English Language Teaching as an Interesting Hypothesis

We know that learners learn. But we can never really be sure that teachers teach them. “That people learn,” Jakobowitz said, “is a fact of life, but that people teach them is only an interesting hypothesis.” The English Language Teaching Department of GSTESOL allows you to test this interesting hypothesis in many intriguing ways.

Let’s look at it from the point of view of the “E” in ELT: English first. On the one hand, we know that students learn (and forget!) vocabulary in a fairly linear way: ten words today, another ten tomorrow. On the other, we know that grammar is not really learnt like this: it seems to develop in a highly non-linear fashion, taking huge leaps today and then leveling off on a long plateau tomorrow. We know that grammatical accuracy, fluency and complexity don’t seem to be closely related to what we are teaching in class. It seems quite likely that a good deal of—maybe most of—language learning is only indirectly related to teaching.

We may also consider the hypothesis of teaching from the point of view of the “L” in ELT, that is, language more generally. Vygotsky argues that language really serves two distinct functions: one, to be sure, is interpersonal contact, but the other is intra-mental reflection: language is what makes our thinking permanent and recordable and what keeps the child from simply swinging from one form of psychological arousal to another. We can see that teaching is a form of interpersonal contact. Can we really be sure that it is a source of intra-mental reflection?

Finally, we can consider the hypothesis from the point of view of the history of teaching itself (and this is something we’ll do at some length in the prerequisite course “General Issues and Trends in ELT”). Although English teaching has been around for over five hundred years, we notice that it has meant completely different things in different periods. For the first two centuries, it was largely a matter of cross channel business transactions. For the next two, it became largely pre-occupied with great texts (especially Shakespeare!). And in the last century, teachers mostly concerned themselves with speech, structure, and exchanges of information. These three very different emphases hardly add up to a single coherent curriculum!

Towards the end of the last century, many academics appeared to lose faith in the possibility of teaching itself. Interest in naturalistic acquisition, immersion programs, and even task-based teaching and content-based instruction all reflected a certain skepticism about the possibility of teaching the language explicitly and a belief in learning without direct teaching.

But even the most extreme learner-centered forms of teaching, such as the “learning to learn” movement associated with Gail Ellis, Rebecca Oxford, and “learning strategies” recognize the importance of teaching when they suggest TEACHING children how to learn. In the 1990s, research by Mike Long and others demonstrated that people learn more with teaching than without teaching. Almost every teacher has a clear feeling that some lessons work better than others, and experienced teachers can often tell that some parts of a language lesson, or even some types of exchanges, appear to be a lot more instructive than others.

So how can we teach ourselves, or learn, more about teaching? Some approaches in the English Language Teaching department are centered around the “E”, of English. In addition to the core course in TESOL Theory and Practice, you can take courses in Academic English Reading and Writing, Literature, and Grammar - either functional or structural. Some other approaches focus on the “L” - the language. We offer courses in linguistics, bilingualism, interculturalism, pragmatics and communication. And finally, some emphasize the “T” of teaching. You will find courses related to instructing young learners, teaching the traditional “four skills” (reading, writing, listening and speaking), as well as courses introducing a wide variety of methods based on information technology.

Now, these classes are in the evening. Most of our graduates work during the day, and many of them work as teachers. This might seem like an impossible double burden at first, but when you start thinking analytically about teaching, you will find that there is a certain synergy to it. Teaching doesn’t allow you much time for reflection, but graduate school does. Graduate school doesn’t give you much time for practice, but teaching does. Particularly if you take courses like research methods, thesis writing, portfolio preparation, or the many courses we offer in course design, lesson design, and materials preparation, you may well find that teaching actually helps you find new sources of data for graduate school, and graduate school can offer new perspectives on what happens during teaching.

Of course, it’s not going to be easy! Our school is not a diploma mill, where you simply pay your money, do your time, and take your degree. Thinking about teaching is in many ways even more difficult than actual teaching, because it involves thinking about all those potential lessons you could have given but didn’t alongside thinking about the one you actually did give. You may find that learning about teaching will not automatically make you a better teacher; in fact, in the short run, it may make you a less confident and assured one.

But that insecurity, so very familiar to every learner, is the most vivid proof we have that learning—and learning about learning—is a real fact of life. At the same time, the insecurity reminds us that teaching—and even teaching about teaching—is still only a hypothesis.