Native Speaker TESOL Teacher’s Talk:
Examining the Unexamined
Catherine Doherty
Parlo Singh
Queensland University
of Technology Griffith University
[email protected] [email protected]
Abstract
In this paper we provide a critical analysis of “native–speaker” TESOL teachers’ classroom talk and interview data collected from English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs in an Australian university to move beyond commonsense ideas of how their talk might resource the language classroom. Using the sociolinguistic concept of “frame”, we analyse episodes of talk from the classroom practices of two teachers. We examine the complexity of layered meanings produced as the teachers teach and simultaneously provide linguistic instruction on the language that is vicariously produced in their talk or the activity. We propose that unexamined, native speaker teacher talk, although well-intentioned, can also carry risks that might make it problematic for the language learner. The two extracts reveal two potential problems—the native-speaker’s agility in con/textual shifts, and the native-native-speaker’s capacity to cumulatively rephrase classroom questions and add unnecessary syntactic complexity that was not in the initial question.
Key Words: native-speaker, pedagogy, classroom discourse, language learning, frame
INTRODUCTION
Since the 1980s, Australia’s higher education sector has pursued a variety of policies to export its educational products to international markets, in particular, to the South East Asian nations in its geographic region. The success of these efforts has produced a marked change in the demographics of the Australian university student body, with some faculties and universities now enrolling more than 30% of their intake as full-fee paying international students (DEST, 2006). The demand for English language teaching in the Australian university thus continues to grow in order to service and support these transnational students. “International colleges” in Australian universities offer ESL (English as second language), EAP (English for academic purposes) and ESP (English for specific purposes) programs at various levels. International students can spend a year or more in such preparatory programs before commencing their mainstream studies.
Australia has thus benefited from its location as the major English-speaking educational provider in the Asia Pacific region, supplying TESOL practitioners, resourced with a marketable accent1, “authenticity” and the communicative competence of “native speakers.” We use the term “native speaker” to mean those for whom the target language is their first or “mother” tongue. However, we use it in quotation marks to signal both its problematic status as a
1
In the hierarchy of Englishes, Australian English comes third after North American (US), and British English, in terms of its desirability and educational consumption by international students. This hierarchy is not static but repeatedly contested.
theoretical concept, and also its everyday usage and the commonsense that accompanies this idea.
The expertise of the “native speaker” tends to come as naturalised, inarticulate knowledge, without a specialist metalanguage to explain itself. The “native-speaker” teacher also typically comes without the linguistic expertise to code-switch in and out of the learner’s first language for instructional purposes. We would also suggest that many “native-speaker” teachers of English also do not have intercultural knowledge about the life-worlds of international students from South East Asia (see also Gao, Zhao, & Cheng, 2007). This does not stop Australia exporting keen young travellers to all sorts of places to “teach English.” It also does not stop nations across Asia advertising and recruiting “native-speakers” to be teachers in their countries. Both sides of this trade thus buy into a commonsense ideology that the “native-speaker” makes a good language teacher. Both sides of the equation seem eager to exploit each other.
In this paper, we critically examine the classroom talk of “native speaking” teachers to see how their perceived “value-addedness” is performed, for better and for worse. Specifically, we analyse the practice of two “native speaker” teachers who are doing routine vocabulary and grammar work, but through different modes of teacher talk. We are interested in how, through their talk, these “native speaker” teachers resource the classroom with their deep, nuanced and locally contextualised knowledge of the language, and whether their design makes that resource available to their language learners. To this end we are interested in examining the often unexamined practice of “native speaker” language teaching.
THE EMPIRICAL STUDY
The data for this study were collected in EAP, Bridging and Foundation programs offered to international fee-paying students at an Australian university in 2002. These programs are typically conducted in commercial “international” arms of the universities, with staff employed under different industrial awards, the majority on casual contracts to hedge commercial risk. Nine teachers across these programs were interviewed using a semi-structured format for approximately one hour before classroom observations commenced. Of the nine teachers observed, only two did not have postgraduate professional qualifications beyond their initial teaching qualification. All nine had substantial cross-sectoral teaching experience, ranging from 7 to 28 years. Five of the teachers had also taught overseas.
A series of three, four or five lessons by each teacher were videotaped. A sample of students from each observed class were interviewed in groups after completion of the observations; and the teachers were interviewed within a month of the observations using a “stimulated recall” method (Dunkin, Welch, Merritt, Phillips, & Craven, 1998; Keith, 1988; McMeniman, Cumming, Wilson, Stevenson, & Sim, 2000; Meade & McMeniman, 1992) to make explicit their thinking behind particular episodes of video-taped classroom activities.
ANALYSING TEACHER’S TALK
—A THEORETICAL OVERVIEW
The videoed classroom lessons were then analysed as a sequence of activity structures using Lemke’s (1993) typology of classroom interactions to give an overview of the selected pedagogy and enacted curriculum unfolding across each lesson. Lemke sorts activity types firstly into a range of stages: pre-lesson activities, getting started, preliminary activities, diagnostic activities, main lesson activities, and interpolated activities. Within each of these stages, he describes a number of possible activity types. Of particular relevance here are his “triadic dialogue” and “teacher exposition” activity types in the main lesson stage, as described further below.
