Today, many FL teachers suffer from a disease of the spirit that we would like to refer to as the BALT syndrome (for: the "Battered Language Teacher" Syndrome). This is a neurosis that is characterized by the chronic and constant alternation between two irrational states of the mind: from self elevation to instructional omnipotence and omniscience all the way down to self denigration to infantile helplessness. The belief in instructional omnipotence and omniscience is founded on the implausible hypothesis that it is routinely possible to teach conversational fluency in a FL in the clasrooms of our mass educational system, in spite of convictincing evidence to the contrary. Infantile helplessness is symptomatized by an exaggerated dependence on methodological strategies that, like number painting and do it yourself kits, leave nothing but trivialities to be decided upon. The recent emphasis in education on accountability and the related requirement to develop behavioral objectives have so aggravated the BALT syndrome that language teachers are suffering from neurotic symptoms of confusion, anxiety, and uncertainty in connection with their work. What follows is an attempt to analyze the BALT syndrome, to expose the fallacies that underlie it, and thereby, hopefully, to ease the language teacher's burden by providing him with rationalizations that might serve for some of them to bring about a conversion to a new consciousness, a new reality about their teaching, one that is based on the premises of freedom rather than intellectual servitute.
Ordinary and Specialized Communicative Skills
The fact that people acquire languages is a commonplace event that needs no documentation. What needs to be discussed are the conditions under which languages can be acquired and the nature of the communicative skills thus acquired. We'd like to discuss two types of conditions of acquisition, natural and artificial, and two types of communicative skills, ordinary and specialized. We shall call "natural" conditions of acquisition those situations in which the individual is exposed to social interactional settings that exclude the learning of language as one of its recognized and legitamite functions. All other conditions of acquisition will then be artificial. Some of a second language in the home, living in a community in which the second language is spoken, and working in a setting in which the use of a second language is spoken, and working in a setting in which the use of a second language is regular and frequent. The classroom, the laboratory, FL conversation hours, and the like, are artificial condition. There are settings which combine these two aspects. For instance, language camps, summer school programs, and some group travel programs that provide opportunities for social interactions that pertain to everday natural communicative acts, even though the overall intent of the experience relates specifically to the learning of a second language.
Thus the distinctions between natural and artificial conditions of acquisition, on the one hand, and ordinary and specialized communicative skills, on the other, are founded in the expectations of members of a community with respect to the normal capabilities of the average person under ordinary everyday conditions. Natural, ordinary communicative skills. Specialized skills, on the other hand, usually but not always presume exposrure to artificial conditions. This interaction, between type of conditions exposed to and nature of the skills acquired, is not coincidental but, rather, conditional or implicative. The totality of an individual's ordinary communicative skills is related in highly significant ways tot he nature of his previous exposure to nonordinary, artificial, specially contrived settings. We would like, now, to elaborate upon what we think is involved in the relationship between "being exposed to" and "acquisition of communicative skills". Here lies the central problem of language education, the teaching learning interaction.
The Teaching Learning Interaction
Typically, language teachers see their task in two progressive steps: first, elementary language training to familiarize the student with the basics-the sounds, the articulations, the vocabulary, and the basic sentential patterns; second, advanced language training designed to liberate the student from speaking sentences to partaking in a conversational exchange on a more or less ordinary fluency basis. Rather than reject this widespread belief, as we have done in the past, we shall make some suggestions for ways in which these two steps can be more harmoniously integrated.
Recent work by a group of sociologists, among them Garfinkel, Schegloff and Sacks, has shown that conversational interaction can be analyzed in ways which exhibit its organizational structure. They refer to this approach as an ethnomethodological enterprise. For instance, they show that there are rules for opening and closing conversations, rules of interruption and taking turns in the conversation, rules for storytelling and reporting, and the like, all of which leads one to conclude that conversation has underlying syntactical structure whose adequate description represents a theoretical challenge no more nor less than what linguistics has already achieved for the description of grammar.
We label the approach introduced in this book transactional engineering analysis or T.E., for short. It is not related to Eric Berne's method of psychotherapy known as Transactional Analysis or T.A. This mehtod is in the ethnomethodological tradition and is closely associated with the work of Goffman on the ritual idiom. In content and motivation, though not perhaps in method and style, T.E. has some affinity with Firth's classic interest in the context of situation, and some current ongoing work in Britain. Similar in content, but still overlapping in motivation, is some recent work in sociolinguistics on situational context for speech, especially the formulations advanced by Dell Hymes on communicative competence.
