Theoretical Development of Writing Skills in ELT
2.11 Role of a Teacher
2) The teacher as organiser (classroom manager) of a range of activities,
3) The teacher as assessor. Obviously the ‘examiner’ role is one of our traditional functions, but Harmer extends it to include the importance of giving regular feedback, as well just correction and grading,
4) The teacher as participant (co-communicator) in an organised activity such as debate or role play,
5) The teacher as resource (consultant, advisor), most obviously as a language informant.
Littlewood points out that these various roles can be put together under the
‘umbrella’ idea of the teacher as facilitator of learning.
Teachers essentially have two major roles in the classroom:
1) To create the conditions under which learning can take place: the social side of teaching;
2) To impart, by a variety of means, knowledge to their learners: the task-oriented side of learning.
The first he terms the ‘enabling’ or management function and the second the instructional function. One function of teacher’s management role is to motivate the de- motivated learners and to nurture the motivated ones to the task of learning a foreign language. Harmer (2001, pp. 200-204) suggests that the teacher can achieve these in the following ways:
1) Adopting a positive attitude towards the learners. Praise and encouragement for positive efforts by the learners will help to keep motivation up,
2) Giving pupils meaningful, relevant and interesting tasks to do,
3) Maintaining discipline to the extent that a reasonable working atmosphere (an atmosphere of calm and organization) is established,
4) Being motivated and interested themselves,
5) Involving the learners more actively in the classroom process in activities that demand inter-student communication and co-operative efforts on their part (i.e.
group work and simulations),
6) Introducing learners to the concept of self-appraisal and self-evaluation through reports and discussions,
7) Giving positive feedback on written assignments, 8) Encouraging pride in achievement.
The teacher needs to give more responsibility to the learners for deciding the agenda for learning and the best way to go about it. Barnes distinguishes between two basic types of teachers: Transmission teachers and Interpretation teachers. The later comes close to the idea of teacher presumed in CLT. An interpretation teacher disperses responsibility for learning among the learners, and maintains control by persuasion and appeal to the better judgement of the learners. Learners develop their knowledge and skill of the subject and at the same time refine their personality. Here understanding is considered the criterion of the teacher’s success. Barnes mentions some more roles of a teacher:
The teacher is an evaluator of learners’ efforts and contributions to the teaching-learning process,
The teacher is a guide in the classroom,
The teacher is a resource of knowledge and how to acquire it.
The teacher is an organizer of classroom activities. He sets up learning tasks and assists the learners in doing these activities.
The methods of what Wright calls ‘enquiry-centred learning’ can also be applied by the teacher in the CLT classroom. In this approach the process of learning is considered to be equally important as the content of learning. The fundamental idea is that students will learn more when they are provided with opportunities to participate in discovering ideas for themselves. This approach implies new roles for the teacher. S/He is primarily a facilitator. S/He sets up activities and acts as a guide to the process of discovery and understanding. The teacher is also an assessor, but in this respect his duty is only helping to clarify concepts and knowledge where it seems to be appropriate. In this approach learners’ own ideas and beliefs are taken into consideration and the teacher tries to refashion it when necessary.
The teacher should act in the classroom as a facilitator of the process of communication between the learners, their tasks, and the data to which the various tasks are directed. In fact, the teacher is pushed into the background. Nonetheless, the teacher’s potential has to be utilized to the full extent. The teacher joins in without dominating the scene. The teacher may initiate the proceedings of language activities, but once the activity is in progress, he will not intervene in it (Littlewood, 1981, p. 19).
Byrnes offered four-stage diagram presenting teachers’ and learners’
contributions. In the A and B stages of the diagram, the teacher provides accuracy focused linguistic knowledge, but in stages C and D, teachers and learners share knowledge and experience etc. Byrne proposes five approaches to classroom learning, which take into account aspects of autonomous learning. They are:
1. Exploiting the classroom as a social setting in its own right:
a) establishing and developing inter-personal relationships within the class;
b) discussing and exchanging ideas and information across the class (formally or informally as the occasion demands). This is one of the areas where the teacher can play an invaluable role as a facilitator and participant.
2. Bringing the outside world into the classroom. There are many things one does outside the classroom in one’s daily life, which can be done naturally with great profit in the classroom. One great advantage of it is that the learners immediately recognize it as
‘real’. The outside world is brought into the classroom by:
a) planning games of different types that unobtrusively generate enough language, b) doing tasks that involve some kind of problem solving;
c) discussing and investigating topics of real educational value.
3. Stimulating the outside world in the classroom in two ways. The ways are:
a) role-play activities;
b) simulations.
4. Escaping from the classroom on an imaginative level through such activities as : a) story telling;
b) using speculative activities, that is, activities that set the learners to give their own ideas about, for example, situations presented visually or verbally;
c) using dramatic activities i.e. activities which involve some form of extended role play and require the learners to develop the settings themselves (and therefore use language in the process).
