Working with Intuition in Language Teaching and Research - Richard Pinner and Richard J. Sampson

  ELT Research in Action (ELTRIA) Conference 10-11 May, 2024

Richard Pinner and Richard J. Sampson

Working with Intuition in Language Teaching and Research

This summary draws on the workshop given at ELTRIA in Barcelona on 11th May and at PLL5 in Madrid a week later. My notes are from the PLL5 session, but I am very grateful to participants in the session at ELTRIA for the photos.

Richard Pinner (Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan) and Richard Sampson (Chuo University, Japan), who from now on will be known as ‘the Richards’, recently co-edited a special issue of the Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning (JPLL) focusing on practitioner/researcher intuition in language education:

After introducing ourselves, the participants were invited to consider the question:

What is your take on intuition?

You might want to consider your own answer to this question for a moment before comparing with some of the definitions that emerged from the discussions in the workshop (see below)

Contributions (in the PLL5 session) included:

- An ability to understand situations and students’ emotions in order to find quick solutions to problems or change problematic dynamics

- A skill set that allows the teacher to deal with challenging situations

- A sum of previous experiences and decisions

In our small group, we discussed the automaticity of intuition: an unconscious ability to make choices based on years of lessons learned from practice.

Richard P. presented some of the properties of intuition (e.g. Claxton, 2003)

- timely/immediate perception

- contrasted with conscious reasoning

- grounded in experience; tacit (Richard likened this to knowledge stored in your RAM memory!)

- synthetic appreciation of whole

- reframing or reconceptualization

- strongly affective (reactive, rather than evidence-based or analytical)

- built-in confidence rating (how confident you are that this course of action is going to work in the current situation)

The next section of the workshop was based on Richard Sampson’s paper in the Special Issue of JPLL (2023). Drawing on his own practitioner diaries, RS identified six areas of Practitioner Researcher Intuition. 

He listed these as:

- Mood assessment: looking for signs from students to judge class mood

- Improvisation: reactive moves away from plans; adaptations to suit needs

- Problem avoidance: noticing potential challenges; evasive or anticipatory action

- Envisaging direction: alterations to research plans via reactions or first pass through data

- Learning opportunity creation: permitting lessons or activities to move into the unknown

- Student personalised actions: strategies based on knowledge of students

The format for the next section was to choose an area of interest from the six listed, look at an example from Richard’s diary and then discuss our own experiences in pairs/groups. In the case of  ‘Student personalised actions’ Richard’s extract referenced a time he had mentioned his favourite football team (Liverpool) in class, which provoked the interest of the football players in the group and a discussion of the teams they supported.

In the ensuing discussion, my partner and I examined the pros and cons of our (very different) contexts. In my case, living in the same country (Catalunya, Spain) for 30 years, I share a lot of cultural background knowledge with my students and I can use their understanding of the world to my advantage. In contrast, my partner works with multilingual/cultural groups, and can exploit learners’ curiosity about each other as a natural information gap. Interestingly she mentioned that the potential offered by this diversity has reduced in recent years, as classes in this context (EAP in the UK) are now dominated (90%) by students of Chinese origin.

Two other participants mentioned the situation of teaching migrants, many of whom have come from difficult and traumatic backgrounds. They highlighted the challenge of recognizing sensitive or triggering topics and how to exercise fine-tuned emotional intelligence, based on experience.

Another extract that Richard shared was related to Learning opportunity creation.

This involves capitalising on opportunities which present themselves as a class evolves. While Richard’s example highlighted learners’ use of strategies, I couldn’t help but relate this area to the unplanned, unpredictable spontaneity of the dogme approach , and of how experienced teachers can pick up on and use the learning opportunities provided by working with emergent language, discussed in a recent post on this blog here.

I’d never considered this as intuitive before, but in my current role, I can see that it is very difficult for pre-service teachers to identify and exploit these opportunities purposefully. Perhaps more surprisingly, experienced teachers are not always prepared for these moments either, especially if their previous classroom experience relies heavily on fluent and well-planned routines. Something I will pay more attention to in future.

At the end the workshop, we had only touched on 2-3 of the six topics Richard had identified (they are further explored in the special issue of the JPLL). It was clear that participants had plenty of ideas to discuss, yet more evidence that this is a field ripe for further exploration. As a conclusion, the Richards promised more potential publications to come in this vein. 

Looking forward to it!

References

Claxton, G. (2003). The anatomy of intuition. In T. Atkinson & G. Claxton (Eds.), The intuitive practitioner: On the value of not always knowing what one is doing (pp. 32–52). Open University Press.

Sampson, R. J. (2023) Diversity of Intuitive Moments in L+ Practitioner Research: An Exploratory Autoethnographic Case Study. Special Issue: Intuition and Practitioner Research. Sampson, R. J & R. Pinner (Eds.) JPLL Vol. 5 No. 2 (2023):