No dogma

"Given the turbulence over the past year caused by the global pandemic and an ideologically driven GCSE MFL curriculum review, and indeed the forthcoming wholesale regime change to initial teacher education in the form of the Market Review in England, many of us quite reasonably feel downhearted.

But looking through the pages of recent issues of Languages Today, our language teaching community should feel very proud of our achievements against adversity. The numerous success stories in schools in some of the most socio-economically challenged areas show that languages really are for all and there are tangible cross-curriculum benefits if languages are given the support they need.

As always teachers are the heart of these successes. Teachers should be entrusted with curriculum innovation because they know the pupils best. They understand the context, purpose and motivation of learning. They have the evidence right in front of them. I was trained as an English language teacher in China in the late 70s, and we were instilled with the Confucian philosophies of teaching and learning, which are characterised in three principles:

• 因人而异 yin ren er yi - Vary the way you teach according to the person you teach
• 因材施教 yin cai shi jiao - Teach in a way that best suits the ability of the learner
• 因地制宜 yin di zhi yi - Teach in a way that makes the best use of the circumstance / context / material available

To me, what these principles say is that the best method is the one that suits the learner’s needs and improves the learner’s learning. We need to avoid dogma, try things out, be prepared to adapt and change, and always keep a healthy level of scepticism around what the theory says.

I have written quite a bit about the relationship between theory and practice in the last few years, with regard to my work on translanguaging*. Again, given my own cultural upbringing, I have applied Mao’s dialectical-materialist approach to knowledge acquisition: knowledge is wrought through practice. Note that Mao was a teacher before he became a politician.

And one of his earliest philosophical writings was ’On Practice’ (1937) where he argued that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice. The process of theorization, or knowledge construction, involves a perpetual cycle of practice-theory-practice. So my idea of a practical theory is one that takes account of the holistic impact of the practice. For me, the theory should enable people to make a principled choice among competing or alternative options, so as to inform and enhance future practice. An important criterion for evaluating a practical theory is the extent to which it asks new, and different, questions of both the practice under investigation and other existing theories about practice.

It should also recognise that effective practices can be very diverse according to setting; for instance, the academic practices of knowledge production (which include research purposes articulated in specific socio-historical settings), practices of the language users themselves, and professional practices such as language teaching in different social contexts.

Do not let any theoreticians tell us practitioners that we can’t do theory! As professional practitioners, we are doing theory and testing theory all the time. There should be no place for dogma - ideological, theoretical or methodological. Teacher-led and learner-centred curriculum and pedagogical innovations are what we need.

The pandemic has reminded us that we are not alone - there are people in all sorts of sectors of society who share our beliefs – and that informed collaboration is a positive way to get us through the challenges before us, especially when we are confronted with an expectation of orthodoxy.

Local grassroots initiatives, rather than centralised directives, are the way forward. It is therefore crucial to share our experiences and support each other in building an ever stronger community of practice."

Li Wei is Director and Dean of IOE where he is also Professor of Applied Linguistics.

* ‘Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language’, Applied Linguistics, Volume 39, Issue 1, February 2018, Open Access

'No dogma' was published on the Languages Today magazine. Here reproduced with permission from the Trustees of the Association for Language Learning (ALL).