Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Bitter honey for a language teacher

by Leslie Simonfalvi, director

International Teacher Training

& Development College

Quite a few years ago. a friendly American Foundation sent

some 500 to 800 teenage students to Budapest, Hungary every

summer for 10 years, as part of the Student Ambassador

Programme. The students were hand-picked from all the 50

States and they came in groups of 25 to 30. Every group was

accompanied by 4 to 5 teachers, also hand-picked from all the

States from Alaska to Florida.

The program included London, Rome and Budapest and the

main aim was to stay here for a week, learn as much as

humanly possible about the local, and through that about the

European Culture, and then go home and disseminate what you

have learned in your school, in your town, or in a wider

community.

The programme was extremely popular both with the Guests,

and with the Hosts, in the Budapest leg the students, the

teachers, and the non-teaching staff of the International

Language School Group. We were doing a massive Russian

Teacher Re-Training Programme at the time, and the re-

trainees had a unique chance of meeting decent native speakers

of English in a one-week live-in arrangement. The Guests were

living with the families of the students, the trainees, their

teachers, and the whole staff.

As part of the programme, we took them round in Budapest to

see the sights and learn about the history, the geography, and

many other aspects of the culture of the place, all wrapped up

in tales and anecdotes, and myths to make it more memorable

for the Guests, and more interesting for their then future

listeners back home.

We did the same at more places in Hungary in coach trips and

boat trips to old kings’ seats and places of famous battles. We

even had quiz-shows: about Hungary and Europe for the

Guests, about the USA, Canada, and the Americas for the

Hungarians, and about general knowledge for mixed groups. It

was great fun and I cannot tell how much we all laughed.

As the director of the International Language School Group, I

met all the students and all the teachers. and I had many of the

teachers as visitors in my classes. They were very interested in

how we teach English to our students to make them so

confident communicators in a foreign language. They tried to

relate our techniques and methods to their own, and they also

had many good questions. I guess both parties learned a great

deal from the exchange, and it is most definitely true for me.

There was one buzz-word that came up from practically all

American teachers, and I could not make head or tail of it. It

was the Bloom’s Taxonomy, and, most sincerely, I had never

heard of it. As a teacher and teacher trainer, I was quite well at

home in TESOL, i. e. Teaching English for Speakers of Other

Languages, and I was quite sure that the Bloom’s Taxonomy

had not entered the realm of language teaching.

I knew nothing about it, but the frequency with which the

American teachers mentioned it made it felt like a panacea, the

solution to all the educational world’s problems. The more I

heard about it, the more interested I grew. It was very clear

from the outset that it was not worked out for language

teaching, what is more, with language teaching in mind among

all other subjects.

I had a very strong feeling that the teacher and the teaching are

sort of left out if the Taxonomy starts with Knowledge. It was

not a general criticism since I knew quite well that there are

opposite requirements in learning anything in L1, i. e. the

mother tongue, and learning L2, i. e. a second- or foreign

language, through anything.

In the first case, you ’know’ the medium of communication,

and you learn new information, fact and figures, concepts and

relationships through that medium.

In the second case, you have some ’knowledge’ of the world

around you, and through that knowledge you learn a new

medium for communication, i. e. for the communication of old

knowledge through the new medium, but also some new

knowledge through the new medium.

All in all, the Bloom’s Taxonomy has not entered the field of

TESOL and the main reasons for this are as follows:

it starts late, neglecting steps that are unique for language

learning,

finishes early, without saving knowledge and

understanding for use in higher categories,

shows continuity where there is a gap,

disregards two important types of students,

the artist, who would not willingly spend time for analysis,

and

the language mathematician, who would want to analyse

anything any time before, and quite often instead of

anything else, and

it handles the developmental steps in the affective and

psychomotor domains as distinct from the cognitive.

I had a strong feeling that the Bloom’s Taxonomy, if we manage

to complement it according to the missing links above, might give

us a new insight into what we are doing, to be able to do it better

and develop further. It might also give us a chance to extend our

teaching to groups of students we were not able to teach, or else

were not able to teach well enough before, i. e.

drop-out students,

physically handicapped students,

the LD Child,

the Concrete Child,

mild cases of autism,

students with the Asperger Syndrome,

students with the Pragmatic – Semantic Disorder, and

mild cases of mentally handicapped students.

It is also very important to apply all our new insights in the

teacher training and development.

Because of this I started to analyse our teaching and teacher

training in relation to, among others, the Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Over the years, I have found 14 Problems, i. e. points that are

most definitely problem-spots in language teaching, but may or

may not be problems in the teaching of other subjects.

The solutions to these 14 Problems add up to 14 Theses and the

material related to this fills a DVD. It is enough for a 200-hour

series of workshops, or three semesters in teacher training.

It has been tried in Hungary, Italy, Belgium, Wales, and the

Netherlands, and also in the Africa Project in Islington, London,

UK. It has always worked where teachers and trainers really

wanted to change and were ready to apply a new paradigm.