Dogme certainly seems to be one of the current buzz words in English language teaching – we've even had a dogme session here at our centre (thanks Peter!) So what is it? As I understand, it's all about making as much out of students' input into your class as you can. But don't take my word for it. There are a lot of experts out there ready to give their definitions and specific takes about its implications for what we do in our classes.
Check out:
Scott Thornbury's blog An A-Z of ELT – and particularly the comments on his posts – for an unwinding debate about what dogme is all about. Scott wrote the classic on the subject - Teaching Unplugged (do we have a copy at our centre? We should!)
He co-wrote the book with Luke Meddings, who is currently the guest writer on the TeachingEnglish website. Lukes's already written there an article, 2 activities: Family snapshot and My wikipedia plus a blog post. And if these inspire you, why not take the opportunity to ask Luke a question while he's around on the site? All you need to do is to add one to his blog post.
Another dogme blogger to look out for is David Coulter. David's blog – which is endearingly called Language Moments – is based around him providing lesson skeletons – not lesson plans – because if you've got a plan you've probably not got the right dogme mind set to go with the flow of how students are responding to your class. (So forget most of what you learnt on your CELTA/DELTA course!) I personally like his skeletons a lot – they're full of practical ideas for activities to do in class and are obviously the product of a teacher who reflects a lot about what works (and doesn't) in his class.
There are many more dogme ELT bloggers than the 3 I've mentioned here. Perhaps you can add them yourselves in a comment or write another blog post? Or if you've found this useful, let me know and I'll add a follow up.
3 comments:
Let's organise a Dogme week at the centre! Only for those who are interested of course. I think Dogme rocks! Unfortunately I always find myself swimming against a tide of course-book-obsessed, exam-obsessed, syllabus-obsessed students, parents and line managers. But whenever I've decided to ditch the book and let the students write the agenda, it's been a very positive experience for me and them. If I were a language learner, I'm sure I'd enjoy a Dogme approach more than a 'Turn to page 16' or 'Take a handout' one ... and I'm sure I'd learn more too.
Good idea, Kath. I'll talk to Martin and see what we can come up with.
It would be a very useful research exercise, wouldn't it? I haven't got a class this year - except for TD - I s'pose that'd do and maybe the Dip lot would be interested ... but apart from that I can't see there being a great deal of interest. BUT, even if a few of us did it and had a feedback meeting and then wrote up our findings ..... hm. Definitely somehting to think about.
Post a Comment