From the overviews of activity, selections of classroom interaction were transcribed from audio tape and video tape. For this paper, we selected episodes of classroom talk from two classrooms (Classrooms A & B) which we believe warranted further close and comparative examination—the first for its topical complexity and the second because of the discomfort it caused the students. We are interested in: the design behind the two teachers’ talk; how their talk positioned the students and allowed them to participate; and the choice of instructional subject matter. Our intention is to analyse these episodes of TESOL classroom practice in order to generate insight and reflection. We do not question the fact that these teachers acted with the best of intentions. Our analysis raises for consideration what often remains unexamined inside educational institutions, that is, their “commonsensical” practices and “invisible semiosis” (Hasan
2002)2 that invoke and sustain forms of classroom talk that may not serve the educational and English language needs of students.
To this end, we present and analyse two classroom vignettes to explore three aspects of the native-speaker teachers’ talk. Firstly, we examine the complexity of layered communicative frames produced as the teachers provide linguistic instruction on language that is vicariously produced in their talk. By “vicarious” we mean language that is first produced in a teacher’s explanations of other matter, but then becomes a teaching point in itself. Secondly, we examine the teacher/student subject positions constituted by the design of the classroom talk. Thirdly we examine the meanings that get circulated and dignified in these activities.
Questioning “Native Speaker” Classroom Talk
The current enthusiasm for naïve versions of communicative pedagogy (Nunan, 2003) or language immersion has widely legitimated the “native speaker” as expert TESOL practitioner:
the insistence on the superiority of the native speaker facilitated the development of what is now a massive worldwide industry: the training and deployment of teachers and curriculum developers all over the world. Insistence on the use of the target language as the medium of instruction ... means that a qualified native speaker teacher can be deployed
2
Hasan (2001) uses this term to refer to the unexamined talk between parents and children. For the purposes of this paper we have appropriated this term to analyse classroom talk between Western teacher and Asian international student.
anywhere without necessarily knowing the language or culture of his or her students (Ellis, 2002, pp. 72-73).
Prescriptive linguistic traditions have held the “native speaker” up as the model of proficiency to which language learners should aspire. However, the associated practice of privileging “native speakers” as teachers is being critiqued and problematised in a growing literature that takes account of social, political and cultural processes of the twenty first century.
As the demand for English as the global lingua franca has increased, English has been appropriated and indigenised in a variety of new settings (see Kachru, 1996; Widdowson, 1994), in which the first language “native speaker” has a significantly reduced presence, stake or relevance. Phillipson (1992) has written about the “native speaker fallacy” to refer to the mistaken commonsense of equating “native speaker” proficiency with the ability to teach the language, and the consequent undervaluing of the non-native speaking teacher. Braine’s collection (1999) offers the perspectives of non-native speaking teachers of English as a second language (ESL), with personal narratives, their socio-political concerns, and implications for teacher education. Davies (2003) outlines some of the myths associated with the native and non-native speaker distinction. Ellis (2002), in her portrait of three non-native teachers of ESL in Australia, illustrates how their experiences as language learners and “their linguistic, metalinguistic and metacultural skills” (p.100) enrich their pedagogy as language teachers. In addition¸ Gao et al. (2007, p. 148) suggest that bilingual teachers in EFL contexts are well positioned to
focus on the cultural identity changes of learners, particularly as these shifts in identity may be “related to transformations of the national or regional identity” and “might also be connected to the modernization or globalization process these countries are experiencing.” This growing body of literature disrupts commonsense claims about the “native speaker’s” superior value as language teacher.
Classic classroom discourse studies such as those undertaken by Cazden, (1988; 2001), Mehan (1979) and Edwards and Westgate (1994) pay meticulous attention to the fine-grained detail of selected episodes of spoken interaction in such classrooms to reveal the implications of both routine patterning and diversity. We apply a similar methodological spotlight to episodes of TESOL classroom talk in a university setting. We argue that university based TESOL classroom practices need to be exposed to the same level of critical scrutiny and inquiry as all classroom practices, with the emphasis firmly placed on delivering quality learning outcomes. TESOL classroom practices need to be moved from the margins to the mainstream, so that the large cohort of Asian international students enrolled in Australian universities and participating in such programs gain the quality learning outcomes that they deserve and pay for.
As described above, the first analysis of each class in this study involved identifying the sequence of activity structures (Lemke 1993) employed across the 90-120 minutes of each class. In the case of Teacher A this proved difficult, because this teacher talked most of the time. The stream of talk in the case of Teacher A was sprinkled with occasional brief questions, often only yes/no question tags, and with ambivalent wait times afterwards. As an observer and probably
as a student as well, it was difficult to tell whether the question required a response or was intended to be rhetorical. Thus by Lemke’s activity types, the vast majority of her classes would be coded as “teacher exposition.”
