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Presenter
Dr. Roger Charles Nunn
Petroleum Institute
UAE

Title
Comparing Teachers’ Method-in-Use across Cultures

Abstract

Named methods (Richards and Rogers, 2001) are defined independently of particular teaching contexts whereas method-in-use is a description of what is enacted in a particular context. What might be developed in that context to improve learning essentially takes the context into account. Named methods do not normally consider
local contexts or cultural assumptions reflected in the method actually being enacted. They have been seen as irrelevant and obsolete because they do not reflect what is actually being done in any context. Research into a “method” is irrelevant because what teachers do when apparently teaching ‘audio-lingually’or ‘communicatively’ is never described.

Two teachers in different contexts cannot be said to be doing the same thing when apparently claiming to enact the same
method or approach and neither of them may be doing something that is recognizable as the ‘named’ method they claim to be following.

My coined term ‘method-in-use’ therefore deliberately sets out to be sensitive to different contexts, as this is essential to being relevant. Relevance theory(Sperber and Wilson 1995, p.108) affirms that ‘new’ information or assumptions have to combine with known information or assumptions to produce “contextual effects”. To change behavior I assume that we need to consider assumptions that
are acted out rather than avowed assumptions.

Sperber and Wilson (1995, p.15) define context as “a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world”, emphasizing that at the very centre of the notion of context are the people who are interacting in it. New information that is perceived as relevant is only effective when it leads teachers to decide themselves whether to modify or even abandon old assumptions or aspects of behaviour. It may also allow teachers to become more confident to support and therefore strengthen the validity of assumptions that they already have. Traditional descriptions of method on the other hand tend to make teachers feel guilty as they are inevitably deviating within their particular setting from the prescribed norms. In this presentation I will present my model for describing method-in-use and the assumptions behind it. This facilitates cultural comparison and the ability to learn from other cultures without being dominated by them. I will illustrate this with a comparison of two very different contexts and invite participants to add a third comparison - their own method-in-use - to establish relevance.