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TDIP201 – 209140111106
FOCUS 5 – SUMMARY

Creativity in language teaching - Jack C Richards

Three different dimensions of creative teaching:

1. The qualities creative teachers possess:
Creative teachers are knowledgeable:
- Creative teachers have a solid knowledge base. They know their subject – English, teaching English, and learning
English - and they draw on their subject matter knowledge in building creative lessons.

- Creativity does not mean making unfocussed and unprincipled actions. It does not mean making
it up as you go.

- Creative teachers:
+ Draw on knowledge of texts
+ Make use of sociolinguistic knowledge
+ Draw on pedagogical principle
+ Teaches creatively with confidence
+ Create a personal learning space
+ Follow one’s intuitions
+ Are committed to helping their learners succeed
+ Develop self-confidence in learners
+ Focus on learners as individuals
+ Follow learners’ progress
+ Are non-conformists
+ Make lessons unique experiences
+ Create effective surprises
+ Avoid repetition
+ Are familiar with a wide range of strategies and techniques
+ Vary tasks and activities
+ Are risk-takers
+ Learn from mistakes
+ Pause to rethink
+ Try something new
+ Seek to achieve learner-centred lessons
+ Personalize lesson content
+ Use student-selected content
+ Make connections to students’ lives
+ Are reflective
+ Reflect through journal-writing
+ Get feedback from learners

2. How teachers apply creativity in their classrooms

- Creative teachers:

+ Make use of an eclectic choice of methods

+ Use a blend of methods
+ Combine the best of process and product activities
+ Use activities which have creative dimensions
+ Make use of a personal element
+ Encourage original thought
+ Make use of fantasy
+ Encourage original thought
+ Teach in a flexible way and often adjust and modify their teaching during lessons
+ Use teachable moments
+ Make the most of teachable moments
+ Look for new ways of doing things
+ Give learners choices
+ Make links between different skills
+ Creative teachers customize their lessons
+ Adapt the textbook
+ Personalize activities from the textbook
+ Encourage students to question the textbook
+ Make use of technology
+ Use blogging as a resource
+ Seek creative ways to motivate students
+ Use activities that showcase students’ talent
+ Use activities from the learners’ world
+ Encourage creative collaboration

3. How can creative teaching be supported in the school?

- The creative school is a place where individuals, pupils and teachers are:

+ Motivated
+ Given time and responsibility for creative activity
+ Able to collaborate with partners to share creativity and ideas

- Some ways in which schools can encourage rather than discourage creative teaching:

+ Help teachers recognize and share what is creative in their own practice
+ Encourage creative partnership
+ Use shared lesson-planning
+ Provide resources to support creative teaching
+ Reward creative teachers

Forty years of language teaching

The nineteen-sixties

- The 1960s were relatively quiet for pedagogically-inclined applied linguists. The sudden popularity of generative-
transformational school of linguistics put language teachers in a quandary of hope and mystery.

- Meanwhile, language teaching in the 1960s seems to putter along unceremoniously with various amalgams of structural
approaches and audiolingual methodology that stressed oral practice through pattern drills and a good deal of
behaviourally-inspired conditioning.

- A glance through the previous five decades’ language teaching shows that as disciplinary schools of thought waxed
and waned, so went language-teaching trends.

- With the revival of behavioural and structural schools of thought in psychology and linguistics, the decades of the 1940s
and 1950s brought another change. A prime example of this cyclical nature of methods is found in the Audiolingual
Method of the mid-twentieth century.
- ALM was destined to grow into disfavor in the 1960s. What then vied for methodological recognition was a short lived,
quite un-sixties-like set of hypotheses that advocated more attention to thinking, to cognition, and to rule learning, in the
form of a rather bizarre approach called Cognitive Code Learning.

- Throughout the Sixties, in the US, audiolingualism was the dominant method of language teaching.

- Chomsky (1965) had raised serious questions about the structuralist linguistic theory on which audiolingualism was
based.

- Firth and Halliday stressed the inseparability of language structure and language function, and particularly focused on
language varieties used in social context.

- Alan Davies, John Lyons,… contributed to the change that was underway – change that would produce interlanguage
study, second language acquisition research, communicative language teaching and ESP  help end the audiolingual era
in the USA.

- From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, everything was first simple – their theory was a vague post-direct-method
orientation. Then everything suddenly got much more complicated as researchers started coming up with new theoretical
and methodological bases for language teaching. Attitudes to the new ideas were often more enthusiastic than critical.

- The new interest in learner-centred, naturalistic, activity-based learning was allowed to fill the horizon, so that teaching
language was all too easily replaced by doing things with it.

The nineteen-seventies

- At the forefront is undoubtedly the establishment of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) as a significant field of
enquiry within applied linguistics.

- The key construct was that of Interlanguage – the idea that learners constructed their own idiosyncratic L2 systems. It
challenged the view that teachers could direct what learners learned and opened the door to a radically different theory of
language teaching that was taking shape under the influence of both SLA and new conceptions of language that
emphasized USE over USAGE.

- The 1970s was a period of adolescence in SLA – a coming of age. It can even be described as the heyday of educational
technology.

- Language learning was no longer seen as purely learning chains of habits, acquired from concentrated repetitive practice
routines, but rather as a creative process. The goals of foreign language learning was also being questioned.

- The 1970s was the decade of the notion and function syllabus.

- In terms of methodology, the structurally-based situational approach ceded ground on two fronts.

- Apart from notional-functional syllabuses and PPP, group work in ELT was the other major novelty.

The nineteen-eighties

- The largest waves being made at the beginning of the decade came from the pen or the typewriter of Stephen Krashhen,
whose various hypotheses and models set off reverberations that can still be felt today.  signal the coming of age of
SLA as a key area of inquiry within the field of applied linguistics.

