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There is nothing so practical as a good theory

Penny Ur, Oranim School of Education, Haifa University,penny@macam.ac.il

Many teachers feel that the ‘theoretical’ component of their teaching coursesor books on teaching has been useless to them, and that they have profited alot more from ‘practical’ tips and ideas. I would like to argue that the kind oftheory they have found useless are what I would call ‘bad’ theory: theory thatdoesn’t translate into practice. A good theory generates an enormous amountof practice. A practical idea, in contrast, is only one classroom tip, which maywork well when used, but is limited because it only applies to itself onceyou’ve done it, you have no further to go. In other words, practical tips are oflimited practical use: but the practical use of a good theory may be infinite.!ence the title of this article.

What is practical input!"

‘"ractical’ guidelines are ones that give you things to do about defined,specific situations: classes, individuals, materials or procedures.

!ere are some e#amples:

$. If you break a piece of chalk before using it, it won’t s%ueak on theblackboard.

&. "repare your lessons the night before if you prepare them earlier, you’llprobably have to redo them the night before anyway.

'. (se green pens to correct students’ work rather than red.

). ‘*igsaw listening’ is a way of organising student interaction. +he studentsare put into groups, where each group learns about one component of the‘target’ story or informative discourse. +hey then regroup so that each newgroup has at least one member from the each of the original groups. +heyshare their knowledge to reconstruct the complete story or information.

. -ive groupwork instructions to students #efore actually dividing them into

groups, not after.

/. 0on’t ‘tell’ your class grammatical rules elicit them from the studentsthemselves.

1. 0on’t smile till 2hanuka.

 A ‘good’ tip is one which is clearly applicable in practice and which you thinkwill be helpful in solving a specific problem. A bad one, conversely, is one youdon’t see how to apply and3or you don’t think it would solve anything anyway.

4hether or not you consider the e#amples given above ‘good’ or ‘bad’ tips,they are all arguably the kind of thing that is meant by the teachers who say

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‘we want practice, not theory’. +hey are immediately translatable into action,and could easily become automatic routines.

5ut they are ‘dead ends’. 6nce you have broken your chalk to get thenoiseless blackboard writing, that’s it, there is nothing further to be learnt fromthe chalkbreaking tip. 6nce you have decided to use green pens, there isnothing further to be learnt. 7either of these helps you with any other aspectof your teaching than the particular act they relate to. And the same sort ofthing is true for the others.

+his is because they typically give you no reasons for doing them. +hey are‘surface’ routines, based on successful past e#perience perhaps, but notbuilding in any causeandeffect reasoning or background generalities whichmight e#plain why such routines are productive 8 because such backgroundgeneralities are, of course, theoretical.

6ne result of this lack of underlying rationale is that the teacher has no criteriaby which to 9udge which of two or more practical alternatives is preferable forthem in a particular situation. !ow, for e#ample, will a teacher decide, if thete#tbook says to use ‘9igsaw’ organisation for a discussion activity whether infact this would be most productive in this particular class, or whether it mightbe better to do the activity as a full class debate, or as group or pair work Ifthe teacher has never discussed in class the various kinds of organisation andtheir various advantages and disadvantages in principle ;and as soon as yousay ‘principle’ you are into theory< 8 then they will probably not even be awareof alternatives, let alone be able to 9udge between them, and will 9ust do what

the te#tbook says or what they has seen others do.

=inked to this is another negative result of the lack of underlying rationale: thedisempowering of the trainees. If they are simply given tips and notencouraged to discuss the whys and wherefores, advantages anddisadvantages in general 8 then they are being denied the right to rethink,criticise and adapt. +hey can only accept or re9ect: and, being in the positionof new entrants into the profession, they are likely to accept. 5asing a courseon practical input alone is the best way to disempower the teacher as aprofessional, and turn them into no more than an obedient functionary ortechnician.

>o practical ‘tips’ are very limited in their contribution to good practicebecause they are ‘dead ends’, because they provide no criteria for choosingbetween alternatives and because they disempower the beginningprofessional. A fourth problem is that each such ‘practical tip’ only covers aminute fraction of what teaching involves. ?ou’d need a million ‘tips’ like thisto cover all eventualities of teaching, and even then you’d miss some. It’s 9ustinefficient to try to teach or learn a teacher’s 9ob through practicalities alone.

+he 9ob of theories is essentially to solve these problems: to state ideas insuch a way that the teacher isn’t then stuck in a dead end but their feet set on

a road which leads to innumerable further destinations to enable informed

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and thoughtful choice between options to empower the professional toenable efficient and effective learning of language pedagogy.

What is theory"

 A theory is a general statement about a set of concrete phenomena ;practice

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4e might call such theories embedded in terminology ‘implicit’: they aren’tstated e#plicitly, but the listener may 9ustifiably infer them from they way theyare used by the speaker.

