In the latest post in his series on what distinguishes the very best language teachers, Interchange author Jack C. Richards continues to explore the importance of learner-focused teaching.
It is natural when one first starts teaching to be preoccupied with one’s own performance as a teacher; to try to communicate a sense of confidence, competence, and skill; and to try to create lessons that reflect purpose, order, and planning. It is a period when things are being tried out and tested, when the teacher’s role and identity is being developed, and when many new challenges have to be overcome. Hence studies of teachers in their first year of teaching have revealed a transition from a survival and mastery stage where the teacher’s performance is a central concern, to a later stage where teachers become more focused on their students’ learning and the impact of their teaching on learning (Farrell 2009). The challenge is to make sure that such a transition occurs and that one’s initial teaching experiences do not lead to a style of teaching that sticks, one that provides a comfort zone for the teacher but which fails to provide learners with the opportunity to achieve their full potential as learners (Benson 2001).
Learner-centeredness as a characteristic of expert teachers is seen in some of the research Borg reviews (Borg 2006), where these are the characteristics of expert teachers:
- They are familiar with typical student behaviors.
- They use their knowledge of learners to make predictions about what might happen in the classroom.
- They build their lessons around students’ difficulties.
- They maintain active student involvement.
Senior (2006) suggests that a central aspect of learner-focused teaching is creating a classroom that functions as a community of learners.
It is sometimes forgotten that language classes operate as communities, each with its own collection of shared understandings that have been built up over time. The overall character of each language class is created, developed, and maintained by everyone in the room. (p. 200)
Effective teachers use different strategies to develop a sense of community among their learners, including using group-based activities, by addressing common student interests and concerns, by regularly changing seating arrangements so that students experience working with different classmates, by using humor and other ways of creating a warm and friendly classroom atmosphere, and by recognizing that students have both social as well as learning needs in the classroom.
The ability to personalize one’s teaching is also an important aspect of learner-focused teaching. By personalizing teaching, I mean centering one’s teaching wherever possible on one’s students and their lives, concerns, goals, and interests. This can be achieved by linking the content of lessons to the students’ lives and by involving students in developing or choosing the content of lessons (Dornyei 2001). Take, for example, teaching narratives. Whereas the textbook might provide examples of what narratives are and describe their linguistic and textual features, having students share personal stories among themselves can be a powerful way of promoting genuine communication among students. In sharing accounts of their childhoods and discussing significant events or experiences in their lives, students will be prompted to practice and develop their communicative resources by asking questions, asking for clarification, responding with their experiences, and so on.
Students can also be involved in generating lesson content. For example, they can work in groups to choose suitable topics for essay writing. Instead of using examples from the textbook to present a lesson on idioms, students might compile lists of idioms they have encountered out of class and bring these to class for discussion. Learner-centeredness in teaching thus reflects the view that “language teaching is an educational endeavour which should seek to empower learners by enabling them to assume an informed and self-directive role in the pursuance of their language-related life goals” (Tudor 1996, xii).
You can find all the references for this series of posts here: References and Further Reading
Read all the posts in this series:
Competence and Performance in Language Teaching #1 – Introduction
Competence and Performance #2 – The language proficiency factor
Competence and Performance #3 – The role of content knowledge (i)
Competence and Performance #4 – The role of content knowledge (ii)
Competence and Performance #5 – Teaching skills
Competence and Performance #6 – Contextual Knowledge
Competence and Performance #7 – The language teacher’s identity
Competence and Performance #8 – Learner-focused teaching (i)
Competence and Performance #9 – Learner-focused teaching (ii)
Competence and Performance #10 – Pedagogical reasoning skills
Competence and Performance #11 – Theorizing from practice
Competence and Performance #12 – Membership of a community of practice
Competence and Performance #13 – Professionalism