Educational theory and course and materials design: beyond language learning

Dr Sue Wharton

We are thinking about:

How people learnWhat (language) education is forWhat values we teach

And the implications of all this for course and materials design.

Ideas about how people learnA systems view of teaching and learning (all based on Clarke 2003, 2007).

Learning is change; the general principles governing change apply.

Teachers can’t make people learn, but they can help create conditions for learning.

Most learning takes place on the edges of perception and consciousness.

Learning interactions are not entirely predictable, so we need to include a budget of flexibility in our plans.

All aspects of the educational environment have implications for learning.

Learning is change over time through engagement in activity.

Two questions:

Do you agree with (some of) the above statements?

If you do, what difference does it make/ should it make to courses and materials which you design?

One debate about how people learn: processes and products

Littlewood 2009: Some key processes which impact on learning

Affective processes: learning facilitated by self confidence but inhibited by anxiety

Cognitive processes: learning facilitated by capacity to infer, but inhibited by premature closure

Social processes: learning facilitated by group cohesion, but inhibited by social laziness

Communication processes: learning facilitated by comprehension, but inhibited if one person dominates turn taking.

Research into how teachers integrate process and product dimensions into their course development

Wette 2010: Investigated 7 teachers working in different contexts – varied in level of constraintConcluded that all teachers had some emphasis on the importance of processes, but none followed a textbook ‘process approach’.

Ideas about what education is for: Do you believe that (language) education should:

• Focus on language knowledge above all else• Reflect the values of the state• Increase learners’ knowledge of target language culture(s)• Raise learners’ self esteem• Help students to become autonomous learners• Differentiate between more able and less able students• Develop learners’ intercultural competence• Focus on skills of language use• Be based on theories of second language acquisition• Equip learners for the workplace• Equip learners for further academic study

What about other stakeholders’ views on what education is for?

Bialostock 2002: metaphors for literacy expressed by white, middle-class parents in the USA

• I savoured every page of that book• We’ll be going away on vacation, and I’m bringing a beefy book to get

through• I would think of digesting at least five or six really good novels minimum a

year

• Reading is something that’s just part of me• Reading will be a piece of what he has• I tell my husband all the time, he’s missing something because he doesn’t

read books • Books have enriched our kids’ lives• Our family may not have a lot of money but we’re wealthy with books• It’s just so sad when a child doesn’t have any books or aren’t read to. They

have such impoverished lives.

What values do we teach?

How about these:

Or these?

What values do we teach?

Note the phrasing do we teach – because it happens whether we plan it or not.

Pioneering article by Littlejohn & Windeatt 1989 on ‘the hidden curriculum’ in language teaching materials.

A principled approach to investigating values in teaching: Critical Pedagogy.

Critical pedagogy in language education• Critical pedagogy is associated with consciousness raising and

emancipation.

• Aimed at reform in the interests of oppressed groups

• Especially important when English is taught in ‘periphery’ countries?

• Critical analysis can be applied to language teaching materials

• “What critical pedagogues are after is the transformation of society through education, including language teaching” (Akbari 2008, p276).

• Language education has sometimes been seen as less relevant for this – a view which Akbari challenges.

Approaches to critical pedagogy in language teaching materials

• Teacher and student generated materials (e.g. Crooks 2010).

• A critical approach to existing materials (e.g. Cots 2006)

Crooks 2010: The importance of teacher and student generated materials for critical pedagogy

Follows some principles that critical pedagogy needs to:

• Be based on students’ own cultural reality• Regard learners’ knowledge as a resource to be utilised• Deal with students’ real life concerns• Make all learners aware of issues faced by marginalised

groups

Explores the internet and social networking as an opportunity for teacher and student generated materials.

Cots 2006: Shows how reading passages can be taught in both non-critical and critical ways – see ‘Amish’ example.

Also see Asghar, Jabreel (2010) Critical investigation into a textbook for actual and potential uses in Pakistani higher secondary education. Unpublished Ed.D. thesis, University of Warwick

However valuable, critical pedagogy is not without problems:

• Any emancipatory perspective presupposes values which cannot be agreed upon universally or permanently. If we fight for something we are always working against someone else’s interests and there are difficulties in creating a robustly moral perspective that will be seen as better by everyone.

Brown & Jones 2001: 4