I've enjoyed reading the posts this month, and not just because I have on more than one occasion been about to put finger to keyboard only to find that someone else had answered a point better than I might. So thanks Dan, and fker. And thanks to everyone else, too - the ideas are now centre stage.
But if we now appear to be circling around an uneasy truce rather than preparing for a proper dust-up, writes Luke Meddings, it may yet be some time before we surrender our boardpens. For this month's posts appear to have uncovered a real sticking point.
This concerns the nature of conversation, or perhaps more accurately, its nature and limits within the classroom.
I enjoyed samsa's critique of the Jehovah's Witness conversation gambit - it is certainly a pretext, and represents one of the rare occasions when a complete non sequitur is the most meaningful reply one can make: "It's a lovely day, isn't it?" 'Not today, thank you.'
But is it true to suggest that we don't set up conversations in the real world? All sorts of gambits are used to set up conversations, from the non-verbal (indicating approval, perhaps, in this hot weather, of some passer-by's physical appearance - in order to elicit spoken reaction from a mate); to the generic ("Warm enough for you?" - proposing an exchange of the most predictable sort which nonetheless performs a social function of bonding or introduction); to the quotidian ("Did anyone see the match/Big Brother/the news last night?" - seeking permission for an expression and exchange of opinion and perhaps emotion).
It is true that of these introductions none represents a contract detailing the precise remit of a conversation, but they are unmistakable invitations to certain types of conversation within relatively predictable parameters.
What links them is an understanding of the kind of conversation - from lewd, to non-committal, to discursive - which is allowed by the relationship between the speakers.
For conversation to flow in the classroom, a certain relationship between speakers needs to be allowed, and managed. The key for teachers, I would suggest, is to show affection for your students. This is not necessarily the same as feeling affection - you are unlikely to like everyone in the class, although I sometimes have - and it is certainly not the same as showing (or feeling) love.
It is about making everyone feel welcome for who they are; it is about recognising and drawing on their characters and loves and hates in an affectionate way, taking every opportunity to include even the quieter students in a conversation.
I should once again state that my experience is in private language schools with classes, typically, of anything from six to 16 students. I know there are many teaching contexts in which considerably larger classes present a different challenge, but equally there are people who argue that anything above four or five students is too large for conversation to flourish. I disagree.
I do agree that the conversation I am talking about is managed in what is ideally an unobtrusive way; the teacher's role is to facilitate, to feed back; to moderate, as fker puts it.
But the more familiar students become with an environment in which low-level input can lead to relaxed but generative conversation and subsequent analysis, the more likely they are to start conversations themselves, and to follow the teacher's example in bringing in small pieces of stimulus - a news in brief or picture from the day's paper, for example - to share with their classmates. It needn't stop there; a student of mine brought in her own poems to share.
I'm not trying to avoid outlining techniques and activities; I simply want to emphasise the importance of the affective sphere in allowing T-ching to thrive.
Finally, it is not in my view necessary that the participants should know precisely what is expected, either of them or of the conversation. I don't think it matters if conversation goes "out of shape," in spacedwarf's phrase; nor do I think that this precludes critical feedback.
It's a question, I feel, of allowing a conversation to go as far as it wants to before addressing the language that has been used - note-taking skills are critical in this phase, as drunkenfall indicates, as indeed is boardwork during the analysis. One can't time this in advance, it has to be felt - one thing that is critical to the "shape" of the conversation (and maybe this is what spacedwarf means) is that it needs to retain the interest of the whole group.
I called the standard Jehovah's Witness gambit a pretext: something that doesn't really invite conversation. And I would suggest that much of what we do in the orthodox language classroom is also a pretext: the speaking activity which is really a vehicle for discrete language exercise, the reading text which conceals like a quiz cartoon ("our artist has cleverly hidden 20 vegetables in this picture of a beach scene, can you find them?") the language which will be addressed in days to come.
T-ching aims to make our discourse in class the moment of our engagement with language, rather than a pretext for language use or study to come - though study, and its record, like Shelley's spring, can not be far behind.
