This is part of a series on teaching unplugged/dogme elt. Be sure to check out the rest of the blog entries, and stay tuned for more.
These are the only two lessons I have seen that were explicitly labeled as Dogme or Unplugged, but from them, I pulled a few conclusions about the teaching practices. The first half of the class in both videos is conversation and discussion between learners and the instructor. This discussion is used to build a list of “emergent language” that is initially noted (perhaps on a notepad), and later written on the board for students to see.
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| I'm running out of "plug" ideas ;-) |
At the first glance, Dogme / Unplugged
teaching sounds like an English teacher's dream – less prep time,
fewer photocopies, and happier students. What's not to love about
that?
Before falling in love and living
happily ever after with teaching unplugged, I think that it's
important to get a better picture of what it looks like in the
classroom. What kind of teacher will be most successful with teaching
unplugged? What are good unplugged practices? What does a lesson look
like?
In the quest for the answers to some of
these questions, I came across several quotations that begin to show
what an unplugged teacher looks like:
"Dogme requires the teacher to have a certain rigour and an ability to deal with emergent language, correction and reformulation whilst combining structuring, multi-tasking abilities and knowledge of language in order to come across as organised and well-prepared." (Source: "Devil’s Advocate vs Dale Coulter on Dogme and Newly Qualified Teachers" on chiasuanchong)
“As a teacher, you need to be able to create relaxed and collaborate learning environments - in contexts where this can be culturally difficult or challenging on account of more practical issues (for example, very large classes of very mixed-level students). You not only need to be able to create the sort of environment where learners will feel they have something to say and actually want to say it, you need to be able to "let go" at the right times and let the learners direct the play.” (Source: "The Trouble With Teaching Unplugged" on English Raven)
"But what I have found in my experiments with Dogme is that it orientates the teacher towards entering the classroom well prepared to, perhaps with the sole intention of, helping learners with what they need here-and-now, not whatever comes next in the book or whatever you happen to have prepared that day. And insodoing, you are really teaching." (Source: "Lesson 11: Exams and Phrasal Verbs" on An Experiment with Dogme)
So, to summarize, to be successful, an
unplugged teacher needs to be a good teacher. They need to know about emergent language and how to exploit it
,
they need to be very proficient in grammar, and they need to have
good classroom presence and management. That doesn't really seem much
different that the requirements for good language teaching in any
other methodology. If the teachers themselves are not so different,
then the next area to investigate is teaching practices.
Here are a couple videos of unplugged
lessons:
These are the only two lessons I have seen that were explicitly labeled as Dogme or Unplugged, but from them, I pulled a few conclusions about the teaching practices. The first half of the class in both videos is conversation and discussion between learners and the instructor. This discussion is used to build a list of “emergent language” that is initially noted (perhaps on a notepad), and later written on the board for students to see.
The two teachers approach the second half of the class differently,
but there is a common sense to both styles. Martin Sketchley
introduces “language that I heard...” and then works with the
students to expand and refine the examples, followed by drills, and
later by note-taking. Jason Renshaw uses an info-gap-like activity
where students create questions to ask their classmates, and later,
without the notes, report back. The commonality is the language
modeling. In both lessons, the incorrect emergent language is
corrected, and through out the course of the lesson, the language is
repeated various times.
Both of these lessons make use of authentic interaction between
students, whether through the agreement/disagreement game or the
question-and-answer activity. Actual communication about real-life
issues that affect the students is emerging in the class, and the
teacher, in both cases, highlights some of that language.
I don't know if this is part of the Dogme/Unplugged methodology, but
I noticed that, although good language examples were modeled and bad
language examples were corrected, there wasn't a whole lot of
repetition of correct language models by the students. I'm not sure
if the idea is to increase the exposure, and hope that the exposure
will be salient enough, or if this is just a feature that isn't
addressed in the video portions of the lessons.
In another video,
Jason Renshaw offers some good ideas to follow-up the discussions
with the new emergent language that we saw in the first part of each
video. I think that these activities would address the issue of
student repetition, if they were incorporated into the lesson,
somehow. Some of his ideas are to find relevant videos or content
passages, create role plays or scenes in groups, do a poster activity
or web quest to explore the issues, do a classroom survey, write
“agony aunt” columns (a.k.a. Dear Abby columns) and reply, do a
review based quiz show, or journal writing.
Later, I will address some of my own
criticisms and some old criticisms of Dogme/Unplugged teaching, but
as far as the basics go, it seems that what has been said many times
– that Dogme teaching is just good teaching – is true on several
levels.
