The Messy Middle.

 Last week I wrote a long post about Language-Learning and the arguments between Knowledge and Skills. I looked at the lovely idea that Skills are not just a result of some people being "skillful". Their skills can be broken down into steps (knowledge and concepts) that can be taught explicitly to all pupils. These steps can be practised until pupils are fluent in them and become "skillful".

This lovely and useful idea has been taken up by the Knowledge Rich Curriculum project and broken. Instead of focusing on analysing and then building up skills, they have taken a different starting point. They started from Knowledge. From the expert's overall view of how the complete system works and can be conceptualised. Instead of breaking down the Skills into Knowledge, they have broken down Knowledge. And then concentrated on force feeding the Knowledge to pupils. And they haven't even been surprised that this doesn't add up to acquiring Skills. Because they have forgotten that part entirely. Or maybe they were never actually interested in it at all.

This post is now going to be much shorter and sweeter. And from now on, entirely focused on Language-Learning.

In fact, here's the whole post in one table:

Where do you see yourself and your teaching for each of these aspects?

In Language-Teaching, the Knowledge/Skills debate is also framed around Learning/Acquisition. You will remember from my post last week, that I am not in favour of neat binary extremes. It turns out lots of the "Research Based" ideology is about judging conformity to an idea of how learning should be. Not looking at the reality of learning in the classroom.

I have tried to look at different aspects of language-learning and find "The Messy Middle" for each of them.

This is how I try to teach. In every case it's messy, it's real, and it's focused on the learners. It builds up their knowledge and their skills in tandem. I monitor their knowledge through what they can do with the language. And I deliver the knowledge that they need in order to do more with their language. I work on the increasing independence, accuracy, fluency and coherence with which they can deploy their language.

Instead of splitting into camps and looking for simplistic doctrines and magic pyramids, can we start to get stuck into the Messy Middle? That's the question I posed in the following snippet right at the start of my previous post. Let's enjoy the Messy Middle. This is us: