steps towards a new educational paradigm - icmr.crru.ac.thicmr.crru.ac.th/journal/journal 3/5 steps...

Volume 2, Number 1, January 2014

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steps towards a new educational paradigm

Professor Adrian M. SmithProfessor Kathryn Shelley Price-Jones

University of South Australia at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea

abstract

Each member state of ASEAN has decided to endorse the use of English as a lingua franca in order to further promote and encourage cross-cultural communications; however, the question as to how to bring this about is still being discussed and debated. Whereas English education in ASEAN countries is currently dominated by a cognitive SLA, Andy Kirkpatrick (2010) has called for a shift towards a social SLA model. This joint paper presentation seeks to include into the discussion our university classroom practices and social Approach that was developed in South Korea. Data will be drawn upon and presented from both of our current PhD research. We believe that the Approach would be usable by both NEST (Native English Speaking Teacher) and NNEST (Non-Native English Speaking Teacher) alike.

Andy Kirkpatrick. English as a Lingua Franca in ASEAN: A Multilin-gual Model. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2010. Project MUSE. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

background

In the field of EFL, teaching methods evolve slowly and much actual teaching practice has rarely moved beyond teacher – dominated grammar–translation style classes. High stakes exams, coupled with standardized testing have recently occupied the attention of politicians and bureaucrats (Sung & Kang, 2012). We see this as posing a potentially large retarding factor on the develop-ment of English as it is taught in the classroom. A large amount of schol-arship has been addressing how to improve teaching methodologies, but it remains to be seen as to whether realeducational interests can withstand institutional pressures. Pressure will also come from publishing houses and from the American and British academic industries that are unaware of the characteristics and needs of Asian classrooms. It is for this reasonthat so many textbooks are directed at either the British or American domesticESL markets, or lack a social and historical relationship in the texts with Asian counties. Furthermore, these


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textbooks have been designed around a cognitive view of language and are based on language input and the testing of student rote/drill memorization. After all, grammar translation, in the case of the British Empire at least, was designed to enable the students to do two things: effectively ensure the following to the letter of the rules, set out by the dominant nation, and also to create a bureaucratic class that would then administer the rules to the letter. This situation can also be seen to be present in South Korea. It has been recognized that not only education in general, but specifically English language textbooks reflect ideologies,including those that are political (Lee IC, 2011). Lee observes: Despite this overwhelmingly celebratory promotion of EFL education as a tool for success on both national and personal levels, a few South Korean analysts warn that English education is a pathway toward Americanization in South Korea (Choi, 1996; Kim, 2000). For example, Yim (2007) maintains that Korean middle school EFL textbook authors tend to embellish lifestyles of the people in the U.S. through various descript ions and illustrations, and globalization is presented as Americanization. More importantly, Yim points out that the textbooks high-

light only images of upper- middle-class Whites of Euro- pean Steps towards a New Educational Paradigm Pro- fessor Adrian M. Smith Pro- fessor Kathryn Shelley Price- Jones University of South Australia at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea decent, omitting the sub cultures of the U.S. Coupled with South Koreans’ view of White middle-class U.S. English as the most desirable represen tation of contemporary English (Jeong, 2004; Grant & Lee, 2009), this caution becomes more alarming. These analysts condemn South Korean English educators and English lin- guists as “followers of American ways of thinking and living by arguing that English is the world language” (Kim, 2000, p. 21). This argument, which represents the stance of a minor number of South Ko- reans, exemplifies the crucial point that the policymakers often fail to recognize: ESL or EFL education is not neutral (Auerbach, 1995; Pennycook, 1998; Phillipson, 1992; Tollefson, 2002; Tsui & Tollefson, 2007; Valdes, 1998). It is then extremely important to realize that how our teaching is carried out can also have a political


