Филологические науки/ методика преподавания языка и
литературы
ЕНУ.им. Л.Н.Гумилева,
Казахстан
Сreativity in foreign
languages teaching and
learning
We can probably all recall teachers
we know who were very creative in their approach to teaching. Of course we have
all encountered teachers who make use of carefully developed lesson plans, who
keep their lessons focussed on accurate performance of tasks, who are strict
about getting homework in on time and returning it with detailed corrections
and 5 suggestions. Hopefully however we also have powerful and fond memories of
a teacher who sparked our imagination, who inspired us by their individual and
personal teaching style, who motivated us to want to continue learning and
perhaps to eventually decide to become an English teacher? What makes teachers
like this different?
Creativity isn’t always something that just happens.
It can take quite a bit of work to nurture, grow, and develop creativity, even
for those who are immersed in creative and dynamic fields.
For educators, it can be even more of a challenge to
inspire creativity in students or embrace your own creativity while trying to
juggle academic requirements, testing, and other issues in the
classroom. It may be difficult but it’s certainly not impossible, and
accomplishing it can help to create a classroom environment that’s more
motivational, interesting, and educational for both you and your students. Creativity depends
upon the ability to analyse and evaluate situations and to identify novel ways
of responding to them. This in turn depends upon a number of different
abilities and levels of thinking. The creative teacher does not simply present
lessons from the book. He or she looks for original ways of creating lessons
and using the textbook and teaching materials and seeks to create lessons that
reflect his or her individual teaching style. This is another way of saying
that being creative means seeking to adapt and modify lessons to better match
the learners’ needs. For this reason creative teachers are generally very
different from each other. Learning to be a creative teacher does not mean
modelling or copying the practices of other creative teachers, but rather it
means understanding the principles that underlie creative teaching. Individual
teachers will realize these principles in different ways. We see this approach
reflected in principles articulated by creative teachers.
Creativity in teaching means having a wide repertoire of routines and
strategies which teachers can call upon, as well as being ready to depart from
established procedures and to use one’s own solutions. In general I find that
novice teachers are much less likely to be creative than experienced teachers
simply because they are familiar with fewer strategies and techniques. The danger is that once a
teacher becomes comfortable in using a core set of techniques and strategies
these become fixed.
The creative teacher is willing to
experiment, to innovate, and to take risks. Risk-taking reflects the flexible
mindset of creative teachers as well as their self-confidence. They are willing
to try things out, even if at times they may not work quite the way they are
intended. So the teacher is willing to rethink or revise, or if necessary
abandon her original plan and try something else. But this is seen as a
learning moment and not an indication of failure
A trait that is reflected in several
of the comments above is that of learner-centredness. This is seen in teachers
who listen to their learners and who seek opportunities for learners to take
responsibility and control of their learning. An important feature of
learner-centred lessons is the extent to which the lesson connects with the
learners’ life experience.
Speaking as a FL teacher, I believe
that the teacher should be responsible for the selection, organization and
exploration of the materials s/he brings to class. I am clearly against the
systematic use of course books and this is an area that should include
contributions from the students (at the levels of (self) production of both
materials and tasks). Materials should be meaningful, provocative, allow for
the active, critical exploration of students and teacher.
There is therefore ample scope for
teachers to be creative in the development of materials. Such materials should,
in turn, support creative classroom practice and elicit creative learning, in a
dialectic continuum between language regularities and lexical expansion.
The teacher should therefore create
tasks based on authentic materials, combining source material in new or
unexpected ways or to achieve a hitherto non-standard or unexpected end,
combining input from English source and target language source or taking
materials associated with one era or area and using them in another.
Useful materials will need to
include some key features, as follows:
* a graded presentation of the
Target Language containing a well-balanced input from three distinct angles
− (1) how meanings are expressed (semantics); (2) structures at and below
sentence level (grammar); (3) the sound system (phonology).
* a systematic contrastive
comparison of phonological, grammatical and semantic points between the
student’s first language and the TL, where traces of interference from the
former can be expected in the latter (in some groups with students from various
linguistic backgrounds, English can be the term of comparison, not as their
first language, but as their language of first use).
* provision for cyclical revision,
including re-lexicalisation of identified models in new combinations of learnt
language elements.
* exploring authentic texts (written
and spoken) which reflect the culture(s) associated with the speakers of the TL
− e.g., everyday life (family, occupation, leisure); social behaviour and
customs; local knowledge; values and beliefs.
* particularly at the more advanced
stages, exploring authentic texts (written and spoken) from:
(a) Area Studies, i.e. on the TL
culture(s) with a focus on the socio-political and economic aspects of the
country/countries involved − e.g., government, welfare, law and order,
legal system, education, business and industry.
(b) Literature, for stylistic
analysis of the choices writers make and appreciation of the ways the language
can be developed to its fullest creative limits; and also traditional folk
literature.
Teacher and student creativity in FL
will greatly benefit from a teaching/learning policy that promotes transferable
skills. This can be best nurtured through a combination of analysis of language
macro- and micro-features with direct language experience and practice based on
spoken and written texts and their contexts. Incremental progression and
cyclical revision will facilitate consolidation and further creative
development. Regular assessment of learning progress will provide guidance to
students and can also provide pedagogical findings which can contribute to a
continual update of FL frameworks. Individual teachers might pool their ideas so as to bring
greater diversity to programmes - creative ideas are very often
stimulated through group discussion and by having different perspectives.
Classroom practice can capitalise on
the creative materials. Through authentic texts students will be experiencing
the target language as it occurs naturally as well as the pragmatics,
that is, interpretation of its utterances in context. This can be enhanced by
spoken texts with a visual component as found typically in television
broadcasts and films, where speakers and listeners can be seen in an
interpersonal context and non-verbal phenomena can be observed which reinforce
the verbal exchanges, such as paralinguistic functions of gesture,
facial expression and body language. Students will also receive explicit
information for a more conscious learning of the semantic, grammatical and
phonological characteristics of the TL. With this compounded assistance,
students can themselves be creative in their foreign language learning process.
In my experience, students are best
encouraged to be creative when they are given independence to choose their own
focus for tasks, and, indeed to decide what they will study. Students might be
encouraged to be creative by involving them in decisions about how and what
should be taught in the language classroom.
Reference:
1.Jones, Rodney (ed.) (2012) Discourse and
Creativity. Harlow:
Pearson.
2. Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (1999) Handbook of
Creativity. Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press.