That language is a structured system is, to the contemporary mind, a commonplace notion. But this was not always the case. The burden, of structural linguistics was, during its beginnings, the satisfactory demonstration ofthis notion. It succeeded in establishing this thesis by inventing a so called objective method of analyzing language data, though it fellshort of attaining descriptive adequacy. It is with a parallel motivation that we are introducing an objective mehtod for the analysis of conversational data, though we recognize that the task of arriving at an adequate description of these data remains to be pursued and is a task we expect to share with others.
The Greening of the FL Classroom
FL education in this country has gone through three historical periods: the period up to the second world war, the period between 1940 and the late 1960's, and the current renewed vision of the new consciousness of freedom to learn and freedom to teach. Each period is aptly characterized by the slogans of their day. The period up to 1940 is the period of Consciousness I; it is the period of pedantic belletrism, of educational elitism: "No person is truly educated unless he has a knowledge of one or more FL's." It is the period of the dull study of vocabulary lists, verb tenses, sentence parsing, and of translation. Neither the instructor nor the student ever felt the realness of the living language, nor did they ever seriously entertain the possibility of communicative competence, for, as everyone knew in those days, "Americans lack the abilityof learning a FL." Beginning with the war effort in the early 1940's, Americans discovered, under the necessity of the moment, that lo and behold, it was possible for them to acquire a speaking ability of a FL in a matter of weeks or months. With characteristic ingenuity and organizational ability that are the hallmark of the Consciousness II mind, this new found freedom was efficiently exploited for the purposes of mass education. The golden age of FL education in America was ushered in with the tape recorder, the language laboratory, and the pattern practice choir. "FL's for everyone" was taught to more students more and more. We began to keep track of number of enrollments and viewed with deep satisfaction the geometrically accelerated shape of the curves. Standardized tests and percentile norms became ever present. FLES curricula were initiated. NDEA institutes for language teachers became the thing to do during the summers. The Bilingual Education Act began to pour millions of dollars into the FL and second language teaching enterprises. Everything became big, big, big, an accelerated bigness that, like the golem of Prague, was mindless and unstoppable.
This picture would be funny were it not so sad. We are going to outline our conception of the new consciousness that is needed to turn these technological innovations in FL education into a tool that is subservient to our educational aspirations. This new reality of freedom will cure the BALT syndrome. Nothing new is needed. Not even money. Only individual initiative, a positive affirmation toward the path of liberation.
The relevance of research
A clear distinction is to be made between "basic research" and "applied research" Basic research is esoteric, specialized, and inaccessible to the teacher. To be a consumer of it, to be dependent upon it means to be subjugated to the authority and expertise of others. It means giving up freedom of choice in favor of faith and trust in the technocrat who very often is far removed from the realities and needs of the classroom, and in any event, is not the person who is held acountable. Basic research is a method of arriving at general theories about basic human behavior. It deals with laws and pricinples in the abstract; its observations are made under controlled conditions which involve the creation of artificial, nonnatural settings. When basic ressearch is carried out in naturalistic settings, its artificiality is not thereby reduced. Only some of the relevant factors are investigated at any point, and these are reduced to operational definitions by observation techniques that must meet certain restrictive standards.
Applied research refers to the systematic inestigation of a particular social setting. It is a tool used for gaining additional knowledge about the total configuration of interacting factors in the setting. The setting and the problem are defined independently of the techniques available through applied research. They are given by personal judgement, folk theory, ordinary experience, intuitive understanding. The systematic techniques made available by applied research are plugged in wherever possible of desirable. The overall integrity of the social settting, as given in the ordinary understanding of it, is never compromised, altered, or reduced to the demands of scientific standards. In a sense, it is the scientific standards that are being compromised for the sake of maintaining the full meaning of the problem being investigated.