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and ideological effect and to take measures to mitigate this. Teaching methodology can affect how language is used, what it is to be used for, and what position the learners are put in. ASEAN’s 2009-2015 roadmap presents an exciting plan for the integration of member countries into a powerful interdependent block. In the foundational documents it is described as being democratic, and resting on three pillars, one concerning politics and stability, one economic and the other socio-cultural. An essential part of this process is the teaching and learning of English and this is noted first on the list of enabling actions in the Roadmap for an ASEAN Community 2009 - 2015 (p 111), where it notes the importance of raising English efficiency levels in government officials and the people of the CLVM countries. What would be desirable then would be a methodology that through its methods not only taught English, but fostered democracy, and which was in line with the techno- industrial economic model. This model would shape the world that all of our students are entering, and meet their need to enter into it with increased social skills and confidence (McKee, 2011, p24). Moreover, a new Approach should then not be perceived as one only providing skills for the educated elite, but one in which access via

English communicative ability should be equally available to all citizens, whether in urban or rural areas. It would not be all that surprising then, as it was in Imsil, Chonbuk province in 2009, for ‘marginalized’ areas of a country to achieve ‘extraordinary results’ (Sung & Kang, 2012, p 9). Kirkpatrick’s (2011) report analyzingEnglish in ASEAN, expressed the belief that what is needed in ASEAN is a social SLA theory-based peda-gogy to replace the existing cognitive based one, and we would add to this, the grammar translation method widely used throughout Asian coun-tries. A range of descriptions of this problem covering Korea, China and Japan can be found in: Chen & Herd (2006), Kang (2008), Kim (2004), Murphyet al (2009), Nam (2005) and Nishima and Watanabe (2008). The connection with us here, at Kyung Hee University, is that we have already developed and have been teaching our English classes using a ‘social SLA’ curriculum for over ten years, going on six of which have been here, including designing our own textbooks the past four years, and so the link to ASEAN that was provided by Kirkpatrick prompted us to further explore collaborative possibilities. What then is a social SLA and how does it differ from current ELT practices?


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moving away from a cog-nitive sla to a social sla

For the last 40 years or so the main view of language learning has been based on cognitive linguistics, a model which likens the brain to a computer, and which excludes from the list of essentials for learning a language, the culture, the context and human interaction. The main way of learning has been seen as through input of language and development of strategies to memorize individual items as well as to, in theory, acti-vate the inherent capacity to grammar that is theoretically encoded within our brains. In the meantime, there has been a widespread recognition of the ‘social turn’ (Bloch, 2003) in the field of linguistics that has contributed many new ideas to the field and a number of leading cognitivist scholars now “do not follow mainstream SLA’s dominant cognitivist orientation” (Atkinson, 2011, p16). The field has become known as Sociocultural and has entered into the academic discourse; initially through the ideas of Vygotsky (1978, 1986). Those ideas were then shaped, primarily by Wertsch (1993, 1991) who laid the basis for a working definition of the Sociocultural. The core ideas are that all knowledge and language are mediated socially through the use of artifacts and symbols. The Socio-cultural does not replace Cognitive

Psychology, but it adds more dimen-sions, practicality and effectiveness. Underlying this model is the view that language is a socially created artifact that is learned socially, while at the same time, people are unique as indi-viduals and no one single standard of language performance can be imposed as the norm. These ideas have spread into other areas and fields, including Anthropology, Education, Economics, Literary Criticism, Psychology and Sociology. ASEAN has clearly stated that it wants to include all citizens equally in the development process and therefore it follows that a teaching approach that is social, historically empowering and culturally relevant is needed. The method we are proposing has come initially from practice, from observation and continuous impro-vement. Its core features are: the creation of the classroom as a social place as a condition for learning, the use of carefully designed educational artifacts and a method of teaching that enables the teacher to create a social classroom. In Korean schools, those teachers who have been interested in developing a form of social learning have complained of lacking a methodology as well as being under various pressures against it, including institutional and peer pressure to have quiet classrooms (Howard and Miller, 2009). At present the system we use, A Curious Dialogue (ACD), contains


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a combination of pedagogical pro-cesses that are unique in how they are utilized, as well as being low cost and easy to administer, once the teacher has been trained. It is not a fixed system, but allows many variations to fit the teacher’s background and experiences as well as local conditions.

