Handbook of Classroom English. Glynn S. Hughes

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      1 Language is a tool and not a museum exhibit. As such one of its primary functions is to communicate information. In the classroom information gaps occur repeatedly, that is, the teacher has new information which the pupils require in order to continue participating in the lesson, or the pupils have answers which the teacher needs in order to know whether to proceed to the next stage of the lesson. These information gaps provide opportunities for language to be used communicatively. The phrase ‘Open your books at page 10, please’ is not something the pupils repeat, translate, evaluate as true or false or put into the negative, but a genuine instruction which is followed by the simple action of opening a textbook. It is perhaps an interesting paradox that whereas teachers are quite willing to spend time practising key structures in phrases like ‘Cows eat grass’ and ‘Is John your mother?’, they may well switch to the LI in order to set the day’s homework. The reason very often put forward for this is that the pupils may not understand! Any naive pupil may come to the very understandable conclusion that English is basically a very tedious subject since all the information it conveys is either known or meaningless. The instinctive reaction to a question like ‘Who has got a grandmother?’, for example, in the classroom situation is to repeat it, or answer it by reference to the text being dealt with. Only in the last resort will it be considered a personal question. Fortunately, this kind of pedagogic ambiguity is usually avoided when the teacher adds the necessary functional label: ‘No, I’m asking you.’

      2 Much of the language put into the mouths of learners in the name of practice may well have little direct application outside the classroom, but many classroom management phrases can be transferred to ‘normal’ social situations, e. g. Could you open the window; I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. By using these phrases the teacher is demonstrating their contextualized use and indirectly accustoming the pupils to the form-function relationships (and discrepancies) that are part of English. Exposure to this aspect of language is particularly important in the case of polite requests.

      3 Classroom situations and procedures are generally quite concrete, which means that most classroom phrases have a very clear situational link. This fact should allow the teacher to vary the form of the instructions given as part of the learning process. For example, given a specific context (repetition after the tape) which is familiar to the pupils, the teacher should be able to choose from ‘All together’, ‘The whole class’, ‘Everybody’, ‘Not just this row’, ‘Boys as well’, ‘In chorus’, or ‘Why don’t you join in?’ and the pupils should be able to react appropriately. In fact, by varying the phrases used in any particular situation, the teacher is giving the pupils a number of free learning bonuses. The pupil is hearing new vocabulary in context and at the same time developing the important skill of guessing the meaning of new words on the basis of the context. Similarly, the teacher can deliberately use a structure that is going to be taught actively in the coming lessons and so ‘pre-expose’ the pupils to it. For example, the future tense might be pre-exposed by choosing ‘now we shall listen to a story’ instead of ‘let’s listen’. Systematic variation is then a valuable pedagogic tool.

      4 There still perhaps exists a belief that (i) pupils cannot really understand a sentence they hear unless they are able to break it up into separate words and explain the function of each of the words, and (ii) pupils at early stages should be able to say everything they hear in the lesson, and not hear anything that they are not able to say; in other words, there should be a 1:1 input-output ratio. This point of view implies that pupils at an elementary level would not understand ‘Would you mind opening the door?’ and therefore they should not hear it since this type of structure occurs later in the textbook under the headings ‘conditional’ and ‘gerund’. Clearly, however, the phrase ‘Would you mind opening the door?’ can be understood in the simplest communicative sense on the basis of the key words ‘open’ and ‘door’. The pupil may hear the ‘Would you mind’ as a meaningless noise which will only be ‘understood’, i.e. broken up into its separate parts, later when the pupil has more experience of the language. If it is accepted that pupils may well understand more than they can say, it means that the teacher’s choice of classroom phrases can exceed the pupils’ productive abilities. This means, then, that the classroom can provide opportunities for the pupils to hear genuine uncontrolled language used for genuine communicative purposes. Because classroom activities are so diverse it is tempting to suggest that an entire teaching syllabus, even methodology, could be built around the use of classroom management phrases.

      5 The classroom situation is often labelled ‘artificial’. If artificiality can be measured statistically, it means that the 11 million schoolchildren in Britain spending 7 hours a day, five days a week, 40 weeks a year in school – a total of 15,400 million hours! – are not engaged in some form of genuine social interaction, and, therefore, of course, the 50 million hours spent watching football matches is an even less genuine form of interaction. What in fact is meant by ‘artificial’ is that the interaction in the classroom is one-sided. For example, all exchanges are probably initiated by the teacher, or all pupil-pupil communication is mediated by the teacher. This obviously has something to do with the prestige position accorded to teachers traditionally, but in the case of language learning it may be due to the fact that pupils are not equipped from the outset with the necessary linguistic code, that is, the phrases and vocabulary related to their needs and problems as learners which would allow them to take part in the lesson as equals. By giving intermediate learners a list similar to that contained in Appendix 1 (p. 219), practising the phrases and then insisting on their use, the teacher is increasing the pupils’ opportunities for using the language communicatively. After all, the teacher may well be the only living interacting source of the language and the classroom may well be the only social context for practising it. Even at an elementary level pupils can acquire classroom phrases holophrastically (i.e. as self-contained unchanging units), e.g. I’m sorry I’m late; Could you repeat that; What’s the answer to number 1? The phrases used to talk about the language itself and learning it Can you say that?; What’s the English for this word?; Is there a corresponding adjective?; etc., are particularly useful but seldom taught. Such metalinguistic phrases provide the pupils with a means of improving their language skills independently, that is, by asking native-speakers for corrections, explanations, etc.