+he second kind of theory I mentioned earlier, the e#planatory, might, incontrast, be called ‘e#plicit’. It suggests causal or other relationships betweenphenomena, it lays out hypothetical patterns or ‘laws’. It is usually e#pressedfrankly in a proposition, which can often be restated as a predictive ‘if Dthen’sentence covering a wide area of e#perience. >ince this is what people in our field usually mean when they talk about ‘theories’, I shall focus on thisdefinition from now on.

!ere are some e#amples from our own field. Again, you may or may notagree with them.

$. +he Input !ypothesis ;Brashen $EF

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+hese theories e#press an attempt by their author to make sense of a set ofobservable phenomena, in a way that accords with their own opinions. 7otethat nobody is completely ob9ective in so doing. +heories aren’t created as aresult of e#periment or observation on the contrary, as "opper ;$E/'< noted,

you can’t actually observe or e#periment effectively at all unless you havesome kind of hypothesis, however rudimentary, to start with. +he function ofe#periment, reflection and observation is to test, criticise and refine orreformulate such hypotheses so they get nearer and nearer the truth.

4hat is a ‘good’ theory of this type

+here are various criteria for ‘good’ theory in the literature the list below isderived from my own understanding of three main sources ;"opper, $E/'!uberman and Miles,$EE) >wan, $EE)<

$. "lausibility: it appears to accord with data 3 e#perience. >ome peoplewould substitute the simpler term ‘truth’ here but truth is very difficult, if notimpossible, to establish conclusively, so I would rather content myself withverisimilitude, or ‘plausibility’. It’s true as far as we can 9udge fromobservation, e#perience, common sense and rational argument. 5uttomorrow someone may come and produce evidence that casts doubt on it.@or e#ample, Brashen’s input hypothesis has an intuitive plausibility, and hecan %uote research that supports it. !owever, other scholars have producedevidence that it isn’t true, or that it is at best an oversimplification ;>pada,$EE1implicity and parsimony: it e#plains the phenomena in the simplest waypossible, avoiding complicated ramifications. +he ‘younger is better’ theory,though it may be deficient from other points of view, is admirably simple.2omplicated theories, by their very nature, cannot be reproduced in the listabove: but one e#ample might be the theory of ‘linguistic imperialism’proposed by "hillipson in his book of that name ;$EE&

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. C#planatory, predictive and generative power: it clearly applies toobservable phenomena, so can be used to e#plain what’s going on, predictwhat’ll happen ne#t or provide a basis for innovation. +his is the crucial‘usefulness’ criterion which makes a theory ‘practical’. @or e#ample, the ‘how

much3how many’ rule is useful in teaching grammar I have found my ‘taskbased discussions’ theory very useful in devising discussion activities.

/. +estability, falsifiability, modifiability: you can try it out and if your resultsshow it’s wrong ;at least in your conte#t< then you can re9ect it or if you needto change it, you can. @or e#ample, the 7atural 6rder hypothesis is virtuallyimpossible for a practising teacher to test out, so it isn’t a good theory fromthis point of view whereas my ‘taskbased discussions’ theory I have beenable to try out out lots of times, and as a result developed further myunderstanding of its implications and limitations.

Hod Cllis ;$EE1:$'< adds the aspect of ‘aesthetic appeal’ which is anadditional ‘bonus’ for a theory, but not, I think, essential. It means that atheory is appealing because it sounds nice, is e#pressed in pleasing andcompelling metaphor. JygotGky’s ‘Gone of pro#imal development’ might be ane#ample of this, with its neat spatial metaphor to e#press an aspect ofcognitive development.

So $hat are the #est! theories"

 Arguably, the best theories for trainees are the ones they work out forthemselves. 5ut they shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time, it

would take far too long: why shouldn’t they get benefit from what otherteachers have discovered before them 5ut they must, at some point, try outthese ‘e#ternal input’ theories for themselves otherwise they remain what4hitehead ;$E&E< famously called ‘inert ideas’.

+he bad theories are the ones our trainees hear about in courses but don’t orcan’t apply to their own practice. +his may be the theory’s fault: it’s simply, initself, a bad one, by one or more of the criteria described above. 6r it may bethe trainees’ fault: they don’t understand it, or can’t be bothered to make theeffort to work out how to apply it. It may be the fault of circumstances 8 thecourses are so designed that trainees have no access to classrooms or other

conte#ts for trying things out. 6r it may be our, the trainers’ fault: we aren’tmaking the theorypractice link clear enough, not providing opportunities,even in our own sessions, of clarifying the implications.

The place of practical tips

I am not denying that you need to learn lots of practical tips. +his isoccasionally because some are simply not ‘covered’ by theory 8 they areisolated bits of practice which you 9ust need to know in themselves ;fore#ample the ‘break the chalk’ one

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>wan, M. $EE). 0esign criteria for pedagogic language rules. In 5ygate, M., A. +onkyn, K C. 4illiams ;eds< $rammar and the Language Teacher . !emel!empstead: "rentice !all International.

4hitehead, A. 7. $E&E. The Aims o# &ducation and 'ther &ssays( 7ew ?ork:Macmillan.