfortable with and more able to perform effectively.

It would appear from an examination of the method-in-use of teachers in one context that the roles of teachers and learners as described in theoretical discussion were very different from the roles that were actually used in the classroom. The lack of an adequate and unbiased initial evaluation of those roles linked to the forceful prescription of new roles seems to have been an important factor contributing to the "role gap."

Japan

Monbusho's 1992 guidelines may not appear to be particularly controversial considering that the approach advocated was introduced in many countries almost 20 years ago. However, the findings of the Gulf research project correspond in some respects to informal assessments of the Japanese innovation reported in recent articles. An issue that is often raised is the applicability of an imported methodology. Miller (1995a, p. 45) stated that communicative practices "run counter to Japanese educational tradition," concluding that this "may be a fundamental reason why the new policy, which took effect in April, 1994, has not led to a major shift in instructional practices." Knight (1995, p. 21) also concluded that the new curriculum is "unlikely to be implemented as conceived," pointing out that conditions do not favour changes in current classroom practices.

The growing evidence worldwide of unsuccessful experiences of communicative methodology applied to the wrong settings should perhaps lead to more serious evaluation of what is achievable in particular settings. Only detailed and adequate description of current practice can provide a solid basis for moving forward.

Reference

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