Taking Action

Action based teaching (Van Lier 2010) is an interesting approach to the conundrum of instructor-authority and learner/learning input. Simply put, we have come to realize that the teacher can not be an autocrat, and that for real learning to take place, there must be a comfortable space for both agents to feel that there is a process of sharing. I agree with Larsen-Freemen: learning is a process learning is a non-linear process that emerges in often unpredictable ways..." (2003). Language learning in particular should embrace the fact that our discipline in heavily vested in society itself. Why else would anyone want to learn language, if it were not to somehow communicate and or commune with people outside of their world, and, indeed, outside their initial comfort zone. The role of the instructor in this sense is ambassador to the new world, but I do think that there needs to be a structure to the group meeting, or class. Honestly, I think that moderation and mediation are the keys to successful classes, where the instructor become the conduit for learning and can be turned to as expert, and the learner, as she becomes increasingly more familiar and comfortable with the language at hand, accepts a greater role in the learning process and production of the language outside of the meeting space.

This is where Van Lier is absolutely correct in that we must recognize that all learners, children as well as adults, have lives outside the classroom which affect the learning. The job of the language instructor in particular is to harness as much of the outside interest as possible to reshape the imagining of that life, so as to include the new language as an integral part of the living we all do.