McLean, A. C. (2012). Destroying the teacher: The need for learner-centered teaching.

English
Teaching Forum, 50 (1), 32-35.

(1) The title of this article comes from a poem by Walt Whitman: “He most honors my style who
learns under it to destroy the teacher.” I chose this epigraph because I wish to plead for a less
dominant classroom role for the language teacher, in accord with the importance of classroom
interaction in the language-learning process.

(2) First, I would like to encourage a lessening of attention to the linguistic content of language
teaching, and suggest that such content, and the theoretical basis on which we choose it, are not
as crucial for language learning as are aspects of classroom behavior. Too often, in discussing the
teaching of English, we behave as if language were the most important factor in the classroom. I
think this is seldom the case.

(3) We need to see English as essentially an educative subject, linked to the cognitive development
of learners, rather than as something isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Unfortunately, in
many classrooms throughout the world, little true education takes place. Instead, there is rote
learning of material irrelevant to the learners’ interests. We need to be aware of the educational
potential of English in such circumstances.

(4) To fully realize this potential we need to look outside the confines of English language teaching
itself. There is now a considerable body of work that focuses on the conditions under which
children learn most effectively. This work relates both to the internal processes involved in
apprehending and storing information and to the most favorable conditions for the operation of
these processes. I would like to consider here the relevance of this work to the teaching of English.
I will deal with it under five main headings:

Reduction of coercion

Several of the quotations accompanying this article come from the American educationist John
Holt. One of Holt’s major beliefs is that for most pupils school is a place of fear. Children are
coerced by various means to produce answers that are acceptable to their teacher rather than to
engage in practical thinking.

Whatever its form, we need to end unnecessary coercion in class and thus minimize defensive
learning.

The fear that many children experience arises most often out of bewilderment, which itself
frequently results from the clash between the culture of the learner and that of the teacher.

There is clear evidence that the learner has a marked ability to correct mistakes that he has made;
furthermore, mistakes so corrected will seldom be repeated, whereas mistakes corrected by the
teacher often will be made again. But this self-correcting mechanism can operate only when the
teacher gives up playing God.

Active learner involvement

Teachers talk too much. And too much of this talk is directive. The only solution is for the teacher
consciously to become more silent, so that the learner may become more vocal. Learning is most
effective when the learner is the initiator of the learning process. With regard to language, it has
been found that syntactic complexity and sentence length both increase when the topic is one in
which the learner has been actively involved. In a recent article, Brown has described affective
factors as “the keys to language-learning success.’’ There is thus a clear need for the content of
language teaching materials to involve the learner—to relate to his needs, interests, and moral
concerns. It seems to me that too much of our material is empty of such involvement. Another
important finding is that learning improves when goals are set before tasks are begun: the learner
should be aware of the learning objectives. Relating this to reading, for example, we may consider
it more useful to ask questions about a text before the students read it than afterward. In this
way, the learner will approach the text with a set purpose, as adults normally do. After all, we
seldom read anything without a reason; yet that is what we ask our learners to do time and time
again.

Experience before interpretation

Psychologists such as Bruner and Piaget have stressed the need for an initial tactile stage of
learning. Bruner calls it the “enactive” stage and Piaget the “sensorimotor” stage, but the principle
is the same, namely, that the learner needs time to “mess around” with target material before he
is asked to give proof that he has learned it. We may have noticed this process while watching our
own children beginning to read. There is a good deal of handling of printed material, or playing
with it, of changing the words of the text before real reading starts. And this period of
experiencing the material seems to be a necessary precondition for interpreting it.

Avoidance of oversimplification

It may seem paradoxical to follow the above plea for giving the learner more time to experience
target material by asking the teacher not to oversimplify it. In reality, however, this is another
aspect of the same principle: that learning is something only the learner can do. The teacher
cannot learn for the pupil; he can only provide good conditions within which learning may take
place.
What I am specifically questioning is the idea that a step-by-step approach is the only way to learn.
Holt says: “If we taught children to speak, they would never learn.” What he means is that as
teachers we would want to break up the learning process into a series of gradeable steps and
prevent movement from one step to another until the first step had been mastered.

Again, let us relate this question of oversimplifying to the problem of reading. New words and
structures in a reading passage are commonly practiced and drilled before the passage is read, so
that the learner does not have to cope with anything that he hasn’t seen before. In some cultures
it is regarded as improper, in fact, to ignore any word that appears in the text, the printed text
itself being accorded an almost religious respect. Yet if we drill all the new language in the reading
passage before it is read, we are preventing the learner from developing a crucial reading skill: the
need to guess, to make hypotheses, to play hunches about the nature of the text—specifically, to
predict what is likely to come next.

The value of silence

Silence is also fundamental to Curran’s Community Language Learning. Each period of learning is
followed by a period of reflection, the first part of which is conducted in silence. La Forge
describes the value of this silence as follows: “The silence cannot be underestimated in any way
for its value and impact on progress in language learning. Far from being a vacuous period of time
after the experience part of the class, the silence of the reflection period is characterized by
intensive activity.”

I believe that these findings should make us reconsider the value of teacher talk in our classrooms.
This would also fit in better with the idea of the teacher as facilitator (to use Rogers’s term),
advocated earlier in this article.

Finally, I would like to stress the need for all of us to consider learners as whole and integrated
human beings and respond to them as such. We should see English as a means of education,
relating closely to the development of the learner’s cognitive ability, rather than as simply the
inculcation of a specific series of linguistic skills.

Let me end by drawing your attention to the two final quotations, by neurologist Colin Blakemore
and philosopher Kahlil Gibran. Both serve to emphasize something we often tend to forget:
namely, that teaching is not so much a process of cramming outside knowledge into the learner’s
mind as of drawing out the knowledge that each of our students has within him.