I came away from the recent IATEFL annual conference in Brighton (this link will take you to the online site where there is a plethora of content available – plenaries, videoed sessions, discussion fora, and more) with a few questions and a lot of ideas.
One area that piqued my interest was that of Dogme and thinking about how to assess it in practice in my own teaching content.
If you’re not familiar with the term Dogme then the following links will, I hope, be of some use:
Scott Thornbury: D is for Dogme, An A to Z of ELT
The Dogme Yahoo discussion group
Teaching Unplugged, Luke Meddings & Scott Thornbury, Delta Publishing
Willy Cardoso, Anthony Gaughan, Candy van Olst, Luke Meddings, in varying degrees on the Dogme Symposium, Monday 18 April
#ELTchat – revisiting Dogme, summary by James Taylor
There are a few reasons why I feel a dogme approach (as I see it) is appropriate for me to take in my teaching context, one of which is as follows:
- In ESOL, much more so than in what you would call traditionally EFL contexts, you can have learners from almost any walk of life. Because the common factor is the level of language, you can have PhD graduates rubbing shoulders with learners who cannot read or write in their first language, meaning that…
- almost any course, however it is organised, be it by grammar or function or vocabulary, cannot possibly cater to a learner body with such a wide range of ability and experience
- a lot of published material that is out there is simply not relevant to these learners and their lives; I feel it much more relevant to teach, and hopefully for them to learn, ‘from the life’
However, the context in which I teach requires the following which could be quite obstructive to taking a fully dogme approach:
- the learners all need to take and pass the Cambridge ESOL Skills for Life in three modes (Reading, Writing and Speaking & Listening) at the level they are enrolled at in order for my college to get government funding
- part of the requirement as a course tutor at my college is to produce a scheme of work (which I’ll be referring to as SOW in future posts on this subject), which is usually done for 6 week periods (a ‘half-term’)
This is my initial thinking about putting dogme into practice in my classes and documenting what progress is made, probably to start next academic year (September 2011):
- Taking a dogme approach (conversation-driven, materials-light, focused on emergent language) in class with my main group (likely to be elementary to pre intermediate learners, but given the current situation in the UK, nothing is certain!)
- Taking wherever possible inspiration and as stimuli the learners’ lives and what they do
- Using teaching and learning journals (i.e. me and the students writing) to keep a record of what happens in and around class, be it successful or not
- More specifically, attempting to subvert the ‘syllabus’ that exists for ESOL/Skills for Life, to reflect a more bottom-up approach to covering the content over the academic year
This is still very much at the embryonic stage as an idea, so expect to see it develop more over the next few months and hopefully, all being well, I’ll be able to put my words into action come September.
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I like this idea…. I agree, I reckon a dogme-esque approach to ESOL should be appropriate – I get the feeling that a lot of the thinking around pre-Skills for Life ESOL shares a lot of its roots with Dogme. Like you, I came to the game later and with an EFL background, but I can see echos of dogme in what I’ve heard and read about earlier approaches to ESOL/ESL and Literacy teaching.
You might want to check out Reflect ESOL: http://www.reflect-action.org/reflectesol – they run workshops training in using Freirian methodologies. I went to a workshop at last year’s NATECLA conference and they also recommended reading Elsa Auerbach, which I haven’t done yet, but really should.
I’m not sure what groups I’ll be teaching next year, but I might try something similar…
Thanks for the comment, Phil!
I agree (as far as I can without having worked in the context) that a lot of ESOL teaching before Skills for Life was probably in a dogme vein. Thanks for the link and the reference to Auerbach – I’ve got so much reading to do!
Mike
I took a lot away from the DOGME symposium as well, especially as had only really heard about it in passing before.
I respected the speaker’s storytelling, rhythm and command of english as much as I did the ideas they put forward. They were ideas I’ve been saying to myself as both a learner and a teacher for years.
Glad to see you’re writing it all out here, and moving forward with some great points.
Cheers, b
I was really interested to see the different perspectives and applications of dogme ideas put forward in the symposium, and that was as someone who had started getting into the idea of dogme (helped by Karenne’s blog challenge). I just think it makes a lot more sense than blindly following a set of resources or heading towards an exam; there doesn’t seem to an easy way to square a learner’s needs with all of that. Hence, I’m going to try and put up here how I intend to take what is there/here and flip it all on its head.
Cheers for the comment, Brad =)
Hi Mike,
First I’d just to say this is a really well thought out approach to a research project. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it goes. I think it’s really commendable that someone is attempting to deliver a really learner-centered course in ESOL.
Best of luck!
Dale
Thanks for that Dale.
Part of what is interesting to me about it is the chance to put this all under the microscope with a group of learners for a decent period of time (I’d try to keep it up for the academic year if at all possible), and hopefully foster reflection on progress made, both by myself as teacher and the learners. What can I say, but hearing what people have said about your talk and approach to teaching has inspired me!
Mike =)
I hear ya. Dogme’s attraction for me is especially the feel I get from those speakers, and from what I’ve read elsewhere— don’t want to sound trite, but it just seems more natural, humane, organic and sustainable and all those nice crunchy adjectives? LOL
In any case, we’ll continue this discussion because it’s an important and enriching one. Always a pleasure, b
What a grand idea, Mike. I know you were concerned about the story approach, as some stories in an ESOL environment may be horrific. You can avoid this by guiding the topic and making it positive, like “A Happy Memory” or “A Nice Surprise”, “A Future Plan” etc. This can also help you to “pre-empt” some of the stuff that is likely to come up….
