Dick Allwright, National Congress on English,
Linguistics, Conferentiecentrum Woudschoten,
Lancaster University, Woudenbergseweg 54, Zeist,
Lancaster, LA1 4YT, The Netherlands,
United Kingdom. January, 1999.
PUTTING LEARNING ON THE CLASSROOM AGENDA:
A CASE FOR LEARNER-BASED ‘EXPLORATORY PRACTICE’.
A Personal Preamble.
For a good many years now my research interests have pointed in two apparently quite different directions. On the one hand I have been continuing my research on classroom life, trying to understand better the problems teachers and learners face there, and on the other hand I have begun, as a quite separate issue, researching teacher development. Recently, however, I have begun to try to build on what appear to me to be important and promising connections between the two lines of enquiry.
It may well strike the reader as ironic, however, that I should now, in 1999, be arguing for connections to be made between classroom research as an academic pursuit, and practical work with teachers, when it is already well-established (see Allwright, 1983, 1988) that the field of language classroom research had its origins in a direct connection with language teaching, and with language teacher training (both initial and in-service). This was very clearly seen in the late 1960s and early1970s work of such researchers/teacher trainers as Moskowitz, Fanselow, Jarvis and Politzer. Following Flanders’ pioneering work in general education, they saw the contribution of the major classroom research tool of the day (systematic observation) primarily in terms of its value as feedback to teachers about their own classroom behavior. But those of us in classroom research who were not directly involved in training language teachers saw its primary value in terms of detailed and potentially insightful descriptions of classroom behavior, which could best be used to enhance our understanding of classroom language teaching and learning. We started with the study of isolated aspects of teacher behavior, sometimes as a direct follow-up to work initiated within the teacher-training framework. The early studies of error treatment are a particularly interesting example (Allwright 1975, Chaudron 1977, Long 1977) because they also represent the first indication of a link with studies in second language acquisition, which at that time was preoccupied with the study of learners’ errors as evidence of their linguistic development. So classroom research, it could be said, moved away from teacher training to seek a research agenda in SLA (Allwright, 1988, 1989). But as classroom research moved from focussing on teacher behavior to concentrate instead on learners, and began to uncover the social complexities of classroom language acquisition, SLA studies themselves (with such honourable and notable exceptions as the work of Tarone and Yule, 1988) changed direction and became much less concerned with classroom language learning and far more concerned with the more individualistic/universalistic analyses such as those provided by Universal Grammar and neurolinguistics. So classroom research, once again in need of an agenda of its own, adopted a more wholistic view of the language classroom, taking both teacher and learner behavior into account, within which perspective the class was seen as a small-scale culture in its own right (Breen, 1985, 1987), and most recently towards a view of the classroom in relation to the greater society of which it is a part (Coleman, 1996). Bringing such considerations into play has taken me, in my own work, to think about social relationships in and around the language classroom in terms of the difficulty it is reasonable to expect teachers and learners to have in behaving as intelligently as they could in principle.
At the same time as these changes were taking place in the field of classroom research the field of teacher education had itself changed radically, and the previous centrality of the notion of effective training was replaced by a concern for a relatively new notion - teacher development.
And within the field of teacher development arose the notion that teachers themselves could, and perhaps should, take up classroom research, modified for their own purposes, so that teachers could become generators of research knowledge, and initiators of change, instead of continuing to be consumers of research knowledge and recipients of change proposals. Action Research was widely proposed, and adopted as the main vehicle for this new conception of classroom research. But Action Research did not in itself bring academic classroom researchers back in direct connection with teaching as they had been at the beginning in the late 1960s. And this was largely because the new thinking about teacher development meant that development was something to be undertaken by the individual teacher, for his or her own sake. This meant there was no obvious role for a ‘researcher/developer’ to parallel the obvious role for a ‘researcher/trainer’ in the late 1960s. It also meant that the agenda for the action research undertaken was not to be derived from theoretical considerations but from teachers’ own practical classroom problems, problems that they needed to solve and could be expected to solve by changing classroom behavior. For me, as an academic researcher normally involved in teacher education (as opposed to either ‘training’ or ‘development’, see Allwright, 1987), this meant that I had to forget my own classroom research agenda whenever I was working with teachers and trying to help them in their own work for their own development. But my own work at that time, in the late 1980s, was beginning to look closely at the relationship between the pedagogic and the social pressures that both teachers and learners have to work under in the language classroom. And my work with developing teachers was revealing the same fundamental issue in the way teachers and learners talked or wrote about their classroom experiences. Their practical research agendas, then, seemed remarkably easy to match with my own academic research agenda.
