Is dogme ELT just a warmer done good?

“Did you recognise my emergent miaow, Steve?”

I participated in a British Council-organised online Facebook discussion with Dale Coulter about using a dogme approach in the classroom and it got me thinking…

I frequently teach 3 hour lessons, punctuated by a 15 minute break. During the break, you hear the usual things being said between teachers in the staff-room; “My lesson’s completely flat”, “They’re completely bonkers tonight, must be the full moon” and “Oh god, I haven’t planned enough, I need to photocopy more materials.”

But sometimes you can be involved in a statement like this:

 “I started the class with a warmer that was only supposed to last 5 minutes, but they got really into it and we were still doing it an hour later.”

 This has happened to me lots of times, especially with communicative groups (usually consisting of noisy but fun teenagers). The warmer is usually a communicative task on a syllabus-related theme with a specific aim and no materials. For example, I’ll go into class, talk about my partner making me watch a terrible TV show the previous night and try to get some feedback that indicates I have interest amongst the students. I’ll then get the learners to work in pairs to remember and sequence the main parts of my anecdote, which they then compare with another pair. Once that’s done, students think of TV programmes, films or music they’re sometimes forced to watch/listen to against their will. They then share their stories and we feedback anecdotes as a group. If such a task takes off, it’s easy to see why it would take up an hour of class time, but if there had been little interest in my initial anecdote the warmer could well have been terminated at that introductory point and I’ll move to the syllabus-specified materials.

So, if I look back at the breakdown of my warmer activity we can say it was converstation-driven and materials-light, which make up two of “the three core precepts” (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009:8) of a Dogme approach to ELT. But the other core precept is a focus on emergent language and sadly I can’t guarantee a significant-for-the-learner focus on emergent language in any of these Dogme-like warmer activities I do. What I tend to do is pick up on errors the learners are making and highlight them to give the learner a chance to rectify those mistakes after the communicative activity, when they have more time to process the accuracy of their language. My learners like this and there is value in the acitivity, but are they really developing their awareness of language through the I process I use? Dave Willis (2003) explains,

“In spontaneous language use there are conflicting priorities. The learners’ main priority is to get their message across with appropriate speed and fluency; they may also be keen to produce language which is accurate – but speed and fluency conflict with accuracy.” (pg.8)

What strikes me when I highlight errors is that learners frequently recognise them immediately. So while the process is useful, the learners are focussing on what they already know rather than recognising new language.

So, the focus on mistakes I’m using is never going to be as useful to the learner as a focus on the form of emergent language. But how can I produce useful out-of-the-box focuses on emergent language? Say if I miss the emergent language or simply can’t establish patterns of emergent language use within the window of time I have to set-up and provide a useful language focus in a dogme-like lesson? I read “Teaching Unplugged” by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury (2009) in the hope it would help me in this area. Whilst the introductory manifesto in Part A of the book is inspiring, the majority of the book was made up of lesson ideas that shared much in principle with the communicative warmers I use with my classes in many lessons. There was little to no advice on how you get your hands dirty with the emergent languag and what you should do with it and that’s what I wanted to learn.

I guess there are naturally-gifted teachers out there who can produce highly useful out-of-the-box emergent language focuses, but I doubt my ability to do this. This was recently confirmed by colleagues of mine, who are starting the Distance DELTA, reminded me of the list of language topics they can focus on in their observed orientation-course lesson. Just looking at areas of possible focus like “used to/would”, “auxiliary verb have and main verb have” and “reflexive and reciprocal pronouns” bring me out in a cold sweat. I’ve no doubt I can focus on these areas effectively given time to prepare but doubt my ability off-the-bat, should those areas emerge unexpected in a lesson.

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Meddings, L. & Thornbury, S. “Teaching Unplugged” (2009) Delta Publishing
Willis, D. “Rules, Patterns & Words” (2003) CUP