Chat is an outcome too …

Maybe the most important outcome.

When we talk about outcomes when planning our lessons or what the CEFR calls an action-oriented approach, I think many people misinterpret this as meaning that all our input models should have an obvious practical benefit and the tasks students do will be role-playing practical activities or having discussions which resolve problems or reach definitive conclusions. This was an ongoing debate we had when writing tasks to encourage mediation in Outcomes Third edition. As we discuss in our course on Mediation in language teaching, while more complex tasks are likely to result in more varied types of interactions between students, ALL meaningful speaking tasks have the potential for mediation to take place. Ultimately, much – maybe most – of what we do with language outside of the classroom has no particular goal other than to create and maintain our social relationships. Even where we are explicitly talking about problems we are experiencing or seeing in the world, we often only tell the story and providing emotional reactions rather than give advice or decide on a course of action. Recently I was lucky enough to go to Kenya on holiday and various chats I had and overheard, made me think of this issue and my own materials writing and teacher development (sadly the teaching and training brain never completely switches off even on holiday!).

A lesson on fire!

For example, last term I wrote a lesson for our Advanced speaking classes on the subject of fire. The theme was actually inspired by a participant in a discussion of one of our teacher development webinars, where she was talking about her efforts to keep thinking of topics for a long running advanced class. She had done a series on elements (fire, water, air and earth) and I was inspired by her idea (thank you!). Anyway, my version of a ‘fire’ lesson included a section where participants related their experiences of sitting round an open fire. I think this is the type of discussion that might not always be considered as outcome-oriented or directly relevant to students needs, and I was conscious that not everyone might have something to say. Still two months later, I found myself sitting round a fire and overheard a (Polish?) woman talking about her experience of sitting round a fire in Nepal. She talked about the relief of getting out of the cold and warming up and then explained the fire was burning cow/yak shit rather than wood. This generated a brief discussion with some of the other travellers before they went back to looking at their phones. So my classroom task did, after all, reflect a spontaneous real-life conversation.

Football is just a beginning

The second non-solution outcome I thought about was football. Almost without exception a trip in a taxi would start with a where are you from / have you been her before and then quickly move on to asking/talking about the premier league and football. Again, this is another debate we have had with publishers, who are reluctant to focus on it as a topic  We could maybe add F to the PARSNIPs list of taboo topics (PARFSNIPS)! But as with other subjects like politics, alcohol & religion etc,, these are the subjects of everyday conversations so you might want a task that incorporate such topics. I know, I know … not everyone likes football. Well, I think we shouldn’t think of the topic as the complete conversation and outcome, but more a beginning. Because the football discussions we had in Kenya were not exactly always about football, There was a certain amount of joking – oh poor you! When was the last time you won something! How can you get excited about football (my wife)? There were questions related to where we live (local team, where is that?). Questions about going to watch led to the expense of tickets which in turn led to more general discussion on the comparative cost of living. There were also questions about if the taxi driver liked any other sport, or if they play football which led to discussions about age and health  and even politics (poor investment and corruption).

Follow the students

I think this is something to bear in mind for teachers. We might worry about students getting ‘off-topic’ and sometimes teachers may even tell students to get back to the task and practise the language that was taught. However, the actual nature of these social, ‘non-goal-oriented’ conversations is that they will normally develop in an organic way into other areas. In such cases, an outcomes-oriented teacher should perhaps embrace the sidetrack and follow the students by, for example, feeding back on language within the sidetracks. We might also note these sidetracks as potential topics to return to in future lessons when they will be a new starting point of a discussion, which itself may veer off in other directions.

Even the buying task might start with chat and not end up with a sale

Finally, if we are going to talk about functional tasks, we might add negotiating prices or, in my case, politely saying ‘I’m not buying anything’ in a variety of different ways! Sometimes the functional language we teach is oriented to a very particular cultural setting. I might also add that even these functional conversations either started or moved on to conversations  which were not strictly about buying and selling.

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