Thus the first connection I see between classroom research and teacher development work is that there is a perfectly natural and close relationship between their agendas. Teacher development can be expected to take as at least a substantial part of its core subject matter precisely the issues that arise when academic researchers try to understand classroom life. Or, put the other way around, classroom researchers can be expected to find teachers’ research agendas easily consistent with their own. For me personally this promises to enrich my own relationships with any teachers I am working with within a development framework, because I can now expect my substantive concerns as a classroom researcher to be much closer to those of classroom teachers than I might previously have expected. Their work to understand what goes on in their lessons can enrich mine, and hopefully mine will at least sometimes be able to enrich theirs. [Need references here to reinforce sense of having got involved already.]
The second connection I have made, so recently that I am still in the early stages of working out its implications for my research agenda in general, is to begin to see that what seems to me to make sense for teachers might also make sense for learners. We might therefore begin to talk seriously about ‘learner development’ in the same terms as I wish to talk about development for teachers - that is, in terms of working towards understanding classroom life. This paper is my first attempt to put these ideas down from this new perspective of ‘learner development’.
1. In what sense is ‘learning’ not on the classroom agenda already?
1.1 It is surely asking for trouble to imply, as I do in my title, that learning is not already ‘on the classroom agenda’. Teachers all over the world do complain that they have difficulty motivating learners to do the necessary amount of work required for learning, of course. And they will sometimes go so far as to suggest that their learners seem to have anything but learning on their personal agendas. But surely everyone would agree that at least that is what they know they are supposed to come to class for - to get on with learning - because that is what is to be done there. So if, reasonably enough, we take the word ‘agenda’ to mean ‘that which is to be done’ then surely that means that learning is already solidly on the classroom agenda.
1.2 But when we talk of an 'agenda' for a meeting we mean not a list of things to be done during the meeting, but a list of things to be discussed and decided upon. The doing is to come later. And in this sense of ‘on the agenda’ I wish to claim that 'learning’ is not so obviously on the classroom agenda already at all. ‘Learning’ just does not seem to be one of those things normally discussed in class. In spite of the obvious fact that the idea of talking about learning has been around for a long time, and is prominent in the work of an increasing number of advocates of learning strategy training, and of course of collaborative and of autonomous learning, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that, for most learners around the world, time just is just not typically made to talk about it. I recently asked a group of forty or so mostly British students at Lancaster University if they could remember their teacher ever, during all their years of schooling, taking class time to talk about learning. Not one had anything to report. Although that of course does not prove that nothing of the sort had ever happened to them, it is still worrying that whatever had happened, if indeed anything had happened, had failed to stay alive in their memories. And it is even more worrying that, over the years, whenever and wherever, except for Scandinavia, I have asked that question, I have got the same negative, even uncomprehending, response.
1.3 The obvious logical consequence of not talking about learning would be that learning was not often decided about either, during lessons. In fact the key decisions (about the syllabus, the textbook, the timetable, the details of method, and so on down to specific lesson plans) seem to be taken before a course starts, or between lessons, rather than during them. The key decisions are therefore taken largely by people higher up in the educational hierarchy who are deemed to be better qualified to do such things than the learners themselves. The same group of forty people referred to above, when I asked them about decisions they could remember taking about their own language learning, produced only one response from their compulsory schooling days: one learner remembered having been able to choose which language to drop and which to continue after the first two years of language instruction at secondary level. And there was only one answer from the voluntary sector, a person who had decided to go to evening classes. Interestingly she was also able to boast that she had taken one other major decision about her language learning, and that was to quit the evening class course after a few weeks because it was not proving productive for her. Again such results could simply relate to memory failure, but that in itself would still be telling, as an indicator of the lack of saliency of such events in educational experiences.
