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self . There is, however, a third player in the relationship, which connects
with the other two: pedagogy. It may be difficult to separate out what we
mean by pedagogy from what we ve referred to as  foreign languages
education , but it was clear from commentaries we collected that boys
themselves do just that, drawing a dividing line between the two which
has implications for our thinking at this point.
There appear to be different levels of resistance by boys to the lan-
guages option. Some appear more entrenched and intractable, shored
up by solid commonsensical knowledge about what s possible, appro-
priate and desirable, by racist and xenophobic attitudes, or by the
monolingual mindset of speakers of the global language who see no
need to learn other languages. But other levels of resistance appear to be
more provisional, more open to consideration and to influence from
variables which are themselves more fluid.
The McPake and colleagues report (1999) referred to earlier suggests
this distinction. The students in that study were not for the most part
178 Boys and Foreign Language Learning
opposed to the notion of foreign language study. Their reasons for drop-
ping out were pragmatically framed, having to do with study pathways,
career options, and the perceived value of languages to future employers.
Evidence of similarly mixed response and motivation came out of the
1998 UK study by Clark, this time drawing attention less to the imperatives
of broader community and work-related values and more to students
evaluation of the quality of the offered experience. While many students
in this study had stereotypically framed views about the relevance of lan-
guage study, reflecting narrow, insular attitudes, a key factor in explaining
their disinterest appears to have been the absence of any intrinsic satisfac-
tion in their language learning experience rather than disinterest in the
option itself. This brings us, therefore, to this third major component of
the boys languages relationship: to what actually happens in language
classrooms, how programmes are designed, how resources and materials
are selected, how teachers  teach . Evidence from our data  like the evi-
dence from the UK data and from the earlier Australian study (Zammit,
1992)  suggest this to be a major focus of concern. Back in 1992, Zammit
identified three main explanations offered by boys for not continuing
with languages: difficulty, dislike and negative experiences; the negative
experiences relating to their classroom experience. They spoke of not
learning much, of being bored, of disliking the activities they were
expected to engage in. Our study suggests that things have not improved
to any significant degree. Students talk repeatedly about boredom, lack of
progress, frustration; of learning the same things  over and over ; of irrele-
vant and meaningless tasks. Learning languages, for many of the boys we
spoke with, is clearly an unenjoyable experience.
This reads as harsh judgement; and these comments have to be put in
context. The focus of our project was boys relationship with languages,
already established as poor. What we knew about levels of satisfaction
and interest when we started out prepared us for discouraging evidence.
Of course we were hoping to find good stories too. In among the stu-
dents interviewed would be boys enjoying languages and doing well;
and we found them. Alongside stories of dissatisfaction and disinterest,
there were positive and enthusiastic reports of  great teachers, who
made learning  fun and  really interesting ; of the cognitive satisfactions
of  cracking codes and the cultural enrichment of seeing inside different
worlds. Some of the case study conversations presented in Chapter 5, for
example, provide the kind of positive, insightful comments that read
like successfully achieved foreign language programme objectives.
Overall, however, a far higher proportion of commentaries  those
detailing the difficulties and problems summarised above  indicate low
Reading Between the Lines 179
levels of approval of what actually happens in language classrooms; and
provide a significant part of the explanation for the mass migration by
boys (and many girls too) from post-compulsory programmes.
From theory to practice and back again: teacher knowledge in
practice
 Pedagogy is almost as complex as  boys . It involves the operationalised
ensemble of informing theories, teaching strategies, course design and
resourcing; plus all those more idiosyncratic and less definable elements
such as personality, communicative style and relational skills which,
while not always addressed explicitly in teacher education, are rank-
ordered highly by students when they talk about what makes a  good
teacher. Part of our interest in this project had been to find out as much
as we could about what teachers are doing in language classrooms, why
they are doing what they are doing, and how they are doing it; because
this has to be a large part of the boys languages equation.
Clearly there are significant variations in what happens in different
contexts. The boys we spoke with inhabited  or had inhabited  some
very different kinds of classrooms, ranging from prescriptive, teacher-
fronted, traditional text-based places to more innovative, experimental
and communicatively focused ones. And, as indicated in Chapter 6,
the teachers we spoke with varied significantly. One of the things that
came through most clearly from these conversations was a sense of the
complexity, ambiguity and variability of what teachers do in classrooms.
Not only of what they do, but also of what they think they do, what they [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]