I look forward to following this research – great!
Candy
It’s quite funny that since mentioning that particular doubt/question to you, Candy, that I recalled a moment another teacher had told me about last year.
I can’t remember in so much detail, but it was exactly what you espoused so eloquently in your symposium talk – getting the learners to tell their story. This teacher did this with a group one day and had a really good (well, as it sounded to me) experience in the class. Going back to the issue I mentioned to you and that you mention in your comment, about the possibly horrific nature of stories ESOL students might want to share – there was a young Afghan lad in the group who told the class all about his journey getting to the UK. Even from what little I could glean from the description of the lesson, it sounded like a real moment from the heart, possibly transcending whatever had been on the agenda for that particular lesson totally.
So, perhaps my concerns about ESOL students telling stories shouldn’t lead me to not having stories at all.
Thanks very much for the suggestions how to guide the topic and pre-empt what might come up when taking this approach. It is much appreciated.
Mike =)
Hi Mike,
It’s great that you are going to have a crack at this. What’s your college’s take on it all?
I broached the subject a couple of months ago with my Head of Department about experimenting and perhaps doing some MA-oriented research at the same time but she wasn’t so keen. “The directors probably wouldn’t like it” she said. “The parents certainly wouldn’t” she added. “And as for the government inspectors….”
But this is a great idea and journaling, both from your perspective and the students’, will help provide a useful document. Have you thought about including any observations, post-lesson/post-course interviews etc?
Need any help, let us know!
Hi Dave,
Good questions! As it’s at the embryonic stage, such things (re institutional view on all this, interviews, etc.) hadn’t fully crossed my mind, to be honest!
Here are a few ideas that I’ll develop further in future posts:
>Exams – I’ll still be teaching the year with the final aim of getting the learners through the exams, there’s no way to get out of that. I don’t intend to do away with exam practice, and properly preparing my learners for such exams. I am thinking of how to go about approaching everything to do with the exams, taking leaves out of Luke Meddings and Jason Renshaw’s books re syllabus planning and tackling exam-related content – more on this soon!
>SOWs – These will still have to be done, and will be useful, as you can normally count on 3-4 teachers teaching such a group of learners (a full time ESOL course at my college is 14 hours per week, which roughly equates to 6-7 lessons in the week). So I need a way to make sure that all the teachers on my course have something to do with my group. Asking them all to go dogme might be a stretch too far, but this might provide a nice counterpoint – the other teachers working with published materials a lot more than I would be, which might provide a nice comparison with my unplugged sessions.
>Learners’ expectations – Most of my learners will be adults themselves, so I don’t envisage having the potential problem of unhappy parents you mention in your comment. However, I will need to OK it with them right from the beginning, so another post in the pipeline will be defining/explaining a dogme approach to elementary students!
>RE my college’s possible take on it – hmmm, I will have to think about that one… Get back to you on it!
Thanks for the prompt and bringing up these points.
Mike =)
I will be watching your posts on this with great enthusiasm. I’m currently in the process of trying something similar but in a different context. I’m working EFL at the moment and getting students ready for Cambridge exams as well (PET & First). I’m eager to go more dogme but I’m struggling to strike a balance between engaging the students (teens) and getting them through the necessary bits and pieces to pass the tests. Standardized testing… gotta love it!
I couldn’t agree more with your take on ESOL and how a dogme approach is likely to be far more useful for the learners’ English. Even if you have a mixed bag of learners like you described we are social animals so I’d hope that what is engaging for one or two of them will still get a better general reaction than a coursebook topic which might have no personal significance to any of them.
Good luck!
Thanks for the supportive comment, Gordon.
Dealing with exam classes was one of the areas that came up in the Q & A following Luke, Candy, Anthony and Howard’s talks at the dogme symposium. It think there’s no reason a dogme approach shouldn’t be possible when dealing with exams, though I would think that it helps if you can deconstruct exam tasks and turn them into true(r) communication acts. The one real concern I’d have is the amount of world/life knowledge such Cambridge exams expect – I think some use of technology or outside texts would be useful to break the 4th wall between the classroom and the outside world.
Best of luck with it – I hope you’ll be writing posts on your blog about it?
Mike =)
Hi Mike,
I’m an ESOL Teacher working at a homeless charity in London and am probably going to do a dogme course starting next week. I’ll be ‘subverting’ the Skills For Life materials, for SOW purposes, and use dogme techniques based around the materials.
I have taught using dogme in an EFL context which is, well teaching using dogme makes me feel like a ‘proper’ teacher. In my current context I have shied away from using dogme as it’s too open and I don’t want sts talking about their homelessness, drugs dependency e.t.c. So now I’m going back to it and I think the main challenge is going to be how to deal with those issues if/when they arise.
Hi Jagtar, welcome to the blog and thank you for your comment.
I think that’s a perfectly sensible approach regarding the Skills for Life materials – I think the heart was in the right place, whoever designed them, but the structure is more than a little slap-dash! And they are woefully out of date – the example of up-to-date technology in the Entry 2 ESOL materials is a walkman!
I understand the concern about letting students open up fully when they may be having to deal with some of the issues and problems you mention. I would recommend Candy’s advice above about ‘guiding’ the stories. I also think, however, that in some way we should be able to provide a safe space, without fear of ‘saying the wrong thing’. Having said that, you mention some serious issues and they could be problematic if they come up in classes. I like the idea of a ‘what’s new?’ section in a lesson as described by Barb Sakamoto in a comment on a post I wrote here: Objects in the rear view mirror
Mike =)
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