Diane Larsen-Freeman

2 lntrodnc tion Introduction 3
As an exam ple-, lcr me relate a n a necdote abo ut a teac her with whom I
was working a few years ago. I will call her Heather, alt ho ugh that is not
her real nam e. h om her study of method" in Stevick (1980), I leather
became very iureresred in how ro work with teac her co ntrol and st uden t
initiative in her teaching. Heather determ ined tha t during her student
reachin g internship she would exe rcise less co ntrol of th e- lesson in orde r
ro encourage her stu dents to rak e mo re initiative. She- decided ro na rrow
the goal down to having students take initiat ive in posing the quest ions in
the classroom, recog nizing that so often it is the reacher who asks all the
questions, not the students.
r was Heather's teaching supe rviso r. When I came to observe her, she
was very discou raged. She felt that the stu dents were not taking the initia
tive that she was trying to get them to take, bur she did nor know what
was wrong.
When I visited her class, I obse-rve-d the following:
H EA T H ER
JUAN
ANNA
II E ATl I ER
ANNA
.\-lUR I E I.
Juan, ask Anna what she is wearing.
What a re you wearing?
I am wearing ,1 dress.
Anna, ask Muriel wha t she is writ ing.
Wha t a re yo u w riting?
I am wr iting a letter;.
This pattern co nt inued for some time. It was d ea r to see that Heather
had successfully avoided the common problem of the teacher asking all
the qu est ion s in the class. The teacher did not ask the qu estion s- the SUl ­
dents did. However, Heather had no t rea lized her aspiration of encouraging
student initiative since it was she who took the initiative by promp ting
the students rc ask the qu estions. Heather an d I discussed the mat ter in
the post-observation conference.
Hea ther came to sec that if she truly wa nted students to take more initiative,
then she wo uld ha ve to set up the situation in a wa y th at her par ­
ticipation in an activity was not essential. We ta lked a bout several wa ys
o f her doing th is. During this discussion, Heather came to a nother imporrunt
awa reness. She rea lized that since she wa s a fairly inexperienced
reach er; she felt insecu re a bout having the stu dents mak e rhc decisions
abou t who says what to wh om wh en. Wha t if the students were ro usk her
many questions that she could not answe r? While having students ta ke
initiative in the cla ssroom was conso na nt with her values, Heather rea l­
ized tha t she should think furt her abou t rhc level of student initiative with
which she could be com forta ble at this point in her ca reer as a teacher. Wt'
talked a bout other options she coul d pursue as well. Th e point wa s tha t it
was no t necessarily simply a matt er of Heat her imp roving her techniqu e;
she co uld sec that that W,}S one possi bility. Another was to rethink the
wa y in which she thought a bout her teaching (Larsen-freema n 199 3).
Th e links between tho ught a nd action were very import ant in
Hea ther's teaching. She came to realize tha t when somet hing was no t
going as she had intended, she co uld change one or she could cha nge the
ot her. Heather had a n idea of what she wanted to accomplish- but the
action she chose to carry out her idea did not accomplish her purpose.
When she exa mined her intentions mo re clea rly, she saw that she was no t
yet ready to haw her students' ta ke complete init iative in the lesson.
A CO HERENT SET
Returning to the methods in this hook, we will see that it is the link
between thoughts and actions that is common to them all. But there is
anot her way in which links arc made in methods, and that is the connection
between one thought-in-action link and another. A method is a
coherent set of such links in the sense that there sho uld be some theorencalor
philosophical compatibility among the links. If a teac her believes
tha t language is made up of 3 set of fixed pa trcms, it mak es little sense for
him or her to use tech niqu es which help lea rners discover the abs tract
rules underlying a lan guage to enable them to create novel patterns.
To sa)' there is a coherence among the links do es not mea n, however,
that the techniques of on e met hod ca nnot be used with a nother. T he techniqu
es ma y look very different in practice though, if the thoughts behind
them differ. For exa mple, Stevick (1993) has shown that the simpl e technique
of teaching students a dialog using a picture to provide a context
ca n lead to very different con clusions about teaching and learni ng
depending on how the technique is managed . If the stu dents first loo k at
the pictu re, d ose their eyes while the teach er reads th e dialog, and then
repeat the dialog hit by bit afte r the teacher, repeating until they have
learn ed it fluently and flawlessly, the students could infer th at it is the
teache r who is the provider of all language and its meaning in th e cla ssroom.
Th ey co uld further infer that they should use that 'part of their
bra ins that co pies bur not the pa n that creates' ( 1993: 432),
If, on the ot her han d, befo re they listen to or rend the dialog, they look
at the picture and describe it using words a nd phrases they ca n supply,
a nd then they guess wha t till' people in the pictu re might be saying to each
other before they hear the dialog, they might infer that their initiat ive is
welcomed , and that it is all right to be wrong. If th ey then practice the dielog
in pairs witho ut str iving for perfec t recall, they migh t also infer that