Reflections on Graves, Ch. 5& Burns Ch. 10

In chapter five, Graves addressed understandable concerns of in-service teachers over formulating goals and objectives beforehand in managing their actual lessons. I agree that teaching is organic; thus evolves upon students’ needs and responses as lessons proceed. In that sense, setting up goals might restrict the dynamic nature of teaching and learning as well as the creativity and freedom of teachers. However, as Graves (2000) aptly noted, “Goals provide guidelines and should be flexible enough to change, if they are not appropriate” (p. 74). Graves added that stating goals will help the teachers make priorities where they see the greatest need in a planning phase among a range of choices about contents, materials, approaches, and a form of assessment. After all, it is a matter of choices and flexibility that teachers make over the entire course with regard to its focus and specificity in relation to subsequent objectives. It was also insightful to note how closely setting goals and objectives is linked to teacher’s teaching principles and educational philosophy.

Among several frameworks for setting goals, I take Stern’s framework that merits serious consideration. Stern’s framework is categorized into four domains: 1) Proficiency, 2) Cognitive including language functions and cultural aspects, 3) Affective including motivation and confidence, and finally 4) Transfer that includes how learning in the classroom will be transferred to actual situations outside of the classroom. What I take most is that the teacher can specify socio-cultural aspects and affective outcomes when formulating goals and objectives. Although socio-cultural and affective domain, in particular, is hard to assess as an outcome of students’ learning, those domains, I believe, are the essence of language and language learning.

As an EFL language educator, I view language mostly as a social phenomenon. One prominent socio-cultural theorist Vygostky (1987) argues that human being s use language as a tool for thought (along with other social artefact such as music, art, numbers) to mediate our relationship with others. According to Gee (1999), language always contains the cues and clues that trigger specific situated meaning in certain social, cultural context, or discourse. Without such socio-cultural consideration along with language, our understanding of learning language might be limited.

From a sociocultural perspective, language learning is a mediated process, one that is not only mediated by mental tools but also by social factors. In other words, people learn languages by exploiting the mental tools that are available to them in their interaction. Learning can be facilitated through scaffolding and Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). When learning includes the supportive, collaborative activities by the experts, learners are enabled to operate within their ZPD to achieve the desired outcome. The importance of scaffolding and ZPD to language learning well accords with my pedagogical focus on collaborative and negotiated activities in which peers and teachers have opportunities to co-construct meaning and in which learners, through feedback, can appropriate the targeted language. 

Albeit my great concern over socio-cultural implications of second language learning , I have been hesitating to apply those approaches into my actual teaching as such constructs were vague and hard to be implemented and assessed. The article of Burns provided an excellent framework for realizing my ideal teaching philosophy. The article demonstrated how skilfully and successfully a teacher can develop a course responding to learner’s actual, authentic needs in a situated context. All in all, teachers need to take the initiatives in their own teaching as well.