IATEFL Manchester 2015 Opening Plenary: Saturday 11.04.2015 By Donald Freeman

The 49th Annual IATEFL Conference and Exhibition had a truly dynamic opening with a plenary that was both interesting to attend (well, watch in my case) and thought-provoking. I must admit that this plenary restored my faith in sessions of this type, as in the last few years, I had started feeling that the diversity of the IATEFL audience was not easy to be pleased with one key-note session per day.  

 

Entitled ‘’Frozen in thought: How we think and what we do in ELT’’, the session set out to challenge the perceptions which are deeply anchored in our own way of thinking about our job and therefore, in the way we talk to others about it. Professor Freeman made a point of saying that these notions are not inherently bad, as they have aspects which are truly connected with the reality of our teaching but if left unchallenged they have a way of setting in and fossilizing us in patterns of thinking which can be dated and therefore less efficient when describing language teaching and learning in 21^st century.

George Pickering when introducing Donald Freeman said that minds, much like umbrellas, work better when they are open and invited the speaker to open our minds. The speaker mentioned his fear that some of the points made in his session run the risk of being misconstrued but at the same time expressed the fear that we might be stuck in the way we think. Professor Freeman went on to explain that when we reason about something, we do two things: on the one hand, we focus on ourselves and try to make sense out of what we do, while on the other we focus on others and we give reasons to them about it. ‘’These reasons are like myths’’, the speaker explained, ‘’they connect and justify what we do and they connect us.

The three myths Donald Freeman decided to focus on in his session were the following

1 The myth of direct causality

2 The myth of sole responsibility

3 The myth of proficiency as a goal

First Myth: Direct causality

It is widely believed that teaching causes learning, much like in shooting pool one ball causes the other to roll and fall into one of the pockets. Therefore, teachers cause learning to happen (which will then be related with myth number 2).  Donald Freeman was quick to remind us that our classrooms are not quite as straightforward in their day-to-day work. Despite that we insist on organizing our schools and our teaching based on this assumption. To make matters worse we base teacher and school evaluation on how learners perform in standardized exams. Admittedly, this myth has some truth in it as it could never be argued that teaching has nothing to do with learning but still we need to view teaching as what shapes possibilities of learning, not what brings into existence. Seeing classrooms under this light, leads us to take a ‘’systemic’’,  more ‘’relational’’ view on them. Learning is seen as a system of interaction whose aspects (teacher – learner-content) are interconnected and in constant interaction.  The question is how do we understand that this is influence and not direct causality?

 

 

Second Myth: Sole responsibility

Teachers tend to think that they are solely responsible for making learning happen in their classroom. Up to a point this is both professional and inevitable, especially when things do not work out and teachers have to make critical decisions. Being responsible for planning how to present content leads teachers to view teaching as only their own responsibility.  This is well-supported by the ‘’shooting pool’’ analogy. One ball rolls and causes another to follow by hitting it. If the analogy changes though, our perception of how learning works in the classroom will change as well. Professor Freeman maintained that classrooms are more like chess boards, where the moves of one player influence the moves of the other player. In that case we can see that responsibility is distributed. It is interesting that Donald Freeman used ‘’distributed’’ and not ‘’shared’’. In the context of the classroom, one move or one decision shapes possibilities of what comes next and this interplay creates opportunities for teachers to teach and learners to learn.  

 

Third Myth: Proficiency as a goal (of our work in class)

