I know how to make the perfect fried egg. I know how to curl a ball and score from 25 yards just like David Beckham. I know how to drive. I know how to ski. I know how to do all of these things flawlessly. Except, of course, I can't do any of them.
The bottom of my fried eggs always seem to burn before the top bit is cooked. Pressure always goes to my head when I shoot in football. My parking is awful. And anybody who has seen me ski - well, the less said, the better.
Yet I KNOW the techniques for all these things. I have had 25 driving lessons and if anybody tells me to plough my skis again I'll.. well, I'll get to that later.
So what's going wrong?
Many skills require more than just a knowledge of how to complete them.
They also require a good knowledge of what it feels like to complete them without too much thinking, so that these skills be called upon when needed. If we are not able to call upon the skill we need, then the knowledge of HOW to do it becomes useless.
I can repeat ad infinitum the rules of how to place my body weight and skis correctly, but this is a pointless piece of knowledge considering the fact I still can't ski.
Language learning is very similar. Rarely do I meet a student at B1+ in Odessa who doesn't know how to form the 2nd/3rd conditional. Rarer still is it to find a student at B1 who actually draws on this knowledge when in conversation to express themselves.
The student can repeat rules but not actually apply them. Wasted knowledge.
It seems there is a gap between knowing and doing. If we want our learners to become successful English speakers then we must bridge this gap.
So what can we do?
Emphasising the need to 'be able to' rather than just 'to know' is an essential step we must take in order to become competent teachers. I believe the onus is on us not only to give the students ample opportunity to practice- fail- repeat- improve - repeat, etc. but also to make the students aware of the gap they have to bridge. We shouldn't be satisfied with the fact that students can mechanically repeat the form of the present perfect continuous in the classroom. Can they use it in real life?
It's also our job as teachers to understand that this process will take more than one lesson. We need to support and push our students to the point of 'being able to' even if they may fight against us with cries of 'We know this'!
The Ukrainian Education Programme
The Ministry of Education in Ukraine has responded to this by reforming its lower-secondary programme and introducing something called CBLT (Competency Based Language Teaching) which (among other things) introduces a more practical 'can do' approach to English learning.
The Ministry has introduced 10 competencies consisting of smaller parts as a guideline of what students should be able to do, with the emphasis being on DO rather than just know.
This is the first step in a movement away from the traditional parrot-fashion memorising of rules that accounted for a large part of education in the past.
The 10 competencies can be found on the Dinternal website.
Help is at hand!
Don't despair teachers! This shift in focus doesn't mean a total overhaul of everything we have done in the past. In fact, many of the top titles on the market such as Wider World, Next Move and Islands have been designed with all these competencies in mind. Teacher's books now list where each of the competencies are taught and practiced, to make sure your students become doers and not just knowers.
We at Dinternal are working on seminars to help teachers with this new approach and demonstrate how it can be easily applied in the classroom without too much upheaval or change.
Look out for our seminars, webinars and workshops!
CBLT will help our students become people who can use English in their day to day life in order to achieve their maximum potential. Who knows, one day I might get that skiing right!
Tom
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