Requesting spontaneity and asking students to ask questions

Throughout my research in foreign language teaching I have come across two very interesting paradoxes.

The first one dealt with teachers requesting spontaneity from students.

The second one dealt with teachers asking students to ask questions in the target language.

In the former, the teachers were aiming for students to communicate about themselves in order for them to acquire a particular point of the formal language or pragmatic system. In the latter, the teachers were concerned about students practicing the forms that already had been introduced (linguistic patterns).

Bernstein acknowledged quite early that the problem of instruction is a problem that deals with values, which he called the social order or regulative rules. Instructional tasks are a function of the regulative order. You see, what teachers are trying to accomplish is students changing or acquiring a new set of values.

These paradoxes reveal the true nature of the educational endeavour as those demands spring from a form of vacuum: (a) is the question that follows a demand for asking a question a real question?; and (b) is the behaviour that follows a demand for spontaneity really spontaneous?

I have recently learned that in psychology, experts who teach therapeutic techniques go through the same kind of trouble: how to get a particular student to do something without paradoxically having to tell him or her ask me a question, be natural, which takes away their freedom.

Well, in the case of psychotherapists, psychology educators may want to educate individuals by freeing them, by having them pondering problems and getting their own solutions. In the case of language educators, I am not sure if they want their students to be free. Just look at language tests: they test the ability of the acquirer to be in the shoes of an ideal learner: a sort of common middle-class-middle-anything guy to whom the words of Nobel-winning Mario Vargas Llosa perfectly apply as he explained who he was addressing to with his particular use of language throughout his novels: a moderately educated reader [un lector medianamente culto]. In current circumstances, foreign language education is for robots. Companies lack bilingual workers, meaning robots like Star Wars android C-3PO. Language teachers just assemble them.

Moreover, parents go through the same kind of problem when trying to get their sons or daughters to do something. If they explicitly tell them, they will get back a kind of behaviour that has not been internalised, which opens the door to several forms of rebelion or resistance.

Psychologist Terrance Olson believes that is better to assign a task than to assign a technique. The latter assignment may create a non-spontaneous response, while the assignment of a task leaves the student free to examine how to accomplish the task. The same, he says, can be applied to children when one wants to strentghen father-child bonds.

This is precisely the type of problem that one encounters with the weak version of communicative language teaching (CLT), which is based on the belief that the communicative competence can be explicitely taught by focusing on the formal aspects of the formal system. In other words, what happens in CLT's weak version is that a path, a technique is taught. CLT's strong version, on the contrary, just sets the object of the task and lets students to find and deal with the procedure in order to achieve the object. But even in this case, it is very difficult for educators to lay back and let students organise themselves and come up with an answer about the means to solve a task. For once, the teacher is biting her fingernails waiting to jump in and teach them the best way to go about is... and one clearly sees where the demand for spontaneity comes from.