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Calgary-based English as a Second Language teacher Mark Dugard has pledged to give up his intimate relationship with his ESL textbooks. Dugard has just embarked on an experiment with a radically outside-the-box language teaching approach called Lexilearn English Language Teaching. Lexilearn-style lessons are based on spontaneous, free-flowing, and undirected student conversations. Publishers’ textbooks and workbooks are shunned, as are syllabi, course outlines, and even lesson plans. Instead, the learning objectives are inductively derived from whatever language naturally emerges from the students. Lexilearn isn’t so much a teaching method as an anti-method. One Lexilearn devotee is Madison Chang, who teaches conversational English at Toronto’s Interglobe Learning Centre. She adopted the Lexilearn approach two years ago and hasn’t looked back. In the past, she says, she would slavishly follow the dialogues, stories, and grammar in the textbook, but now she and her students collaboratively create these texts as they emerge from natural conversations. Chang says students are much more engaged with and take greater pride in texts they’ve authored and grammar they’ve produced themselves. With Lexilearn, Chang feels more attuned to her students, listening intently to everything they say so that she can tease out narratives and extrapolate relevant grammatical structures. Chang says Lexilearn has made her a more creative and engaged teacher, it forces her to think on her feet. But Regina College principal Evan Kasowitz derides the Lexilearn approach as nothing more than a dignified term for “winging it.” Kasowitz, who trains the school’s ESL teachers, notes that the few-and-far-between teachers who succeed with the approach tend to be unusually gifted at making up activities as they go along, even when preparation was obviously needed. Kasowitz also charges that Lexilearn is elitist, because its practitioners must be highly fluent native speakers of English—a rarity among ESL teachers worldwide. And even with an impeccable Lexilearn teacher, the approach still doesn’t work with many students: those wanting test preparation, those from cultures where textbooks are seen as giving credibility to the course, and, finally, Kasowitz says with an ominous tone, teenagers. Don’t ever try Lexilearn in a large classroom of adolescents, Kasowitz warns. It will fail beyond your worst nightmare. Happily for Mark Dugard back in Calgary, his classroom is full of adults. Whether or not Lexilearn becomes a permanent fixture in his classroom, Dugard says the first 15 minutes of his class will always be what he calls “not true Lexilearn, but certainly Lexilearn-esque.” Starting every class with undirected, voluntary conversation, Dugard says, puts the students at ease and prepares them to learn. But that’s not Lexilearn, insists Dugard, it’s just a good warmup.
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