By contrast, Teacher B’s classroom lessons were characterised by what Lemke (1993) refers to as “triadic dialogue” but other classroom discourse analysts (Cazden, 1988; Mehan, 1979; Edwards & Westgate, 1994) would term “IRE” (initiation, response and evaluation). This is the common classroom talk pattern using three parts: the teacher initiates with a question, a student responds, and then the teacher gives an evaluation of the student response. Student responses to the IRE structure in Classroom B were very short, often limited to one word responses. However, in both of these teachers’ lessons there seemed to be much more going on than is captured by the activity descriptions of “teacher exposition” or “triadic dialogue.” In the next section, we review literature around the concept of “frame” in order to develop an analytic tool-kit to unpack the complex dynamics of interaction within these two classrooms.
Framing “Native Speaker” Classroom Talk
“Frame” as a feature of spoken discourse and as a concept in literary theory, ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics has a long and complex heritage (McLachlan & Reid, 1994). Following Bateson (1973), the concept of frame captures that sense-making of “what is it that’s going on here” (Goffman, 1974, p. 8), its premises, and the interpretation of “context” which underpins any interaction. A frame offers a participant a “structure of expectations” (Tannen, 1993, p. 53)
that assists in understanding how to read any event, and what formulaic roles are invoked—so finding out that an utterance was intended as “a joke” will radically alter how the interaction is construed. There can be frames within frames whereby a subset of the interaction can be “bracketed” as a separate embedded episode (Goffman, 1974). For example, an interval in a play can be inserted between parts of the play proper. Similarly, everyday talk can incorporate a collage of frames which a “competent” person would interpret and navigate unproblematically. Linguistic and non-linguistic cues can help indicate which of the multiple embedded frames a speaker is orienting to at a particular time (Tannen, 1993).
Classroom discourse relies heavily on frames within frames. Green, Weade and Graham (1988) offer a useful analytic heuristic in their “divergence map” with which to graph the “social and instructional demands” and “patterns of communication” (p.11) in their sociolinguistic ethnography of lesson variation. This mapping makes evident the different “studenting” (p.24) or expectations of student participation thus enabled. By tracing thematic development between interactional moves, and where potential and realised divergence occurred, they could illustrate “seismic” (p.29) activity in lesson structure where topics (and frames) shift backwards and forwards. Cues to such divergences are not necessarily verbal. In her analysis of “radical visible pedagogy,” Bourne (2003) describes how an effective teacher uses her own bodily disposition, gesture and spatial placement to cue shifts in the interactional frames that define “what’s going on,” and how the layered cues render a productive
redundancy, that is, a cue that cannot be missed given its many encodings.
In the particular case of the second language classroom, Willis (1992, p. 163) distinguishes between the necessary inner and outer discourse, the former being “the target forms of the language that the teacher has selected as learning goals,” and the latter being “the framework of the lesson, the language used to socialize, organize, explain and check, and generally to enable the pedagogic activities to take place.” She points out that the inner can only be in the target language (that is, L2 for the learner), while outer discourse could well be in the learner’s first language. With the native-speaker teacher, however, this choice is typically not available. By distributing transcribed classroom talk into the two “outer”/“inner” columns with finer grained distinctions within the “inner,” Willis illustrates how “there is a very definite lack of propositional coherence” (p. 165) across their boundary. The semantic intent of the discourse channels differs—the outer means what it says, the inner is taken more as a heuristic conduit for forms to master. She then raises the question, “how do students tell inner from outer?” (p.174), and describes “boundary exchanges” and other paralinguistic markers/cues that assist in such navigation of the combined discourses.
Such notions of shifts and tracks of discourse can be encapsulated in Hasan’s (2000, 2001) treatment of “con/textual
shift,” being “a shift in the text’s design … (and) by virtue of the
dialectic of context and text, there is a shift in the context as well, in the sense that the interactants are no longer engaged in the activity which they were performing previously” (Hasan, 2000, p.29). Rather
than a shift being a discontinuous break, Hasan highlights the point that “quite often the talk that is indicative of the con/textual reclassification ends up playing a part in the management of whatever discourse was in process previously: the shift thus becomes a sub-text to an ongoing text” (Hasan 2000, p.30).
This discussion has highlighted the complex features of everyday talk, classroom talk, and ESL classroom talk with its frequent use of frames within frames; and inner and outer discourse structures. The analytical concepts of frame and con/textual shift inform the analyses below, and more importantly, our reading of the cues and moves across frames for orienting learners to the teachers’ purpose in the two classrooms.
DATA ANALYSIS: EMPIRICAL CASE STUDIES
Unexamined Pedagogy: Teacher A
The teacher in this first vignette had a Diploma in Teaching with no formal qualification in language teaching, but experience working in an academic support role in two other countries. “Teacher A” was generous with her time in and out of class to help students meet the university entrance requirements (comparable to an IELTS3 overall score of 6.0) for their 12-week course. The 26 students in the class came from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Thailand, East
3
IELTS is the International English Language Testing System, the language proficiency test most widely used for the purposes of entrance to Australian universities.
