Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Table and Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- 1 What Makes Good Teachers Great?
- Part 1 The Teacher Paradox
- Part 2 The Learning Paradox
- 6 Taking Advantage of Structure to Improvise in Instruction
- 7 Breaking through the Communicative Cocoon
- 8 Improvising with Adult English Language Learners
- 9 Productive Improvisation and Collective Creativity
- Part 3 The Curriculum Paradox
- Index
- References
7 - Breaking through the Communicative Cocoon
Improvisation in Secondary School Foreign Language Classrooms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
By
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Table and Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- 1 What Makes Good Teachers Great?
- Part 1 The Teacher Paradox
- Part 2 The Learning Paradox
- 6 Taking Advantage of Structure to Improvise in Instruction
- 7 Breaking through the Communicative Cocoon
- 8 Improvising with Adult English Language Learners
- 9 Productive Improvisation and Collective Creativity
- Part 3 The Curriculum Paradox
- Index
- References
Summary
Language is not just a tool for communication. It is also a resource for creative thought, a framework for understanding the world, a key to new knowledge and human history, and a source of pleasure and inspiration.
(Kern 2008: 367)In this chapter, I provide specific examples of how I have used guided improvisation in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms in Germany. Very few attempts have been made to examine the potential of improvisation for learning and teaching foreign languages in schools. I demonstrate that improvisation provides a unique way to balance the teaching paradox: Improvisation is not only related to directionality, competence, performance, and design, but to spontaneity, intuition, and chance as well. Thus, it contrasts with the traditional view of teaching as transmission of knowledge and skills, that is, of delivering a prescribed curriculum, attending to a particular methodology, following a specific procedure, actuating a lesson plan, and interacting in pre-arranged ways. This traditional view avoids the teaching paradox altogether, but at the cost of removing all student creativity. Moreover, because improvisation encompasses attunement to a situational context, involving “an opaque stock of past experience” (Ciborra 1999: 79) as well as spontaneous decision making and problem solving, openness and unpredictability, it also contrasts with current educational trends that place tremendous emphasis on standardization, predictable improvement, outcome-orientation, and testing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching , pp. 133 - 161Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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