We're off this morning - 4-5 hours to Surabaya and then another 4 1/2 hour train ride to Jember - it's one of those Indonesian travel days that you get used to if you move around much here. Lots of transport.
The workshop ended yesterday, and it seemed to go well. We got behind - for one thing the men kept showing up late for every session, which as I have mentioned I don't get really annoyed about because it is Indonesia after all. And then there were several moments where we got pulled in other directions because of questions that came up that demanded discussion. We'd been talking a lot about helping students generate a lot of writing, and about the need to curtail the teacherly impulse to point out every mistake. I always tell them that this isn't an issue solely for people teaching English to speakers of other languages; teachers in the United States, too, seem unable to resist pointing out where the student screwed up in the writing. There is something funny about this, usually. Certainly, in Indonesia, one thing most Indonesian students I have worked with are well aware that they struggle with grammar, so on one level, if I correct all their mistakes, they just learn what they already know: they are far far from competence.
At one point yesterday, a participant insisted that we stop to discuss a question he had. Indonesian students, he said, have a tendency to write English using in their heads Indonesian grammatical structures. He went to the board and wrote an example of this: "Ibu Ummi angry I. She beat my. Because me steal bagblack." How can we focus on students doing a lot of writing when they make such a level of mistakes? Shouldn't we get them to stop making those mistakes first?
So I asked the participants, what would you do with a passage like this? How would you respond to it. They had several answers, usually including the words subject and object and pronoun and how they would explain this and how they would introduce the lesson and the difficulties of teaching these sorts of things. I let them discuss this for a while and then one of them asked me how I would respond to the passage. "I would say, 'why did you steal the black bag?" I told them."Or maybe, how did you feel when Ibu Ummi beat you?" (I also told Umi that she needed to stop beating her students, even if they do steal.) We talked about the process of assigning writing primarily to point out what the students are not capable of. "What happens if we read with different glasses, without always looking for mistakes?" If someone came up to me on the street in the United States, I said, and told me that, my fist impulse would not be to offer a quick lesson about object pronouns in English. I'd want to know if the person was injured.
It's a fairly old idea, of course, in my field, but it never stops being relevant for teachers: if we read to find mistakes, we will find mistakes. And if we don't read to find mistakes, we have to read for something else When I first wrapped my head around this idea, it was like someone had just lifted a weight off my shoulders, because reading student writing with the agenda of pointing out what lousy writers students are is a drag, and it leads to endless and tedious carping by teachers about how terribly their students write and look at this stupid thing one of my students wrote and on and on. It's a kind of mean-spirited teaching.
It's always hard to know what effect a workshop like this has for teachers, but they seemed genuinely enthusiastic and excited to try out something new, to invite their students to write and then to celebrate and listen to what they wrote instead of remind them, yet again, how long they have to go before they can speak English.
Wrapped around in some of this is the way that "native speakers" are fetishized sometimes in English language teaching contexts, as if a person who grew up speaking English somehow has magic teaching English powers that others cannot have. It comes back to a belief that a speaker who doesn't learn a language from birth can never call that language his own language. One student, talking to me between sessions, asked me what I thought about his accent. "I don't sound like you when I talk," he said. "Of course you don't sound like me," I said. "You won't ever sound like me. People in Ireland don't sound like me either. But I understand what you are saying" - which is actually more than I could say about some of the people I spoke English to in Ireland last summer. "You don't have to sound like me to be a speaker of the language." No one gets to own a language - that's the beauty of language - and no one has ever been able to build a tall enough wall to hold onto their ownership of English. In fact that wall is a relic, like the Berlin Wall, with pieces protected here and there that we should treat like an artifact of well-left past.
Then they took me to a batik store, where I found a few fine shirts (I am XXL in Indonesia, which makes things a little difficult sometimes). After we bought our shirts we waited outside, in the dark, near the beach, listening to a child reciting something from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque. We were waiting for our driver who was also buying things at the batik store. "He waits for us to leave because he will get a discount," Umi told me, "for bringing us here." I can't quibble with this logic, of course.
So goodbye to Madura today. It is a beautiful place, and I am so lucky to have the chance to come out to the farthest part of this island in a place where tourists simply do not visit. I landed in Jakarta at one AM last Thursday morning, and I have only been in the country for one week. I can hardly believe it. Time moves slowly here, in the best of ways.