Timor and Columbia, many with previous academic qualifications in engineering, IT, law and health.
The selected activity was a whole class activity around the correction of particular grammar and vocabulary points that arose from previous student writing. The topics of these student-generated texts stem from previous class work on non-verbal communication, particularly when giving oral presentations in the Australian university setting. Students had each been supplied with a photocopied sheet with the selected sentences for correction reproduced out of context. Thus the activity seemed designed to be an interactive discussion exploring these corrections.
The most noticeable feature of Teacher A’s teaching practice was that she spoke in a declamatory style with exaggerated articulation and constant theatrical hand and face gestures, in short, in a type of Foreigner Talk. Secondly, Teacher A talked for the vast majority of the time. The class was flooded in her “native speaker” English. Students were immersed in this seemingly rich resource. As an example, the raw transcript of part of the selected episode reads as follows. The italicised words are read from the classroom exercise, or offered as additional examples. If the teacher were a non-native speaker sharing L1 with the students, these italicised words would be in the target L2, while the other words could be in L1:
T: No, no. Commun—yeah, no, no, no. Right. It really should be it’s a general term, isn’t it? It’s a collective term like
information and furniture. It shouldn’t have an “s.” Okay. It
interfere in a conversation, mightn’t you? Okay? But you can
also interfere with the verbal communication that is going on at the moment. Interfere with the verbal communication. I’d take the “s” off. Okay? Remember I said that it’s a collective term, like information, like furniture, vocabulary. Okay? So we’ll take the “s” off. Unless we’re talking about the specific
communications. Okay? Generally, you’ve got an ongoing
process—okay—of feedback—of messages and then you might use an “s” on it but generally I would rather you did not use an “s.” Okay? May also interfere with the verbal communication
and distort its real meaning. Now, do you remember I had that
on the board the other day?
The following analysis takes a larger piece of Teacher A’s well-intentioned “native-speaker” talk, including the data above, and breaks it down into strips in terms of its frame for “what is going on here,” with brief descriptions to distinguish the multiple frames operating and to locate the con/textual shifts. The analysis also describes from the video recording how she marked or cued the boundary shifts between frames in other ways. However, there were minimal openings offered to students, often limited to yes/no answers, or one word responses. The quietness of their answers further erodes these contributions, reinforcing the students’ constrained role in this classroom.
Table 1
Classroom A Extract
Strip Text Framing—what’s
going on here? Teacher’s paralinguistic cuing/shift marker at end of strip
1 Okay. Let’s go quickly now through these corrections. Okay,
Class directions Puts on glasses and picks up sheet. 2 Non-verbal communication
may also interfere—
Reading/quoting from worksheet
Looks up and addresses class. 3 There’s a special preposition
that goes in there with “interfere”
Class instruction Lifts chin, scans room, fixes on student. 4 [name], do you know what it
is?
Student elicit Looks back at text, hand gesture. 5 Let’s think about it. Class direction No change 6 Think out loud Student direction No change 7 Non-verbal communication
may also interfere the verbal communications.
Reading/quoting from worksheet
Stops reading and fixes gaze on student.
8 STUDENT: [indistinct]
9 Individually, yes Responding to student’s question
No change
10 STUDENT:
[indistinct] …communications.
Shakes head
11 No no Student evaluation Hand gesture 12 Commun -- Prompting student,
using text from worksheet
Hand gesture
14 It really should be … It’s a general term, isn’t it? It’s a collective term like
“information,” and “furniture.” It shouldn’t have an “s.”
Helping students see the problem with “communications,” offering correction Talking moves from student to class back to student. 15 It shouldn’t have an “s.” Repeats correction No change 16 If you “interfere”—Okay Starting a
question …
Checks texts, looks and addresses class. Chin up. 17 You may “interfere” in a
conversation, mightn’t you? Okay? But you can also “interfere” with the verbal communication that is going on at the moment.
Exemplifying different prepositions following ‘interfere’ to correct the text
Looks to student.
18 “Interfere” with the verbal communication.
Repetition of corrected text
Hand gesture
19 I’d take the “s” off. Okay? Clarifies correction of the text mistake, “communications”
Shifts gaze to class.
20 Remember I said that it’s a collective term, like “information,” like “furniture,” “vocabulary”? Class direction, linking back to previous instructional point Scans across class.
21 Okay? Checking that
students are following
Gazes back to student.
22 So we’ll take the “s” off Reiterating correction to make
Hand gesture for taking
something off 23 Unless we’re talking about the
specific communications. Okay? Generally, you’ve got an ongoing process—okay—of feedback—
Presenting an exception
24 Of messages Rewording “feedback”
No change
25 —And then you might use an “s” on it. Resuming instruction on exception to instructional point regarding collective nouns No change
26 But generally I would rather you did not use an “s.”
Returning to original instructional point
No change
27 Okay? Checking that
students are following
Returns to reading text 28 May also interfere with the
verbal communication and distort its real meaning.
