Changing the approach

The learner-centred classroom can look very much like the traditional classroom. The teacher is still in control, but the students are more actively engaged than before, often relating their own life experiences to the content they learn.

This term marks the nationwide introduction of Thailand’s new reform curriculum. If implemented successfully, it will mark the beginning of the end of our traditional teacher-dominated rote-learning approach to education. In its place, proponents hope, a new more learner-friendly system will take root, flexible enough to adapt to the needs of our rapidly changing times.

Flexibility, in fact, is built into the curriculum. Schools receive syllabus guidelines from the Ministry of Education, but they have remarkable leeway in how they choose to carry them out. The idea here is that schools will now be able to tailor their curriculum to the needs of their local communities.

As few teachers are experienced curriculum writers, however, there has been some understandable confusion – particularly over what constitutes learner-centered teaching.

Do the students have a say in the curriculum? What is the role of the teacher in a learner-centred class? What types of activities are most appropriate for this way of learning?

Recently, the learning post had a chance to put these questions to three prominent textbook writers who attended the Thai TESOL conference in Bangkok. Each has vast experience in writing learner-centred materials and each has travelled extensively around the world, talking to teachers and observing classes.

While their experience has focused mainly on English language teaching, their observations are relevant to many other fields of study as well.

Writer, consultant and teacher trainer Dr Andrew Littlejohn has authored and edited numerous books published by Cambridge University Press, the best known of which include Cambridge English for Schools and Classroom Decision-Making.

Well known Cambridge University Press author Andrew Littlejohn is fond of telling a story of a dedicated teacher who took the learner-centred concept a bit too far.

She had just begun a new course at a private language school with a group of 13-year-old students, Littlejohn recounts. "She began by asking them ‘What do you want to do today?’.

"Their reply was one she had not expected: ‘Go home!’.

"Unsure of exactly what to do, she said after a moment’s thought ‘OK. And, next week, let’s talk about if that was a useful thing’.

"Needless to say, she lost her job!" Littlejohn says.

Clearly, here is an example of a teacher who did not fully understand her role in the learner-centred classroom. "You’re talking about young kids," Littlejohn cautions. "They’re not professional educational managers. They need help. It’s the teacher’s responsibility to make sure this is a successful learning event and what the teacher’s got to do is to try to manage things so that kids do not waste their time."

This does not mean, however, that the teacher was entirely misguided in involving the students in classroom decision making, says Littlejohn, who has written extensively on the subject. She was simply doing so at a level beyond the capacity of her students to contribute intelligently.

This is a common problem among teachers making the switch to student-centred teaching, Littlejohn observes.

"What’s happened in many cases is that some teachers have tried to introduce a learner-centred curriculum at the curriculum level – trying to involve the learners in designing the whole curriculum and they’ve got out of their depth. It’s chaotic. It all falls apart and they go back to even more traditional ways of operating."

What Littlejohn advocates is that teachers begin allowing student choice at the very lowest level of what he calls the "curriculum pyramid." The place to start, he says, is with the immediate learning task itself.

"You can introduce small changes first at this level. It may be simple things like when they’re doing a listening exercise they can choose whether they want to listen with their books open or their books closed. Or if they want to do it in pairs or by themselves. Making the kids feel a bit more involved in what’s happening," Littlejohn explains.

Littlejohn also has advice to curriculum reformers at the national level. "What has to happen is that the change that’s required must be fairly small and that change has to fit in with the framework that’s already in place. It’s still the teacher’s class. The teacher still has ultimate control over what is happening," he asserts.

Simon Greenall, author of the popular Macmillan Reward series of textbooks, has some words of encouragement for Thai English teachers who may be new to learner-centred teaching.

"I think perhaps to reassure Thai teachers for whom this might be a new idea, this is not a way of getting rid of the teacher or entirely shifting responsibility on to the student," Greenall explains.

"The teacher’s role and the textbook’s role is still very much to provide meaningful models and meaningful inputs for the students ultimately to produce their own output. It’s the output above all that’s learner centred."

Macmillan authors Sue Kay and Simon Greenall. Kay is a teacher and trainer at the Lake School, Oxford and is the co-author of the new Macmillan course, Inside Out. Greenall has authored eleven coursebooks and supplementary materials, the latest being a pre-intermediate course entitled People like us.

One of the ways to create learner-centred output, says Sue Kay, another well known Macmillian author, is to find ways for students to become personally involved in the lesson.

"At every opportunity I try to create activities where students can bring their own experience of the world to the classroom by asking them to relate to what they are doing in the classroom in a personal way," Kay says.

"We ask them questions like ‘how different or how similar is this to your life?’ ‘Have you ever been to a place like this?’ ‘Have you ever met a person like this?’ ‘Have you ever eaten something like this?’

"Get them to relate to the topic that you’ve been reading or listening to.

It’s what makes a classroom come alive. When students bring their own life to the classroom, they’re focusing on meaning. Focusing on meaning creates the most effective conditions for learning," Kay explains.

