ELTWeekly Issue#19, Subscriber space: A Book Review by Hall Houston

By Tarun Patel

Teaching Unplugged by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury

A Book Review by Hall Houston

About 8 years ago, I read an article titled “Teaching Unplugged” by Scott Thornbury in It’s for Teachers magazine. The article described a new approach to teaching languages that de-emphasized coursebooks and other teaching materials, and stressed real communication between students. This approach was loosely based on a Danish film movement called Dogme, after which the new approach was named. I found the article fascinating. It challenged me to rethink the role of the coursebook in the classroom.

In April 2009, Delta Publishing printed Teaching Unplugged, which is part of their new Delta Teacher Development Series. This book gives a reader-friendly introduction to Dogme ELT. Basically, there are three principles to Dogme ELT: teaching should be conversation-driven, materials-light, and focused on emergent language. This approach emphasizes students’ and their needs over technology and techniques.

The book contains 3 sections. Part A is a brief overview of the philosophy and core principles of Dogme ELT. It runs only 15 pages, but it gives a clear explanation of Dogme and includes some intriguing quotes such as “The only questions asked in a school should be by the pupils.” (A. S. Neill). Part B is the longest section of the book. It features almost 100 activities for implementing a Dogme approach in class. The activities are clearly stated and easy to follow. Most require no materials except for pen and paper. Part C provides additional support for certain contexts, such as teaching one to one, teaching exam classes, and teaching with a coursebook.

Overall, this is a useful resource for both new and experienced teachers. I’m looking forward to trying out some of these activities in my lessons this month.

Additional Reading

To learn more about Dogme ELT, read some of the articles on Dogme at Scott Thornbury’s website:

Teaching Unplugged Website

http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/portal.htm

Delta Publishing – Teaching Unplugged

http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/html/books/Delta_Teacher_Development_Series.html#TEACHUNP

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May 13th, 2009

About... Tarun Patel

This author published 561 posts in this site.
Tarun Patel (http://tarunpatel.net/blog/) is an ELT and Communication skills teacher, working with Charotar University of Science & Technology (CHARUSAT - http://charusat.ac.in/). He has been dealing with the Language learning processes for last seven years. 'Technology in Teaching English' is his favorite domain and he has presented several research papers in national and international conferences on the same theme. He is the founder editor of ELTWeekly (http://eltweekly.com/), India's first weekly ELT eNewsletter which reaches in more than forty countries and benefits more than 1600d teachers of English and Communication Skills. Have a look at his personal blog http://tarunpatel.net/blog/.