Page 91 - Beyond Methods

Minimizing perceptual mismatches 79
learner and teacher perceptions of learning purpose, Block (1994, 1996) examined the ways in which learners describe and attribute purpose to the activities that teachers ask them to do. The experi- ment was carried out in an EFL class for MBA students in Spain. The lesson that Block observed consisted of five activities: a brief conver- sation warm-up, a vocabulary review, a review of a news broadcast, a practice minitest, and an extended activity about job advertise- ments. Block found that while the teacher attached great importance to the job ad activity, which took the bulk of class time, the learners “tended to write it off” (1994, p. 483). On the other hand, the learn- ers spoke most highly of the news reviewing task, which, from the teacher’s perspective, “hardly deserved mention.” This study points “not only to the autonomy of learner thought but also to the exis- tence of a gap between the way teachers and learners ‘see’ the class- room and all that occurs within it” (Block, 1996, p. 168).
Yet another study conducted in South Africa involved high school students learning English as a second language (ESL). Barkhuizen (1998) focused on the students’ perceptions of learning and teach- ing activities they encountered in their classes. Predictably, he, too, found that students’ perception of classroom aims and events did not match those of their teachers. The teachers involved in the study were frequently surprised to learn about the thoughts and feelings of their students that, of course, were very different from theirs. For instance, the teachers “could hardly believe the high ranking given to the mechanical language skills. They were obvi- ously not aware of the students’ and their own focus on these skills in their classes and would hardly have predicted that their students see the acquiring of these skills as the most effective means of learn- ing English” (p. 102). Based on his study, Barkhuizen advises teach- ers to “continuously explore their classes, particularly their learn- ers’ perceptions” (p. 104).
Reflective task 4.1
Why do you think perceptual mismatches occur in the language classroom? What does it show when learners say they learned certain items that were not at all highlighted by teachers, and did not learn certain items highlighted by teachers?