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Activating intuitive heuristics
Reflective task 8.3
Pause here for a moment and think about what the teacher in episode 8.2 has been able to achieve that the teacher in 8.1 has not. And, how did she manage to do that?
Let us compare the two episodes. The teacher in episode 8.1 is interested mainly in eliciting grammatical descriptions that can be easily lifted from the handout, with either no or partial under- standing on the part of the learner. With her mode of presentation, she has not only minimized the creation of learning opportunity in class but has resisted any attempt on the part of the learner to seek any clarification. For instance, in turn 8 a student has doubts about the answer given by another student (turn 6) and says with a rising intonation: “the dependent clause?” The teacher, instead of clearing the learner’s confusion, merely asserts: “the dependent clause . . . right” (turn 9) and moves on. On another occasion, two learners (turns 20 and 23) say “no” to the question whether a dependent clause has a subject and a verb. Their incorrect response prompts no more than a stern disapproval (turn 24: “Who said no?”) from the teacher, which triggers a choral “yes” from the class.
In the end, neither the teacher nor the those two learners seem to understand what each other is trying say. If the teacher had given a few examples and asked the learners to analyze them, they would have had an opportunity to find out more about how dependent and independent clauses are structured in English. The teacher’s preoc- cupation with grammatical description may have even been an ob- stacle to grammar learning. What seems to be clear is that in her en- thusiasm to deal with the grammatical rules governing dependent/ independent clauses in English, the teacher missed an opportunity to create the kind of linguistic environment that is necessary to acti- vate the learners’ intuitive heuristics.
In sharp contrast, the teacher in episode 8.2 asks a series of questions for which the answers cannot be lifted from the distrib- uted material. Her method of presentation seems to actively engage the learners’ minds. Like the teacher in the previous episode, she, too, focuses explicitly on grammar (turn 17: “use another word like . . .