If you read and enjoyed my recent post Silent Periods can also be good for teachers, I've got some good news for you!
The very talented Darren Elliott from the lives of teachers recently put this idea into practice with his own class of adult learners in Japan, and he's posted about it in a great report titled a class with no teacher.
A great read, and definitely worth checking out. Darren's account is set to become more interesting than mine, as he is going further than I did and actually collecting feedback and comments from his learners about the experience.
One thing that struck me about both my and Darren's experiences is that they occured in Korea and Japan respectively - two contexts that feature monolingual and monocultural groups of students. Based on the comments on both of our posts, some teachers expressed doubts about using the silent treatment with students from Asia who share the same mother language, but Darren and I are either proving the exception to the rule or perhaps touching on an over-generalisation about learners from these (and potentially other) contexts.
What this issue does remind me of is something Dr. Andrew Finch once mentioned in an interview at an ELT conference in Seoul. He talked of the need to understand that, in places like Korea, where students are bombarded with Grammar-McNugget style English from very young ages, there is less of a need to teach students more language and much more of a need to facilitate chances to use it.
I think Dr. Finch is absolutely right, and in my opinion the experience of the silent teacher I shared with Darren has a lot more to do with taking the padlock off the door leading to a overstuffed storeroom than anything else.
I've included that interview with Dr. Finch below - there are also some fascinating comments from him about the game baduk ("go") and how it could relate to thinking about ELT in so-called 'rote-learning' contexts, plus the whole idea of dealing with students who have been effectively "trained to fail." You'll also pick up some diamonds here about making highly localised, student-centred coursebook material.
Fascinating stuff.
One of the highlights of my time in ELT was having Dr. Finch give me a job in his own department at Kyungpook University in Daegu, where I got to have conversations like this with him over a casual coffee. I was a lucky fellow indeed!
:-)
