TEACHING ENGLISH as a Foreign Language - ebook

INTRODUCTION TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (TEFL) AS STRATEGIC BEHAVIOUR. THE ROLE OF PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE

This book is intended as a textbook for courses in teaching English as a foreign language within the frame­work of our educational system. Focus on English as a foreign language may be contrasted with teaching fo­reign languages in general, which has an imposingly vast lite­rature. English as a foreign language should be distinguished from English as a second language since a second language is studied as well as learned in the community which uses it. Unlike in the case of a fo­reign language, learning is not confined to the classroom process, but significantly enhanced by environmental input and interaction. English has a status of a world language as well as a leading foreign language taught in Poland. It is studied for a wide variety of pur­poses, ranging from communicating with na­tive speakers of British, American, Ca­na­dian, Australian, New Zealand English to international communication with native speakers of other languages, such as Dutch, Spanish, or German.

The book aspires to be representative of the fundamental issues, but cannot be exhaustive. Its focus is on the background and origin of our teaching strategies and activities, as well as their function, but not on textbook, curriculum and syllabus design, or standar­dized testing, which are vital, but specialized aspects of foreign language teaching and, more often than not, are covered in separate courses. The book looks at the evolution and refinement of our ideas about foreign language teaching and their increasing anchoring in our notions of language learning. The focus is on two complementary facets of language use, comprehension and production, divided into four language skills to highlight issues of developing control of the language code. Teaching is considered to be a form of strategic behaviour which involves diagnosing the teaching problem and selecting/designing the appropriate solution. Teaching strategies are presented as basic categories with a potential for adjustment and modification. The teacher should regard them as options to choose from in real classroom conditions according to his or her diagnosis of the current didactic situ­ation and the learners’ needs.

The book’s advantage is that in one volume we cover key topics in teaching English as a foreign language reflecting recent developments in the field, especially the idea of foreign language learning as verbal communication including its underlying mental processes. Each of these topics may be treated as a point of departure for a much more detailed and extensive study. At the same time it provides a point of departure for much more specific issues, which result from these fundamental considerations to be developed in the next volume. The main emphasis is clearly on the teaching aspect of the whole process, types of activities, criteria of their grading as well as their specific functions. It is not intended as an overview of research exploring language learning, or Second Language Acquisition Research, or re­search me­thods in the field of second language acquisition. Nevertheless, every attempt is made to link teaching principles to our current understanding of language use and learning in verbal communication.

The book is addressed to a qualified teacher of English as a foreign language or a teacher trainee, such as a BA or an MA student of English at a philology department, an applied linguistics institute, or a teacher training college. It is taken into account that the students take many specialized courses in linguistics and literature which constitute their degree programme. As a result, they develop extensive background knowledge in the British and American language and culture and are capable of integrating it with the field of teaching English as a foreign language. For this reason, the textbook aims to provide teaching principles with rational justifications rather than arbitrary tips or recipes. My principal goal here is to systematize techniques and strategies of teaching English and address the question of why and how they can be used in developing various areas of communicative ability in English. This is the reason why the word ‘professional’ is used in the title. The book is addressed to a (prospective) professional with considerable background knowledge, determined to understand reasons for his or her actions while teaching. This professional must be able to identify, diagnose and solve numerous problems and make various decisions in the classroom. Such a person will not benefit from too local or arbitrary advice. Teacher education must indeed foster the understanding of foreign language learning and teaching as well as the abilities to diagnose classroom situations, make reasonable choices, as well as adjust and evaluate. Teachers’ creativity, a most precious human resource which must not be ignored, can truly blossom only on such solid professional foundations rather than as a substitute for them, as some academics and practitio­ners maintain.

The key question is who can be considered a professional. In general terms, this is someone educated or trained with a considerable skill and experience in a given activity, especially the main activity for which one receives pay, as opposed to just a hobby or pastime. Such a person can demonstrate professionalism in the sense of high quality and standards of performance. A profession is an occupation or vocation requiring extended training and ad­van­ced study in a specialized field whereas a professional is a specialist whose predispositions have been developed by extended education and training.