5. Getting out of the classroom into the outside world through activities generated and linked together by a project, such as producing a class newspaper or magazine:
Not all these activities will take place outside the classroom, but they do provide opportunities for interviewing and investigation in real life settings. Importantly activities may be inter-linguistic; cross-culture and of a kind that integrates all four skills. Project work is an interesting activity; it provides opportunities for combining all five approaches.
The teacher has two main roles. The first role is to facilitate the communication process between all participants in the classroom, and between these participants and the various activities and texts. The second role is to act as an independent participant within
the teaching-learning group (Littlewood, 1981, p. 19). These roles imply a set of secondary roles for the teacher; first, as an organiser of resources and as a resource himself, second, as a guide within the classroom procedures and activities. A third role for the teacher is that of researcher and learner, with much to contribute in terms of appropriate knowledge and abilities, actual and observed experience of the nature of learning and organisational capacities.
According to Richards and Rodgers (1986, p. 69) other roles assumed for teachers are needs analyst, counsellor and group process manager.
i) Needs Analyst: CLT requires the teacher to determine and respond to the language needs of the learners. The teacher may do it formally through administering a needs assessment instrument or personally through one to one sessions with students. Such needs assessments allow the teacher to plan group and individual instruction that responds to the learners needs.
ii) Counsellor: In the role of a counsellor, the teacher is expected to exemplify an effective communicator seeking to maximize the meshing of speaker intention and hearer interpretation, through the use of paraphrase, confirmation, and feedback (Richards and Rodgers, 1986, p. 69).
iii) Group Process manager: CLT procedures encourage student –centred classroom and therefore often require teachers to acquire less teacher-centred classroom management skills. The teacher assumes responsibility to organize the classroom as a setting for communication and communicative activities. At the end of group activities, the teacher conducts the debriefing of the activity, shows other options and extensions and helps groups in self-correction discussion.
The teacher must provide the pupils with sufficient exposure to the target language, and he must motivate and encourage them to communicate through it. When learners fail to meet the demands of a situation, the teacher can offer suggestions and recommendations, and supply the requisite vocabulary or grammatical item. He settles any kind of disagreement among the learners. He is a constant source of guidance in the classroom, and the students can consult him when they face any kind of difficulty. His unthreatening and friendly presence in the classroom may be an important psychological support for those learners who find it hard to develop independence. At the initial stages errors of form are tolerated, and seen as a natural outcome of the development of communicative skills. While learners are performing, the teacher can monitor their efficiency and deficiency. He can take their weaknesses as signs of learning needs which he must return to for later commentary and drill. He may do it through more controlled pre-communicative activities.
In some cases the teacher may decide to exercise immediate influence over the language used. Littlewood (1981, p. 19) maintains that a teacher should “...discourage learners from resorting to their mother tongue in moments of difficulty”. Furthermore, a particular error may be so crucial that the teacher may need to interrupt the learner and correct it immediately; otherwise it may get fixed in the learner’s memory. However, in only one of these roles the teacher is the traditional dominator of the classroom interaction. Substantially the teacher has no direct role in the activity. He can act as a ‘co- communicator’ without being dominant which allows him to provide guidance and stimuli from inside the activity. Moreover, he must suppress or subdue any desire or impulse to intervene at every moment of faltering or doubt or at every false start. These are necessary outcome of the students’ urge and effort to express meaning which never before they may have come across in the target language.
CLT ensures more active learner contribution and participation to the learning process. It discards the conventional role of the teacher and encourages him to act as a facilitator of the learning process. He may need to assume a variety of specific roles, individually or at the same time. Littlewood (1981, p. 19) summarises these under six points:
1) As general overseer of students’ learning, his/her aim should be to coordinate the activities in such a way that they form a systematic and consistent progression, leading towards more efficient communicative competency and skill.
2) As classroom manager, his responsibility is to group activities into ‘lessons’ and to make sure that these are properly organised at the practical level. Here s/he decides on his/her own role within each particular activity
3) Sometimes he may have to perform the formal and more traditional role of language instructor. S/He will provide new language items, directly control the learners’ performance, evaluate and correct it immediately, and so on.
4) Generally he will not interpose or intrude after initiating an activity, and will allow students to learn through independent activity.
5) While an independent activity is in progress, he should make himself available as consultant or adviser, and help where necessary. He may also walk about the classroom in order to monitor the strengths and weaknesses of the learners, and plan future learning activities on the basis of his observation.
Sometimes he needs to participate in an activity as ‘co-communicator’ with the learners. In this role, he can stimulate and present new language, but must not take the main initiative for learning away from the learners.