For many teachers what we are trying to achieve in the classroom is general language proficiency. Once again, up to a point this makes sense as language teachers try to create opportunities in the classroom for learners to learn the language.  ‘’What’s frozen’’, as Professor Freeman put it, ‘’is the relationship between what we do in the classroom and the way we think about how it travels outside’’. The speaker went on to analyze that the concept of proficiency is grounded on the idea of nativeness. In this sense proficiency is a virtue native speakers are blessed with and non-native speakers can never acquire through learning and practice. This leads us to create terms such as ‘’native-like’’ ‘’near-native’’. Still, both proficiency and nativeness are geopolitical not linguistic terms, which makes proficiency what Freeman called ‘’a usefully wrong idea’’.  Freeman went on to quote David Nunan and his paper ‘’A ghost in the machine’’ in which he mentioned that the construct of general language proficiency has not been empirically derived but has been assumed to exist because the concept is intuitively appealing.  What the construct of proficiency does is to describe how people can get good at something (in this case language learning) that will go with them into other contexts of use. Freeman went on to pose a question: How do we define the stuff that people get good at (language) when language itself is flexible like water, and not set like ice. Therefore, getting good at language is a function of place and circumstances, not a general and universal attribute. This introduces the need for boundaries and limitations. The concept of general language proficiency is what is frozen here. What our learners can do in class or in a formal assessment, is not necessary what they can do in other contexts. To illustrate this, the speaker showed a photo of a sculpture from Florence entitled ‘’The suitcase for travel’’. He connected the sculpture with the point he was making by saying that what is in the suitcase is the language we teach in class. The horizon symbolizes the large variety of language there is to teach. What is outside the suitcase is the language that is not in our classroom. We can easily understand by this graphic depiction of the point that the language we teach in class in not a reflection of the language that exists outside, but a part of it. ‘’When language goes to school, some funny things happen to it.’’ Donald Freeman said. In order to chart the chaotic we give it attributes it does not have and hasn’t asked for, such as grammar and skills and levels.  All these meta-concepts function as the suitcase in our classroom. At the same time, when teaching, we have to consider the horizonal knowledge which is a combination of what our learners know at the time of learning but also how we have to project and relate this knowledge to the future of the learners and of the subjects. Personally, I feel that this is a really interesting concept for language teachers particularly when teaching grammar where we make a habit of telling learners one rule only to expand, complicate and practically change it completely in the next few years. 

What can be done.

As Donald Freeman pointed out there is nothing inherently bad with these three myths. The real problem is not probing into them.  What can we do to see teaching re-shaped in the 21^st century?

A Multiple Literacies

The speaker mentioned that we should look into the idea of multiple literacies and accept that there are multiple proficiencies in particular settings. This will allow us to judge what the boundaries of each setting are and decide what we are proficient at. To make his point more clear, the speaker referred to the sculpture by Julius Popp called Bit.fall. This sculpture takes water (water-fall) and turns words which commonly appear on the Internet (bit) and turns them into visual shapes. Then the words dissolve into water again. Freeman argued that the water is the language which becomes bounded as it enters our classroom. The whole image of the Bit.fall represents how we contain language in an attempt to teach it.

B Creating a version of English that can be charted

 This gave rise to the idea of Bit.falling English, which means creating a version of English to be used when teaching. Freeman was quick to point out that it is not claimed that this is the only or the best language but it is the language needed to get the job done, as general language proficiency is too general to chart. This English-for –teaching summarises the essential English Language Skills needed to prepare and enact a lesson. Freeman presented the work he and his colleagues have done with teachers of the public sector in Vietnam. Language knowledge was broken down to three areas: a) Managing the classroom b) Understanding and communicating context and c) Assessing students and giving feedback. Tables were created which listed the functional area, the classroom routine and the language exemplare. Then teachers looked at the tables and decided what they needed to become better at, thus distributing the responsibility between teacher trainer (teacher) and trainee (student). This also made teachers more responsible as learners since they need what they needed to learn and how much they needed to study.  

 C Skateboarding works in teaching too.

The last of the many metaphors used in this intricate session was that of skateboarding as an example of an activity in which one can observe

1 Direct Causality: the more the skater practices, the better he performs

2 Sole responsibility: nobody else can skate but the skater

3 Clear boundaries: there is a very specific proficiency to be achieved. 

4 Personal assessment:  the skater monitors his own progress and does not rely on recognized standards of performance. 

Donald Freeman quoted Eleanor Duckworth and her article ‘’On the virtue of not knowing’’ to make a point about our over-reliance on formal exams.  The two quotes mentioned that exams focus more on people getting the answer right when what one does with what he doesn’t know is in the final analysis what determines what you will ultimately know.’’

Donald Freeman ended his  plenary by wishing participants that they find a lot of things they don’t know during the conference. 

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2015/session/plenary-donald-freeman