Reflection 5 Humberto Marino

In recent years there has been an increase of research in language teaching; new
methods, approaches, techniques and theories have been created, but, in order to
understand and put into practice this valuable material, teachers need training programs
where they can be taught and become aware of the principles and practices described in
English teaching research books. How can collaborators manage to make a link between
theory and good teaching practices with trainees?
There are many training programs that seek to update their teachers knowledge through
lectures and reading assignments but, in this way, the teacher-students are regarded as
passive individuals without giving importance to their own perceptions or insights. I would
not adopt this approach to teacher training because it is based solely on transmission of
knowledge. Another way that collaborators train others is by example; since the very first
encounter, the trainer sets a model for the trainees in many ways like the activities and
input he uses, the modes of interaction among participants and the way he gives feedback
and corrects errors. It is not enough the collaborator talking about all the great techniques
and methods he knows, he has to show student-teachers how these activities are
implemented.
Besides from learning by observing the collaborator, the trainees can also look at their own
practice and describe the criteria for a certain course of action and even the feelings they
experience during class. Through a process of recall and introspection they can identify
their best and worst moments during the session. They can also reflect upon their own
class by using transcripts of their lessons where they can easily see the procedures that
helped them create positive learning experiences. This is one thing I do regularly every
class I have: I think about what I did well, what I did wrong and how I can improve; I write
this down as fast as I can and the next day, as I decide what I will do for todays class, I
take into consideration all the previous insights to make progress in my teaching. A
transcription would be an excellent idea but I consider it a technology hard to include in my
budget.
Esther Ramanis research (1987) gives a valuable and interesting answer to the question
of making theory and practice come together; Ramanis experimenting procedures are an
excellent way of integrating practice and theory for English teachers. She starts by

showing teachers a videotaped lesson of an experienced teacher giving a class and they
come up with ideas as to what parts of the lesson they considered most and least
satisfactory and why. She allows little time (10 min) to do this in order to get spontaneous,
subjective answers that reveal their criteria and ways of thinking to act in a certain way.
After writing these responses on the board, she began analyzing them with the group of
teachers.
They discussed that the variety of teaching activities was both in the list of the most
satisfactory practices and in the list of the least satisfactory ones. Following a long
discussion about this apparent contradiction, they came to an agreement and final idea
that: Although variety is important, it is much more important to ensure that the activities
are genuinely challenging. While helping to examine subjective responses more critically,
Ramani played 2 important roles in teacher training: reformulator and focuser.
Reformulator because she helped teachers to rethink their own insights in more specific
terms. And focuser because she suggested which topics might be interesting to spend
more time with as she made teachers aware of current theoretical issues.
This is a great idea to put into practice in my training function as a collaborator. I can
definitely have my student-teachers watch classes from experienced professionals or even
from their own classes and tell me their thoughts about the teaching process. As a final
stage we can analyze their responses while helping them to clarify (or even correct) their
own ideas in the light of current theory; I can also suggest areas of language teaching
theory on which to focus based on my own teaching experience. Besides from improving
teaching practice, this method can also show what literature is recommended for a group
of teachers (or to individual teachers) based on their own interests and needs.
Ramanis ideas are a good way to reflect upon the role of the collaborator in the training
process but what is commonly done in training programs is the famous Loop Input by
Tessa Woodward (1988). In this experiential approach, teachers take the role of students
while the trainer takes the role of a teacher and together they read texts about activities
while putting them into practice at the same time. For example, in order to practice
strategies to read better, the trainees read a text that talks about getting the gist from a
paragraph, scanning for specific information and skimming for the main ideas. They read
this text by skimming and scanning it through it.

This will be a common practice in my work as a collaborator in the future because teachers
learn by doing and reading theory at the same time. I will implement activities like Wallwork
Posters (Woodward 1992) where members have a discussion about a text they read, a
class they saw or an assignment they did; after listening to each others ideas, they come
to an agreement as to what the main ideas are in order to write them on paper and use
them as posters. I will also put into practice Zoltan Dornyeis presentation through dialogue
(1986)1

where teacher-students will read out a dialogue and repeat it in different

formations like: together in chorus, half of the class take one role and the other half take
the other role, one student to another student, one student to the rest of the class. After
this, students will make a video with them saying the dialogue and showing it to class.
In this text I have analyzed the different options there are to link theory and practice within
the teacher training framework. There are training programs where the main focus is on
listening to lectures and doing readings in a passive way in order to implement this
content. There are other programs where student-teachers get to see their own or
somebody elses performance by watching it live with the help of devices like videotape
recorders or transcripting machines; in places where all of this technology is not available
teachers simply remember and assess their own class to analyze it and see how can they
improve in any way. Finally, there are more advanced techniques like watching a
videotaped lesson from a specialist and discussing their own criteria against experience
and collaborators ideas to come up with valuable insights about the teaching practice. The
loop input also helps teachers in learning new teaching techniques and experimenting how
their students feel about the different ways of teaching procedures.

1 In Ur(1999)

Bibliografa
Dornyei, Z. (1999). Exploiting textbook dialogues dynamicly. En P. Ur, A course
in language teaching (pg. 142). Cambridge: Cambridge Teacher Training
and Development.
Hughes, J. (2010). L is for Loop input.
http://elteachertrainer.com/2010/05/28/do-we-still-use-%E2%80%98loopinput%E2%80%99-these-days/ consulted on March 28th 2015.
Ramani, E. (1987). Theorizing from the Classroom . ELT journal Volume 41/1.
Woodward, T. (1988). Loop Input . Eltj Oxford Journals.
Woodward, T. (1991). Models and Metaphors for Language Teaching. CUP.
Woodward, T. (1992). Ways of Training. Uk: Longman Group.