The first point to make is that the procedure typically followed in the implementation of a new educational program is one that may be suitable for the construciton of a chemical plant but is totally unrealistic for a school. A blueprint program imposed externally, from the top, is an act of violence upon the individuality of the teacher and the student. It destroys, alienates, and cannot succeed. An educational program, in fact rather than delusion, is not a blueprint plan but a descriptive statement of ongoing activity. A program cannot realistically be planned and followed; it can only emerge after the fact, within the total configuration of a setting. A program cannot objectively be evaluated as to its overall success; evaluation can only consist of descriptive statements about isolated and seperate aspects of the total educational setting. Many aspects that are intuitively meaningful cannot be directly and unambiguously assessed: the effects upon the teachers morale and self satisfaction, the long term effects upon student creativity and motivation, the quality of student-teacher interaction, the psychological climate in school, the support and involvement of the community. Just because these aspects cannot be scientifically and objectively described, assessed, or controlled is no justification for leaving them out of the overall picture and for making decisions without considering them in equal importance to those aspects that are measurable in more straightforward terms.
Exploration of these broad, all encompassing issues clears the way for more specific ones, those that are more direclty related to the teacher's instructional activities in the classroom. He may find that he is dissatisfied with certain aspects of his teaching. He would like to explore with some new techniques but doesn't know where to start and what the consequences might be. He doesn't know how to get helpl how to talk openly with his supervisor, how much freedom to allow his students. He may realize his understanding of the fundamentals of his field are inadequate, but how and to whom shall he make such an admission? He may have difficulty getting along with some young people in the class and needs opportunity to learn more effective interpersonal management techniques. And so on.
Finally, he may feel sufficiently involved and committed to do something concrete. He wants to be shown how he can use systematic observation techniques to monitor the process of change, how to prepare tests and questionnaires, how to change the participatory structure in his classroom, how to state behavioral objectives, how to use multiple evaluation criteria, and how to interpret them in the light of his own personal judgemnet which must always retain a primary status lest alienation and inhumanity destroy his effectiveness and sense of wellbeing. Out of these concrete activities, individually coherent and custom tailored to his personality, interests, self confidence, emerges the program, and with it the curriculum. There is no prodding from the school administrator, no externally imposed blueprint, no threat, no alienation, no loss of personal dignity. There is the recognition that the educational process is a complex configuration of fluid, changing, uncontrollable set of interacting factors. There is no personal responsibility for failure or success, no personal accountability, only that of the system as a whole.
The ercent new emphasis on acountability in education has both positive and negative potentials. If used by school administrators to pressure teachers for improved student scores on standardized norms, it becomes a pernicious act of violence and injustice against the personhood of the individual teacher. If used as part of an assessment procedure for the overall educational process in a particular school setting along with other observation techniques, it may have some value as an information feedback system. However, the very concept of accountability contains the notion of individual responsibility within a complex system tht is beyond significant individual control and choice. It is likely, therefore, to be more abused as an instrument of arbitrary punishment and scape goating than used constructively as an assessment instrument.
Freedom to teach is an essential component of the new educational process that is unfolding. It includes freedom from personal responsibility for students' percentile ranks on standardized, norm-referenced tests, freedom from administrative authority relating to decisions and policies governing the teacher's activities, freedom from the obligation of certification and specialized training. Freedom to learn is a necessary condition for the full development of the individual's creative potentials. It includes freedom from compulsory courses and curricula, freedom from authority, freedom from the requirement of tests, examinations, and grades.
To the person whose reality is at the level of the older consciousness,
our description of the educational process under freedom to teach and learn must evoke a
feeling of horror or derision, or both in turn. Visions of anarchy, chaos, abuse,
waste, present themselves to his excited imagination. His reality of our
technological socieyt held in place by regimentation, bureaucratic order, certification,
standardization, individual reward system, laws, regulations, guidelines, blueprints,
etc., is threathened by the cataclysmic implications of an individual freedom that
removes itself by one fell swoop of the sword of liberation. A world without
systemic control and paternalistic rule is, for him, the worst imaginable hell. Man,
who cannot transcend the reality of organization and technology is fearful, resttricted,
restrictive, lacking hope and faith and trust. The only creative imagination that is
left to him lies in the construction
of visions of doom unless....His blind faith in organizational structure robs him of any
remaining faith in the goodness and capacities of free man. His restricted vision
limits him to incapacitating slogans, the futile call for more and better of the
same. Under the spell of these tired, old, worn-out impotent notions he condones the
current reality of mediocrity, injustice, inequality, intellectual poverty, dull
regimentaion, inhumanity, and dehumanization.
