Anne Fox :: Blog :: Informal learning in practice

I am coming to the end of a short English course for my colleagues and want to think about follow up. I am forever teaching short courses which last from two weeks (full time) to five weeks (one day a week) or six or ten weeks (2 lessons a week). I don't think that anybody taking one of these courses can honestly expect more than to be re-activated into the language and maybe pick up one or two useful habits to extend after the course, especially since many of my students end up only thinking of English when they are in the classroom, in spite of their oft-stated good intentions that they will read, watch films without sub-titles and so on.

Therefore I think my job is far from done when the course ends next week and I am trying to think of a solution which will achieve language progress and student motivation while being acceptable to management for financing. Suggesting a second eight-week round is unlikely to fit the bill. The lessons were at the end of the working day (to suit those who had teaching commitments themselves) and now that summer is in full swing people are really reluctant to be tethered indoors for even longer than they have to, even though we have had three or four sessions partially or completely outdoors.

What to do? I think that the solution lies in an informal learning set-up of some sort but can't quite work out the best model. I believe that little and often is more productive for language, especially here in Denmark where there is lots of external English in the environment to reinforce points met in learning sessions. I know that I have pushed people out of their comfort zone so that they felt obliged to write mails, closed forum posts and blog comments in English outside of the lessons and I could capitalise on that as a good habit. There has even been a case of a totally unrelated thread started by one of the participants quite informally and spontaneously through email.

So I am looking at some sort of blended model where we could have weekly or fortnightly conversations for half an hour at the beginning of the working day before teaching starts supplemented by forum conversations and exercises based on their input (eg cloze, vocabulary). I cannot see the blog posts continuing as we would no longer have an audience - at the moment we are running a mystery guest exercise. This more hands-off approach would require that even more attention was also paid to language coaching, promoting good habits, promoting the compilation of a portfolio, monitoring participation and diagnosing necessary input and remedial action required.

The final element in the model as I see it, is a monthly meeting to review these last-named meta-aspects.

I work with these people every day so this is a one-off situation. I could suggest that I just interact with them in English instead of Danish but I don't think that that would work for many reasons, not least because I'm not sure that I would have the discipline to do it.