1.4 Before such stories are dismissed out of hand as ‘mere’ anecdotes, I should perhaps add that these were all students who had come through their secondary schooling with an interest in language study intact, since they were all doing courses in the linguistics department where I teach. And many if not all of them must have had some interest in language teaching as a possible career, since it was a course not about advances in linguistics but about advances in language teaching. These were not the ‘disaffected’ students who might resent compulsory schooling and all it stands for, and who might therefore relish the opportunity to present their experiences negatively. These were among the most successful students of their generation. And yet no teacher, it seemed, had found the time to talk with them about classroom learning. At least not in a sufficiently memorable way for them to be able to recall it. And no teacher, therefore, had left space for them in lessons to get publicly involved in any significant decision-making about their learning.
2. Two major problems that arise from this state of affairs.
2.1 Firstly, learners probably get much less from the classroom lessons in their daily learning lives than they in principle could, at least if we believe that what people get out of lessons is to some significant extent dependent upon what they are prepared to put into them. Many years ago Stevick (1976) wrote very persuasively about ‘investment’ as a key issue for learners, and more recently (1995) Pierce has argued cogently for a social conception of ‘investment’ to be preferred to what she insightfully sees as the more narrowly individualistic notion of ‘motivation’. If learners are not given any substantial responsibility for their learning, and therefore for decisions related to their learning, they are less likely, the argument goes, to invest fully in their learning. And they are accordingly less likely to get the most out of lessons.
2.2 Secondly, learners who never get a chance to talk about learning in class, and who therefore never get involved in any significant classroom decision-making, are probably going to learn considerably less than they might in principle: firstly about themselves as learners, and secondly, about how to manage their own development as learners. And they are therefore going to be far less well equipped than we would surely want them to be for learning after they finish with compulsory schooling - for the life-long learning they may have to do without a teacher, and without classmates.
2.3 But is it accurate to describe the two problems I have just identified as ‘major’? I certainly cannot claim to be in a position to establish beyond reasonable doubt the justice of my analysis here. Indeed I may even appear to have presented some powerful counter-evidence myself when I insisted that the forty or so students I mentioned earlier were among the most successful of their generation. The fact that they had survived so well in the system could be used to argue that what I see as ‘major’ problems may be largely irrelevant, at least to the most gifted.
But even here I would wish to argue that these people have only been tested within a state school system which has not required of them that they understand themselves as learners and take decisions for themselves as learners. Even the university system they are currently in will not expect very much of them in that respect, and it will certainly not offer them much help unless they go outside the regular academic classes to take the special courses we offer as learning support, and of course these are primarily intended for the least well-achieving, not the ‘brightest and best’. It is surely no mere coincidence that learning support classes, where offered, seem themselves to have to focus on helping these ‘least well-achieving’ learners (still among the top 15-20% of the population in intellectual measurement terms) to understand themselves as learners and then accept their own responsibility for their learning. The ‘brightest and best’ have somehow achieved whatever they have achieved by 'playing the game' in their teachers' terms, perhaps. As Keddie put it long ago (1971:156): "It would seem to be the failure of high-ability pupils to question what they are taught that contributes in large measure to their educational achievement”. In other words: those who do best in our educational system are the children who are clever enough not to ask the right questions. Alternatively they may have found other sources of help (parents perhaps) in their development as thoughtful and aware learners, or perhaps they have been intelligent enough to work it all out for themselves. In any case we have perhaps a right to believe that they could have got even further if they had been positively helped inside the classroom.
I can only hope, therefore, that even my most sceptical reader will accept that the two problems I have identified might be major ones, in many if not all cases, for many if not all learners, and that we would probably therefore be taking too great a risk if we tried to ignore them altogether, if we decided they were not worthy of at least a little more discussion here.
3. The special, and advantageous, position of language teachers.
3.1 But a sceptical reader might still object that the obvious reason why talking about learning and making decisions about it during lessons are not on the classroom agenda currently is that so much else is on the agenda. National curricula, or prescribed textbooks, keep everybody far too busy trying to work through course content at the expected pace set by government inspectors and the like. Teachers universally seem to believe, and typically not without reason, that they are given far too much to teach in the time given to them and their learners. The last thing they need is to have someone like me come along and suggest something else to fit into their already overburdened lessons. It is therefore obviously very unwise of me to try to do so.