Page 66 - Beyond Methods

54 Maximizing learning opportunities
information on what the government and the people of Turkey did to solve rural developmental problems. That would have given the other students in class not only some valuable information and additional linguistic input but also an opportunity to participate in meaning- ful interaction. It would have also involved the Turkish student him- self in an interactive situation. Instead, the teacher merely said “OK” and moved on.
My interview with the teacher after the class revealed that he did not have any particular reason in mind for closing the learner dis- course; it just did not occur to him to pursue the matter any further. He realized later that he had lost an opportunity to engage the minds of the learners, and also to relate the Turkish case as an example for some of the issues raised in the prescribed essay. The loss is all the more noticeable because this was a class about developing com- munication skills, and the teacher was expected to create as many opportunities as possible for the learners to communicate in the target language.
Reflective task 3.3
On any given day in any given class, so many learning opportunities go un- recognized and unrealized by teachers as well as learners. How do factors such as poor classroom management, or rigid relationships between teach- ers and learners, or lack of training or lack of motivation, or X (insert a fac- tor that occurs to you) contribute to this situation?
While the first two episodes illustrate the success or failure on the part of the teacher to create learning opportunities, the next two highlight the importance of the teacher’s attempt (or failure) to uti- lize the learning opportunities created by the learners. It should be remembered that the classroom teacher is only one of the partici- pants—one with greater competence and authority, of course—but only a participant nonetheless, and as such s/he cannot afford to ig- nore any contributory discourse from other partners engaged in a joint venture to “accomplish lessons” (Mehan, 1979).
One crucial way to ensure the accomplishment of lessons is for the teacher to show a willingness to utilize learning opportunities created by the learner, even if the learner talk, from the teacher’s point of view, is not highly relevant to the task at hand. More often