Methodological madness: Dogme, CLIL and the curse of the Recency Illusion
I want to start with a disclaimer. This blog post is not intended to support nor falsify the principles of either Dogme or CLIL. As with most methodologies I am sure they have both their own merits and their shortcomings. I was inspired to write this after reading this recent blog by the messiah of ELT Jeremy Harmer:
http://jeremyharmer.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/to-teach-english-is-human-to-teach-clil-is-divine/
It is a thought provoking debate about the validity and future of CLIL. But my overriding thought when I read it was that, as with Dogme, CLIL suffers from the “Recency Illusion”. A theory postulated by Arnold Zwicky which states that the Recency illusion is “the belief or impression that something is of recent origin when it is in fact long established”.
Teachers who have long done conversation classes have no doubt skirted very near if not completely encompassed the principles of Dogme, and English teachers who use topics as a springboard for discussion, language exploitation etc have no doubt essentially been teaching a CLIL class, just without calling it so. But we do live in a label obsessed world, so it was perhaps inevitable that this would occur.
It is this illusion that spurns teachers on to jump onto the latest methodological bandwagon. Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, we as teachers all have to decide which of the quadrillion billion zillion methods to choose from and go with it. However, it is slightly concerning when new “methods” are blindly implemented and steamrolled ahead with the students’ learning experience and future language capability being gambled on a teacher’s whim to experiment.
This is not to say that a teacher shouldn’t experiment with effective methodologies. But certainly in the case of CLIL, and to a lesser degree Dogme. The teacher has to possess a rather high level of expertise and confidence to pull it off. And in truth, I think we all know that our industry has its fair share of imposters and duds.
And if experimentation on students in this manner is for their own benefit, then why do people treat me with sympathy when I mention my language learning experiences have sometimes been audiolingual/G.T in nature? Might not this pity be laid upon those students who are CLILed on in the future if it turns out the method is not so effective as its proponents claim?
I am not suggesting that all progress come to a halt for the sake of pedagogical security but I find myself quite uncomfortable with the plethora of methodologies and the almost religious zeal with which some teachers align themselves.
Naturally, you get the Agnostics, or in pedagogical parlance the “eclectic” teachers who pick and choose to suit the individual circumstances, which in fairness, is probably a wise choice.
I also find myself tiring of the endless debate about which methodology is “the best”, as if there actually is a holy grail of methodologies still waiting to be discovered (or re-discovered) which will suit all students in all circumstances and imbue them with almost magical language acquisition powers.
What’s really sad is that I can see myself 20 years from now debating about the benefits of the latest ELT methodology: D.N.T (Direct Neural Transfer). A new method whereby the linguistic competence is downloaded directly into our students’ brains and the teachers deal exclusively with linguistic performance.
The debates will rage on as to whether downloaded knowledge actually is retained and accessible as traditionally learned knowledge. It was have advocates, fans, opponents and critics. It will take its rightful place alongside other methods in teaching textbooks where Dogme and CLIL are now considered as old-fashioned as Grammar Translation and the endless debate will go on…….
February 24th, 2011 at 10:38 pm
A very thoughtful post. BTW, I’m new to this blog.
A thought about the Recency Illusion, don’t you think that trends/bandwagons are just a natural and inevitable phenomenon in any community? Are they really such a bad thing, anyway?
February 24th, 2011 at 10:54 pm
I agree with you about the inevitability of bandwagons in any field and it isn’t necessarily a negative thing either. I am just concerned that it’s people’s education on the line, I guess once again it comes down to the market and what they want and as a student I don’t think I would be happy if I thought that I/my class were guinea pigs for a new-fangled teaching practice, at the very least I would be apprehensive. Especially when reading the comments on Jeremy Harmer’s blog it certainly does appear that while CLIL in itself isn’t bad, the haphazard way it is being applied merely for the sake of being progressive at times is quite bad.
October 3rd, 2011 at 9:18 am
This blog is gorgeous! I love it with so many great details. Good job!