Freedom to teach will come to cure the BALT syndrome. With freedom from threat and retaliation, the liberated teacher will explore that vast range of possibilities that exists, in self concept, between instructional omnipotence and childish helplessness, and in teaching, between the despotism of overstructuredness and the debilitatinf frustration of understructuredness. No doubt, some teachers will misuse this freedom, just as they now misuse the authority they are given by the system. This is no legitimate reason for withholding that freedom, but it may be instructive to consider how freedom to teach could be misused, so that those who do may come to gain more insight into their actions.
For the School Administrator and the FL Supervisor
If you are an old fashioned old timer, you are no doubt ready to scoff at all that we have written in this chapter. OK Goodbye. It was nice knowing you. Don't call us, we'll call you. We are interested in talking to those of you whom the teacher considers "sensible, reasonable, often helpful and understanding, but unfortunately overworked, not aware of what goes in the hearts of the teachers, and constantly pressured by numbers, reports, accountability, failure rates, and an unreasonable principal or district administrator." To you we want to talk about freedom to teach and about the education of children, and let the teachers listen in on our conversation.
A clear distinction is to be made between "basic research" and "applied research" Basic research is esoteric, specialized, and inaccessible to the teacher. To be a consumer of it, to be dependent upon it means to be subjugated to the authority and expertise of others. It means giving up freedom of choice in favor of faith and trust in the technocrat who very often is far removed from the realities and needs of the classroom, and in any event, is not the person who is held acountable. Basic research is a method of arriving at general theories about basic human behavior. It deals with laws and pricinples in the abstract; its observations are made under controlled conditions which involve the creation of artificial, nonnatural settings. When basic ressearch is carried out in naturalistic settings, its artificiality is not thereby reduced. Only some of the relevant factors are investigated at any point, and these are reduced to operational definitions by observation techniques that must meet certain restrictive standards.
Applied research refers to the systematic inestigation of a particular social setting. It is a tool used for gaining additional knowledge about the total configuration of interacting factors in the setting. The setting and the problem are defined independently of the techniques available through applied research. They are given by personal judgement, folk theory, ordinary experience, intuitive understanding. The systematic techniques made available by applied research are plugged in wherever possible of desirable. The overall integrity of the social settting, as given in the ordinary understanding of it, is never compromised, altered, or reduced to the demands of scientific standards. In a sense, it is the scientific standards that are being compromised for the sake of maintaining the full meaning of the problem being investigated.
The first point to make is that the procedure typically followed in the implementation of a new educational program is one that may be suitable for the construciton of a chemical plant but is totally unrealistic for a school. A blueprint program imposed externally, from the top, is an act of violence upon the individuality of the teacher and the student. It destroys, alienates, and cannot succeed. An educational program, in fact rather than delusion, is not a blueprint plan but a descriptive statement of ongoing activity. A program cannot realistically be planned and followed; it can only emerge after the fact, within the total configuration of a setting. A program cannot objectively be evaluated as to its overall success; evaluation can only consist of descriptive statements about isolated and seperate aspects of the total educational setting. Many aspects that are intuitively meaningful cannot be directly and unambiguously assessed: the effects upon the teachers morale and self satisfaction, the long term effects upon student creativity and motivation, the quality of student-teacher interaction, the psychological climate in school, the support and involvement of the community. Just because these aspects cannot be scientifically and objectively described, assessed, or controlled is no justification for leaving them out of the overall picture and for making decisions without considering them in equal importance to those aspects that are measurable in more straightforward terms.
Exploration of these broad, all encompassing issues clears the way for more specific ones, those that are more direclty related to the teacher's instructional activities in the classroom. He may find that he is dissatisfied with certain aspects of his teaching. He would like to explore with some new techniques but doesn't know where to start and what the consequences might be. He doesn't know how to get helpl how to talk openly with his supervisor, how much freedom to allow his students. He may realize his understanding of the fundamentals of his field are inadequate, but how and to whom shall he make such an admission? He may have difficulty getting along with some young people in the class and needs opportunity to learn more effective interpersonal management techniques. And so on.