Reading/quoting from worksheet with corrections noted thus far Looks up from text. Moves to fix gaze on another student. 29 Now, do you remember I had
that on the board the other day? Yes, it became … [indistinct]
Class instruction and elicit
Faster, quieter voice. Turns to desk out front. 30 [PAUSE] Time out to locate
essay for latecomer.
Looking for an essay.
31 That’s your essay. Okay. Making an aside to a student
Moves to back of room. 32 Girls just take one each of
those. There’s a couple there. Okay?
Greeting latecomers Returns to centre front, gaze returns to scanning class. 33 If you, when you see that word
written “i-t-apostrophe-s” that’s a contraction isn’t it? Of what?
Resuming class elicit
Fixes on one student.
As a point for language instruction, Teacher A has selected one worksheet text to highlight the need for an appropriate preposition after “interfere” (Strip 3), but then proceeds to illustrate two such prepositions (Strip 17) with no guidance for students on which to select beyond their exemplification in specific contexts. This abundance of fine detail demonstrates the “native speaker’s” particular expertise in nuance and exceptions. Meanwhile, she had responded to an error in a student’s reply (Strip 10) and went on to offer instruction on this vicariously produced language point (“communication” vs. “communications”) (Strips 14, 15, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26). In this example, she offers a general rule students can use, but then also offers and explicates an exception to this rule, to be comprehensive. This vicarious point of instruction is inserted between strips that deal with the initial ‘interfere with’ teaching point (Strips 3, 7, 16, 17, 18, 28).
Like this brief example, the extended analysis showed that Teacher A’s talk shifted frames frequently, often embedding teaching asides within another strip of talk so that many sentence fragments did not logically or semantically flow from the fragment before. Rather, in her talk she was stepping in and out of various frames of discourse, rarely spending more than a sentence in a frame. Divergence was often vicariously produced:
• from errors made by students which she corrected on the spot with another layer of explanation (see for example Strip 14);
• from commentary asides on instructional points, giving exceptions to the rule/pattern she has just explicated (for example, Strips 23, 25); or
• from vocabulary she had inadvertently produced in her talk, offering rewordings (see for example Strips 22, 24) or explanations (see for example Strip 19).
The effect of this is that the talk, though presented as a ribbon-like stream, was in fact a composite of tangled strands addressing multiple purposes with complex logico-semantic relations. Though often starting what promised to be an IRE pattern, she interrupted herself with exceptions, rewordings, and diversions from her initial point. The student rarely gained the floor to take their turn in the IRE pattern. Could this detailed richness be too much of a good thing for the second language learner? There is an irony in that, in her effort to make her native speaker talk more comprehensible to the language learner, Teacher A has produced an ambitious thematic structure that vastly complicated the task of following her lesson.
If as Willis points out, the “inner discourse,” in this case the worksheet’s text, was in the target language while the “outer” discourse, explaining, instructing, and directing, was in the students’ first language, maybe the shifts and discontinuities would be much easier to distinguish and navigate for the language learner. Without such a clear bracketing convention at her disposal, there perhaps should have been more conscious monitoring of how the stream of talk was organised to maximize the second language learner’s navigation of the con/textual shifts.
As a boundary marker, Teacher A often used a non-determinate expression, “Okay,” but not consistently so. Sometimes this had an upward inflection, serving as a question: “(Is that) okay?” or “(Do you understand that) okay?” At other times, it was more enunciative: “Okay, (here comes the next stage).” Both types also occurred mid-strip, perhaps where she is taking stock and preparing her next utterance. For other con/textual shift cues, she relied heavily on changing her gaze or moving across a restricted centre front zone, signifying a change, but not necessarily signifying the nature of the change. Her hand gestures occasionally mimed some sense of the meaning she was conveying (see Strip 22), but were more typically flourishes carrying no clear meaning through mime or symbol.
Similarly, she only occasionally used the class whiteboard to briefly reinforce a grammatical point. The board texts observed displayed only example text, not some principle or model of her more general point. Our point here is that this teacher is resourcing this classroom with an overabundance of talk, and could fruitfully and purposefully call on other semiotic modes that would add productive redundancy and reinforcement for the second language learner.
Across the data set, Teacher A’s talk was the most extreme and sustained case of such tangled complexity of multi-tasking frames. However, every language teacher will recognize opportunistic aspects of their own practice here, as we do too. However, this opportunity to examine the unexamined minutiae of the ESL classroom allows us to challenge some problematic aspects of its commonsense. Firstly, Teacher A’s enthusiasm to make the most of all vicariously produced language instruction opportunities as they arose displaced her planned
selection, sequencing and pacing of learning. We would argue that such regular divergence from the planned curriculum in the enacted classroom curriculum/talk impacted on the development of a coherent body of ESL knowledge for students. Secondly, her effort to exhaust the complexities of exceptions to the rules demonstrated her native-speaker control, but did not take account of the students’ learning stage/needs.
