by Vivian Magalhães vfmagalhaes@via-rs.net

Just as much and as often as parents, we, teachers, tend to suffer from the "am I doing the right thing?" syndrome. No matter how well we have prepared ourselves for the job, we very often wonder if we are doing the best we can to get our students to learn. That makes us very vulnerable to anyone who comes along with new ideas on how to teach English more effectively, and we don't hesitate to leave behind what apparently has worked fine in order to move along with the crowd who has discovered how to do things "really right".

You may think that I am generalizing and exaggerating, but it is a fact that over the last few years structural approaches have given way to communicative approaches, drills were replaced by other fun and dynamic ways of practicing, and memorization - mostly of verb forms and vocabulary-was substituted by reasoning, as well as "learn-by-using" activities and games . We are definitely improving, but now we are being told that games and rewards - which students seem to love-bring about competitive feelings in class and that such competition ought to be urgently substituted by approaches that promote cooperation and the "socialization" of knowledge. Should we hop on that boat, too?

First of all, the issue of competitiveness in the classroom is not new; in fact, books on that topic have been published since the late 60's. What has happened is that cooperation has been again in the spotlight since renowned authors such as Howard Gardener, Alphie Kohn and Daniel Goleman started conducting new studies on it. Of course, when they formulated their theories , they didn't have ESL/EFL teachers in mind, but if Goleman's concept of emotional intelligence has been proven right in many other fields, maybe we, too, should follow his advice and just do what he says.

Or maybe not. One of our mistakes, not only as teachers, but as human beings, has been believing, throughout the times, that if something is good, whatever is different from that "good" must be necessarily bad. I don't mean to oversimplify the issue, but it is basically the hatred caused by differences in race, religion, social status and political beliefs that has caused the most gruesome episodes in history, including the massacre of Albanians by Serbs in Yugoslavia.

I have been a teacher for over 20 years, and I am much less excited about new trends in education than I used to be. Of course, I have tried to make my classes as communicative as possible, but I have found out that grammar is also quite important. I try to diversify practice with as many different techniques as I can possibly find, but drills, sometimes, seem to be a resort that works, just as much as it worked with me when I was a student and learned from books by Robert Lado and and Robert Dixon. I certainly believe that teaching our students to work cooperatively will make them learn a lot more about English and about life, but I don't see competition - especially in the form of games - necessarily as antagonistic to cooperation. In fact, I have witnessed that cooperation and healthy competition can not only coexist quite peacefully in the classroom, but also lead to fun and effective learning experiences. Even activities that aim at a given prize (a medal, a piece of candy, the "first place") can enhance group interaction, as long as an atmosphere of respect is kept at all times in the teacher-student, student-student and student-teacher relationships. Just to give an example, in several competitive games -including most sports -- the cooperation among the members of a group or team is absolutely essential if victory is to be achieved.

And I don't seem to be alone in my views. In his book "Cooperative Learning", Dr. Spencer Kagan doesn't advocate the exclusive use of cooperative methods, but rather a balance of cooperative, competitive and individualistic classroom structures: "(...) it would be just as unhealthy for schools to teach exclusively with cooperative methods as with competitive or individualistic methods", says Kagan. "If our future generations are to behave rationally across the full range of social situations, our classrooms must include cooperative, interdependent learning situations along with competitive and individualistic learning strategies. (...) We need flexible and rational individuals, who have experienced the full range of social situations and who are prepared to work and interact productively in them all."

And what about rewards, aren't they just too "Pavlovian" to be considered "appropriate" in a healthy and friendly classroom environment?

Not to my understanding. The balance that should exist among cooperative, competitive and individualistic methods should also happen in intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. It is obvious that if teachers can only get the students to work by offering a prize, whenever the prize is removed, so will be the motivation to do it. But it is also true that extrinsic rewards can increase motivation just by making learning more interesting and game-like. Only the teachers' good sense can determine whether or not to reward, how often to do it and how to enhance cooperation skills through it.

We may acquire knowledge by reading books and learning about new theories and trends, but wisdom... well, that will have to come with experience. May we have enough of each -wisdom and experience-to use competition constructively in making English learning more efficient, pleasurable and fun. We will then know that we have, indeed, been doing the right thing.