Page 89 - Beyond Methods

CHAPTER 4
Minimizing Perceptual Mismatches
Ways of seeing are also ways of not seeing. —KENNETH BURKE, 1995, p. 70
We learned in the previous chapter that generating learning op- portunities in class is the joint responsibility of teachers and learn- ers alike, because both are co-managers of learning. Even if the co-managers believe that they have carried out that responsibility successfully, it is perfectly possible that they have very different per- ceptions about what constitutes a successful learning opportunity. An anecdote reported by Allwright (1987, p. 99) makes this point clear: “An ESL teacher used to handle ‘conversation’ classes by going in with a dialogue which the learners first practise and then build into a more general discussion. One day he went in with a di- alogue on paper as usual, but his learners immediately started a conversation on some topical issue. After twenty minutes or so of lively discussion—just what the teacher always wanted but rarely got from these learners—one member of the class put up her hand and asked: ‘Please, when are we going to start the conversation?’”
What this anecdote tells us is that teachers and learners do not look at the same classroom event as a potential learning event. In other words, there can be, and often are, mismatches between teacher perceptions and learner perceptions of what is available to learn. At least for the particular learner mentioned above, twenty minutes of student-initiated, lively, authentic conversation did not constitute conversational practice. She was impatiently waiting for the lesson on conversation to start.
The gap between teacher and learner perceptions of the aims and activities of classroom events can easily increase the gap be- tween teacher input and learner intake. Input refers to oral and