Inventing Bicycles,
or Some Common Truths on What Is Interactivity
 I started
working as a school teacher not because methodology was among my university favorites. To
be honest, I disliked the subject very much and missed even those few lectures that we
were given. More than that, being very proud of my philological education, I supposed I
knew enough to start teaching or instructing without any sort of methodology and pedagogy.
I graduated from a university – what else would you want?
Some years after, as luck would have it, I got some practice teaching
English in the so called “intensive course groups”, started by Igor Yurievich
Shekchter in the sixties and still very popular at the beginning of the nineties. The
course was specially invented and intended to get people to start speaking. As far
as I can judge, that short experience of mine, so to say, saved and essentially shaped my
teaching career.
The course included a set of psychological devices (or rather tricks,
in my then understanding) accompanied by a series of training units which consisted of
dialogues only. What was the most surprising – the devices worked regularly, even in my
– that is, in a most inexperienced tyro’s – lessons, which I attributed to the
liveliness of the cues and vocabulary. Sometimes, nonetheless, I was really scared. No. I
was scared most of the time, because the core of the course, its crucial part, was
improvised dialogues, which meant live communication. My task as a teacher was to organize
and conduct it, keeping the ball rolling – not correcting mistakes. I would rather say
the correction work was part and parcel of that rolling ball. I was to find an appropriate
phrase or tone, sometimes just a look, to everybody; I was learning to estimate and rate
everyone’s “current conversational potential” all the time (having thought over all
possible starts and failures beforehand). It goes without saying that I was supposed to
improvise, remember every single move, and smile heartily all the time.
This complicated term, “current personal conversational potential”
(let us abbreviate it to “CP squared”), simply means that someone is always more
talkative than another, this not necessarily depending on their “vocabulary stock”.
Some people would never speak first, and another would stop only when being gently but
decisively interrupted. Put in a narrower learning context, the term characterizes the
behavioral and learning dynamics of any given student during a lesson. The most exсiting
factor about “CP squared” is that it is not a constant. Your students (=interlocutors)
may be tired, nervous, overwhelmed by joy, or sunk in a brown study due to a thousand and
one reason; so what works today will not necessarily work tomorrow, not to mention
yesterday’s achievements. (By the way, it is a good idea to sing or just hum
“Yesterday” when everything seems to be going wrong compared with the previous day.)
So my look-down-on attitude to psychology and pedagogy gradually faded.
In a few years, for some family reasons which are only too very well
known to at least half of my colleagues, I happened to start working as a secondary school
teacher. There were children who also (as grown-ups earlier) expected that I would do
something to make their English better. So I started to speak with them, trying to apply
what I had been learned and still knowing nothing about traditional testing, assessment,
introduction of new material or a good deal of other useful things which can make your
teaching life easier. I argued with the administration because of the multiple empty holes
in my class-register pages; but nobody knew how to assess this vibrant and unstable “CP
square”.
Today I also can’t call methodology my strong point; moreover, I
would hardly call myself a regular teacher. What I am I would rather call “a
bicycle-inventor”, these are people who are bound to work at their loss because most of
the time they are busy analyzing the learning psychology of their students which is every
time different because people are different. The result of the analysis are make-or-break
intuitive decisions – you are to use your intuition, for it is a powerful reality in the
realm of psychology; and all this is not often very good for your physical health, not to
mention your psychic condition. I do not want to say that I made experiments at every
lesson – this is both impossible and unnecessary. The difficulties arising are so
obvious for anyone who has spent a bit of time in a classroom that there is no use
discussing the point. The metaphor would rather stand for your readiness to start every
time from the very beginning, as if there were no methodology before you came to the
classroom. It appears very often that you use some device already invented; well, in this
case you modify it to adjust to your pupils’ learning psychology. As “inventing (or
modifying) bicycles” is a brain-consuming and time-consuming, very often
money-consuming, process, one may call it not merely a method, but an attitude, even a
philosophy.
It was not the last century which pioneered the interactive or
communicative methods. Socrates’ dialogues were probably among the first reliable
research methods, if we stay within the European cultural boundaries (by the way, do you
remember how it all ended up?). In the New Time Figaro of Bomarche’s comedy promoted the
approach when he was going to say “God damn” in any situation using prosody and body
language – that is, meta- and extra-linguistic factors – as the main communicative
means. Fundamental science was scarcely the place for these flippancies until the
beginning of the 20th century, when it came to the understanding of what was formulated as
‘the principle of uncertainty’. In 1905 Einstein used the quantum theory to show that
the fundamental units of light have the properties of both waves and particles. In 1923
the French physicist Louis de Broglie suggested a more general and more surprising
hypothesis: he proposed that all objects have wave properties.
De Broglie’s arguments, in the form of sophisticated mathematics,
showed that the wave properties of objects of ordinary size would be too small to be
observable, but that these properties would become significant for objects as small as
subatomic particles. In 1927 scientists in England and the United States carried out
experiments that confirmed de Broglie’s hypothesis by showing that electrons have
significant wave properties.
In the late 1920’s the German physicist Erwin Schrodinger created a
mathematical model called the Schrodinger equation to describe the wave properties of
electrons in atoms. At the same time another German physicist, Werner Heisenberg,
established a limit to the certainty with which the locations of electrons in atoms could
be known. His calculation showed that the uncertainty in our knowledge of
the position of an electron in an atom will always be about the same as the size of the
atom.
It follows from what has been outlined above that: 1) today uncertainty
is a scientifically existing fact, and 2) the degree of the uncertainty is obviously
broader for the fields we usually call humanities. It is proven nowadays that even
counting the words in a textual extract is a very complicated task unless one knows for
sure what a word is; in multiple experiments different linguists came to different
results. In language teaching, the uncertainty in our knowledge of “CP squared” of
a student in a group will sometimes be about the same as the size of the group; sometimes
the knowledge will be even more uncertain.
Why is it so difficult, if not to say impossible, to make an
“interactive” textbook? The explanation, from my standpoint, lies in the fact that
“to make” in this case means “to write and print on paper”, and “to write and
print” means obviously “to fix”; whereas we have stated that communication, or
interactivity, is something essentially uncertain, that is, unfixable. Interactivity is
not to speak to but to speak with: the latter implies an answer expectation,
which includes an unexpected answer, even if it is a silent look. In other words, your
lesson is inevitably a dialogue, if it is not a dictatorship; I dare say, it is always a
dialogue, even if it is a dictatorship; the difference is whether you expect the answer or
not. In case you don’t hear (or don’t listen to) the cues, you will just be answered
the other way.
If a “communicative” textbook says: Now, prepare to speak to your
mate: you will be discussing your pets – he will ask you where your dog is and you will
answer that it is in the living-room/kitchen/garden – it is not a communicative
approach; as a learning point it does not make sense at all. What make sense, in my
viewpoint, are communicative variants which should be given to students each time to make
a personal choice. Your students should also be taught that their choice is not absolutely
free, but depends on the communicative context. In other words, we can suggest and discuss
the boundaries within which we are free to response.
Speaking of boundaries I also try not to forget about “language
landmarks” that could (and, as a matter of fact, are expected to) be set clearly enough;
setting such landmarks is the objective to make your pupils feel linguistically and
socially confident. If you are consistent enough the students will start helping you and
each other inventing their own bicycles and that is what I mean speaking of the
interactive principle.
By Tatyana Surganova, MSU
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