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7 - Breaking through the Communicative Cocoon

Improvisation in Secondary School Foreign Language Classrooms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Jürgen Kurtz
Edited by
R. Keith Sawyer
Jürgen Kurtz
Affiliation:
Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany
R. Keith Sawyer
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
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Summary

Language is not just a tool for communication. It is also a resource for creative thought, a framework for understanding the world, a key to new knowledge and human history, and a source of pleasure and inspiration.

(Kern 2008: 367)

In this chapter, I provide specific examples of how I have used guided improvisation in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms in Germany. Very few attempts have been made to examine the potential of improvisation for learning and teaching foreign languages in schools. I demonstrate that improvisation provides a unique way to balance the teaching paradox: Improvisation is not only related to directionality, competence, performance, and design, but to spontaneity, intuition, and chance as well. Thus, it contrasts with the traditional view of teaching as transmission of knowledge and skills, that is, of delivering a prescribed curriculum, attending to a particular methodology, following a specific procedure, actuating a lesson plan, and interacting in pre-arranged ways. This traditional view avoids the teaching paradox altogether, but at the cost of removing all student creativity. Moreover, because improvisation encompasses attunement to a situational context, involving “an opaque stock of past experience” (Ciborra 1999: 79) as well as spontaneous decision making and problem solving, openness and unpredictability, it also contrasts with current educational trends that place tremendous emphasis on standardization, predictable improvement, outcome-orientation, and testing.

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Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching , pp. 133 - 161
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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