Embarrassment and hygiene in the classroom

Abstract

Throughout the world, large numbers of students whose mother tongue is other than English attend English-medium primary and secondary schools. A high proportion of these students do not complete their education. Among the many explanations offered are an unsupportive home environment, irregular school attendance, lack of student motivation, and home-school language switch. However, none of these explanations offers room for the teacher to take positive action in the classroom in order to promote student success. The study reported here makes the classroom the focus of investigation and examines aspects of classroom interaction which may unwittingly contribute to student failure and teacher dissatisfaction. The author identifies six common student behaviours which ‘embarrass’ or obstruct the planned flow of classroom instruction and twelve teacher strategies—hygiene resources—used to ‘clean up’ the embarrassment. Unfortunately, these also have the effect of reducing the complexity of the pedagogic tasks demanded of the students as well as the quality of the language generated in the classroom, and may contribute to student failure.