Until then they had been a group of people who had worked through exercises and didn’t speak English very well. A teacher who began using this technique half-way through an academic year suddenly found out that his pre-intermediate class included, amongst other professions, a concert pianist and a comedian. The situation is no longer ‘them’ and ‘us’ but everyone working together as a group with the teacher as facilitator and resource rather than director of the class. You sit openly with your students, not being afraid of silence in the classroom, and allowing students time to collect their thoughts. There’s no hiding behind texts and media content. This in turn brings down barriers that exist between the teacher and students.
#Teaching unplugged meaning full#
do.fifteen years?’ ‘ He change?’ The teacher now has a board full of great questions and a topic which can then be used as the basis for the class.Īnother benefit of the teaching unplugged method is that it takes out all external input.
The teacher then encourages other questions if students take an interest. Take for example the elementary student who comes into class and says excitedly ‘ see….fifteen years!’ Instead of saying ‘Oh, that’s nice! Now open your book at page twenty seven, we’re looking at the past simple’, the teacher constructs the sentence on the board: ‘I’ve just seen a friend I haven’t seen for fifteen years!’ The beauty is that, even if this use of the present perfect doesn’t come up in your course until pre-intermediate, you’re confident that the student knows exactly what this means as it is her own sentence and you’re absolutely sure you’ve just taught her something new as she definitely couldn’t say it before. The main reason it’s become so popular is that the main focus is one hundred per cent on the students’ actual language needs. In fact, Dogme ELT discussion list, which was originally set up in March 2000 by Scott Thornbury to help bring this style of teaching to the fore, has now been disbanded, not due to lack of interest but because he felt the support had become so strong the method was ready to stand alone. The ‘Teaching Unplugged’ or ‘Dogme ELT’ movement has a very strong following amongst teachers.
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