“The entire process of education is shaped by the culture within which it operates. So long as a culture is shared by teachers and students, the problems of learning that arise are merely those of educational expectations and methods. Much less tractable problems arise, however, when students shift from one education system to another and the normally shared cultural assumptions no longer obtain.”
– Ballard and Clanchy, 1991
Students learning in Languagelab's virtual English City
A teacher of English will often find that students ‘warm up’ and do better after their initial nerves but this is more to do with how they learn and how they adjust to the teacher. In online education, particularly in virtual reality, very little of the course content is covered because the learners are adjusting to the technology. This is because the technology affects their habits as learners. Rather than seeing this as positive or negative, the teacher needs to see this as a truism – that learners need training.
Indeed, the learner attitude towards knowledge is exceedingly important because it affects the importance of knowledge in society and how students learn in the first place. This is an aspect of learning that schools who teach English are increasingly recognising. This is why most institutions, like Languagelab, have orientation days, leaflets that explain their teaching approach and learner training in the first class of some courses.
The ramifications of learner training are that students in different countries have different approaches to learning. What they know is learned experience, and how they behave in the classroom is because of where they come from and how they learn. For example, students from some countries in Asia do not want to get into debates because they feel that etiquette demands that they show their respect through silence. In some other countries in Asia, like in India or Pakistan, rote learning or memorising, is essential, and the critical discussion is often not considered to be necessary. On the other side of the spectrum, young European students may need to learn the etiquette of turn-taking. For this reason, I believe that teachers need to pull together their knowledge about students from different countries and have workshops on how to change the way a student learns.
- Iffaf Khan, teacher at Languagelab.com
Twitter: iffafteacher
SL avatar name: Iffaf Ling
Bibliography
Ballard, B and Clanchy, J. (1991). ‘Assessment by misconception: Cultural influences and intellectual traditions’. In: L. Hamp Lyons (Ed.), Assessing second-language writing in academic contexts (pp19-36). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
