Planning for learning opportunities

Scott Thornbury

I was observing a beginners’ class in Valencia a while back, where the teacher was introducing the present simple for daily routines: She takes the bus to work. She gets home at six in the evening, etc. It was a well-designed and very competently executed lesson. To his credit, the teacher had allowed time at the end to administer a simple feedback questionnaire. Among other things, the questionnaire asked the students what they liked about the lesson, and what they thought the lesson objectives were.

Once the students had left, the teacher and I went through the responses to the questionnaire. It was clear that the lesson had been rated highly by all the students, and that a number had identified the lesson aims as being ‘about daily habits’ or even ‘the present simple’. But what struck us was that one student had decided that the lesson was about prepositions. Prepositions? PREPOSITIONS!?

Lesson outcomes can be unpredictable

But then, thinking about it, we reflected that the lesson had indeed included a lot of prepositions: She leaves home at seven. She takes the bus to work. At midday she has lunch in a restaurant… etc. For some reason, best known to her, the student (who had also rated the lesson highly, by the way) had seemingly ignored the present simple ‘lesson point’ and had noticed – and taken away – the prepositional content of the lesson. Perhaps she had ‘done’ the present simple before and wasn’t interested in it. Or maybe she’d had problems with prepositions recently – a fairly likely scenario. Either way, the student’s response to the questionnaire underscored the fact that the outcomes of any lesson are unpredictable and often idiosyncratic. As Allwright and Bailey (1991, p. 28) noted, many years ago:

Learners do not learn directly from the syllabus. They learn, partly, from whatever becomes of the syllabus in the classroom, but they can learn from other things that happen too.

What does this mean in terms of lesson planning? Does it mean that we cannot confidently predict our lesson outcomes? Does it mean that we cannot evaluate a lesson simply on whether it achieved its aims or not?

Yes! That’s exactly what it means! Let me tell you why.

For a start, it is generally accepted by researchers in second language acquisition (SLA) that, in acquiring both a first or an additional language, learners follow a developmental path that is not easily manipulated by explicit teaching. As Skehan (1996, p.19) put it, ‘teachers and learners cannot simply “choose” what is to be learned. To a large extent the syllabus is “built in” to the learner.’ Thus, our ‘prepositions lady’ may simply not have been ready for the target structure (the present simple) but at least she was able to find something else in the lesson to capture her interest.

Moreover, the idea that a language learning cycle, from first encounter to full integration, can occur over the space of a mere fifty-minute lesson seems ambitious in the extreme. Certainly, most teachers will have experienced a sense of disbelief at the failure of learners to retrieve very much from a previous lesson, a frequently witnessed expression of which is the teacher complaining to the students: “Come on, guys, we did this last week!”. ?And yet teachers in training are still coerced to articulate lesson aims using the formula ‘by the end of the lesson the students will be able to…’ or ‘by the end of the lesson they will have learnt that…’ This seems woefully to misrepresent the nature of language learning. The best we can hope for, perhaps, is that ‘by the end of the lesson some of the learners will have some explicit knowledge about the target linguistic item X... and over time, given sufficient motivation and opportunities for use, they may be able to integrate it into their overall communicative competence.’ Anything else is magical thinking!

More importantly, the expectation that learners will obligingly comply with the teacher’s plan does not reflect the dynamic, reactive, and constantly evolving nature of the typical language lesson. As J. Richards (1998, pp.118-19) argues, ‘teaching can be viewed not so much as the process of realising plans, but as a creative interaction between plans, student responses, and teacher improvisation.’ Whatever the teacher’s initial intentions might have been, they are frequently subject to ongoing modification – even complete abandonment – in accordance with the way that the students respond to the lesson content as it evolves. Defining a lesson’s goals solely in terms of a pre-specified outcome would, according to K. Richards (2006, p. 57), ‘exclude the many unanticipated, incidental and spontaneous interpolations – including those directly flouting the teacher’s purpose – that provide educationally valuable diversions and sometimes important learning opportunities.’

Process-based planning supports learning opportunities

Indeed, research into the way that experienced teachers go about planning their lessons suggests that a less product- and more process-oriented approach to lesson design is the norm rather than the exception. Tsui (2003, p.187), for example, notes that ‘studies of teachers’ planning processes and planning thoughts observe that experienced teachers seldom start with aims and objectives when they plan a lesson. Rather, they will start with materials or content, and think about students’ interests and activities that may be required.’

This does not obviate the need for planning, but, as Allwright (2005, p. 10) insists, it should be planning for learning opportunities, ‘not planning to determine highly specific learning outcomes.’

