Why Do We Teach The Way That We Teach? (with Karin Xie)

TEFL Training Institute Podcast

What shapes the ways we teach? What influences teachers' views and beliefs about language learning? Trinity College London teacher trainer Karin Xie and I discuss what factors we see influencing teachers' ideas about teaching and talk about how our own experiences have informed our views of language teaching and learning.

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Ross Thorburn: Today, we have with us Karin Xie. Hi, Karin.

Karin Xie: Hi, everyone.

Ross: Karin, do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do? You do teacher training. Tell us who you do teacher training for.

Karin: I work with teachers who prepare students for [inaudible 0:13] exams. It's a graded speaking exam that focuses on communication skills.

Ross: You were saying also for those teachers, a lot of them end up teaching in a way that they were taught before, right? Which is really quite different to what the exam measures.

Karin: Yeah. In my experience with the teachers, I found a lot of them, they would still focus on teaching students the knowledge, like the grammar and the vocabulary, so that students have the knowledge for the exam but not really the skills. I wondered why. I found that relates to how they were taught when they were students. How they learned language and how they were trained.

Ross: That got us into this conversation about all the different things that might affect how teachers teach to them, we just mentioned. One is how you were taught as a student backwash, and then how teachers are trained.

Today, we're going to try and look at what affects how teachers teach. Let's start off by talking about backwash, you mentioned earlier. What's backwash?

Karin: It's the impact an assessment has on classroom teaching. For example, for [inaudible 1:18] exams, it's a one‑to‑one, face‑to‑face conversation the candidate has with an examiner. There's no script, no question banks.

To prepare students for that, the teacher has to mimic what's happening in the real exam and give the students a lot of chance to use the language at their own choice and express what they want to say, ask questions, etc.

Ross: I guess a good example backwash, and maybe less good would be what? If your test is a multiple choice, pick the right tense of the verb exam, right?

Karin: Yeah, exactly.

Ross: In that situation, people end up just...

Karin: Giving students lots of words to remember and do a lot of written exams that don't really prepare learners for real‑life languages.

Ross: It's amazing how much of an effect that they can have on what happens in the classroom. IELTS, for example, the speaking part of that test, this is one of my bugbears is that the students don't have to ask any questions in the IELTS speaking exam.

If you think of what effect is that going to have in the classroom? If you're preparing students for IELTS, why would you ever teach them to ask a question? Because you never need to do that.

Of course, people usually take the IELTS so they can study abroad or so they can move to another country. I think we all agree that if you do move to another country, one of the main things you have to do is ask questions because a lot of the time you don't know what's going on.

Karin: Yeah. Any kind of speaking exchange requires contribution from both people whereas in IELTS, the examiner is not allowed to contribute to the communication by say, giving comments or giving support.

Ross: Absolutely.

Karin: I think maybe we could add one point here...

Ross: Sure, of course.

Karin: ...about the materials teachers use, especially with new teachers. Very often you see the teachers fall into the flow, what it says, and just use it as it is.

Ross: Materials can almost act as a source of teacher training if they're good materials, because teachers will get into the habit, maybe if they're new teachers, of following whatever structure there is in the coursebook.

It's problematic though, isn't it, if the structure in the coursebook may be using ideal or if the coursebook has been written for first year teachers and you never move beyond that.

Karin: Or if the book doesn't allow a lot of communicative activities, the teacher may not even think about designing any activities for students to talk to each other and work with each other.

I remember you were really excited when you were designing materials. You were like, "If you do a teacher training workshop with the teachers, you are not so sure whether they're going to apply everything. But if you design good teaching materials, you are kind of sure that they're going to use it somehow." I don't know if that's...

Ross: [laughs] I guess that must be before I'd seen the reality of how teachers use materials.

[laughter]

Ross: I guess those are both ways of influencing what teachers do, but all of it passes through some filter that the teachers personally have of this is work, does this is fit in with my views of teaching and learning.

I remember in a previous job doing some research where we tried basically introducing different materials in this job. It was all one‑to‑one classes. Because it was online, every class was filmed. You could go back and you could watch and see the effect that the materials had on the teaching.

We did a little bit of research and started including some personal questions in the materials because we noticed in general, teachers didn't ask for [inaudible 4:47] . I remember one word that was a tongue twister.

It said like, "Can you change one word in the tongue twister and make a new tongue twister?" Pretty simple. Not an amazing activity, but some tiny bit of personalization. Afterwards, we watched 20 videos of teachers doing this. 18 of the 20 teachers didn't even ask the question.

Karin: I found if you have that is often at the end of the unit or of the chapter. You find teachers either saying that we don't have time for that anymore or they go through it really quickly, whereas that's the most important part of the lesson. That's when the students really get to use it.

Ross: I guess you think that's the most important part of the lesson but maybe the person using the book doesn't see it that way.

Karin: That makes me think about why we make those different choices. We both have the same course book, but we use it so differently. That, I think, is the beliefs we have towards teaching.

Ross: Absolutely. Another thing that maybe affects how teachers' beliefs are formed obviously is people's own experiences as a student. I can't remember what the numbers are, but it's something like by the time you graduate from university, you've been a student for something like 20,000 hours.

If do a CELTA course or something, or an initial teaching course, if you're lucky you do like a 120 hours. You're at 120 hours versus 20,000 hours. One month versus 20 years of education. It's very, very difficult to break the beliefs that are formed and how teachers themselves have been taught as students.

