From Unplugged to Unchained: On to a Balanced Approach

This post is a collection of thoughts about Dogme ELT (and the need for a balanced approach) from around the blog-o-sphere, beginning with a little of my own commentary, of course.

A balanced approach to language teaching is like a complete protein. 

picture from timigustafson.com

When I took Nutrition 101 during my undergrad years, we learned about proteins. There are four different kinds of vegetable protein sources, but they are “missing” something. For example, proteins from the “bean” group are missing something that is found in the proteins from the “corn” group, and proteins from the “rice” group are missing something from the “nuts” group. You need to get proteins from multiple different vegetable sources in order to be sure that you have a complete protein. Teaching approaches are like vegetable proteins – they need to be supplemented with other approaches. Dogme ELT offers an incomplete protein...and that's not a bad thing--you can still use it to make a complete "teaching" protein in a balanced approach. Here are some quotations that support the need for a balanced approach to language teaching.

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An obsessive focus on doing one style of teaching and of being a particular type of teacher is, I personally feel, a quick way to narrow the number of options available to you. (Richard Whiteside, I'd Like To Think That I Help People To Learn English)

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Teaching isn’t a science. It simply isn’t. It’s not mechanical. It’s not like some intricate computation that is going to give you the same answer every time you enter it. It’s an art. It is constantly changing and shaping and being shaped by the students that you are working with. I won’t carry out the metaphor (we language teachers tend to over do it with similes and metaphors, I’ve noticed), but I will ask you to consider the truth of the statement... So . . . all of that to say. I’ve been examining methods recently. I’ve gotten a lot of good ideas, and I’m excited to mess them all up by mixing and matching and creating my own concoction. (K. Liz Barker, Just a Word) 

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The Scandivanian [Dogme] filmmakers kept their vows for, oh, well about two or three films. And then they suddenly realised (duh) that music, lighting, tricksy editing, precisely all the artifice of film-making REALLY WORKS....So what do I believe in? I believe in the richness of techniques, approaches, materials and artefacts available to the modern teacher. I believe that an over-reliance on any of these to the exclusion of others is unattractive and unlikely to be in the best interests of all. I believe that everything – in a classroom – has to be grounded in the expertise of a teacher being able to find the best way of doing things for the benefit of (and with the help and guidance of) the greatest number of students. And often that may be unplugged, but there is no guarantee (or moral reason) why it should be. And sometimes that might be coursebook-mediated but there is no guarantee (or moral reason) why it should be. (Jeremy Harmer, Jeremy Harmer's Blog)

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As Dogme ELT employs various EFL methods, approaches and techniques, teachers who might be unaware of teaching unplugged are, as confirmed by primary research, unknowingly incorporate aspects of Dogme ELT. Nevertheless, teacher participants suggested a balance be-tween Dogme ELT (also a form of Eclectic Teaching) with more traditional, yet structured, forms of teaching...A Balanced Approach to teaching would offer EFL teachers the best of both worlds: the prospect of struc-tured lessons or the opportunity to incorporate more explora-tory or experimental teaching techniques, dependent uponclassroom expectations. For example, some students andt eachers that participated in the survey indicated mixed opinions: that they preferred structured lessons or less structured lessons (Martin Sketchley, ELT Experiences) 

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One of the benefits of coursebooks is that they give students something to hold on to. Their linear structure might be flawed and will often obstruct meaningful conversation, but at least they give some sort of structure. And don’t be mistaken, students WANT structure, they NEED structure. As much as intelligent scaffolding is useful for language instruction, it is central to many other aspects of your teaching and your students’ learning. By renouncing coursebooks the Dogme approach also gives up on their greatest strengths: visible and comprehensible – if sometimes illusionary – structure. (Christian Schenk, Mr. Schenk) 

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I see the work we did on establishing lexical notebooks as important in the Unplugged framework. The retrospective discipline and meta-cognitive skills needed to keep such a notebook seems to make up for the ‘structure-on-a-plate’ that my course lacked by not working out of a coursebook. (Oli Beddall, An Experiment with Dogme)

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Let’s continue to train our teachers and encourage our colleagues to be eclectic, to teach the context, to use a course book selectively if they and their students / institute want to, to encourage students to negotitate the syllabus and select texts, to structure classes with logical stages that achieve aims and to leave that structure when the context suggests it, to balance the focus on skills and language, to develop critical thinking skills, to encourage learner autonomy, etc. (Neil McMahon, A Muse Amuses) 

Any thoughts?