Methods and culture
What methodology?

With so many different approaches and methods available, many teachers are unsure of which to choose and how to go about making that choice. In this section we will look at some of the cultural implications of the methods we use, and come to some conclusions about the bases on which we can decide on our approach to teaching.


Methods and culture

The writer Adrian Holliday has come up with the term native speakerism to describe the way that British and American teaching methodology and practices have been exported around the world, almost without question by the exporters, though they are increasingly questioned by commentators, both native speaker and non-native speaker alike. Holliday's worry about native speakerism is that it is often premised on a view of 'us' and 'them'. Native speakerism, he worries, 'cuts into and divides by creating a negatively reduced image of the foreign Other of non-native speaker students and educators'. In this section, however, it is methodology and its relationship with educational and social culture which concerns us.

Many years ago, Dilys Thorp wrote an article that identifies a problem which occurs when different educational cultures come into contact with each other. What, she wondered, are we to make of the following comment by a British lecturer about an Indonesian student: 'His work shows that he's very bright, but he's quiet in class'? If the comment was made about a British student, she suggests, it might indeed indicate that the student was of a quiet and shy disposition, and that this was a pity, whereas for the Indonesian student the judgement might not be about that student's personality at all, but rather about norms of classroom behavior that the student feels are culturally appropriate. 'It is far too easy,' she writes, 'to think that our own ideas as to what constitutes "good" learning are universal, and forget their cultural specificity'.

The fact is that many of the approaches and teaching methods we have discussed in this chapter are based on a very western idea of what constitutes 'good' learning. For example, we have expected active participation in class, and we have encouraged adventurous students who are prepared to have a go even when they are not completely sure of the language they are trying to use. We sometimes ask students to talk about themselves and their lives in a potentially revealing way. We tell students that they should take charge of their learning, that the teacher is a helper and guide rather than the source of knowledge and authority. Yet all of these tenets may well fly in the face of educational traditions from different cultures. Thus British and American teachers working in other countries sometimes complain that their students have 'nothing to say', when in fact it is not an issue of the students' intelligence, knowledge or creativity which makes them reluctant to communicate in a British or American way, but their educational culture.

However, we are not suggesting for one minute that it is necessarily the case that ideas with an ideological origin in English-speaking TESOL are by their very nature inappropriate. On the contrary, many of them are sound and have a proven usefulness. However, what we are saying is that if teachers (native or non-native speakers) grounded in English-speaking western TESOL assume a methodological superiority (and as a result perceive other kinds of learning as inherently inferior), they will be doing their students and themselves a potential disservice.

For, as Alastair Pennycook has said, 'we need to see- English language teaching as located in the domain of popular culture as much as in the domain of applied linguistics'. Our attitudes to the language, and to the way it is taught, reflect cultural biases and beliefs about how we should communicate and how we should educate each other.

When teachers from one culture (e.g. Britain, the USA, Australia) teach students from another (e.g. Cambodia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia), it is often easy to see where cultural and educational differences reside. However, as we have suggested, it is the methodological culture that matters here, not the background of the teachers themselves. In 1998 an Argentinian teacher, Pablo Toledo, posted a message on an Internet discussion list for teachers from South America which he called 'Howl' after the celebrated poem by the American Allan Ginsberg (republished in Toledo 2001). In his posting, he lamented the fact that teachers who try affective learning and humanistic teaching, who try drama and role-play and other communicative techniques, fall flat on their faces in secondary classes where the students are not interested and merely wish to get good grades. He argues passionately for a new kind of methodology to suit that kind of reality since the ideas developed in 'comfy little schools with highly motivated students' just aren't right for less 'privileged' contexts. 'Not,' he writes, 'because there is something wrong with the ideas, but they just were not made for our teaching reality, and do not deal with our problems.'

Adrian Holliday would almost certainly agree. He describes his own use of a basic Audiolingual methodology at the beginning of his career in 19/os Iran. His approach, he writes, 'was entirely methodology-centred in that students and business clients alike were expected to submit to its wisdom, as recipients of a superior treatment'. He suggests that in many situations it was entirely inappropriate and certainly 'native speakerist'.

All we are saying here is that applying a particular methodology thoughtlessly to any and every learning context we come into contact with may not always be appropriate. What we need to ask ourselves, therefore, is how to decide what is appropriate, and how to apply the methodological beliefs that guide our teaching practice.

One approach for context-sensitive teachers is to try to create a bridge between their methodological beliefs and trf students' preferences. For example, Dilys Thorp, whose article was cited above, had what she saw as a problem with students in China when they were confronted with listening tasks. An important skill for students is listening for gist (general understanding) without getting hung up on the meaning of every single word. Yet Thorp's students were not used to this idea; they wanted to be able to listen to tapes again and again, translating word for word. It is worth quoting her response to this situation in full:

In listening, where they needed the skill of listening for gist and not every word, and where they wanted to listen time and time again, we gradually weaned them away from this by initially allowing them to listen as often as they liked; but in return - and this was their part of the bargain - they were to concentrate on the gist and answer guided questions. These guided questions moved them away from a sentence-by-sentence analysis towards inferential interpretation of the text. Then, we gradually reduced the number of times they were allowed to listen. This seemed to work: it was a system with which they were happy, and which enabled them to see real improvements in their listening skills.

 

 
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