Thirdly and most importantly, as Willis (1992) suggested, the semantic content of the “inner” text in this exercise has become incidental to the heuristic value of its form. Its messages (about essentialised differences between cultural communication styles) are not explicitly dealt with, rather its semiosis is invisibly mediated. Thus the worksheet’s meanings, “In Australia they encourage
students eyes movement” and “However it has many differences in different culture. It will compare then contrasted between Eastern and Western culture,” enter this classroom as undisputed claims. Such
essentialised categories have been dutifully reproduced by these students in response to a curriculum that firstly is premised on reified cultural difference and secondly has fetishised (Hall, 1997) essentialised contrasts between “my” country and “your” country (see also Gao, Li, & Li, 2002).
Persistent Pedagogy: Teacher B
Teacher B had a Diploma in Education and a Masters in Education, with seven years teaching experience in schools and the tertiary sector in Australia. Her class was an intermediate English for Academic Purposes class, with approximately 15 students from
Thailand, Taiwan and Vietnam. Most of these students already had a degree from their own country, and were undertaking this EAP course in order to enter mainstream university programs. Teacher B spoke with a clear emphatic tone, slightly louder than normal, but not with the exaggerated articulation and emphasis of Teacher A. She conducted her classes mostly seated at a desk in front of the classroom, using hand gestures and voice inflection to augment or reinforce her meanings. She used the blackboard to model note-taking. Another strategy she often used was to stop mid-sentence with mouth open and to scan the students with an expectant look. From this they understood that they were to offer a suitable wording for her sentence. This “oral cloze” mode of interaction offered students a small space where they could contribute the desired lexical item. The episode selected for analysis was preparation for a listening exercise to practice identifying cause and effect relations in the text, and to practice note-taking strategies. This lesson built on similar exercises and texts the class had done previously, thus the teacher was initially trying to reactivate students’ memory of language and topics they had covered before.
In the following extract, Teacher B is preparing students for a commercially produced listening activity which is a recording of a lecture about urbanisation, in particular a segment on the introduction of the flushing toilet. As preparation she revisits the topic, reminds students of what they have discussed before, and in this extract, tries to recover a particular piece of vocabulary—“sewage.” She starts to elicit this particular wording in Strip 17 and it is only in Strip 41 that she supplies the word. The episode was selected firstly because of its
curious choice of content and the obvious discomfort, embarrassment and evasion it produced amongst the students. Secondly, it serves as a comparative foil to Teacher A’s tangled interlocking frames. Teacher B in this extract remains markedly focussed on her aim to extract this particular item of vocabulary. She refuses to shift frames, but in doing so exemplifies another risk associated with the linguistic resources of the “native speaker” language teacher.
Table 2
Classroom B Extract
Strip Text Framing—what’s going on here?
Teacher’s
paralinguistic cuing/ shift marker at end of strip
1 Okay. Now the next topic. Alerts students to change in topic.
Sits down, clicks tape player off. Check notes. 2 Introduction of the flushing toilet. Reads the title of the
excerpt.
Looks up at class.
3 Now we have spoken about this before. Right?
Reminds students of link to previous activity.
No change
4 Now, what do you remember about this topic?
Invites student’s recall. No change 5 I know you couldn’t care less
but we have done it before.
Makes a comment on student motivation.
No change
6 Now remember that this Starts to direct students. Looks across to other side. 7 —we have done this before. Reasserts previous
activity.
Looks student in the eye, nods head.
8 STUDENT: Yeah.
9 Remember? Prompts students to
engage with recall.
Still looking student in the eye
10 Cheap soap. Offers an item mentioned in previous activity.
11 [STUDENTS laugh]
12 Button. Refrigerators. Recites items of
vocabulary from previous activity.
No change
13 Remember? When the guy was talking about all of the improvements in hygiene. Remember he mentioned this then?
Offers other prompts to assist students to recall previous activity.
Looks around the room.
14 We have spoken about this before. Reasserts previous activity.
Looks around the room.
15 Tell me what do you know about the introduction of flushing toilets in London? What happened?
Prompts students to contribute to recall.
Looks at notes then back up.
16 So, wait. Halts previous task. Hand gesture as if wiping aside. 17 What do you do in a toilet? Initiation—starts looking
for the vocabulary item “sewage.”
Head down, fixes on one student, hands open to invite response.
18 STUDENTS laugh:
One student responds [Indistinct]
Response No change
19 So what do we call that? Do you remember the word?
Initiation again Hand gesture as if sweeping out. Looks at student.
20 STUDENT: “Do-do.” Student offers a response
21 Yeah, “do-do” is a word that we would use in an informal situation. So not “do-do.” “Do-do” is probably what you’d use for the kids.
Evaluation—comments on student’s contribution.
Looks at ceiling, hands together.
22 But what— Starts to probe further. Looks back at student. 23 in an academic setting, your lecturer is
not going to go, “Oh, and the ‘do-do’ [students laugh] is done in the toilet.” Nuh.
Resumes comments on student’s contribution.
Shifts gaze to other side.
24 So--- Invites another student response to same question.
25 STUDENT: Elimination. Student offers another possible response.
26 Sorry? Asks for student to repeat contribution.
Looks to responding student.