acd: the social sla curriculum we use

Our curriculum has two levels, in line with our university department’s requirements and our research is based upon these. The first, called English 1 was to be Reading and Discussion and the second, English 2, to be Writing. Smith’s research refers to English 1, and Price-Jones’s to English 2. Both curricula share the common features of having been designed to include a high level of student engagement and interaction in English in class. The core of the learning process in the classroom was usually the movement between a study of texts, written by Price-Jones and Smith, which provided artifacts for the lessons, containing the topic and a stimulus for further personalized thinking and expression by the students, and questions for homework that formed the basis of the following in-class discussions. We believe that for learning to occur, there has to be mediation of the

language that students have first worked on by themselves in home-work. This process is very different from the model currently being used in the school system in Korea which relies on vocabulary memorization and grammar rule learning without students significantly speaking or writing. That is a cognitive model that relies on passive listening to input alone. By way of contrast, an ACD class is more about the extraction of language. In brief, the key features of the ACD Approach are: 1. Making connections both among students, between students andeducators, and with the materials used in classroom processes. 2. Language acquisition is based upon making it ‘Real’ and involves the generation of an optimum learning environment that is comprised of: 2.1 Building upon a triangular speaking frame that creates relatively intimate sociopetal spaces where students can speak more freely as they are not being viewed by all members of the class, and where an educator can, while making rounds of the class, easily enter into student conversations, provide lingual assistance, interject points of consid-eration, and even just add their own thoughts. 2.2 The continuous generation of ‘random encounters’ reflect what the students would


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encounter in the world outside the classroom. ACD’s classroom process of Turns, Turns, Turns has students moving from one group to another throughout the class. As such, there are no fixed groups and no specific group that students will only interact with. Students have to adapt to the ‘new’ people and this helps to increase their overall confidence levels for encountering new situations where English is required. Moreover, students recycle the language they want to use on the given topic for that day. This helps a lot with student engagement, as while acting as interlocutors in ‘in the moment, Real’ conversations they can not only say what they want to say several times and build upon their thoughts, but they can also have people listening to what they say, as they will listen to others, ask, or be asked for clarification, or more details, and thus can further develop their language fluency. 2.3 There are no taped artificial dialogues, and no videos shown in darkened rooms as there is no place in those classroom practices for students to interject, or question what is being said. Everything that happens in an ACD classroom is focused on the dialogic present. There is no practice. 3. ACD language learning in-volves making the materials Relevant: 3.1 Classroom subject matter engages students in the learning

processes. Their own culture is drawn upon for textbooks and artifacts as they need language to talk about their own ideas and opinions. 3.2 Students are pro-vided with numerous chances to work on their syntax and only processes that maximize student active involve-ment are utilized. 3.3 Students are assisted with pronunciation help in the moment by the educator and their peers. 3.4 Testing is carried out to show what students can do, rather than what they cannot do and thus builds students’ confidence to try in areas outside the class. 4. Making language learning Realistic in the ACD approach involves: 4.1 The connection of materials forward to what will be carried out in the class next and back to materials already covered without making any of the processes too easy, or too difficult. 4.2 Always providing a methodological structure that is consistently used in all classes so that students have a greater sense of comfort. 4.3 The building onto pre-existing skills while introducing new information or steps in a process. ACD classes consider students to be very much as Lave and Wenger observed: social actors in English


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learning communities of practice, in which they constantly negotiate meaning’ (Lin, 2012, p 10).

