As far as I have been able to surmise, there are a lot of binary opposites among ESL teachers. Think of it as a Coke/Pepsi kind of a thing. For those of you that aren't ESL professionals, let me explain the difference and have you reflect which one you might be. Coke, or Pepsi?
Coke: (Classic, traditional) Some ESL teachers, for example, see themselves as primarily grammar teachers. To advocates, they are the keepers of the linguistic gate. They are the ones who have truly paid their dues and can, upon request, recite two reasons for the present perfect and the three purposes of the passive voice. They are smart (they do know the rules, after all), well-respected, and have tremendous influence in ESL circles. However, to the naysayers, these teachers move their way through classes like sharks hunting amidst a school of fish. Their focus is to eradicate errors. Their goal is accuracy, and they never realize that accuracy is a far cry from actual competent use of language. Who cares if you speak accurately if you have nothing important to say? And, one could argue, a knowledge of a thousand rules doesn’t really translate to real performative competence anyway (i.e. just because I read a lot of books about basketball doesn’t make me Michael Jordan).
Pepsi (Daring, new) Other teachers take the opposite approach. You might think of them as content teachers. They are those who teach away from the English language and focus on a set of skills or knowledge that they perceive as being valuable to the student. They might teach autobiography, history, resume writing, engineering, or nursing. They focus less on the actual form of language and move toward subject matter. To proponents, these are those who understand that language is a medium for communication, and that errors are simply part of any process to learn a second language. In short, they don’t care so much that students say something right as much as to say something meaningful. Risk and meaning are paramount: pillars of virtue upon which this method rests. To critics, these teachers are hippie feel-gooders with low standards and little understanding of grammar. If these ESL hacks knew the rules, it is implied, they would teach students about them.
Here is a metaphor to delineate the difference. In it, you’ll need to think “words” every time I say “clothes.”
I think of the first kind of ESL teacher as the kind of fussy OCD type that cannot resist the urge to organize a clothes drawer. If the clothes are out of order, how will you ever find them? They arrange by size, color, and function from suits, jackets, shirts, and slacks, all the way down to the sock drawer (formal socks go HERE, casual HERE, and sports HERE). Aside: my grandfather insisted that by safety pinning each pair of sock as soon as he took them off, he never lost another sock again. Such elegant efficiency appealed to the man. Anyway, these teachers are the organizers of chaos. They are the efficient, snappy dressers of language.
I think of the second kind of ESL teacher as the fashion conscious. This teacher doesn’t care so much about organizing the socks by type and function, rather this teacher thinks of how fun it is to be creative with clothes. This teacher will get out all the clothes, mess them up, play with them, and come up with an arrangement that is pleasing and original. This teacher will encourage others to do the same. The teacher will discuss how one might dress and for what purpose one might dress just so. This teacher is interested in trying to show students their own sense of style and that the whole reason for clothes isn’t for them to hang in a closet, rather clothes are for the wearing.
And these two different types, like a bickering married couple, tend to upset the other.
“Can’t you understand” says the first, “how important it is to keep things clean? Then you could FIND stuff.”
“Can’t you understand,” says the second, “that in order to find what I like, I have to make a mess of it?”
So which are you?
