In this column Rose Senior explains why certain teaching techniques and class management strategies are effective, and identifies specific issues that can assist all language teachers in improving the quality of their teaching.
With the worldwide rush to learn English, language teachers are increasingly conscious of the need to speak English in class and to encourage their students to do likewise. The problem is that even in multilingual classes, students are often reluctant to speak in English for fear of making mistakes and appearing foolish. How can teachers encourage their students to use English more readily in the classroom? English language teaching occurs throughout the world, with class sizes, the availability of materials, the teaching conditions, and so on, varying enormously from place to place. This article focuses on teaching English to multilingual classes (classes containing students from a range of linguistic backgrounds) in Englishspeaking countries. Virtually all teachers teaching English in English-speaking countries have English as their first language. Although they sometimes teach classes of students from a single country of origin, for the most part they find themselves teaching classes containing students from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. They might have students from two or three different countries – or from as many as a dozen countries – within the same class. Since they clearly cannot speak the mother tongues of all the students they teach, such teachers are compelled to rely on English for all communication purposes: for issuing instructions, modelling new linguistic forms, clarifying the meaning of unfamiliar words, explaining tricky grammar points, setting up communicative tasks, and so on. This is clearly beneficial for their students’ listening skills, but what about their speaking skills? One problem in multicultural classes is that students tend to have friends from the same linguistic background as themselves, and they tend to gravitate towards them when it comes to classroom seating or choosing partners for interactive tasks. Teachers need to work hard to counteract such natural tendencies, particularly in the early days of each new class, by having students engage in getting-to-know-you activities and interacting with as many class members as possible. As the course progresses, they should, if possible, encourage students to change seats and work with different partners to counteract the notion that certain seats or parts of the room ‘belong’ to certain student groups. Teachers should also seek to cultivate an overall atmosphere of tolerance and mutual respect within the room, by showing that they value the contributions of all the students and that they expect others to do likewise. Particularly detrimental to language classes, from both a social and a learning point of view, is the formation of cliques, when peer groups solidify to the point where individuals both influence and are influenced by the behaviour of their immediate circle of friends. The behaviour of students who whisper together in their mother tongue or who laugh privately amongst themselves makes other class members feel uneasy, excluded or affronted. It also reduces the opportunity for clique members to practise speaking English, since the pressure is strong to show off to friends by not making a serious attempt to communicate effectively in English. Although some teachers allow their students to confer in their mother tongues from time to time (for example when clarifying the meaning of a tricky English word or concept), most teachers in Englishspeaking countries insist on an English-only policy during lessons. When students make occasional lapses, teachers are usually quick to notice, issuing tactical reminders such as: Was that a strange language that I heard? Translate, please! or staring at the perpetrator with an expression of wideeyed horror. One technique for reminding students that the classroom is an Englishonly environment involves having students pay a small fine into a class kitty whenever they break the class ‘rule’. Provided thatthe class accepts that this is appropriate ‘punishment’ – and that the proceeds will go towards an end-of-term reward for the class as a whole – this can be a highly effective sanction since everyone has a vested interest in enforcing it. Apart from the usual range of interactive activities that provide students with opportunities to practise speaking in English with their classmates, teachers can take advantage of the natural information gap that exists in multicultural classes, where students from different countries are strangers to one another. By setting up interactive tasks that require students to talk about themselves, their life experiences, their cultural backgrounds and their ideas, teachers can encourage a flurry of information exchange, with students genuinely interested in what other class members have to say. Sometimes life-changing moments occur, when students realise the culturally-embedded nature of their previously-held views about other nations or ethnic groups. The biggest plus is that since English is the common language shared by everyone, the communication must occur in English! This article has focused on multilingual classes of language learners, suggesting that teachers of such classes need to focus on developing an overall classroom culture of interest in and respect for others that overrides any individual subcultures that may exist. In the next issue of ETp, I will focus on monolingual classes in non-Englishspeaking countries. Rose Senior is a researcher and teacher educator who runs customised workshops on a range of aspects of successful language teaching. She is the author of The Experience of Language Teaching, published by Cambridge University Press.
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