- In the 1980s, teachers were less inclined to embrace pedagogical proposals without some kind of evidence.

- The 1980s was the decade in which the principles of CLT, which had evolved in the preceding decade, began to gain
traction in the classroom.
- Needs-based programming was part of a broader trend towards a learner-centred from traditions of humanistic
psychology and experiential learning that Stevick, among others, was promoting within language education.

- Another key development in the 1980s was the emergence of task-based language teaching and learning (TBLT).

- Another major push in the 1980s was from learning strategy researchers such as Mike O’Mally, Anna Uhl Chamot…
who stressed the importance of language learning strategies for gaining language proficiency and autonomy.

The nineteen-nineties

- As the 1990s begin, it is increasingly realized that teacher development is just as or possibly more crucial.

- The second main trend – a growing interest in the lessons that might be learned from the study of innovation theory –
also has its roots in the 1980s.

- The continuing global expansion in the use of English as a means of international communication throughout the 1990s
contributes to the third trend. A succession of critiques of the ELT enterprise emerge. These items take the view that the
English language and/or the ‘ELT industry’ can be constructed as being in a hegemonic relationship with other languages,
and that teaching of English as a foreign language is inextricably bound up with a neo-colonialist discourse.

The new millennium

- On the threshold of the twenty-first century, language teaching has come to be not only big business but an increasing
focus of theoretical interest, engaging researchers and practitioners alike in a quest for the ‘best’ practice to meet the
needs of an expanding population of learners.

- The elaboration of what has come to be called CLT can be traced to concurrent twentieth-century developments in
linguistic theory and language learning curriculum design both in Europe and in North America.

- Central to representation of CLT is the understanding of language learning as both an educational and a political issue.

- When it comes to methods of language teaching there is clearly no one size that fits all. However, through the careful
building of data sets from a wide range of contexts such as those sketched briefly above, researchers should aim to arrive
at a more powerful set of theoretical principles to inform practice.

Postmethod Pedagogy (Kumaradivelu)

1. The three-dimensional framework

- The Intralingual-Crosslingual Dimension

+ The terms intralingual and intracultural refer to those techniques that remain within the target language (L2) and target
culture (C2) as the frame of reference for teaching.
+ Crosslingual and crosscultural pertain to techniques that use features of the native language (L1) and native culture
(C1) for comparison purposes.
+ The intralingual strategy adheres to the policy of coordinate bilingualism, where the two language systems are kept
completely separate from one another, whereas the crosslingual strategy believes in compound bilingualism, where the L2
is acquired and known through the use of L1.

- The Analytic-Experiential Dimension

+ The analytic strategy involves explicit focus on the formal properties of language, that is, grammar, vocabulary, and
notions and functions whereas the experiential strategy involves message- oriented, interaction in communicative
contexts.
- The Explicit-Implicit Dimension

+ This dimension concerns the key issue of whether learning an L2 is a conscious intellectual exercise or an unconscious
intuitive one.

+ This model claims that it is possible to know some things about a language explicitly, and others only implicitly, and
that there is an interaction between explicit and implicit knowledge.

2. The exploratory practice framework

- The Principle of Exploratory Practice:

+ Exploratory Practice is premised upon a philosophy that is stated in three fundamental tenets:
(a) the quality of life in the language classroom is much more important than instructional efficiency;
(b) ensuring our understandingof the quality of classroom life is far more essential than developing ever “improved”
teaching techniques;
and (c) understanding such a quality of life is a social, not an asocial matter, that is, all practitioners can expect to gain
from this mutual process of working for understanding

+ Seven general principles:

Principle 1: Put “quality of life” first.

Principle 2: Work primarily to understand language classroom life.
Principle 3: Involve everybody.
Principle 4: Work to bring people together.
Principle 5: Work also for mutual development.
Principle 6: Integrate the work for understanding into classroom practice.
Corollary to Principle 6: Let the need to integrate guide
the conduct of the work for understanding.
Principle 7: Make the work a continuous enterprise.
Corollary to Principle 7: Avoid time-limited funding.

- The Practice of Exploratory Practice: involves a series of basic steps:

Step 1: Identifying a puzzle.

Step 2: Reflecting upon the puzzle.
Step 3. Monitoring.
Step 4: Taking direct action to generate idea.
Step 5: Considering the outcomes reached so far.
Step 6: Moving on.
Step 7: Going public.

- The Global and the Local

+ Allwright seems to be wrestling with is the exact connection between the principles and the practices of EP. He sees the
need for global principles for general guidance, but their implications need to be worked out for local everyday practice.
He sees a cyclical connection between the two, as represented in what he calls a “crude loop diagram”: Think globally, act
locally, think locally.

3. The Macrostrategic Framework:

- Macrostrategies:

1. Maximize learning opportunities;

2. facilitate negotiated interaction;
3. minimize perceptual mismatches;
4. activate intuitive heuristics;
5. foster language awareness;
6. contextualize linguistic input;
7. integrate language skills;
8. promote learner autonomy;
9. ensure social relevance; and
10. raise cultural consciousness.

- Microstrategies:

+ Classroom procedures that are designed to realize the objectives of a particular macrostrategy. Each macrostrategy can
have any number of, and any type of, microstrategies, depending on the local learning and teaching situation; the
possibilities are endless

+ Microstrategies are conditioned and constrained by the national, regional, or local language policy and planning,
curricular objectives, institutional resources, and a host of other factors that shape the learning and teaching enterprise in a
given context

+ They have to be designed keeping in mind the learners’ needs, wants, and lacks, as well as their current level of
language knowledge/ability.