Luke Meddings on Dogme ELT | Education | guardian.co.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2004/mar/26/tefl.lukemeddings/print

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Throw away your textbooks

Dogme ELT argues that materials stifle the very communicative approach they are designed to drive. Luke Meddings on why he thinks the movement is as relevant as ever
Luke Meddings guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 March 2004 12.25 GMT
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This month marks the fourth anniversary of Dogme ELT. Whether it is a movement, approach or affectation, depends on your point of view. I must admit to a certain amount of pride in the fact that Dogme has got this far, but also to a certain frustration that it has not gone any further. Dogme ELT began when some of us read Scott Thornbury's article A Dogma for EFL, which argued that over-use of published materials was stifling the very communicative approach they are designed to drive. Emails followed and pretty soon, as is only the case in the most unconventional courtships, an e-group was born. To mark the movement's fourth anniversary, Scott has written an article imagining what a Dogme-styled coursebook, which he calls Dogway, would be like. The fact that this article was written for the journal of the Matsda group (that's the Materials Development Association, for all you acronym-pickers out there) seems to have escaped some critics. It has also led detractors to surmise that the roof has caved in on Dogme, the movement is on its way out, and that Bjork and Nicole Kidman aren't far behind. The man behind the original Dogme manifesto was Danish film-maker Lars von Trier. Addressing von Trier's decision to push his back-to-basics 1995 credo to the limit, with the movies Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, starring Bjork and Kidman respectively, Scott now asks whether or not Dogme ELT is at a similar crossroads. Time perhaps to leave the art-house and organic flapjacks behind, and head for the multiplex to spread the word in the land of popcorn? The book Scott envisages is by no means a Hollywood, or even Heinemann extravaganza. Although presumably it would have pages, printed in a consistent order, in contrast to the possibly apocryphal looseleaf novel of the 1960s, which the reader was at liberty to assemble in any order (I should point out that most of my reading list remains apocryphal; I still maintain that Henry James is an urban myth.) Dogway would in fact be a great improvement on existing coursebooks: text-lite, non-linear, (joy!) listening free. Its effectiveness however, would be heavily dependent on the teacher's book - or, more accurately, the teacher's inclination to read it. "The language focus should emerge from, and not determine, the communicative needs of the learners," Scott writes, adding that "guidance for teachers as to how this might be achieved will be provided in the teacher's book." There's a revolution in the small print, folks. For my own contribution to Dogme's birthday celebrations, I also went back to the original text. I have to say that I still rather like the starkness of its "commandments". While not explicitly proscribing coursebooks, the commandments state, among other things, that: "teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and students bring to the classroom - ie themselves - and whatever happens to be in the

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Luke Meddings on Dogme ELT | Education | guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2004/mar/26/tefl.lukemeddings/print

classroom." I think it was this directness that drew myself and others in, but from the very beginning we all questioned exactly how these so-called commandments might be applied; laws, like CD cases, are made to be broken. Due to the fact that coursebooks might very well happen to be in the classroom in many schools, and their use might be more or less central to a teacher's prospects of continued employment, the rules about materials became a natural area for debate. I still think that in the market with which I am most familiar - teaching English to adults in multi-national, continuous enrolment classes - our strictures of yesteryear could be applied pretty much in their entirety. This is because we've gone materials mad. We consume published materials, like McDonald's breakfasts, all too readily. Both have their place in the grand scheme of things, but neither can be enjoyed every day without things eventually seizing up. We use coursebooks because they make it easy to get from 9 o'clock to 10 o' clock, not because they are a good way to promote learning. We reach for the supplementary materials as if they were vitamins, when in fact they are the same old junk: processed food, refined sugar, a quick fix when we are too late or too lazy to think of something better. And don't even get me started on the heartless whirring of the photocopier, which so cruelly destroys the natural peace and good order of our staffrooms, where once was heard only the sound of the sports pages turning and the gentle hum of the traffic below. Even critics of the current state of affairs seem caught in a circular argument. On this site, Bill Bowler argues that: "to breathe fresh life into ELT classrooms and publishing, I am convinced we must topple the currently fossilised 'coursebook = magazine dogma.'" And how will this be done? By "returning to books and good writing as a source of language texts that are deeply rewarding to read," not to mention "specially written graded materials." Never mind breathing fresh life into publishing. Why not make our own graded materials and revive our classrooms? How could materials be better graded than by the students themselves? I'm not arguing against having a bash at a simplified Pride and Prejudice (though, come to think of it, that's another set-text that managed to retain an elusive quality). What I am saying is that brief texts, generated through the activities that might one day grace Dogway, can do more for students than any number of passively enjoyed, or endured, readers. Lose your readers. Ask me, I know how! The answer to materials overload is to generate your own and, more importantly, to allow and encourage students to generate their own - from personal narratives to records of the language learned that day - and not to worry when this doesn't happen overnight. Like the paradigm shifts worn by maidens to rouse the addled libidos of ageing business gurus, new ways of doing things can take time to work their magic.
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