Beyond Rashomon: Conceptualizing and Describing the Teaching Act

When teachers, supervisors, employers, students or salespeople discuss the same lessons, texts, tests, methods and schools of language teaching, they often sound like the characters in the Japanese movie, Rashomon-they each give contradictory and equivocal accounts of the same events or items.To classify the communications people send and receive in both teaching and non-teaching settings so that we can move beyond Rashomon, and give similar accounts of the same events, an instrument has been developed called FOCUS, an acronym for Foci for Observing Communications Used in Settings.The language of FOCUS is technical: composed of operationally defined terms that are non-judgmental.One purpose of the article is to teach the five characteristics of communications that are noted with FOCUS, provide a rationale for each and suggest applications of the instrument for teachers, teacher trainers, supervisors and researchers.Another purpose is to argue that the teaching act is not a mystery that defies precise and rational description and that we can learn a great deal about how to teach by analyzing descriptions that show how practicing teachers and their students communicate both in the classroom and outside the classroom at parties, on the job and at home. In The Silent Language, Edward Hall describes three types of learning: formal, informal and technical (1959). Formal instruction is prescriptive, outlining what should and should not be done and judging the degree of approximation to a model. Informal instruction depends on models presented for imitation. Technical instruction depends on an explicit description and classification of what is to be learned, conveyed in a vocabulary of operationally defined terms; it is non-judgmental.To illustrate these three types of learning, Hall uses the example of skiing.In a village where all have to ski to get around, children learn to ski mainly by watching their parents-informal learning.Weekend skiers in the same village learn mainly by being admonished with judgments and prescriptions as they ski-formal learning.One learns skiing technically through explicit labels.These labels are based on a description, classification and analysis of the patterned behaviors of skiers and are nonjudgmental.Though all three types of learning exist in various proportions in all learning situations, formal and informal learning dominate the practica in the pre-service and in-service education of most second language teachers.Some programs are entirely formal, relying solely on injunction.In other programs, judgments and prescriptions (formal) are presented along with