Karin: I always think about the teachers that taught me and the good things that they did that I think made me learn better and the things that I didn't really enjoy. I think that shaped my teaching beliefs.

Ross: Which is interesting, but it reminds me of the George Bernard Shaw quote, "Don't do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It assumes people's preferences are the same. Obviously, it's worth thinking about what you liked or disliked about your teachers might be different to what the other people in the class liked and disliked about their teachers.

Karin: I was thinking about the cultural environment behind our teaching beliefs. The one reason that my teachers used to do the lecture style teacher‑centric way of teaching is because the thousand‑year‑old teaching belief of the role of a teacher is to impart the knowledge to the students.

If the teacher doesn't talk enough, you feel like you don't learn enough. Same with a lot of parents today. If they send their students to a class, if the students were doing things rather than the teacher doing all talking, then they have the feeling of they don't get good value for the money. I'm not learning enough.

Ross: I like your point there about the it's maybe not the 18 years that your teacher was a student...

Karin: Or 2,000 hours.

Ross: Yeah, or 2,000 or 20,000 hours. It's actually maybe the last 1,000 years of the culture or something that's affecting how that person teaches. There's also something in there about the culture of the school that you're in, I think as well.

There's a great chapter, I think it's at the end of Jack Richards book called "Beyond Training." He has students who did his [inaudible 7:54] course. All these teachers, after doing the [inaudible 7:58] course, are really brought into communicative language teaching, task‑based learning.

Then they go into these public schools in Hong Kong. The reality in those schools is very different from the context often surrounding communicative language teaching where in those public schools in Hong Kong, there's 60 students in a class. You're next towards others classes, so you can't be too noisy. Your manager expects you to do X, Y and Z in the class.

It's amazing how over the course of a year, you look at these teachers, some of them just go 180 degrees, and go from being like, "Oh, I want my students to communicate. I'm going to speak English in the class. I'm going to make sure students enjoy what they're doing," to being authoritarian, grammar‑based and doing everything in the students' first language.

Karin: We need to raise teachers' awareness on their own teaching beliefs because that's how they make the choices in lesson planning and delivery, but we often miss out the step of how they can adapt all those methodologies into their own teaching context.

I had a similar experience of training some public school teachers where we talked about communicative language teaching, group work, student feedback and things like that. They were like, "With our learning aims, and the class size and our schedule, it's really hard to do that. We literally don't have the time for that, or if we get the students do that, they won't be able to pass all the exams."

Ross: Another point here is teachers' own experiences of learning a language. This is something that I personally find really interesting, because I've learned my second language without going to any classes and without studying.

I think I have a very laissez‑faire attitude towards the teaching of grammar, really anything overly formal in the classroom, because I know that's not how I learned. Implicitly, I think that's not important, but I obviously that's not true for everyone.

Karin: Personally, I like the language awareness approach because my experience with the language learning is that when I was learning English in high school, I never really enjoyed the grammar lessons where we learned the rules. I liked to engage myself with different sources of the language.

In the last two years, suddenly, I just became aware of the rules and I see how it works. I was like, "This is amazing." Now I like to lead my students to be aware of how language or how English works rather than giving them the rules. For example, one day, they were asking me about a brand sly. Like, "How can I say this?"

Instead of teaching them the pronunciation, I said, "Well, how do you say fly?" They were able to say that. Then I said, "Now take another look at this. How do you say this?" She was like, "Oh, sly. I know how to do it. Now I'm going to find more examples of that." I think that sense of achievement as a learner, and for me as a teacher, was really important.

Ross: Obviously, this end up being very personal. One of the dangers with this is that there's always some learners that will learn regardless of what you do. You could have something which is definitely not the best method of teaching a language.

Let's say audio linguicism or grammar translation. There will be still have been some people that learned like that. They can then use that to justify, "Well, it worked for me, so I'm going to use it for everyone else."

Karin: Our teachers didn't talk about why they did the things with us. Now, we can get the students to have conversations with us on how we learned the language, how we teach the lessons, and why we did them and how they can discover the ways that work for them the best.

Ross: The last one we had here was something that affects how teachers teach is their personalities. I'm sure you've heard this before. I definitely have. Saying teachers are born instead of made, or often there's people saying, "So and so, they're just a natural teacher."

That's something that really used to annoy me a lot, because to me, it just seems as devalue all the professional development, qualifications, knowledge, and research. No one would ever say that about a doctor or a scientist. At the same time, I think there are a lot of personality traits...

Karin: There are.

Ross: Yeah.

Karin: Yeah. For example, very often when you ask someone, "What makes a good teacher?" Instead of saying all those skills, people say they need to be patient, they need to care for their learners and things like that. Those were all personality traits.

Ross: Absolutely. To me, it also reminds me of the nature/nurture debate in psychology. Are we who we are because of our genes, or are we who we are because of our upbringing? Just like that with teachers. Are teachers who they are because of their personality and who they are as a person, or is it their training and professional knowledge?

Obviously, I guess it is both, but it's really interesting to think and reflect on what are your own personality traits that you bring into the classroom, and how do you use them. Overall, it's a wrap‑up. I think it's useful for us to think about who we are and how all these different factors affect how we teach and what our teaching decisions are and what our beliefs are.

Karin: For me, I think it's the most important thing now as a teacher that we are constantly aware of why we're making the decisions we make.

Ross: Good. Karin, thanks so much for joining us.

Karin: Thanks for having me.

Ross: Great. See you next time, everyone. Goodbye.

Karin: Bye.