The challenge
A student recently expressed that he wanted greater structure for his Spanish lessons and also wanted to have a clearer sense of what he would be learning when. He said that he wanted a textbook and practice exercises. I am reluctant to head too far down the coursebook path for various reasons such as the likely greater focus on grammatical forms than on communicative competencies, the lack of individualization (and therefore relevance to students’ lives) and the limited amount of textbook-like resources for Spanish that are available online.
The solution
To address the student’s concerns, I have developed a kind of syllabus that gives greater structure to the classes and yet is naturally student focused. This syllabus is based around situations that the student may well find himself in and themes that he is interested in. There is a tendency for certain communicative skills to be foregrounded according to the situation, but neither specific linguistic skills nor grammatical forms are the driving force behind this syllabus. Instead, there is considerable flexibility with how the student and teacher jointly interpret the activities proposed by the syllabus.
Syllabus contents
The syllabus contains the following sections…
- Subjects for discussion: My World activities are suggested topics of conversation that focus on the students’ own lives. There are also suggestions of how to ensure that these in-class conversations are pedagogically fruitful.
- Situations for role-play: Practical Simulation activities are unscripted role-plays that allow students to prepare for everyday scenarios that they anticipate encountering in the near future.
- Teacher’s guide to help teachers use the syllabus. The guide includes support on preparing lessons and on how to teach using the syllabus.
- The student guide helps students understand what their role could and perhaps should be in the learning process.
A Dogme textbook
In some sense this syllabus can be considered a Dogme textbook. This sounds like a contradiction in terms, but in fact is intended to offer the student greater structure than pure Dogme teaching and yet maintain the freedom for dialogic learning.
- Content (materials) light: this syllabus is an unusual type of textbook, because it has no content for the student to consume. True to Dogme principles, there are no materials such as texts to read, exercises, gap-fills, scripted dialogues, vocabulary lists, videos or audios. Instead there are guidelines and templates to help students give their learning a thematic structure.
- Conversation driven: both My World and Practical Simulations place considerable emphasis on dialogic learning; conversation (rather than exercises, gap fills or vocabulary memorization) is the vehicle for the learning of new lexis and structures. However, not any conversation is inherently pedagogical, and so it sets out in the teacher guide what the properties of a pedagogical conversation are (see also “What makes a pedagogical conversation?” blog post).
- Emergence: dialogic learning is based on emergent pedagogy, which allows for learning opportunities to be exploited as and when they arise. Essentially this emergent syllabus allows for “just-in-time” learning (as compared to “just in case” learning).
Just-in-time learning
The syllabus is a list of potential topics for in-class and out-of-class learning, rather than a course to be followed in any particular order. Indeed, the idea is that the student will choose what topics are covered in the syllabus (either choosing from the list or suggesting new ones). As such, students focus on what they need, when they need it. New vocabulary, phrases and (grammatical) forms emerge from the process as they are needed.
In “just-in-time” learning the teacher or textbook presents language that learners need. For example, a chapter on furnishings may well present new words that are typical for a house. However, students are most likely to need words to describe their own house (rather than a typical one). So, if a student has wooden floors, terms such as parquet, bamboo, hard wood, soft wood, polish and plastic-coated would be relevant and useful. If the student has wall-to-wall carpeting then carpet pile, soft, durable and various colors would be more appropriate. Dogme teaching gives sufficient space for this specific vocabulary to emerge from the learning process.
This emergent syllabus offers two approaches to learning:
- My World: activities focus on discussing topics that are relevant to the student’s life. They follow similar themes to those found in textbooks, but from the student’s perspective. The suggested topics give the students ample opportunity to present and discuss their own particular situation: their work, their home, their commute to work, etc. Each ‘unit’ is presented as a pure Dogme lesson, where the lesson plan is merely a starting point for conversation.
- Practical Simulations: activities designed to prepare the student for specific real-life situations that the students will soon find themselves in. Simulations are more structured (than My World activities) and there is a clearer aim: namely that the student will be able to carry out a task in a given situation. Although these activities are structured, they still draw on emergent pedagogy and can therefore be thought of as Dogme style role-plays.
Real-life learning: out-of-class and mobile learning
The syllabus forms a link between the student’s real-life experiences and their classroom based learning. It also provides a route for teachers to support the student’s out-of-class learning. Practical Simulations prepare students for real-life tasks; but these tasks can also feedback into the classroom: students can prepare for a phone call or a shopping trip using a Personal Phrasebook to prepare and look up useful phrases before (or even during) the situation. Students can then record the experience (using an MP3 player or other mobile device) and bring the recording to a subsequent class. My World activities can also function in a similar way because they are, effectively, simulations for general conversation. Students could even record (short) conversations to be subsequently used in class. In this way lessons recognize and support out-of-class learning.
The main difference between My World discursive activities and Practical Simulations is the extent to which the student can predict the nature of the dialogue: is it a general conversation that could cover a wide range of topics or is it more tightly determined by a specific goal or by social norms?
Why do this?
An ‘emergent syllabus’ or ‘Dogme textbook’ sounds like an unusual collocation and it begs the question of why. I see a couple of reasons to go through with the process of drafting an emergent syllabus.
- it has helped me to understand what I like and dislike about textbooks and to better understand the value and shortcomings of textbooks
- it has encouraged me to navigate the conundrum of offering structure to the teaching and learning processes, while at the same time keeping the focus on the student and allowing the student to maintain control of his/her own learning process. In short, it allowed me to consider how to structure learning without taking control away from the student
Future developments
This emergent syllabus is just a first draft and it will need some changes and additions after a little while. It is certainly focused on written and spoken work and it is clear that sections addressing reading and listening activities will need to be developed too.
Springboards for learning
This syllabus has been based on my experiences as a language learner and as a language teacher. Recent Mandarin classes in China helped me better understand what lessons are like from the student’s perspective and they gave me an opportunity to link my out-of-class learning with my one-to-one lessons. I frequently brought my own objects, photos, texts, voice recordings and video recordings into lesson and used them either as props for My World activities or to help me prepare for Practical Simulations. I found that the simulations tended to merge into a general discussion about the topic of the simulation; yet these broader conversations were complementary to the Practical Simulations and served to reinforce new lexis and form. The (Dogme) classroom conversations helped me in real-life situations because it reused the same vocabulary (eg words to describe tea) but with a different perspective (what I liked/disliked rather than ordering a cup of tea). I think this demonstrates that textbooks, class materials and lesson plans (even if they are created by the student) are only a starting point for the student’s own learning.
In fact, developing this syllabus has been a learning process for me and I welcome feedback (perhaps as a comment below or by email) on this project to help me continue learning.
