humility

Steven Bax writes, "In my view, this displays an unfortunate attitude: a young and relatively experienced teacher comes to a new country of which he has almost no knowledge. Without any reference to the culture, the learning context, student needs and wishes, and other contextual factors, he immediately judges far more experienced teachers as failing. And what gives him a license to do so, as he sees it, is the fact that he is a native speaker and that he is armed with CLT" (Bax, 279).

That is an unfortunate attitude! I hurt for this teacher who has perhaps always been "right" in the past and has never had anyone who loves him or cares about him enough to suggest that he maybe doesn't have everything all figured out.

I was just talking to my cousin about this the other day. She's a Biology Teacher Education major at ISU, and doing PDS this fall. There have been some challenges for her, and she was lamenting to me the other day that she just felt like her lesson that day had completely failed. We talked about how it is a good reminder that we are not everything, that we don't have everything figured out, and that, in essence, we still have a lot to learn.

We've learned and discussed a lot about English as a lingua franca in both 344 and 345, and I agree very much that English is a powerful language in terms of global communication. Hu writes, "English is perceived as a key to promoting international exchange, acquiring scientific knowledge and technological expertise, fostering economic progress, and participating in international competition" (Hu, 93)

However, this gives native speakers no platform to think of ourselves as better or more intelligent simply because we happen to speak the language that much of the world wants or needs to know. Clearly, Hu's article argues for the ineffectiveness of the CLT method in the Chinese culture. Western ideas that seem "intuitive" to us, as Hu mentions, are very radical in the PRC and not effective. And I think that any teacher would agree that any "method" that is not helpful in the classroom is not an appropriate method at all.

I thought that the naive comments that Bax listed from those teachers that didn't understand the presence of methods aside from CLT were fascinating. I picked out a few key words that together, seem to tell a story of pride and insistence upon our own correctness as native speakers and as professionals:

"it never occurred to her that there could be another way to learn English"

"assumed it was deficient"

"less good than 'we' are"

"'traditional' implies 'backward'"

"learning 'in spite of' methods"

Personal reflection is often emphasized in current language teacher education preparation programs, and I think it is very valuable. Perhaps this is a situation where we as teachers, professionals, and individuals need to take a step back and consider the impact of our views and assumptions on others. Perhaps we need to examine ourselves and our own attitudes before we criticize others. Perhaps we would learn something.