Learner-Based Teaching. Colin Campbell

activities described in this book show teachers how to help their students to teach themselves, and each other, about English. Using a learner-based approach, the learners themselves are responsible for the information input, thereby ensuring its relevance and topicality for each particular group.

      The basic procedure has two stages. In the first, learners prepare materials which are designed to practice, for example, a particular skill, function, or grammar item. In doing this, they draw on all the linguistic resources they already have. In the second stage, these materials are passed to other learners in the class who carry out the activities. In this way students obtain valuable language practice, not only while they are using the materials, but while they are preparing them as well.

How we arrived at learner-based teaching

      We arrived at learner-based teaching along different routes but mainly in response to teaching conditions in Poland. Here, few teachers have access to a wide range of recently published materials. We found that people were dissatisfied with the repeated use of the same coursebooks. Many complained that the materials they had did not meet the real needs and interests of their students.

      As a result, in the teacher-training sessions we ran we evolved the principle that the activities we developed should not require ‘materials’, equipment such as photocopiers, or a lot of preparation time. We eventually concluded that a lack of ‘good materials’ might, in fact, be a very positive and liberating thing. A second factor was that some of the groups of students we taught consisted of academics of varying ages, with different specialities, who already possessed a good command of English. In certain areas their knowledge was often considerably greater than ours. This taught us to respect them as learners, and see them as individuals rather than as ‘a class of foreign students’, and to call upon their specialist knowledge in the lessons. For example, a physicist specializing in acoustics proved to be an invaluable source of information during a class on noise pollution. His expertise was available to be exploited and he was only too eager to co-operate.

      Two other events set us thinking about learner-based teaching. One of these was a teacher-training session run for teachers of our Language Centre in Poland by John Morgan and Mario Rinvolucri. The second was using a manuscript of Chris Sion’s Inner Voice (to be published in 1992 as Talking to Yourself in English) for group sessions. These stimuli made us realize how much potential resided in the students. Yet we had been complaining of the scarcity of topical and authentic material!