research methods

This paper will draw on two sources of student participant data that have been gathered by way of a survey and interviews, and which are part of our research for a paper and larger PhD on this new kind of teaching and learning. We both use a blended curriculum and textbooks that we made and designed for each course based on our unique social based ACD teaching Approach. One textbook was designed with more emphasis placed on speaking, and the other with more weight placed on writing. In Price-Jones’s study the data comes from 160 anonymous student surveys carried out in 2009. Students were recruited on a volunteer basis and no students who volunteered were excluded. The large sample, all com-ing from one semester, and different classes that she taught, also adds to claims for validity. For the purposes of this paper it is to establish where students are, in terms of English language proficiency when they first arrive in our classes. In Smith’s study, research data comes from using an ethnomethodo-logical approach and a case study, in which ten students were interviewed and field notes were made of the

classes. The ethnomethodological approach, with the researcher acting as a participant observer, meant that the students’ views and experiences within their social conditions could be more broadly taken into account. The case study was bounded and natural-istic. The students came to the class through the university’s allocation processes, they were not chosen by the researcher. The class was one of five that Smith taught that semester and it was chosen randomly. It was an intermediate level class. The criteria for selecting students for the inter-views also had a randomness factor as Smith initially invited all students to interview for the study. Smith interviewed all of the students who replied. The boundedness of the case study and randomness of this process strengthens the claims for validity. In light of this conference we were look-ing at our data for evidence of connec-tions between classroom/micro level experiences and the broader/macro level view of ASEAN’s goals.

the research

Part 1 - Price - Jones’s Research When our students arrive at university it is expected that they will be able to attend classes held in English, that they will have some basic English writing skills, and that they will be able to write essays, and


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express themselves in other written formats. To fully comprehend the problems the majority of students encounter with this assumption, on the part of administrators, it is useful to first examine the amount of personal writing that they believed they did in their previous school years. Students were given the survey in week 13. At this point they had enough experience with the innovative curriculum (ACD) that they had been experiencing to reflect upon their past English language classes and compare the two approaches. Of the 160 students who took part in the survey 89 were males and 71 were females. Questions were posed with graduated level choices: The questions referred to how much personal writing they had done from elementary school through high school, and also at institutes as they play a major role in the Korean education system. The choices the students had for this section were: never, a bit (only a few unconnected sentences, with no detailed/reflective/analytical/creative writing), or a lot (as they had been writing in our classes.)

Part 2: Smith’s research Smith conducted ten inter-views of around an hour each, one to three months after the semester was over and dependant upon when students could find time to be in-terviewed. The interviews were in

English, and were recorded and then transcribed. All ten students inter-viewed indicated a liking for a social based curriculum and found it very different from how they had been previously taught English. They were all critical of the grammar based in-put approaches. For this paper I will present three excerpts from the student interviews that relate to the key themes of this paper.

findings and analysis

Price-Jones From the 2009 surveys the following information represented what a possible university freshman class would look like. • 4% of male and female students had not done any personal writing in English before attending university. • 66.3% of male students had not done any more than a bit of personal writing in English before attending university. • 70.4% of female students had not done any more than a bit of personal writing in English before attending university. In a class of twenty students (equally divided with 10 males and 10 females) based upon the survey results, you could expect to find: • Up to 1 male and 1 female student will never have done any personal writing in English before


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attending university. • Up to 7 male and female students will have not done any more than a bit of personal writing in English before attending university. • 2-3 of male and female students will have had varying degrees of experience with carry-ing out personal writing in Eng-lish but none will have had a lot of personal writing experience con- tinuously in their prior education.

findings and analysis

Smith Of the themes that emerged from the student interviews this paper then will refer to the following three: 1. Attitudes to a social based curriculum. 2. Attitudes to the Grammar-translation and input-based curricula. 3. Attitudes to ACD processes.Note that the identifying codes: Student A, student B and student G come from Smith’s data encoding. 1. Example of an attitude to a social based curriculum. The first student (Student A) was a freshman and the important things she noted are how she found it a social class in which she made friends, how this is unusual in Korean universities and it is why she believes it is important for learning. Student A links the current school teaching methods to a lack of sociality.

