The importance of being anxious

ise from a whole host of unexamined and untested personal, institutional, and theoretical assumptions about teaching and learning processes --that 'teacher training' notwithstanding, it is the idiosyncratic personal beliefs of both trainer and trainee concerning how these processes take place that will in the final analysis determine the respective roles of teachers and learners, and the kinds of teaching tasks and materials selected

Back to the Top

--that Lazonov's dictum (cited by Jeremy Jacobson in TD 32) - 'there is no learner incompetence, only teacher mismanagement' - both a) smacks of 'the customer is always right', which clouds important economic and structural, not to mention ethical issues in ELT, and thereby fuels teacher anxiety and b) belittles and humiliates the teacher practitioner, which also exacerbates professional anxieties

--that, despite extensive lip service paid to the learner-centred classroom, in the vast majority of settings it is the teacher who is inevitably at the centre, since 'all classroom actions, curricular decisions, and methodological concepts are filtered through and influenced' by her own 'complex interpretative construct' (Medgyes, ELTJ 5114, reviewing Devon Woods' book on teacher cognition)

--that we fail to differentiate between teaching 'language' and teaching 'communication' (Dodson, 1985a, p. 179)

--that learners (unless very 'advanced') cannot attend at simultaneously to both the 'medium' (i.e. the 'form of the words) and the 'message' (i.e. what the words are 'saying' and what the speaker's intention is in a given speech act) and therefore must be helped to systematically progress from one to the other (Dodson 1967, 1985a & 1985b)

Back to the Top

--that 'understanding' takes place in Wernicke's area of the cortex, and 'production' in Broca's, which are indifferent parts of the left hemisphere thereby making progression from practice' (or'medium') to 'production' (or 'message') a 'quantum leap' (Caldwell, 1990, p.463) which is not taken into account by CLT methodologies, and certainly not by the less flexible 'PPP' model

--that both long silences in the classroom (a perennial cause of teacher anxiety) and fossilisation are due to the factors I have just mentioned, and not to deficiencies in our learners

--that 'learner autonomy' requires students to deploy learning strategies which cannot be developed without the acquisition of 'threshold' competence (Curnmins, 1984, the 'acculturation threshold' of Acton & Walker de Felix, 1986, et al) and is simply not feasible without due attention to the above factors

--that, above all, our eyes are in the wrong place - we are teaching to the wrong model; as Dodson has shown (op. cit.) there are similarities between first language 'natural order' and second language acquisition, but the differences are of vital importance

--that we have failed to recognise these differences, with the result that we continue to teach according to a monolingual model of first language acquisition, rather than a bilingual model of second language acquisition

--that the profound implications of teaching to a bilingual model are first and foremost that learners need to reflect on and try to analyse differences between Ll and L2, and must be systematically helped to do so

--that if we are to avoid fossilised 'interlanguage', we must allow for carefully sequenced bridge-building between Ll and L2 beginning with 'medium' oriented activities which alternate between the two languages; only then does the 'quantum leap' from 'medium' to 'message' become possible

--that we must therefore abandon our 'English only' classroom policy, and integrate systematic reference to Ll into principles and procedures of 'good practice'

《The importance of being anxious》