Robin Walker currently works at the Escuela Universitaria de Turismo de Asturias, Spain. His specialist interests are pronunciation, ESP and teacher education. He is the Special Projects Officer of the IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group, and Vice-president of TESOL-Spain.

Recently I noticed my niece working from a document entitled Good Medical Practice. We have all been patients, so I felt curious as to what such practice might be, and picked the leaflet up to find out. Essentially, after a brief introduction, it was a series of statements detailing what good practice meant. However, almost as soon as I began to read them, I realised that by substituting teacher for doctor, and learner for patient, it was possible to use the concepts to reflect on our own professional lives.

Naturally, some of the results of the substitution needed reinterpretation, but they all constituted food for thought. The introduction, for example, became:

Patients (read learners) must be able to trust doctors (read teachers) with their lives and well-being. To justify that trust, we as a profession have a duty to maintain a good standard of practice and care and to show respect for human life.

The idea that our learners’ physical lives are in our hands obviously does need reinterpreting. However, the references in the literature to the relationship between language and identity are sufficient for us to have to accept that we do have language egos in our care, and that our learners’ language well-being is one of our responsibilities as teachers.

Of the statements that made up the rest of the leaflet, the first five, adapted and reinterpreted by myself, are:

Make the progress of your learners your first concern

Doctors care for their patients in order that they get better. Similarly, as teachers the care and concern that we show towards our students is in order that they get better at English. This, of course, is obvious – or at least it should be. But if we have been in the profession for a long time, we do need to guard against becoming immune to the plight of students who do not progress. This is not to say that lack of progress is automatically attributable to poor teaching. Clearly there are a number of factors that can bring about stagnation, and these can act individually or in combination. However, should we detect a lack of progress in an individual student or in a group, it is surely our responsibility to ascertain the cause of this situation, and to take whatever steps we can to remedy it.

Treat every learner politely and considerately

As with the first point, this is obvious, and indeed I am sure that we all feel that we do treat our learners in this way. Irony, satire, abuse of authority – these are strategies that professionals who read newsletters such as IATEFL Issues never employ. But if we are honest, have there not been moments in the many, many hours of contact time we have accumulated at which for one perfectly comprehensible reason or other, we weren’t quite as polite or considerate as we should have been?

I know that I can be less than polite or considerate on occasions, though less so now than in the early days when I genuinely believed that I knew how to teach English. However, the key here for me personally has not been to aim at becoming the perfect teacher, but to increase my awareness of the situations or students that cause me to err, and then to develop strategies to help me to control myself in moments of tension. Added to this strategy of avoiding conflict, I have tried hard over the years to learn how to apologise should the need arise. This actually comes hard to me, but looking back over more than 25 years of teaching, I can see that it has always been the best thing to do. Apart from putting things back into place, when I have been courageous enough to admit that I acted wrongly, students have invariably seen me in a more positive light.

Respect learners’ dignity and privacy

Respecting learners’ dignity and privacy is apparently easy. However, there are activities that can threaten dignity or invade privacy. Roleplay, for example, is something some students take to wonderfully, and not just those of an extrovert nature. However, in some cultures the idea of being somebody else, or of saying things you would never personally say, can threaten a learner’s dignity. Even just pushing students to pronounce foreign sounds in front of colleagues or classmates can attack their dignity, especially if the sound is taboo in the mother-tongue culture.

Another common classroom activity type is that of students asking each other about families, friends, husbands, wives, girlfriends or boyfriends. Whilst such exchanges of personal information may appear innocent enough to some, there are cultures in which questions on these topics represent a clear intrusion into the learner’s privacy. As teachers we need to be very sensitive to even the slightest reticence on behalf of our students to participate. Indeed, in certain contexts we may need to eliminate these activities from our armoury altogether, or, if this is not possible, provide students with fictitious but culturally acceptable information for them to use in class.

Listen to learners and respect their views

This can be taken at two levels. The most obvious, perhaps, is that of learners’ views during a discussion. As teachers we are in an advantaged position in discussions: we often choose the topic, we speak English better than our students, and, though we would sometimes prefer not to be, we are the teacher. This automatically bestows a special authority on anything we say, and, indeed, in some cultures it would be very difficult to challenge us. In a debate then, it would seem wise to leave our own opinions outside the classroom, or to avoid topics where we know that we will be incapable of remaining impartial.

A second level at which we need to respect learners’ views, however, is at that of classroom practice and course contents. This does not necessarily mean that we have to negotiate both of these with our students on a daily basis. Desirable as this may seem to some students in some cultures, to others it may be perceived as an abdication of our responsibilities. It may well be that in some teaching contexts, learners will have assumed from the outset that our job as teachers is to determine both contents and methodology. If this were to be the situation, then out of respect for the learners it surely is what we should do.

Clearly the situation is more complex than this. In my own teaching, for example, I am constantly confronted with students with little or no background in learner autonomy, something I consider essential for them, given that they are about to enter the world of professional tourism. However, on first discussing the need for autonomy I frequently encounter a degree of resistance. In this respect it could be argued that I should abandon my attempts out of respect for my students. However, it is precisely the respect I feel for them, influenced by the knowledge I have as to the language competence their future profession will require from them, that pushes me to insist on certain things despite their limited popularity. The correct use of dictionaries is a case in point.

Give learners information in a way they can understand

As with the previous point, this can be taken in more than one way. Two immediately obvious levels are those of classroom language, on the one hand, and explanations about wider aspects of our teaching, such as the rationale behind course contents, on the other. In terms of the former, it is not too difficult to give simple, clear instructions to learners. However, it might not be a bad idea from time to time, to record ourselves teaching in order to check the clarity of our language. I work mostly with intermediate students, for example, and I find that anything that is not stated directly is very often not understood. When we are working on listening skills, I usually offer the class the chance to listen as often as they wish, with time between listenings to discuss what they have understood. However, the utterance of ‘Again?’ when I feel they are ready to listen once more leaves many students lost. In contrast, the full question ‘Would you like to listen again?’ never produces confusion.

The second level of the learner’s right to accessible information is something I have been slow to pick up on. For many years now I have made my marking schemes for exam essays and oral work freely available to students at what seemed an appropriate moment in the year. Similarly, I give students a detailed description of course contents in the first session of each new academic year. However, it is only relatively recently that I have understood the need to explain what I mean when I say, for example, that the course will develop the sub-skills of skimming or scanning. Similarly, where a marking scheme for written work refers to a text displaying ‘an appropriate level and range of grammar’, I now explain to students before the exam exactly what this means in terms of their level of English and the work they have done with me that year.

The Good Medical Practice leaflet continued with the following statements:

respect the rights of patients to be fully involved in decisions about their care;
keep your professional skills and knowledge up to date;
recognise the limits of your professional competence;
be honest and trustworthy;
respect and protect confidential information;
make sure that your personal beliefs do not prejudice your patients’ care;
act quickly to protect patients from risk if you have good reason to believe that you or a colleague may not be fit to practise;
avoid abusing your position as a doctor; and
work with colleagues in the ways that best serve patients’ interests.

It would be tedious and presumptuous, if I were to reinterpret all of them. Instead, might I invite you as a reader of IATEFL Issues to make your own reinterpretations, based on your own experience and teaching situations. Better still, could I invite you to send the outcome of your reflections to Issues for publication? We are a profession, and as such are required to ‘work with colleagues in the ways that best serve patients’ (read 'learners’) interests’. Guidelines such as those given to doctors through Good Medical Practice could be of real value to us, especially if we were to write them ourselves.