Littlejohn, too, takes care in designing language tasks that will engage the learner. "My emphasis really has been on developing tasks which are much more open than conventional tasks – tasks that require and draw on students’ own ideas so the answers to everything aren’t just simply in a text they’re reading, " he says.

Littlejohn likes to invert the traditional read ‘the text and answer the question format’ by having the students generate a set of questions that they want answered before they see the text. At the beginning levels, this could even be done in the native language, he says.

Littlejohn gives as an example a text and photo featuring a praying mantis. "The first task is ‘praying mantises are very strange animals. What questions can you ask about them?’ The students generate their own questions and then they read the text to see if the text answers their questions, whereas the conventional setup would be text - questions - back to text," he says.

Littlejohn also offers a new slant on one of the oldest language learning activites, the dialog. "Dialogs are very common in English language teaching," he says. "Most are stupid dialogs."

Suppose, however, the dialog contains a moral dilemma, like a girl who finds five British pounds in a book in the library. That’s an interesting and useful problem for the students to explore, Littlejohn says.

"Does it now belong to her? If you find it, is it yours, in other words? The activity requires comprehension, but it also calls on their own personal ideas and opinions," Littlejohn says.

Greenall points to the need to come up with engaging topics. He says he has carried out extensive research on what subjects most interest people for his Reward series.

"There’s a surprising amount of common interest amongst an international audience," Greenall says. "The topic that interested people most of all was travel. The next one was food. The next one was general customs and traditions. Of course sport and fashion and music were high up there, as well. Topics that people didn’t like – and once again this was pretty universal – were things like science and technology and politics."

That doesn’t mean that unpopular topics should be avoided, but they require special care on the part of the materials writer, Greenall says.

Clearly, the modern English language classroom goes far beyond a simple focus on the language itself. It is particularly suited for helping deliver one of the key requirements of the new curriculum: acquainting Thai students with other cultures.

"We’re not just simply language facilitators imparting knowledge of a linguistic system," Greenall says. "The point of learning English and teaching English is that it be used. And students are going to be using English more and more as a lingua franca to communicate with people – not just British, American or Australian native language speakers – but with people from a variety of other cultures."

Obviously, dealing with other cultures is easiest in multicultural classrooms like those found in many of Thailand’s international schools. But there is much that can be done in mono-cultural settings as well.

This includes traditional fare like studying about foreign customs and traditions. Both Greenall and Kay suggest, however, that the definition of culture should be expanded to include cultural differences within the classroom as well.

"Students are not empty vessels to be filled up," says Kay. "They come along with all sorts of ideas, opinions and different experiences. They are individuals and that’s what I find terribly interesting – the whole idea of individual culture or ‘microculture’."

This concept can be extremely productive, Greenall says, and it has a direct link to learner-centred teaching.

"The first question might be how the British celebrate New Year’s and then how the Thais celebrate the Thai New Year. But not just what people do in general. You also focus on the individual differences, a family amongst families of very similar backgrounds," Greenall suggests.

"You’ll find that two children in the classroom – for cultural purposes – will come from different cultures. It’s those individual cultural characteristics which constitute their personal cultural identity. Thus, having 40 children in the classroom is not have 40 people from the same culture. It’s 40 individual cultures. That’s where it links up with learner-centred teaching." Greenall observes.

With this view of the classroom in mind, teachers have almost endless opportunities for allowing students to react to the content of the class in their own individual ways.

Teachers, says Kay, need to be aware of this. "In mono-cultural or multicultural classes, your students are your best resource," she says.

Acharn Suriya Chamniam

One of the most experienced and committed English teachers in the Thai secondary school system is Acharn Suriya Chamniam of Khuru Prachasan School in Sankhaburi, Chainat.

Acharn Suriya has been designated as a "model teacher" by the National Education Commision and, as such, she works with other English teachers in her network to improve standards of instruction.

This hasn’t reduced her teaching load, however. Like other teachers in her school, she is responsible for five classes at three different levels – one at Mathayom 4 (M4), two each at M5 and M6. Classes range in size from 35 to 40 students.

Acharn Suriya is one of Thailand’s pioneers in learner-centred teaching and has even developed a self-assessment / self improvement model used by several teachers in her network. Appropriately enough, she has dubbed it the Suriya model: "S"for survey, "U" for understanding, "R" for research or react, "I" "or implementation, "Y" for yourselves, and "A" for application.

Archarn Suriya herself uses her model as part of an M5 Project English course. Students begin by doing a self assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. There are also peer, teacher and even parental assessments. Students then identify a weakness that they want to overcome and develop a plan and a time frame for doing so. They then implement the plan and evaluate their results.

Such a programme requires significant resources and Acharn Suriya and her students depend heavily on the ERIC centre at her school. There, the students are able to borrow books, audio cassettes, video cassettes and a range of other materials to carry out their projects.

Acharn Suriya says the point of her model is not just to help her students improve their English. It is to help them become autonomous learners. Indeed, the other teachers using her approach are not English teachers at all, but come from subject areas such as social studies, math and health.

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Last modified: May 19, 2003