Teacher in Development

Reality in the ESL classroom is shocking, scary, and beautiful. By reality I mean what happens when you step out of that enclosed, safe, course book enslaved meeting room where your class happens each day.

Students who spend years bottled up in the classroom, who rip through course books, and easily listen to the scripted audio that comes with their course book, pale and freeze when reality strikes.

An English only client walks into the office reception and the secretary (your fearless classroom student) blocks up, forgetting everything English other than “One moment please.” or “Hello.” Or the phone rings, again an English only moment, and your “fearless” classroom student quickly passes the buck onto someone who really speaks English.

Or what about the students you’ve had for a year or so who keep making the same mistakes, no matter how many times you correct them.

What’s going on?

We’re missing out on reality. Experience really does make the best teacher. AJ, over at Effortless Acquisition really slams the point home: Real Work, Real Language

“A growing body of research indicates that for students to apply knowledge in real situations, they need to learn in those situations. Abstract knowledge gained inside schools is poorly applied by students in real situations outside of school.” (Dennis Littky via AJ)

Classrooms must stop being a safe bubble.

I had an interesting experience this week with a few of my students. We’ve been working on passive voice - where all you care about is that the action is done, not who is doing/did it.

I’m a passionate opponent to having students memorize grammar. It’s boring. It’s joyless. It rarely works. My mantra: Use it! Use it! Use it! The more you use it, the faster you own it. I’d rather own something over memorize something any day!

So that’s what we did. We lightly examined the passive tense, with a focus on what it’s good for (what it will help them do.) One of those “usefull” things is when you need to leave a list of “To do’s”

Since all of my students love to travel, we decided to pretend that they were about to leave on a trip, but had a few unfinished projects that had to be left for someone else to take care of.

In class, the bubble, we worked out their lists on paper: The bosses’ credit card needs to be paid, annual reports need to be delivered, etc.

We worked these through a few times and then we moved it up a notch. E-mail. What if you had to e-mail this to a co-worker? Could you do it?

Again, we did it on paper. Then a little bit of reality, a sanitized version I admit, but definately a step closer to the real thing: I told them that I would take their paper-mails to my office and send out real e-mail replies to their work accounts, which they would have to reply to.

Five shocked, fearful faces starred back at me as the classroom bubble went “POP!”

Reality is also beautiful. We finished the entire exercise in less than a day. (I e-mailed a response, and they replied in real time.) The e-mails were very well done, and after minimal tweaking, became really cool examples of passive tense in reality.

In the classroom, after we reviewed it in the book, there were still a few questions and “Hmmm…I don’t really get this yet’s”

After our e-mail exercise, all wrote back saying that it had become crystal clear - and their mails were evidence to prove it.

Reality makes a difference. The more we open classroom doors wide and welcome it in, the easier our jobs as “teachers” will become.