We were recommended to read the 1st chapter of a book called "There is nothing as practical as a good theory" by Morgan Lewis.You may remember this book.Morgan Lewis draws his attention to the importance of teaching collacations when learning the English language.
The whole chapter is very interesting to read and comment on, so I would like to suggest you all to revise the article and start a debate or something like it , so we could share our opinions about this teaching turn of the screw.
I´m sure many of these questions were also in our teachers minds before we saw them on this chapter.Nevetheless, it is good to see them printed and made by a native English teacher.In any case, this way we can see that non-native English teachers and native ones have quite the same questions and worries.We are both teachers anyhow.
There are many different inquiries along the chapter. However, these are just the introductory questions he made as an example:
- -Why is it that what my students learn doesn´t more closely resemble what I teach?
- -Should I spend so much time trying to achieve accurate grammar from my students?
- -Should my lesson plan rule the proceedings?
- -What is the most efficient way of improving students´performance, given they don´t have a lot of time to learn the language?(and I would add they don´t feel like spending much time studying the English language)
- -What can you really do for those ´intermediate plateau´students who need a breakthrough and a feeling of progression?
- -What can you do for advanced students after they have met the third conditional?And what is ´advanced´English anyway?
-The task is :
- What percentage of the time in your training was spent at looking at teaching and what percentage was devoted to learning?
- After a lesson now, do you tend to think mostly about what you did, or about the learners?
On the other hand, I would like to have a look to the two broad conclusions he came to:
1.THERE WAS NO GUARANTEE THAT LEARNERS LEARN WHAT TEACHERS TEACH.
2.THE GRAMMAR /VOCABULARY DICHOTOMY WAS SPURIOUS, AND THE CENTRAL ROLE OF GRAMMAR , AT LEAST AS DEFINED WITHIN MY TRAINING, PROBABLY NEEDED TO BE RE-EVALUATED.
- Would you read the chapter again?
- Have you ever made these kind of questions before?
- Do you find the matter so interesting to deal with it?
- Would you be interested in discussing about this subject?
- Do you think your teaching should be re-evaluated according to his ideas?How ?
- What do you think about teaching collocations?
I would love you to have a look and try to think about this text. I´m very interested in it and your ideas may help me.Thank you for all your suggestions, ideas,etc.