Of course, such a process-oriented approach does not find much favour with proponents of outcomes-based lesson planning, especially in the form known as ‘backward-design’ – that is, where the starting point in the teacher’s planning decisions is the pre-specified outcome of the lesson, after which the activities that are intended to support it are slotted in retrospectively. As Wiggins and McTighe (2005, p. 14) describe it, this ‘involves thinking a great deal, first, about the specific learnings sought, and the evidence of such learnings, before thinking about what we, as the teacher, will do or provide in teaching and learning activities.’

Such a relatively rigid, ends-driven and teacher-controlled approach to lesson design allows little or no deviation from the plan, and hence little ownership of the lesson on the part of the learners, with a resulting loss of engagement. Nor is such an approach likely to provide the incidental learning opportunities that were afforded that student in Valencia and her decision to focus on prepositions.

Of course, she might well have been an exception. There are always one or two students who are marching to the beat of their own drum! Indeed, the other students were generally in no doubt as to the teacher’s intentions. Nevertheless, the idea that language learning can be so tightly and narrowly constrained by a focus on outcomes, one ‘grammar McNugget’ at a time, seems to run counter to the experience of most reflective teachers – both in the short and the long term. Larsen-Freeman (1997, p. 151) nicely captures the somewhat chaotic nature of the process: ‘Learning linguistic items is not a linear process – learners do not master one item and then move on to another. In fact, the learning curve for a single item is not linear either. The curve is filled with peaks and valleys, progress and backslidings.’

How, then, can we design lessons that accommodate the non-linearity, variability and unpredictability of actual learning processes, and which, at the same time, maximise opportunities for incidental learning of the type experienced by the prepositions learner?

Work with a broad curriculum

One approach is to work with a curriculum whose goals are more broad than narrow. A narrow curriculum is one that formulates lesson aims in terms such as ‘to teach the present perfect continuous, third person, affirmative.’ A broader aim, on the other hand, might be ‘to talk about recent activities.’ The broad aim can accommodate the narrower, grammatical aim – but a lot more besides. The relatively language-rich classroom culture it creates is likely to offer a wider range of learning opportunities to a greater diversity of learners than the more narrowly focused one. As McNaughton (2002, p. 42) reminds us, ‘a curriculum that promotes only segmented, isolated, and elemental learning tasks reduces the student’s degree of learning (including incidental learning) and also their preparedness for future learning.’

Nurture both surface-level and deep learning outcomes

On similar grounds, Hattie (2012) distinguishes between surface-level and deep learning outcomes. In our field, the former would be represented by the grammar syllabus, but deep outcomes might include such things as a willingness to communicate, or the ability to regulate one’s own learning, or simply an enthusiasm for the language being learned. According to Hattie, teaching that focuses solely on surface-level outcomes does not guarantee the achievement of deep outcomes. Expert teachers, however, are able to nurture both surface-level and deep learning outcomes.

Of course, a really wide curriculum, and one with really deep learning outcomes, would not specify any linguistic aims at all. Rather, it would be one where the learning opportunities emerge from the content that the learners themselves generate. It would be of the type developed by Wade (1992, p. 30) when he was working without a prescribed syllabus as a volunteer teacher in Papua New Guinea. His lessons consisted of a very simple design:

1 Set up a situation where students talk about relevant topics that are important to them.

2 Write down what they want to say.

3 Use what is written to teach them about various aspects of the language.

Including prepositions, of course!

Scott Thornbury ’s 66 Essentials of Lesson Design is available now. Learn more.

References

Allwright, D. (2005) ‘From teaching points to learning opportunities and beyond’.? TESOL Quarterly, 39/1.

Allwright, D. & Bailey, K.M. (1991) Focus on the language classroom. Cambridge University Press.

Hattie, J. (2012) Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. Routledge.

Larsen-Freeman, D. (1997) ‘Chaos/Complexity science and second language acquisition’.?Applied Linguistics?18/1.

McNaughton, S. (2002). Meeting of minds. Wellington, NZ: Learning Media.

Richards, J. C. (1998) ‘What’s the use of lesson plans?’ In Richards, J. C. Beyond training. Cambridge University Press.

Richards, K. (2006) ‘Being the teacher: identity and classroom conversation’. Applied linguistics 27/1.

Skehan, P. (1996) ‘Second language acquisition research and task-based instruction.’ In Willis, J. & Willis, D. (eds) Challenge and change in language teaching. Heinemann.

Tsui, A. B. M. (2003). Understanding expertise in teaching: case studies of second language teachers. Cambridge University Press.

Wade, E. J. (1992) Teaching without textbooks: Accelerative learning in the language classroom. Carlton, Vic: CIS Educational.

Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005) Understanding by design (2nd edn.) Association for Supervision and Curric