Finally, he may feel sufficiently involved and committed to do something concrete. He wants to be shown how he can use systematic observation techniques to monitor the process of change, how to prepare tests and questionnaires, how to change the participatory structure in his classroom, how to state behavioral objectives, how to use multiple evaluation criteria, and how to interpret them in the light of his own personal judgemnet which must always retain a primary status lest alienation and inhumanity destroy his effectiveness and sense of wellbeing. Out of these concrete activities, individually coherent and custom tailored to his personality, interests, self confidence, emerges the program, and with it the curriculum. There is no prodding from the school administrator, no externally imposed blueprint, no threat, no alienation, no loss of personal dignity. There is the recognition that the educational process is a complex configuration of fluid, changing, uncontrollable set of interacting factors. There is no personal responsibility for failure or success, no personal accountability, only that of the system as a whole.
The ercent new emphasis on acountability in education has both positive and negative potentials. If used by school administrators to pressure teachers for improved student scores on standardized norms, it becomes a pernicious act of violence and injustice against the personhood of the individual teacher. If used as part of an assessment procedure for the overall educational process in a particular school setting along with other observation techniques, it may have some value as an information feedback system. However, the very concept of accountability contains the notion of individual responsibility within a complex system tht is beyond significant individual control and choice. It is likely, therefore, to be more abused as an instrument of arbitrary punishment and scape goating than used constructively as an assessment instrument.
Freedom to teach is an essential component of the new educational process that is unfolding. It includes freedom from personal responsibility for students' percentile ranks on standardized, norm-referenced tests, freedom from administrative authority relating to decisions and policies governing the teacher's activities, freedom from the obligation of certification and specialized training. Freedom to learn is a necessary condition for the full development of the individual's creative potentials. It includes freedom from compulsory courses and curricula, freedom from authority, freedom from the requirement of tests, examinations, and grades.
To the person whose reality is at the level of the older consciousness,
our description of the educational process under freedom to teach and learn must evoke a
feeling of horror or derision, or both in turn. Visions of anarchy, chaos, abuse,
waste, present themselves to his excited imagination. His reality of our
technological socieyt held in place by regimentation, bureaucratic order, certification,
standardization, individual reward system, laws, regulations, guidelines, blueprints,
etc., is threathened by the cataclysmic implications of an individual freedom that
removes itself by one fell swoop of the sword of liberation. A world without
systemic control and paternalistic rule is, for him, the worst imaginable hell. Man,
who cannot transcend the reality of organization and technology is fearful, resttricted,
restrictive, lacking hope and faith and trust. The only creative imagination that is
left to him lies in the construction
of visions of doom unless....His blind faith in organizational structure robs him of any
remaining faith in the goodness and capacities of free man. His restricted vision
limits him to incapacitating slogans, the futile call for more and better of the
same. Under the spell of these tired, old, worn-out impotent notions he condones the
current reality of mediocrity, injustice, inequality, intellectual poverty, dull
regimentaion, inhumanity, and dehumanization.
Freedom to teach will come to cure the BALT syndrome. With freedom
from threat and retaliation, the liberated teacher will explore that vast range of
possibilities that exists, in self concept, between instructional omnipotence and childish
helplessness, and in teaching, between the despotism of overstructuredness and the
debilitatinf frustration of understructuredness. No doubt, some teachers will misuse
this freedom, just as they now misuse the authority they are given by the system.
This is no legitimate reason for withholding that freedom, but it may be instructive to
consider how freedom to teach could be misused, so that those who do may come to
gain more insight into their actions.
NOTES
1Of course, the individual concerned may have been previously categorized as a member of anothe subculture or culture. In that case, a different subsystem of rules of interaction comes into play to alter behavior and expectations
2Not, of course, the particular utterances previously encountered, but rather, the nature of the underlying ruleds that account for the set of previously occurring utterances in his experience.
3Whatever the theoretical difficulties associated with functional behaviorism (see Part III), the applied research it has generated in special education and in clinical psychology is much to be admired.
REFERENCES
Reich, Charles A. The Greening of America. New
York: Bantam Books, 1970.
| My Home Page || Gender Differences || New Directions || Pattern Practice || Freedom to Teach || Review Study Questions ||Appendix I|| Appendix II | Dr. Leon James Home Page |