Learner-Based Teaching

Learner-Based Teaching Colin Campbell Hanna Kryszewska Resource Books for Teachers The book provides seventy language practice activities which use the wealth of knowledge, experience, and expertise that learners bring with them to the classroom. Colin Campbell, Hanna Kryszewska Learner-Based Teaching Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam OXFORD and OXFORD ENGLISH are registered trade marks of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 1992 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 1992 2014 2013 2012 20 19 18 17 No unauthorized photocopying All rights reserved. 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Oxford University Press disclaims any responsibility for the content ISBN: 978 0 19 437163 6 Typeset by Wyvern Typesetting Ltd Printed in China Acknowledgements We would like to thank the people from whom we have learned so much: all our students and colleagues everywhere, but especially those at the English Language Centre at the University of Gdansk who willingly participated in the activities and tried out the ideas and who allowed us to include their materials as sample products; and teacher trainers we have met, both in the United Kingdom and in Poland, and the authors of books from which we have also learned. We owe a lot to the following people whose work has inspired us: Mario Rinvolucri, John Morgan, Chris Sion, Alan Maley, and Alan Duff, among others. We also thank all of those who are dear to us for their support and encouragement. Finally we would like to acknowledge how much we have learned from each other. Working together was a pleasure. Hanna and Colin. The authors and series editor Colin Campbell began his career in EFL in 1976, and worked in Spain, England, and Italy, where, with a friend, he prepared a series of ten 15-minute programmes teaching English on local television. He did his MA in Applied Linguistics at Reading University, and in 1984 moved to Poland to work as Director of Studies at the British Council/University of Gdansk English Language Centre. From 1995 to 1998 he was ELT Consultant in Estonia for the British Council. Since 1998 he has been working at Reading University where he is now EAP Lecturer and Course Director. He is one of the authors of Options for English (Warsaw 1991), and co-author (with Hanna Kryszewska) of Towards Teaching (Heinemann European Language Classroom series, 1995). Hanna Kryszewska is a senior lecturer at the University of Gdansk, where she teaches on general and specialized language courses. She also teaches methodology and trains future teachers on pre-service young learners courses at the Institute of Pedagogy at the University of Gdansk. She also runs courses on English language children’s literature with a pedagogical slant, and is a trainer and visiting speaker on CELTA and DELTA courses. She is the co-author of Towards Teaching and Observing English Lessons, a video-based teacher training course, and contributed extensively to the The Stand-by Book and The Teen Book for teachers. She is co-author of a series of coursebooks for the reformed Polish secondary schools entitled ForMat. She is an external reviewer of coursebooks admitted for use in Polish state and oral examiner for Cambridge ESOL exams. She has travelled extensively in Europe, running courses and giving presentations at conferences. Alan Maley worked for The British Council from 1962 to 1988, serving as English Language Officer in Yugoslavia, Ghana, Italy, France, and China, and as Regional Representative in South India (Madras). From 1988 to 1993 he was Director-General of the Bell Educational Trust, Cambridge and from 1993 to 1998 he was Senior Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore. From 1998 to 2003 he was Director of the Graduate Programme at Assumption University, Bangkok. He is now a freelance consultant. Among his publications are Literature, in this series, Beyond Words, Sounds Interesting, Sounds Intriguing, Words, Variations on a Theme, and Drama Techniques in Language Learning (all with Alan Duff), The Mind’s Eye (with Fran?oise Grellet and Alan Duff), Learning to Listen and Poem into Poem (with Sandra Moulding), Short and Sweet, and The English Teacher’s Voice. Foreword In the kind of classrooms with which most of us are familiar it is normal and expected that teachers will make most, if not all, of the decisions about the teaching content and materials. And that, in a majority of cases, teaching will be based on some sort of published or pre-determined materials. This book presents a radical alternative to both these assumptions. In the first place, the learners take over much of the decisionmaking normally assigned to teachers. The approach makes learner-input central to the learning process. It is the learners themselves who become the major teaching resource. It shows how, by tapping into the knowledge and experience of the learners, the quality of the learning process is enhanced, since it becomes both more relevant and more deeply felt. There is a sense in which the teacher becomes a learner and learners are transformed into teachers. In the second place there is a clear move away from dependence on the pre-determined content and format of published materials: every class will bring its own unique mix of individuals and their past experiences; every lesson will generate a unique set of needs. This freedom from dependence on sophisticated materials or technology makes the approach especially suitable for resource-poor environments, and it is perhaps no accident that the authors developed it in Poland where, at the time, access to such facilities was rare. There are clear links between this approach and the current trend towards Learner Autonomy, Self-directed Learning, and Learner Independence. Perhaps unusually however, the emphasis here is on Learner Independence in the group mode rather than the individual self-study mode. Among its ancillary advantages is its power as a tool for teacher development. No teacher taking this route can fail to develop both as a person and as a professional. The approach offers an exciting and rewarding alternative to those teachers willing to try it. It undoubtedly takes courage to cast off from the security of control and pre-determined materials, to trust to the power of process and of learner-input, but the rewards are correspondingly great. Alan Maley Introduction What is learner-based teaching? The main principle in learner-based teaching is that all class activities can be done using information that the learners themselves bring to the class. All humanistic approaches to teaching accept that some language input can be based on the experience, knowledge, and expertise of individual students. What is novel about learner-based teaching is the idea that all activities can be based on that wealth of experience, be they grammar exercises, exam preparation, games, or translations. The activities described in this book show teachers how to help their students to teach themselves, and each other, about English. Using a learner-based approach, the learners themselves are responsible for the information input, thereby ensuring its relevance and topicality for each particular group. The basic procedure has two stages. In the first, learners prepare materials which are designed to practice, for example, a particular skill, function, or grammar item. In doing this, they draw on all the linguistic resources they already have. In the second stage, these materials are passed to other learners in the class who carry out the activities. In this way students obtain valuable language practice, not only while they are using the materials, but while they are preparing them as well. How we arrived at learner-based teaching We arrived at learner-based teaching along different routes but mainly in response to teaching conditions in Poland. Here, few teachers have access to a wide range of recently published materials. We found that people were dissatisfied with the repeated use of the same coursebooks. Many complained that the materials they had did not meet the real needs and interests of their students. As a result, in the teacher-training sessions we ran we evolved the principle that the activities we developed should not require ‘materials’, equipment such as photocopiers, or a lot of preparation time. We eventually concluded that a lack of ‘good materials’ might, in fact, be a very positive and liberating thing. A second factor was that some of the groups of students we taught consisted of academics of varying ages, with different specialities, who already possessed a good command of English. In certain areas their knowledge was often considerably greater than ours. This taught us to respect them as learners, and see them as individuals rather than as ‘a class of foreign students’, and to call upon their specialist knowledge in the lessons. For example, a physicist specializing in acoustics proved to be an invaluable source of information during a class on noise pollution. His expertise was available to be exploited and he was only too eager to co-operate. Two other events set us thinking about learner-based teaching. One of these was a teacher-training session run for teachers of our Language Centre in Poland by John Morgan and Mario Rinvolucri. The second was using a manuscript of Chris Sion’s Inner Voice (to be published in 1992 as Talking to Yourself in English Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/colin-campbell-2/learner-based-teaching/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.