Dear column readers, how have you been?
Chá Pedagógico is growing and we’re grateful to you for following our work. Thanks to your support, Disal’s YouTube channel has passed the 4K subscribers mark. You rock! Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel and stay tuned for more upcoming episodes.
Is it really true that native speakers make the best language teachers?
This couldn’t be further from the truth. We can actually consider that a myth, especially when it comes to English. As we all know, English is now considered a Lingua Franca and the native speakers are outnumbered by non-native speakers. If we consider that English is also the official language of several countries around the world, giving it a wide range of accents and regional expressions, it makes no sense to prioritize a native speaker as a teacher. Native from where? What are the qualifications of this teacher? That’s precisely why we need to emphasize intelligibility, that is, the ability to be understood more easily. Let’s reflect on this. If all these people were teachers, who do you think would help students more: Adele, Chimamanda Ngozi, or Christoph Waltz (Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds)?
Remember: in our current global scenario, being bilingual is an advantage, and intelligibility is key. Watch our face-to-face episode about this topic at the BRAZ-TESOL International
Does the failure of Brazil’s educational system have anything to do with Paulo Freire’s pedagogy?
Absolutely not. We’d say quite the contrary, actually. Freire’s work calls for a more humane, just, and liberating education that empowers learners to become critical thinkers and agents of
social change. In episode 8 of Chá Pedagógico, we talked about how Freire’s bad rep is connected to his promotion of learner-centeredness based on the contexts these learned are based in. As he emphasized in his work, the alliteration “Eva viu a uva” is not an effective teaching tool when it does not consider who Eva was, her position in society, and the production process involved in bringing her the grape. Critical thinkers go beyond the mere instrumentalization of reading and question the status quo of their realities. Freire’s pedagogy is about giving them a voice and agency in their own learning.
Why can’t we trust our students’ judgment about their own learning?
Although students can give us many insights about how much (and how well) they’re learning, they can be terribly mistaken about what’s actually going on. So can we. Because we’re susceptible to cognitive biases. We can think of them as mental shortcuts that can lead to inaccurate judgments. In other words, they are distortions of objective reality based on our perception of things. Instead of relying on how students “feel” about their learning, it’s a better idea to check their learning. In other words, we should make their learning visible.
How do you prepare your lessons for a [genuine] bilingual school?
On Teachers’ Day, our episode was fully in Portuguese and we addressed the matter of bilingual education in Brazil. Considering that the school is actually bilingual, and not only offering an extended lesson of a foreign language, lessons need to go beyond the language and place students in an environment that allows them to use their native language and other languages depending on the situation. The experience is immersive. Therefore, your lesson plan must focus on their performance (not only linguistic) to achieve a given goal that can be guided, i.e. you establish the objective, or incidental, i.e. at a random moment the students need to turn to the foreign language in order to communicate, provide information, etc. You can involve the entire school in your lesson plan because it is structured for this. Whether you use the famous PPP or choose a project (PBL), your students need and can explore the language in varied moments that will require fast processing and reply, while after minutes they will be required to use their native language again.
Is there any truth to the claims that people can become fluent in just a couple of weeks or even months?
In our 11th episode of Chá Pedagógico of this year, we identified some red flags that have been advertised out there related to language learning and methodologies. We also talked about some nuggets of truth these institutions have been using to sell their lies to both students AND educators.
Some of the major red flags are:
“I created my own method after spending 6 months abroad and tested it on my private students and it works 100%”
“It’s based on a revolutionary new tech”
“According to an unnamed expert from Ivy League University, if you learn to activate a region of your brain, you’ll “boost”, “enhance”, “accelerate”, “potentiate”, “maximize” your learning”
“Regular schools don’t want you to know the truth”
“No boring grammar exercises and traditional classes”
“From 0 to fluency in a few weeks / months”
If it sounds too good to be true and if it makes vague statements using false premises or distortions, run!
