English Language Teaching in its Social Context

170 JACK C. RICHARDSClassroom managementClassroom management refers to the ways in which student behavior, movement, andinteraction during a lesson are organized and controlled by the teacher to enable teachingto take place most effectively. Good managerial skills on the part of the teacher are anessential component of good teaching. In a well-managed class, discipline problems are few,and learners are actively engaged in learning tasks and activities; this contributes to highmotivation and expectations for success. Evertson, Anderson, and Brophy (1 978) found thatit was possible to identify teachers with managerial problems in the first few days of theschool year, that such problems continued throughout the year, and that managerial skillsin the classroom were related to levels of student involvement.StructuringA lesson reflects the concept of structuring when the teacher’s intentions are clear andinstructional activities are sequenced according to a logic that students can perceive.Classroom observations and studies of lesson protocols indicate that sometimes neither theteacher nor the learners understood what the intentions of an activity were, why an activityoccurred when it did, what directions they were supposed to follow, or what the relationshipbetween one activity and another was. Hence, it may not have been clcar what studentsneeded to focus on to complete a task successfully. Fisher et a1. (1 980) conclude that students“pay attention more when the teacher spends time discussing the goals or structures of thelesson and/or giving directions about what the students are to do” (p. 26). Berliner (1 984)likewise suggests that “structuring affects attention rate: it is sometimes not done at all,sometimes it is done only minimally, and sometimes it is overdone”(p. 63).Tasks, or activity structures, refer to activities that teachers assign to attain particular learningobjectives. For any given subject at any given level, a teacher uses a limited repertoire oftasks that essentially define that teacher’s methodology of teaching. These might includecompleting worksheets, reading aloud, dictation, quickwriting, and practicing dialogues.According to Tikunoff (I 985) , class tasks vary according to three types of demands theymake on learners: response mode demands (the kind of skills they demand, such as knowledge,comprehcnsion, application, analysis/synthesis, evaluation); interactional mode demands (therules governing how classroom tasks are accomplished, such as individually, in a group, orwith the help of the teacher); and task complexity demands (how difficult the learner perceivesthe task to be).Teachers have to make decisions not only about the appropriate kinds of tasks to assignto learners, but also about the order of tasks (the sequence in which tasks should beintroduced); pacing (how much time learners should spend on tasks); products (whether theproduct or result of a task is expected to he the same for all students); learning strategies(what learning strategies will be recommended for particular tasks); and materials (whatsources and materials to use in completing a task) (Tikunoff 198s).The concept of tasks has been central to studies of effective teaching. The amount oftime students spend actively engaged on learning tasks is directly related to learning (Goodand Beckerman 1978). For example,Teacher A andTeacher B are both teaching the samereading lesson. InTeacher A’s class, learners are actively engaged in reading tasks for 75%of the lesson, the remaining time being occupied with noninstructional activities such as