If IATEFL 2010 marked a tipping point for technology in the classroom, it also coincided with the 10th anniversary of dogme ELT – and featured a number of related talks, prompting Scott Thornbury to reflect that dogme is ‘self-propagating’.
I couldn’t see them all live, but thanks to Harrogate Online I was able to catch up with Chia Suan Chong’s excellent talk on Improvised Principled Eclecticism, in which she reported on a classroom-based dogme research project.
Sustainability is key to any serious teaching approach, so action research of this sort is important: dogme is only tangentially about magic moments, and much more to do with the extended interplay between conversation and a responsive focus on form.
As Chia acknowledged, maintaining this flow can be demanding. But as her learner feedback indicates, it can also make classes motivating and language memorable.
Beyond onefortywords…
Lindsay Clandfield posted this great mash-up of Avatar and ELT last week. An alien people with a firm grasp of dogme principles – now that’s what I call normalisation!
[...] Hats off to Lindsey for this mini masterpiece! Big thanks to Luke Meddings for pointing this up on his blog! [...]