Copy of Tessa Woodward-Planning Lessons and Courses_ Designing Sequences of Work for the Language Classroom-64

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4.2 Finding out for yourself
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made up of conductive material, that electricity gives you an unpleasant
shock, and that wires that tick should be avoided. We often call this
process of exposure, noticing and remembering ‘trial and error’ or ‘dis-
covery learning’. We find out things this way by bumping into them or
by making slightly more controlled experiments all the time. Not all the
things we find out are shocking. We can discover that foot massages feel
wonderful, that zabaglioni tastes sublime, or that being with a particular
person always makes us feel good. Finding out for yourself can be a 
powerful, deep way of learning and that’s why we try to harness it for
use in the classroom. 
Going back to that electric fence, it would be possible to learn about
its effects more pleasantly if you had someone with you who knew all
about electric fences. ‘See that wire?’ they might say, ‘Don’t touch it, but
put your ear close to it. Can you hear something?’ And then, ‘Get a blade
of grass and put it on the wire. Can you feel a tickling sensation?’ You
would still find out for yourself that an electric current passes through
the wire but your guide could structure the experience for you so that it
was pleasant and effective. The guide could be anyone with a little more
knowledge about something than you have.
How it works in the language class
When we transfer Finding out for yourself to the language classroom, it’s
important to include a first stage of establishing what the learners
already think and know (see steps 1–3 below). Conventionally, course
planning often starts with an analysis of the subject matter, in our case,
the language. We look at the language or the coursebook and try to
analyse which are the basic ideas, which things are easier or more diffi-
cult and build our course from there. Writers in school science teaching
as well as language teaching now argue, however, that it is essential to
recognise that students have already constructed their own ideas about
subject matter and that these may be very different from the analyses
contained in our course or coursebook. We need to take into account
learners’ ideas. This may lead to our revising what we consider to be the
starting points in our teaching and the ideas that we assume students
have available to them. If we know how our students are thinking, we
can suggest activities that challenge or extend their ideas. So first of all,
we need to find out how our students are thinking about English. If we
believe that English lessons should be about more than just English, then
we’ll need to find out what our participants think about other things too.
From the teacher’s point of view then, the following are necessary for
this type of guided learning encounter:
1 Provision of motivating tasks designed to show what learners already
know and don’t know. This could include small or whole group
discussion, written examples, diagrams, drawings, a statement of
‘rules’.
2 Provision of interesting materials, data or activities designed to move
the learners’ understanding on. These could contain unexpected or
deliberately discrepant data or examples. 
3 Provision of guide questions to foster learning from (2) by helping
students to notice where their own thinking is incomplete or
inconsistent.
4 Provision of time and space for learners to interact with the stimuli,
and the capacity to stand back and let this happen, and to be
surprised, since investigations may throw up unexpected results, no
matter how carefully the tasks are shaped.
5 The capacity to answer investigatory questions from learners
genuinely and flexibly and to allow class sharing of questions and
answers.
6 Encouragement for students to observe how their understanding has
changed as a result of the investigation and to evaluate their new
understanding.
Finding out for yourself will go down well with students who are pre-
pared to take risks in a safe environment. Some students may feel they
learn more quickly and at a deeper level by finding things out for them-
selves. When students ‘find out for themselves’ in class, we can’t take it
for granted that learning will take place, that it will always be of the
things that the teacher wants the students to notice, or that students will
actually change their own language as a result of this guided noticing.
With a forgiving atmosphere though and plenty of risk-taking, most 
students can help each other towards the same shared understanding.
Finding out for yourself: Functional expressions
1 Put the students in pairs for a conversation about a film they’ve seen
recently. Ask them to consider the phrases they know for commenting
on the film, e.g. ‘It was really interesting.’
2 Play snippets of real conversation on tape and ask students to note
down all the phrases used by the speakers to discuss films seen
recently. 
3 Students note which phrases are the same and different in form,
function or meaning from others on the tape and from their own and
categorise the phrases according to whether they are positive (e.g. ‘It
was absolutely ace’) or negative (e.g. ‘Dreadful!’).
4 How do people learn and so how can we teach?
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