27 STUDENT: Elimination Student repeats their response.
28 Yeah. Elimination. Evaluation of response and restates response.
Nods.
29 What do you call that stuff though when it’s flushed down the toilet? There was a word that started with “s”, can you remember?
Initiation—restates question and offers a “clue” to what lexical item she is seeking.
Hand gesture as going down. Looks around room.
30 STUDENT: Stool. Student offers another
possible response that satisfies the meaning and clue.
Hunches over quickly when she hears the word.
31 Stool is a very good word for a “do-do” but---
Evaluation Looks up and points to student.
32 [Students laugh]
33 No when we’re actually talking about the urine and the faeces —right? So the stool is the thing. The shape of the faeces. The faeces that way. The urine is that way.
Rejects student’s response and adds more
information. Continues with graphic hand gestures, looking around classroom, facial expression exaggerated. 34 Soooo—yeah, you’re right— Concedes that student’s
response is viable.
Looks to students
35 but when that stuff is mixed together— mmm!
Adds an additional criteria.
Hand gestures— miming mix.
36 [Students laugh quietly]
37 When that stuff is mixed together--- Repeats additional criteria as clue to desired
response.
Continues.
39 ---when you—well it’s not separated, is it? It goes down together, doesn’t it? You know there’s not one for the wee and one for the poo or the “do-do.” It goes down together.
Adds more explanation. Hand gestures continue
40 Now what is that stuff called? Can you remember? There was a word—that you—an academic word that you could—well—a formal word that you could use to just—to talk about— because you’re not going to use “do-do.” Do you remember?
Restates initiation and exhorts students to recall the particular item.
Looks across room—hands stop gesture, help open to invite comment.
41 Sewage. Offers the desired
response.
Nods head.
42 STUDENTS CHORUS: sewage Students repeat the vocabulary item.
43 Do you remember that word? Seeks confirmation of student recall.
Nods head.
44 STUDENT: Yes.
45 Yes. Thank you. Yeah. Acknowledges students’ response.
Nods head around room.
46 Remember we had a big discussion about sewage once before
Repeats the purpose of this chain of interactions.
Brings hands together.
Compared to Teacher A, this teacher used a much more limited palette of gesture and bodily cues, but her gestures are more linked to the meanings she is seeking or creating. Across these interactions, Teacher B remained fixed upon her aim and main frame (Strips 17, 19, 22, 24, 29, 40, 43, 46) of making the students recall the particular vocabulary item, “sewage,” encountered in a previous activity, and of relevance to the activity they are about to undertake. Her considerable effort and tenacity to achieve this particular word means that other possible wordings that the students offered (Strips 18, 20, 25, 27, 30)
did not satisfy her purpose. Her revised prompts had to recruit more specific and more explicit clues (Strips 23, 29, 33, 35, 37, 39). Across the various moves, she started with a fairly open call for possible wordings (“What do you do in a toilet?”, Strip 17), then gradually funnelled downwards to a more narrow focus expressed with more complex syntax in order to carry forward all the restrictions and clues accrued (Strip 40: “Now what is that stuff called? Can you remember?
There was a word—that you—an academic word that you could—
well—a formal word that you could use to just—to talk about—
because you’re not going to use ‘do-do.’ Do you remember?”).
All TESOL teachers, ourselves included, can recognise aspects of their own practice in this scenario, in particular fishing for a particularly apt wording, and the tendency to restate an initial question through more complex, more closed questions when the first simple, more open initiation does not achieve its purpose. Such “fishing” tactics were also regularly observed in the other classrooms in the data set. The sequence could be considered an extended IRE sequence: I R I2 R I3 R I4 R …. (E). Our point is that each elaboration of the initiation, easily done by the “native speaker” teacher, introduces additional linguistic complexity for the student, potentially making it more difficult for them to produce the desired outcome.
Meanwhile the choice of subject matter needs to be considered. On a number of occasions (Strips 11, 32, 36, 38), the students seemed to laugh nervously, but Teacher B continued to maintain her purpose, getting more and more explicit, adding hand gestures and more detail in her prompts (for example Strip 33). How does this degree of
insensitivity position the students? In an interview reflecting on this teaching episode, Teacher B explained the rationale behind her choice:
Those things (listening texts) are quite old but they are … one of the few resources around where you can actually listen to extracts from actual lectures … They’re actually university lectures—extracts from university lectures that they start listening to and then they build up to listening to the whole lecture and taking notes. So what do I think about that? I think the topics are sometimes a bit daggy and dated.
By this account, her selection is about the text’s form, and its authenticity as an example of the texts students could be expected to encounter in mainstream university settings. This renders its content unimportant, reflecting Willis’s point that “inner discourse” text typically serves as an exemplar of form rather than for the meanings it carries. In her interview, Teacher B justified her pursuit of the topic in the extract above in terms of its authenticity: “Like, flushing toilets and what we do and that. No, I just say it. I mean because—you know, that’s reality baby. We talk about these things. They talk about them in lectures.” Elsewhere, she qualifies her account of what constitutes the notionally authentic, “reality” experience: “the reality is, okay, so I haven’t really been to lectures in a million years but the reality is how—well—not, how but do the lecturers limit and take into account offending other cultures in that? Do they? I don’t think they do.”
