Teachers are caught in dichotomies

First one

Learning by doing vs learning by thinking

teach skills or teach content,

teach students to talk and write as fluently as possible?

or teach them the depth and breath of thought and how to think?

Get out of this by seeing it as two sides of a coin

Students

Reflect on your experience

use your new language to reflect it

And language

understand ye teachers!

is the unspoken ideological substratum

of the educational system, the community, the peer group, the family.

Second dichotomy

Grammar vs communication

conscious application of rules vs unconscious acquistion of conversation patterns

communicate only after mastering of rules and structures in drills?

but rules really have to be broken down, analysed and explained

but students have to be given chances to speak, to write, to focus on the message even before

forms are mastered

HOHOHO ... now, so what really happened is an 'everything goes attitude' on both teachers and learners

and teachers' abdication of their responsibility

The solution is not an either or, for: the structures learners use construct the context of communication in which learning take place (?????) hence, Contextual shaping = language teaching

what is context, really?

and, we have multiple options regarding the way language is used in variable contexts (?????)

Third dichotomy

Teacher talk vs student talk

exclusive of one another?

new focus on student and the amount of talking done in class

nobody cares what is being talked about and the meanings negotiated anymore?

Ask: What is the nature of classroom dialogue

krashen! Quality input =\= structural input

but quality of interaction and cultural understanding!

teachers! Difficult to impart a body of knowledge and letting students discover it themselves to internalize it?

focus on the various ways in which learners learn to learn

both as a cognitive and social process with variable individual styles of learning

does it mean....

(debate, drama, writing, listening, discussion, newspaper editing, discussion, mentoring, tutoring...)

4th dichotomy

Reading to learn vs learning to read

Is reading an exercise to reinforce students' knowledge of grammar & vocabulary?

an exercise to decode form?

or is the written text a source of information about the foreign culture?

for students to decode information despite deficient knowledge of forms?

Nay. Both lose sight of the writer's style, social conventions, registers, genres,

and the text creating the reader and the reader creating the text.

5th dichotomy

Language vs Literature

Language teachers feel competent only to teach language but

incompetent to teach the many layers of meaning of literary texts

The question:

how can language teachers help learners read texts at a variety of levels of meaning

6th dichotomy

Language vs Culture

4 skills 'Plus culture' ?

culture seen as mere information conveyed by the language, not as a feature of language

If language is seen as social practice

then culture becomes the very core of language teaching.

Cutural awareness should be seen as enabling language proficency,

and as being the outcome of reflection on language proficiency

Halliday calls grammar a theory of human experience

and text, the linguistic form of social interaction

since language use is the creation and transmission of culture

then, let's deal with a variety of cultures, international ones, conventionalized ones

Let's initiate students into a language's social and cultural meanings, some explicit, some implicit

and make students culturally competent learners with a cross-cultural personality

7th dichotomy (oops!)

Native speaker vs Non-native speaker

Non-native teachers and students are intimidated by the native speaker norm, they try to approximate this norm

but language study should be an initiation into a social practice that is at the boundary of two or more cultures.

The classroom should create a social, linguistic reality that is born from the L1 speech environment of the learners

and the social environment of the L2 native speakers, but is a third culture in its own right.