It occurred to me another day that bridges might be one of the most amazing achievements of humans.
Not the ones made of concrete and steel, mind you – I know they are spectacular feats of engineering, and I have admired a number of them in different places. From the Caravan Bridge in Turkey to the Danyang-Kushan in China and using the homophony to include nautical bridges which have metaphorically connected the entire world, they are technological marvels. I was thinking, however, of the kinds of bridges that demand even more precision and care.
One of my all-time favorite stories would not have a conclusion were it not for bridges. The famous Fermat’s Last Theorem could only be solved by linking two completely different parts of Math and by solving a seemingly unrelated problem in the process. To make an analogy to our field of Linguistics, it is as if the key to figuring out proto-Indo European syntax lay in the phonetics of modern Basque. The solution for the 350-year-old problem seemed unattainable; thanks to a movement in Mathematics that opened way for the connections between fields, this complex proof was made possible. If not for the work of numerous mathematicians over the centuries, in different areas of Mathematics, and the monumental effort of those who were able to establish the connections between concepts as foreign to one another as modular equations and elliptical curves, then the most elusive problem in algebra would still be a complete mystery.
What does that mean for us? As English language professionals, whether as researchers, teachers, writers, or a mix of all above, it is time we recognize that there are more connections than divisions to be made between the different fields of English as a Foreign Language instruction. By doing so, we can make better use of complementing knowledge and minimize the ‘jargon fever’. It is quite the feeling when you realize the concept you are struggling to grasp is basically a modification of one you have been using in classes for years.
There and back again
I have recently started teaching Language classes in a regular school, after a decade of being involved with language institutes and materials development, and one thing that has always bugged me is the way that regular classes are seen from the perspective of institute and private teachers – and vice-versa. At times, it seems as if we are in completely distinct universes, not only because the classes have diverging dynamics, contexts, and sizes, but fundamentally because the pedagogical principles do not seem to share a common language. Sometimes literally: while most of our communication (conferences, workshops, this very magazine) in English Language Teaching (ELT) happens in English, for a large part of the education world in Brazil it happens in Portuguese. This is also a reality when we discuss more formal education rather than pre- or in-service instruction. While I have built my theoretical foundations for language acquisition in university, there is no denying that I learned much more from language teaching in practice and in in-service training courses. While I was privileged to participate in a pre-service training course which was essentially a mini-CELTA, this is to an extent true to most professionals in ELT: we use the concepts in English, as we learned them at the schools we teach or have taught, rather than the ones we learned in more formal contexts (if we had formal training in Linguistics and/or Education at all).
Despite all that, there are many concepts that are quite translatable. I have recently watched Mary Kalantzis, from the University of Illinois, discussing Multiliteracies and describing four kinds of pedagogies: Traditional Pedagogy, when there is overt instruction (i.e., the teacher provides students with input), Critical Pedagogy, when there is critical framing (i.e., students are exposed to academic materials and asked to reflect about them), Applied Learning, when students put learning into practice (i.e., they learn by doing something), and Progressive Pedagogy, when students’ experience is in the forefront (i.e., students are exposed and react to a situation). The center of her idea was that there is something to be used from each of these approaches in a modern classroom. If this sounds familiar to an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher, it’s because the parallels to our own Post Method era are striking.
One could easily associate Traditional Pedagogy to the approaches that were considered outdated by Communicative proponents, such as Audiolingualism, and which had concepts we now mostly consider worth including in our classes, such as drilling activities. In the same vein, if we were to consider the whole process of having students experience a situation, being instructed in more detail about the topic, and having them reflect about it before putting the knowledge into practice, we are describing a frequent sequence of events in many language classrooms.
Bridges to Flipped Learning
On a different perspective, we can consider the concepts that may seem completely new to us but become much more manageable when we make associations to other experiences (no, it’s not only our students’ schemata we are trying to activate). Something that has been a focus of attention for me since the lockdown in early 2020 is the idea of Flipped Learning. The concept gained traction with some technological advances we have had (the fact we can share long videos easily, for instance, might seem trivial to younger people, but if you remember attaching heavily pixelated videos to an email and waiting an hour for it to be sent, you understand what I mean), but during the pandemic we had to incorporate so much in terms of asynchronous instruction and distance learning that it made sense to dive into Flipped Learning as well.
New though the keyworded concept might be, the fact is that in Masters courses the idea of reading a text before class and discussing it has been a staple for ages. But the bridge I think might help many teachers is the one that can be made with an EFL structure that is quite dear to me: Test-Teach-Test (TTT). You see, in many cases, a difficulty of Flipped Learning is making sure students have performed the pre-class task and are ready for the class activities. By appropriating some aspects of TTT, we can devise activities that check students’ comprehension, focus on teaching particularly thorny points, and use our time in class more effectively.
From the Caravan Bridge to the Enterprise
These examples are a starting point for something that I believe may be used to great effect in our area of learning. More than others, there is a great divide between English teachers depending on their context, particularly between those who teach in institutes or privately and those who teach in regular schools. I strongly believe there is much to be gained and nothing to be lost by encouraging greater interface between professionals of these two realities.
To circle back to the story behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, it seems to me we need a version of the Langlands program: a way to establish clear connections between seemingly unrelated areas and concepts so that we can make use of our collective data in a more meaningful way. The benefits for teachers, researchers and administrators alike are far-reaching and tangible: the optimization of efforts, after all, can be appreciated no matter how you connect to ELT.
The truth is that our bridges have come to stay. No longer can we use a positivist lens to see the educational process. The connection between different areas of knowledge, and even between different teaching realities, can only enrichen our work as teachers and our learners’ progress. What are your bridges going to look like?
