7. THE TEACHERS
The students found the course difficult to get used to. What about the teachers?
Teachers tend to talk too much. They are often tempted to talk when other activities might be more useful for the students. This might well have been the most useful aspect of the English Block for the students - that teachers lectured less.

The disadvantage of teachers talking is that a lecture is hard to concentrate on. Most people find their attention wandering during a continuous speech of longer than quite a short time. How long? Research would be needed to find out, but it may well be as short as ten minutes. When a student is reading silently he can be encouraged to ask himself questions and go back when necessary to understand something. A speech or monologue is harder to review: when something is missed by temporary inattention, it is missed and there can be no recall. A conversation on the other hand allows give-and-take, repetition and feedback when necessary. A solitary speaker, unless very skillful, is unlikely to keep an audience rapt for long. In a conversation boredom and inattention become instantly noticeable and a tactful speaker will either shut up or change his tune. A teacher talking to a small group, even for a short time, may well be much more effective in his impact on their language than when he speaks to a large group, even for a long time. It is hard to be irrelevant when talking to a small group. Actual communication is likely to take place as real questions and answers are exchanged.

This was the main activity of teachers during a session - to talk to groups about the work they were doing, to inspect progress to listen to problems, to suggest ideas, in the course of which to provide conversation. Other activities were reading work in progress and then assessing finished work, mainly that published by the groups.
Did the teachers influence students' language accuracy? It is established I think that much marking by teachers - red marks underlining "errors" in written exercises has little effect on students' writing. The errors are often repeated. In the English Block informal advice on spelling or grammar could take place almost while the student was writing. The time difference between having an error pointed out and the rewriting could be small. At the time of the project it was noticed that the non-standard forms which the students brought from primary school tended to disappear from their writing. It is not possible to say how much this was because of teachers' advice and supervision, and how much due to imitation of the large amount of written and other English the students were exposed to. An important type of action performed by the teacher was to use during his talks with the groups, without emphasis, the correct forms of the expressions used by the students in a deviant form. This is the way mothers have been observed to talk to young children to correct the deviant forms produced in the early stage of learning the mother tongue. # (10)

The rôle of the teacher is changed in this kind of work. Instead of seeming the omniscient fount of all knowledge the teacher can dare to say he doesn't know, if that is the case, and point out to the student how to find out. The students may be considered to be learning from so many sources of the language that their reliance on the teacher can be reduced, in the knowledge that he is one among many sources. This is a useful deflation of the teacher's status which is much too high in many countries. Students who over-value the teacher are also under-valuing their own learning abilities. On leaving school, whether to go to higher education or not, the student will have to teach himself for the rest of his life. He might as well get the knack of it while in school.

Of course those teachers who have come to believe in their own omniscience may find it difficult to behave in a suitable way and perhaps shouldn't take part in this kind of project. The dangers of self-importance are always with us.

Do teachers need training to take part in this kind of learning? During the period of the English Block in Kakamega many different teachers joined in at different times. Most had little difficulty, as far as I could see, in adapting to the method. Teachers could pick up the way of behaving by watching the others and consulting whenever necessary. (In the conventional school, teachers seldom see other teachers in action.) The students gained here, because they had stability during a period when teaching personnel changed frequently. (This was a period when teachers changed due to many being on relatively short contracts, the need to take overseas leave, and rapid expansion of the school system which required teachers to be posted to new schools.)

#(10)Hirsch-Pasek, Treimann & Schneidermann Journal of Child Language 11:81-8 (1984) (Quoted by Krashen in the Input Hypothesis)