When I began teaching classes with predominantly Asian students, I was shocked and seriously disappointed to see that my good old teaching methodology — which I had been using with US, UK, and other western international students — didn’t seem to be effective for them, or me.
The students were shy, somewhat puzzled and intimidated; there was a lot of awkward silence in the classroom, which I — after a certain period of time — unintentionally and unconsciously started to fill up, responding to my own questions, finding myself in delivering lengthy monologues. Day by day, my Teacher Talking Time was stretching.
This state of affairs did not help make my students more comfortable. They lost their concentration, and they did not appear to take responsibility for their own learning. Instead, they relied quite heavily on my corrections and comments. Essentially, their learner autonomy was quite limited. I had achieved the opposite of what I had desired for the students. As a consequence, I decided to return to my “old” classroom techniques with limited teacher presence. I started to reduce my talking time, and give the dominant role back to the students. This seemed to be much more of a challenge in the case of international students who were socialized in a less involving classroom culture in their home countries. My methodology and approach to the students therefore needed further refinement and new techniques.
First of all, the position of the teacher in the classroom can indicate to the students what is expected of them. If the teacher gives up the “in front of the group” position, and instead arranges the desks in a circle with the teacher’s desk among the others, the students will interact with one another more frequently if they perceive you as one of them rather than being told. Also, feedback involving the teacher can be limited to problematic areas rather than every question in the subject matter as communication among students starts to develop and deepen.
“Silence is golden”. It does indeed apply in a classroom setting especially when your goal is to achieve active participation on the part of the students. Although I agree with Julie, a fellow EAP blogger [1], that on a pre-sessional course, where time is so limited, the stakes are so high, and there is so much pressure to get through all the materials, the request from students for the “answers” instead of clues to discover the answers themselves does not seem wholly unreasonable, we should still provide enough ‘processing time’ between instructions and explanations, while waiting for a student to respond, and during monitoring of activities. Prompting, providing clues and rephrasing the question are often counterproductive when the student merely needs time to answer. Wait-time is important.
McWilliam (2008) talks about a shift from the ‘guide from the side’ to the ‘meddler in the middle’, where we use our increasing relative ignorance to create space for discovery, creation and innovation. It develops the learning dispositions among students that would be appropriate in future academic contexts and shifts students from consumers of education to users and ultimately producers (Hearn, 2005). To provide them space and opportunity to become producers of education, I create project groups of 4 or 5 students and usually assign a task from their textbook to work on together and present in the class as micro teaching. They do all the background work, preparation of supplement material and classroom techniques plus manage the class. This way, the teacher needs to step up only when something gets derailed to help interpret or deconstruct, or if time management seems to be inappropriate. My experience with such initiatives is that students tend to be more courageous and challenge their peers if the material is not presented by their tutor. This ultimately brings more student-student discourse with a lot of agreeing and disagreeing, keeps communication alive and active leading to a common discovery rather than the passive digestion of the material. This also helps them in negotiating skills and develops their own educational planning, which involves searching for and finding solutions to their everyday problems or queries. Finally it reduces their fear of academic failure, as well as creates a more relaxed atmosphere in the classroom. I usually give them feedback via email to further reduce Teacher Talking Time in the classroom.
Last, when I started to search the topic of Teacher Talking Time in the EAP literature, I came across the question of quality and quantity. It seems that relatively lengthy TTT can be very productive if it is “good talk”. Now what can be considered as “good talk”? We have to look at what purpose it serves. If you talk about your experiences as graduate students and the difficulties you had to face, that is “good talk” because it might prepare them for the road ahead of them and give insight of what might be at stake. Also, teacher intervention to raise the intellectual challenge of a seminar, for instance, is a learning oriented decision – ergo, good talk. [2] Scaffolding is also necessary to establish good practice and provide guidance towards independent learning and it emphasises active student involvement. Thus, some Teacher Talking Time is indispensable in the deconstruction stage of the learning cycle in order to ultimately achieve independent construction from part of the students.
Teacher Talking Time has multiple functions and forms in education. At some points in the EAP course it works best if you reduce it to nearing zero giving students the maximum autonomy in the learning process. However, if the intervention is fundamental in learning and helps to develop the students’ confidence and competence, it is definitely valuable.
[1] https://teachingeap.wordpress.com/tag/eap-practitioner/
[2] http://eaping.blogspot.hu/2015/09/teacher-talking-time.html
Works cited:
Hearn, G. (2005) The Shift to Value Ecology Thinking and its Relevance to the Creative Industries. Paper presented at the QUT Brisbane Conference: Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons.
McWilliam, E. (2008) Unlearning how to teach. Innovations in Education and Teaching. Vol 45 (3) pp263-269
[1] https://teachingeap.wordpress.com/tag/eap-practitioner/
[2] http://eaping.blogspot.hu/2015/09/teacher-talking-time.html
Nice article Vicky.
The distinction you mention – that of ‘good’ or ‘quality’ TTT as opposed to ‘unhelpful’ TTT is definitely worth highlighting.
Unhelpful TTT, ie, answering your own questions, providing a running commentary, and just blabbing without really thinking about what’s coming out, is likely to confuse students and probably result in some pretty shoddy classroom management.
Quality teacher talk, on the other hand, can be very powerful as you say. It can serve as a context for conscious recycling of previously learned language, a context for new language input, as a demonstration of a task that we want students to do themselves, and, of course, as good old listening practice.
Of course, there are times when we need to give the floor to students and let them do their own speaking, but I think anyone who says ‘TTT is bad’ is failing to recognise the numerous benefits it can provide.
I’m pretty much fully in favour of quality TTT!
Thank you, Matt. I do appreciate your comment and couldn’t agree more, teacher talk can be very precious and insightful but teachers like me with background in teaching humanities tend to bring some unnecessary lecturing to the language class too, now that has to be under control.
really nice article Viktoria. liked it