We would suggest that the ability to draw so comfortably on one’s own dated experiences to inform pedagogical practice is a result
of the “native speaker” teacher’s privilege. It is somewhat surprising that Teacher B makes claims about the supposed authenticity of the resources, given that lectures in Australian universities are increasingly podcast and made available to students online. Why then use “dated and daggy” resources? The prepacked curriculum materials used by many teachers contain not only audio-tapes of supposedly “authentic” lectures, but also sequenced teaching activities, worksheets, and assessment items. All teachers use the same resources, and ensure that classes of students progress through the content at the same pace. The native teacher’s experience of lectures and lecture content is outdated, and if left unexamined and un-renovated, it can serve to sustain outdated and culturally questionable practices.
CONCLUSION
In this paper we provided a qualitative exploration of how “native-speaker” benefits can come packaged together with risks if left unexamined. Our objective was not to engage in an exercise of “teacher bashing,” or to construct the “native speaking” teacher as “deficit” or “neo-colonialist.” Nor do we suggest that this qualitative study has predictive generalisability to all native speaker teachers in all settings. Rather, we build on research which loudly asserts that quality teaching makes a significant difference to learning outcomes. This research often draws on data collected from mainstream primary and secondary schools. By contrast, we have provided a detailed
analysis of the classroom talk of two “native speaker” teachers of English and their practices in order to encourage teachers to critically reflect on their own attitudes and practices, and thereby improve the quality of TESOL practice.
In summary, the analysis showed how Teacher A’s talk was trying to do too much at the same time, and was not carefully considering how the second language learner could follow all her frame shifts. With Teacher B, the analysis showed how in her search for one particular vocabulary item, she used more and more complex questions, building a syntactical complexity which was not helping the students. In her search for this one word, she also overlooked the student’s competence with other possible wordings, and their discomfort with the topic. In our commentary, we highlighted how Teacher A’s subject content was used to explore linguistic form, but also served to reinforce simplistic cultural stereotypes. For Teacher B, our commentary reflected on her version of authenticity, and how the “native speaker’s” notions of what is “real” can be outdated and irrelevant to the internationalised university setting today.
We suggest that “native speaker” TESOL teachers have expertise to offer, but need to examine how such intricate expertise is made available in the classroom—for better and for worse. Consequently, they, like all teachers, need to critically examine their own classroom practices. Unexamined “native speaker” talk can be useful for the language learner, but it can also re-produce unreflective practices which are not beneficial. Teacher A’s talk was unnecessarily complicated in its complex of frames within frames and its eagerness to provide examples, exceptions and complications all at the same
time. Teacher B’s talk drew on more and more complicated rephrasing of her initial question to doggedly pursue one particular lexical item. As her question got bigger, the space for students’ answers became smaller. Teacher A’s “native-speaker” proficiency allowed her to perform multiple con/textual shifts with the risk of losing her audience in the manoeuvres. Teacher B’s “native-speaker” proficiency allowed her to dig in and refuse any con/textual shift while risking students’ discomfort.
From these two worked examples, our more general point is that the “native speaker” TESOL teacher has a great capacity to reword and rephrase meanings in classroom talk but this capacity carries the risk of making the flood of language incomprehensible to the language learner. We suggest that teachers need to examine the internal framing of classroom lessons—ensuring that such framing does not shift unpredictably and potentially disorient students. At the same time, we suggest that overly rigid framing of classroom talk which does not engage with the cultural and language worlds inhabited by students can also be counter-productive in the language classroom.
If “native-speaker” TESOL practitioners are to engage effectively with the new issues and opportunities currently facing the profession, they need to critique their own classroom practices, and move beyond unexamined pedagogies. As professionals, commonsense ideas about “native speakers” as teachers are not enough. Such critique could start with the following types of generative questions: What language resources are deployed in classrooms, why, with what insight and with what consequences?
How do teachers come to “know” and position students through classroom practices, and with what consequences?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study was funded by the Australian Research Council. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Mary Macken-Horarik, Jan Connelly and Zane Goebel for their conversations around the data reported in this paper at various stages.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Catherine Doherty lectures in sociology of education and sociolinguistics in the Faculty of Education at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia. She has taught in migrant English, adult literacy, tertiary preparation and teacher education programs. Her research interests centre around educational policy and pedagogical responses to global flows of people, educational products, technologies and ideologies.
Parlo Singh is Dean of the Graduate Research School at Griffith University, Brisbane Australia. Her research is in the field of sociology of education, with a particular focus on issues of cultural identity and global cultural flows. Empirically she is interested in educational policy - the politics of policy formation, implementation and traction. She is also interested in educational practices—the politics of knowledge construction and dissemination in schools, training centres and online environments.