Student A (freshman female): Smith: How did you feel about the class in general? Student A: I feel it was very good because… social…your class is very good for many reasons. First I can make many friends in your class…and I can speak with your class. Smith: Is that unusual? A: Actually that is unusual in Korea …

2. Example of an attitude to the grammar based and input basedcurricula. Student B found this approach better for her in the active communi-cative areas of speaking and writing. Student B (freshman fe-male): Smith: How did you feel about the class in general? B: I’m really interested in that because we…When I was in high school we just learned about gram-mar or English writing or listening for exam…entrance exam… but this class more focus on talking or writing and most Koreans are really bad at speaking or writing so I have more [inaudible] at writing or speaking in this class. Student G This excerpt illustrates several important things. First, the textbook if related to their lives can greatly contribute to student confidence and


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language production. Second, students also have to be able to choose their own topics, as in the case of Student G who was interested in the question of transgender identity. Thirdly, student G is referring to the ACD methodology of creating many opportunities to speak with other students in the class. Student G importantly uses the word ‘share’ which is at the heart of a social SLA and illustrates the core idea of mediation and how it is linked to understanding. In order to share, the student needs opportunities to over-come shyness, develop confidence, and to develop new understandings. They need to feel they are part of a community. Smith: So when you get in these groups, and you had to speak to people, did you find the homework useful? Student G: As I said, the text-book asked me what I think ( Note: this was said with great emphasis.) so I … I can think my thoughts and mind like about fashion or transgender, so … and I ask another people in class: “What do you think? What do you think”, “ I think…”, “ I think blah blah blah” And “ You think blah blah blah..I can…..you can share each other and I … … … I can … … under-stand their”.

discussion

The data Price - Jones re-ceived from the student 2009 surveys, provided us with greater insights into the students’ experiences before university, yet actually left us with more questions about how the students perceived an ACD class in light of their past educational experi-ences. The data has also left us with the firm conviction that the current public education system is not meet-ing the students’ needs for function-ing in an English based curriculum once they get to university, and that a social SLA model (ACD) would appear to act as a bridge in assisting students to develop their confidence with and usage of English. The data from Smith suggests that opportunities to be social, to be able to discuss relevant issues and to have textbooks and teaching meth-odologies that enable this are very important. The data also strongly supports what many have been say-ing, that pedagogy based on grammar translation and also on input without the social dimension, which is the essence of a cognitive SLA. The social dimension, along with the mode of instruction, has been shown to be more effective (Paradis, 2009; Lantolf, 2010) in language learning, given that language needs to be able to be used spontaneously. The social SLA is effective in this and thus


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creates more sociable, free-thinking and confident students. These qualities match the requirements of the new techno economic model which is information based and which “demands continuous reconfiguration as a dialog be-tween the producer, the user and the product itself” Engesstrom (2004) cited in Kallio (2010, p 43). The new reconfiguration of social relations and the achievement of joint goals in other areas besides business also require that “dialogical informa-tion be shared by the participants” in addition, when knowledge becomes “tacit and confined to individuals” Engesstrom (2004) cited in Kallio (2010, p 44). There can be no joint development. If this new interaction is essential for economic success, then ASEAN countries need to develop the dialogic and social capacities of their countries, in English. For this a social SLA in schools would seem to be eminently more suited than the cognitive SLA and grammar trans-lation methods that do not develop language to be used socially.

conclusion Taken together, the data of Smith and Price-Jones provides some tangible evidence for the benefits of a social SLA, which Kirkpatrick recommends for the ASEAN nations (2010). Consequently we propose the establishment of a new system for teaching English that can help achieve ASEAN’s goals for social and economic development based on sharing and co-configuration. At the heart of it all there is a serious need for a new paradigm for teaching English itself which can start at the micro level of student interactions in a classroom and extend through to interactions between neighbors and governments. What is sorely needed is a system of teaching that works reliably all of the time, and which teachers can receive training for. Also needed is a system for which there are principles for creating curriculum materials without relying heavily upon expensive publications from theoutside that do not work well, or suit the local cultures. Consequently we wish to put forth an English teaching Approach (A Curious Dialogue – ACD) that we created and that we believe may have some pedagogic use in the implementation of ASEAN’s goals. In essence ACD helps students develop the ability to dialogue in English in both written and spoken formats and this would appear to be


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what ASEAN is desirous of for all of its member countries.

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