Reading through a book called “Success In English Teaching” by Paul Davies and Eric Pearse, so I’ll be posting about some of the ideas I’m encountering there.

Defining Your Success as and English teacher:

How do you measure success in your classroom?

If your students are passing their exams, even attaining high marks  - does that mean you’re doing well as a teacher? You know, I used to be guilty of thinking that. But how many times have you ever seen students do well on a test – only to freeze up or choke in a real life conversation? I’ve seen it happen many times.

Why?

Beware of Classroom Focus: Test passing or Genuine communication?

The darkside: We work in corporate settings. Our clients often require us to deliver services inside of strict blocks of time – 60 hours, 120 hrs etc.  In most cases, those times are just what you need to finish a course book.  The big question clients ask, thanks to budgets, is: how fast can you train my people? How fast will they learn English? It’s all about results at highspeed.

Sadly, learning a language is rarely high speed. So how do you balance the need to meet client “speed needs” with reality?

The tendency when you’re working inside tight time deadlines is to default to a test passing mode, don’t you think? You focus your classroom work around quickly moving through course book units, and ensuring your students pass the unit end test.  This could be seen as success. The student does well during the unit, and aces the test. You’ve done your job. Right?

I think the answer to that question depends on who you’re responding to. If you’re talking to the HR budgeting manager, then yes – the mission was completed. Student “was trained” successfully and inside the allotted time. But what about if you ask the student? What would the answer be?

I suspect that at the beginning, the student will feel very happy with their “progress.” We all love to have a sense of progress -and I would argue that genuine and rapid feedback is often lacking in ESL programs. But after all the units have been finished, and their exams passed, has the student been able to improve their ability to SPEAK in English? Has fluency and confidence gone up? Are your students better able to write those pesky English emails to clients? Are they able to present an update through a teleconference to their head office with fewer errors? Less fear?

Don’t get me wrong – the course book does hold value for helping students develop their English skills. But beware: high speed/book married environments are not conducive to helping students develop their communicative skills.  Communication – that’s the whole reason why you help students learn another language to begin with. It’s not to help them finish a course book in 65 hours.

Next time: how to combine the dreaded course book with genuine communicative exercises.  (But I wonder…can you serve two masters?)