【TESOL】Teaching and Learning in multicultural classroom settings

by Mutsuko Takahashi

Teaching and learning are the core elements of education.

How can we define those elements?

Introduction

We can define those elements: teaching is to give knowledge while learning is to receive knowledge. However, this definition will not fully succeed in reconciling or finding a way to express all meanings of teaching and learning.

How teachers teach and how students learn have always been controversial issues, because both elements will be learned and improved through trial and error.

For example, it is easy for us to simply raise an ideal education model, but it wouldn't go beyond the range of utopian thought. Not only being ideal, but it has to be practical.

By clarifying the link between learning and teaching, and the relationship between individual and group, the purpose of this article is to answer the question of 1) what I have learned about myself as a leaner during the first week of the TESOL course by considering other people and factor, 2) what I have learned about one's learning process and about learning in general, 3) how I will apply this learning to my teaching, and 4) what questions are left with me.

I will approach these issues as a language learner, and also as an educator to seek the way toward our pedagogical goal which we should aim. In this article, I will speculate on how we should apply our learning experience to our teaching, especially for a language learning group in multicultural settings.

Background

I believe that the methodology of education has been dramatically improving in decades. However, speaking of my personal experience in Japan, for example, conventional English education in Japan until just a decade ago was to read English sentences and translated them into Japanese, and to memorize grammatical rules, and to analyze pronunciation in phonological viewpoint.

In order to survive in a competitive society of meritocracy, such a conventional style was inevitable to pass the entrance examination for higher educations; however, it wasn't effective to improve the practical language skills. I want students to enjoy learning about foreign culture and communication with foreign people through language learning. The TESOL course is a very practical course for teachers to teach their students practical English.

The first question: What have I learned about myself as a leaner during the first week of the TESOL course by considering other people and factor?

To answer the first question, I really confirmed that practical language learning can be cultivated by collaborative learning, during the first week of this course. The article, "Learners are Individuals" emphasizes the importance of knowing a difference between individuals; however, the difference between individuals should be considered in their connection with society, the community, or a group to which they belong.

The second question: What I have learned about one's learning process and about learning in general?

As for the second question, studying in a group, I have found that environmental factors will affect the learners.Considering other people and factors (my classmates, my trainers, the materials, the subject matter the environment) in this perspective, I think that the individual learner can be enormously influential to others. I have learned about how people learn.

Sharing the knowledge with other participants, I have learned that the relationship between individual knowledge and community is interrelated to each other and makes endless cycle, in which social knowledge cultivates individual skills, and individual knowledge gained by collaborative learning can be shared to society. In this sense, our classroom is the area of exchange of knowledge which is not only for an individual but for society at large. In fact, what I have learned through this course so far is that environmental factors, my classmates and trainers, are the mirror to reflect myself. Observing other participants' teaching, I could reflect myself and learn the key elements to improve my teaching. This is what I learned about myself during the first week, as a learner as an individual person and a member of the group.

Working on assignments during the first week, I also found that this idea of the group in collaborative learning could relate to one of our reading materials, Weber's "The Group". After reading both of essays: Weber's "The Group" and Sheerin's "Learners are Individuals", I tried to think about an individual in the light of the concept of a group. I was concerned about the issue which is inherent in any type of group; overvaluing social constructionist label in collaborative learning might have a risk to deny creative knowledge of an individual. Social knowledge can be associated to meritocracy, and is supported by social order and is embedded in hierarchical relations of power. For this reason, collaborative learning involves a risk of impairing difference between individuals and their individuality. An individual idea can be compromised by parochialism and narrow perspective affected by common sense. The biggest difference of a language learning group from other groups is that the group is built on multicultural settings.

The third question: How I will apply this learning to my teaching?

In order to approach the third question, "how will I apply this learning to my teaching?", I would pose a question. In the group of which students have various cultural backgrounds like ESL, how can ethnic minority, for example, maintain his/her autonomous thought without being pushed to the periphery? To solve this issue, I think that one of our pedagogical tasks is to create a safe environment in the classroom, in which a teacher can encourage his/her students to take the necessary risks for learning independently; and this can be the answer to the third question. Weber emphasizes the importance of the role of leadership in his article, "The Group". As a person who assumes leadership, a teacher has a role to lead students into a desirable direction. Without being impaired by a group, uniqueness of a group must be created by the individuality of each student. Thus, an individual can contribute to social knowledge, and it is a productive form of collaborative learning that we should aim.

The article entitled "Learners are Individual" puts emphasis on the difference between individuals in terms of psychological differences, study habits, personality differences, motivation, and purpose. It is very interesting that the TESOL course is also focused on cognitive factor in addition to social factor, whereas conventional teaching and learning is social but is not cognitive. As each student is different, a group consisted of diverse personalities might have a unique personality.

As another of our important pedagogical task which I have considered during the first week, I would raise the issue of how we can manage students' motivation. While wanting to learn is originally a natural human instinct, the desire can be enormously enhanced by environmental elements. A teacher is a part of environmental elements for students, and this potential motive can be more drawable by a teacher. Creating an environment that can satisfy learners' desire is an essential element for students' motivation. More precisely, a teacher should provide a framework of which students can make a self-evaluation, so that students can know what they have understood and what they can do. To support their autonomy of the individual, a teacher should present a mutual learning environment where teachers can also learn by teaching their students.

The final question: What questions are left with me?

To conclude this essay, I would discuss the issue of error which is mentioned at the end of the article, "Learners are individuals", and this will be an answer to the final question. It is controversial how far a teacher should correct the error of his/her students. This controversial issue is suggested in our TESOL course material, Ray Clark's "Error Correction Techniques" . When we put more emphasis on students' communication skills, grammatical and lexical elements are a superficial failure which wouldn't affect their communication capability.

In fact, according to the linguistic theory of paralanguage, our linguistic communication is consisted by a small amount of verbal information and a great amount of non-verbal information, in which people will understand the entire message with a few percents of the literal language information. As a possible answer, the issue of the error correction might rely on "different purpose" of students, which is listed in the article, "Learners are Individual" as one of the differences of students. I think the purpose will remarkably be different between an English user and an English learner; English users try to achieve communication whereas English learners aspire for correctness. Hence, as well as other differences, psychological, habitual, personal and motivational differences, it is very important for teachers to know what their students need.