I am at the end of two weeks of conferences: iFLT (International Forum on Language Teaching) in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the TPRS Workshop in Agen, France.
Both workshops were excellent but very different.
At iFLT, I worked as a coach for participants who were in the Beginning TCI and the Advanced Beginning TCI track. It was a pleasure working with Teri Wiechart and Michelle Kindt as our leaders for the week. Coaching continues to develop as we try out new strategies and practices. One of the new experiments this year was including some group activities in the “coaching circle” prior to having anyone be the teacher. Participants said that this helped them become more at ease and feel like part of a group. We also had “cohorts” so that the same participants and coaches worked together all week. This helped develop a sense of community and make everyone feel comfortable taking risks. My partners in coaching for the two cohorts I assisted were Teri Wiechart and Dustin Williamson for each cohort respectively.
In Agen, I worked as an “embedded coach” in the language class / language lab led by Sabrina Sebban-Janczak and presented a couple of sessions. The coaching program was led by Laurie Clarcq, who is most well known for Embedded Reading and her website Hearts for Teaching. In addition to facilitating the coaching, Laurie held a daily session on Skill Building in Action. One of the ideas that came out of the week was having the embedded coaches encourage observers in the language classes to look for skills that Laurie was addressing in her sessions.
Throughout the Agen workshop, there was a tremendous sense of camaraderie and community. I got to see this especially in Sabrina’s French course. Everyone felt welcome and was included in some way. We celebrated a couple of birthdays during the week and created – as Glisan and Donato call it – a classroom discourse community. In other words, everyone bonded in the course, and all of the students had a lot of fun throughout the week. Observers also got caught up in the teaching, and those who weren’t already French speakers learned or improved their language skills as well as seeing a master teacher at work.
Other language lab teachers had similar experiences – I just didn’t see them at work. Daniel DuBois taught Breton, Tamara Galvan taught English I, Margarita Pérez García taught Spanish, Diane Neubauer taught Mandarin, Pablo Ramón taught Japanese, and Judith DuBois taught English II, plus Sabrina Sebban-Janczak’s French course.
This is a smaller conference in a delightful French town. Since it is a town rather than a big city, just walking around town gives participants not only the opportunity to enjoy the ambiance, but you see other participants also walking and can stop for a chat. Lunch is a bit longer than in most US conferences, both because that is part of the French culture and because going out to eat takes a while. It also gives participants an opportunity to get to know one another and discuss what they are learning over a shared meal.
I highly recommend experiencing the Agen workshop at least once. More than likely, you will keep coming back whenever you can.
And now we’ll move on to taking a look at some more of Bill Van Patten’s Book, While We’re On the Topic. We’re taking a look at CLT Principle 5: Tasks Should Form the Backbone of the Communicative Classroom.
After a self-evaluation section and an agenda, VanPatten turns yet again to his definition of communication:
Communication is the expression, interpretation, and sometimes negotiation of meaning in a given context. Communication is also purposeful.
Here, he reminds us of two things:
1. Communication must have a purpose other than “language practice”. These purposes are psychosocial, cognitive-informational, and entertainment.
2. Not everything that calls itself “communicative” is communicative.
To illustrate his point, VanPatten presents two examples from current college textbooks that claim “to have a communicative approach.” (2017, p. 77)
The first example is clearly not communicative at all. It is a drill or exercise in which the student is asked to change “Est-ce que …” questions into questions that use inversion. (It’s a French textbook.) No one is interested in the answers to those questions. In fact, meaning is not simply superfluous but may be considered a hindrance to the exercise. Any student could do this exercise without the slightest idea of the meaning of any of the questions. How the authors of a textbook that has “a communicative approach” could include this exercise and others like it remains a mystery to both BVP and me (and I hope to you).
The second example is at least partially communicative. It requires students to “Interview your partner and find out what he or she did last night”, so it looks like this could be communicative with either a cognitive-informational or psychosocial purpose (or a combination of the two). If, however, the context is for students to practice the past tense or get experience asking questions, then the real purpose is language practice, and communication is incidental rather than at the core. It is not truly communicative.
Note: I contrast this with what many high school teachers do on Monday in their classrooms. In my classes, every Monday (or Tuesday at the latest) I asked my students what they did over the weekend. My purpose was not to practice the past tense but to find out what they did over the weekend. I wanted to be able to let them “shine” for a moment (psychosocial) if they had done something noteworthy or simply inform us (cognitive-informational) of what they did. If they saw a movie, I would always follow up with finding out which movie and what they thought about it. Other students who were interested might have other questions. Sometimes students had something happen and simply wanted to tell us the story (entertainment).
I hope you see how the two situations are different.
In summarizing his point VanPatten notes that
Just because mouths are moving in a classroom doesn’t mean that students and teachers are engaged in any kind of communicative event.
Furthermore,
Pair work is not necessarily communicative.
This last statement is something about which language teachers may have to educate administrators, who are usually trained to look for students talking to students as a sign that instruction is “student-centered” rather than “teacher-centered”.
And with that comment, I bring this post to a close. Check back next time for more thoughts on tasks as “the Backbone of the Communicative Curriculum”. Thanks for reading.