Foreign language teaching witnesses a paradox, however: language learning, including mother tongue and subsequent languages, can happen naturally, without any deliberate activity on the part of a ‘teacher’ provided certain conditions are met: the learner is fairly young, and there is unrestricted exposure and contact with the language. However, the process is hard to replicate or evoke in the educational context when the learner is slightly older and contact hours are limited. The intricate nature of foreign language learning justifies the involvement of professionals, which is to say, people who understand the working of the process to the point that they can deliberately cultivate it in the educational setting. What should such a professional know apart from being a fluent speaker of the source and target languages of the learner, as well as a trained linguist and an expert in culture? What is the difference between a professionally trained teacher and a non-professional? Ideally, a professional is someone who can make sense of foreign language learning in the classroom, in other words, can understand the process. It is then feasible to adjust teaching procedures to the language learners, taking into account their age, needs and interests. A professional can guide and assist the learners in the process of language learning in terms of both content and strategy and provide them with feedback about their progress. A professional teacher has a clear orientation in the complex and vast domain of the target language and culture. In other words, he or she can address and cope with a genuinely complex and extensive task.

A non-professional, on the other hand, does not benefit from such a map because he or she has not been educated in this domain. It is fairly easy for him or her to get lost in the complex problem space and become preoccupied with one set of activities or techniques as universal, i.e. all-purpose solutions and forget about the others, or unnecessarily discard some techniques for inadequate reasons. Error correction may be used to illustrate such a case: a teacher may discard error correction as anachronistic to be in line with the recommendations of Communicative Language Teaching, whereas it is not only anachronistic in terms of our understanding of verbal communication, but against the teacher’s professional role expectations to leave errors uncorrected.

This state of orientation is necessary for the professional teacher to do his job well, if not to say at all. It is also absolutely ne­ce­ssary for him or her to establish his professional role in the classroom, which, regardless all the other claims, is the role of the leader. The teacher is a leader in the educational process, if we understand ‘the leader’ as someone who has a vision for the future and a way of convincing others to work toward this goal. What a good and honest leader needs is not only the vision, but rea­listic and rational understanding of what it takes to accom­plish it. In the case of foreign language teachers, this ‘vision’ is tantamount to a clear idea of what it takes to learn a foreign language in the conditions afforded by the educational institutions characteristic of our culture. The clarity and practicality of the idea is relative to the level of education and specialized training. Anyone can act as a foreign lan­guage teacher once in a while, for a while, but sustaining the long-term process of foreign language learning on a mass scale calls for professionals with so­lid, i.e. rational foundations in the field.

Professionals have specialized know­ledge of the field at their disposal, they are aware of the tradition in the field so as not to reinvent the wheel and to criti­cally evaluate old and new ideas in their context. In other words, they have a mental map of what it takes to learn and use a foreign language in the educational context, a map which systema­ti­zes va­rious options and strategies. As a result, they can be methodical, i.e. systematic, about their work. Both the professional and the non-professional teachers may believe in variety, but only the professional can link techniques or tasks to certain aspects of language learning and use to determine their function in the long run. Although both let themselves be guided by intui­tion, the professional can also deal with a host of rational questions, such as why, how, for what purpose, with what effect, under what conditions certain teaching procedures can be implemented. Whether a truly satisfactory state of professionalism can be accomplished or not is another matter, but it is certainly worth trying because teaching and learning English as a foreign language is done on a mass scale.

A professional is a rationalist who knows enough about his domain to demystify it. If one can answer the ‘wh’ questions listed above, the magic of language learning is gone. Is this state welcome? I think it is if we want to be paid for our work in the educational system. The numerous puzzles which still remain are challenging enough and undoubtedly there is still plenty of room for employing our creativity.

Three sources of information are relevant to an educated teacher: one is professional knowledge on teaching English as a foreign language, the se­cond is the real world in which we live and communicate, and the third is our careful insight and observation of the foreign language classroom with its learners, treated both as individuals and a group. On the basis of these three sources of knowledge the teacher may start diagnosing his problems and making decisions in the foreign language classroom. This is challenging and de­mands creative, strategic thinking. The purpose of this textbook is to outline key elements of background knowledge on teaching English as a fo­reign language to be tapped as one of the three sources of information in our professional activity. The word ‘guide’ used in the title indicates that the book introduces some information, but cannot be a substitute for ‘being there’ – in the classroom – where the teacher can gradually learn about his or her educational institution, the structure of the courses being taught, the coursebooks to be used, as well as develop the idea about his or her specific group of individual learners, their personalities and needs. No guide, let alone one volume, can replace first-hand experience and the teacher’s continuous education. It is clear to me, however, that the degree to which any textbook on methods and strategies of teaching English as a fo­reign language can be considered practical does not depend on its abundance of ready tips and directives, but on the degree to which it helps to understand the complexity of foreign language learning and teaching, i.e. make sense of it. We badly need a map of the problem, the available options, criteria for choosing them, and the strategies of adjus­ting teaching to the learner and his or her needs.