Teaching with discussion

With communicative activities that focus on topics related to the public sphere, FLTs can create a discursive classroom where students are “talking to learn”

(Alexander, 2008). This can encourage reflection on the topics being discussed, and, according to Crick (1998), may also help nurture associated values:

children learn responsibility best and gain a sense of moral values by discussing, with good guidance from the earliest age, real and

controversial issues. Talk, discussion and debate are the bases of social responsibility and intercourse and the grounding and practice of active citizenship. (p. 64)

Hess and Avery (2008) provide a review of scholarship on the role of discussion in citizenship education. They see a consensus among scholars that discussion acts as a vehicle for promoting democratic values, as well as increasing knowledge and awareness of social topics. Some studies differentiate between types of talk. Parker and Hess (2001), for example, distinguish between

deliberation, seminar and conversation modes of discussion, and contrast these with other kinds of discourse like debate. On the other hand, Hess and Avery (2008) refer to suggestions in the literature that the benefits of classroom talk to civic learning may be related not so much to the form discussion takes or to whether talk focuses on issues as to the sense students have of being in a classroom with an open climate: “It may be that while controversial issues discussions do matter in terms of democratic outcomes, students’ sense that they are in a classroom where they can speak and their opinions are respected also

matters” (pp. 508-9). The latest ICCS study reports positive correlations between

students’ interest in social and political issues, and teachers establishing classroom climates in which discussion is encouraged (Schulz et al., 2016).

Teachers of any school subject may find opportunities to include

discussion of contemporary topics, and indeed this is what all teachers are urged to do when citizenship is treated as a cross-curricular theme (K. Brown & Brown, 1996; Whitty et al., 1994). It can be argued, however, that the

communicative pedagogies employed in the foreign language classroom make it especially conducive to the kind of citizenship-related talk referred to by Crick.

The principles of CLT are in many ways similar to those of dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2008; Mercer & Dawes, 2008). Drawing on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, which presents knowledge-building as a reciprocal,

discursive process, Hardman (2011) argues that teachers should aim to teach dialogically, giving students opportunities to actively explore new information through talk. Traditional teacher-fronted lessons tend to deny learners this opportunity, since

knowledge is often presented by the teacher as closed, authoritative and immutable rather than as a reciprocal process in which ideas are

discussed between student and teacher and student and student so as to take thinking forward and open it up to discussion and interpretation. (p. 37)

This characterization of traditional, non-discursive classrooms bears a close resemblance to pre-communicative language teaching, and such pedagogies as the audiolingual method and grammar-translation method. As Starkey (1991) notes, these leave little room for discussion:

In such approaches the teacher controls the form of linguistic exchanges, … and grammatical considerations (rather than the truth or the desire to express something) control the range of acceptable answers. The teaching style is teacher-centred rather than learner-centred, authoritarian rather than democratic. (p. 216)

In contrast, Starkey (2005) argues that CLT is “in itself democratic” (p. 32). Moreover, where FLTs adopt a communicative approach, their teaching can take on important features of the dialogic pedagogy advocated by Hardman. Richards and Rodgers (2001) discern three principles that constitute a theory of learning for CLT:

- the communication principle: “Activities that involve real communication promote learning.”

- the task principle: “Activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning.”

- the meaningfulness principle: “Language that is meaningful to the learner supports the learning process.” (p. 161)

Reviewing the principles of dialogic teaching provided by Alexander (2008), the similarities with CLT are striking. For example, Alexander describes dialogic teaching as reciprocal – teachers and learners “listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints” – and, at the same time, purposeful – “teachers plan and steer classroom talk with specific educational goals in mind” (p. 38). This resonates with CLT’s focus on structuring lessons around “real communication” and “meaningful tasks”.

Alexander (2008) also describes dialogic teaching as supportive: learners “articulate their ideas freely, without fear of embarrassment over ‘wrong’

answers, and they help each other to reach common understandings” (p. 38). Again, this is similar to the atmosphere FLTs try to establish for learners

engaged in communicative tasks. Since such tasks focus on meaning rather than form, as Willis (1996) advises, “The teacher … should encourage all attempts to communicate in the target language. … Learners need to feel free to experiment with language on their own, and to take risks. Fluency in communication is what counts” (p. 24). To be sure, FLTs are concerned with grammatical accuracy, but when using activities intended to promote speaking fluency they are likely to save any error correction for other, form-focused phases of the lesson. Certainly, CLT does not entail the frequent highlighting of errors that characterizes the grammar-translation method.