The workshop ended yesterday, and it seemed to go well. We got behind - for one thing the men kept showing up late for every session, which as I have mentioned I don't get really annoyed about because it is Indonesia after all. And then there were several moments where we got pulled in other directions because of questions that came up that demanded discussion. We'd been talking a lot about helping students generate a lot of writing, and about the need to curtail the teacherly impulse to point out every mistake. I always tell them that this isn't an issue solely for people teaching English to speakers of other languages; teachers in the United States, too, seem unable to resist pointing out where the student screwed up in the writing. There is something funny about this, usually. Certainly, in Indonesia, one thing most Indonesian students I have worked with are well aware that they struggle with grammar, so on one level, if I correct all their mistakes, they just learn what they already know: they are far far from competence.
At one point yesterday, a participant insisted that we stop to discuss a question he had. Indonesian students, he said, have a tendency to write English using in their heads Indonesian grammatical structures. He went to the board and wrote an example of this: "Ibu Ummi angry I. She beat my. Because me steal bagblack." How can we focus on students doing a lot of writing when they make such a level of mistakes? Shouldn't we get them to stop making those mistakes first?
So I asked the participants, what would you do with a passage like this? How would you respond to it. They had several answers, usually including the words subject and object and pronoun and how they would explain this and how they would introduce the lesson and the difficulties of teaching these sorts of things. I let them discuss this for a while and then one of them asked me how I would respond to the passage. "I would say, 'why did you steal the black bag?" I told them."Or maybe, how did you feel when Ibu Ummi beat you?" (I also told Umi that she needed to stop beating her students, even if they do steal.) We talked about the process of assigning writing primarily to point out what the students are not capable of. "What happens if we read with different glasses, without always looking for mistakes?" If someone came up to me on the street in the United States, I said, and told me that, my fist impulse would not be to offer a quick lesson about object pronouns in English. I'd want to know if the person was injured.
It's a fairly old idea, of course, in my field, but it never stops being relevant for teachers: if we read to find mistakes, we will find mistakes. And if we don't read to find mistakes, we have to read for something else When I first wrapped my head around this idea, it was like someone had just lifted a weight off my shoulders, because reading student writing with the agenda of pointing out what lousy writers students are is a drag, and it leads to endless and tedious carping by teachers about how terribly their students write and look at this stupid thing one of my students wrote and on and on. It's a kind of mean-spirited teaching.
It's always hard to know what effect a workshop like this has for teachers, but they seemed genuinely enthusiastic and excited to try out something new, to invite their students to write and then to celebrate and listen to what they wrote instead of remind them, yet again, how long they have to go before they can speak English.
Wrapped around in some of this is the way that "native speakers" are fetishized sometimes in English language teaching contexts, as if a person who grew up speaking English somehow has magic teaching English powers that others cannot have. It comes back to a belief that a speaker who doesn't learn a language from birth can never call that language his own language. One student, talking to me between sessions, asked me what I thought about his accent. "I don't sound like you when I talk," he said. "Of course you don't sound like me," I said. "You won't ever sound like me. People in Ireland don't sound like me either. But I understand what you are saying" - which is actually more than I could say about some of the people I spoke English to in Ireland last summer. "You don't have to sound like me to be a speaker of the language." No one gets to own a language - that's the beauty of language - and no one has ever been able to build a tall enough wall to hold onto their ownership of English. In fact that wall is a relic, like the Berlin Wall, with pieces protected here and there that we should treat like an artifact of well-left past.
Then they took me to a batik store, where I found a few fine shirts (I am XXL in Indonesia, which makes things a little difficult sometimes). After we bought our shirts we waited outside, in the dark, near the beach, listening to a child reciting something from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque. We were waiting for our driver who was also buying things at the batik store. "He waits for us to leave because he will get a discount," Umi told me, "for bringing us here." I can't quibble with this logic, of course.
So goodbye to Madura today. It is a beautiful place, and I am so lucky to have the chance to come out to the farthest part of this island in a place where tourists simply do not visit. I landed in Jakarta at one AM last Thursday morning, and I have only been in the country for one week. I can hardly believe it. Time moves slowly here, in the best of ways.
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