Leadership and Values in Language Education - Al Akhawayn ...

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116Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual Conferencein turn, help them develop a variety of organizational and interactional skills, aswell as the personality traits associated with them, such as tolerance, mutualleadership and appreciation of diversity. The practice of shared leadership on thepart of students requires them to assume an active, participatory, creative, andproductive role in classroom communication and organization. This successfulengagement in shared leadership practice would certainly contribute to teachers’professional development and would help students to develop life long learningabilities, that is, “the ability to continue learning after the end of their formaleducation” (Littlewood,1999: 71). It would also help them to grow as “authenticpersons [who] know what they are doing, and attend in relaxed or focused ways,in accordance with the demands of the situation, [who] are also autonomous, inthe sense of feeling responsible for their own actions, and able to deal withchoices” (Vanlier, 1996: 144).2. 2. Two-way communicationIn the literature on classroom communication (e.g. Johnson, 1995 and Lynch,1996, etc.), two types of communication have been distinguished. The first type isone-way communication where the initiative-response-evaluation/feedbackinteractional sequence is the dominant structure of communication. This structureallows the teacher to control the structure and content of communication whichbecomes a process of top-down influence and allows leadership to be centralizedin the hands of a single participant, the teacher, the formally appointed leader,who leaves little space for other participants/students to practice the interactionalcompetencies recommended by advocates of shared leadership. This pattern ofparticipation reflects the traditional vertical approaches to leadership which isclosely related to teacher-centred approaches to second and foreign languageteaching and learning.Shared leadership education suggests a view of communication as an integratedand complex process which is achieved through interactive language use,collaborative and cooperative negotiation of meaning, and shared understandingbetween participants in communication in general and classroom communicationin particular in order to sort out misunderstanding and communication problemsand breakdowns. It is a two-way communication which stresses the centrality ofinteractive communication or “the interactional nature of dialogue, one of thecoordinating practices of shared leadership” (Yukle, 1998). Within theperspective of this type of communication, the emphasis is placed on students’active and motivated participation in open and free communication whereby theycould exchange opinions, share ideas, chair discussions, and practice differentinteractional skills and various speech acts and exercise a great deal of control
117Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual Conferenceover the structure and content of communication. In brief, as previously pointedout there is a close interrelationship between shared leadership and open pattersof communication, one of the major defining elements and innovations broughtabout by shared leadership and communicative language teaching, on the onehand and between the traditional command-and-control models of leadership andtraditional teacher-centred approaches to second and foreign language teachingand learning. Therefore, shared leadership provides further arguments for theneed to implement more communicative approaches, which would berecommended here for successful practice of shared leadership in foreign andsecond language classrooms.2. 3. Small-group work and team-workThe patterns of communication in general and classroom communication inparticular which have been distinguished to foster participants’ active,productive, and creative participation and leadership sharing in interactivecommunication are generally student-students interaction in problem solving,information-gap, and role-play activities in pair-work, small-group work, teamwork,and whole class discussion. These activities and patterns of organizationare recommended because they are student-engaging and student-led in that their“major characteristic in terms of participation is that the student is primaryspeaker” (Vanlier, 1988: 173). Student-student(s) communication in small-groupwork activities provides an interactional environment in which they couldpractice various speech acts, a communicative environment in which they couldshare a great deal of ideas, initiate discourse, exchange opinions, give and ask forinformation, give instructions, interrupt and be interrupted, and correct otherpeers and be corrected. Students’ self-motivated involvement in such patterns oforganization would help them to develop their confidence in speaking in public,develop personal characteristics, develop the skills of logical and creativethinking, develop the skills of chairing and many other shared leadership andgroup management abilities, develop the skills and traits of efficient andcooperative group work, and would also help them to develop the abilities toorganize information, ideas, and priorities, to develop problem solving strategiesand the ability to cope with stress and complexity and to manage time. In brief,students’ engagement in such kind of interaction would help them practicevarious skills and competencies of shared leadership, which are essentiallyinteractional, managerial, and communicational in nature at the linguistic andsocial levels.2. 4. Classroom communicative competence
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