The focus of this article is to define classroom management and problems the teacher may face. It shows how classroom management  helps to achieve better atmosphere for active communication during sessions through classroom dynamics improvement. I would like to argue that classroom management and other aspects of teaching and learning are culturally based and therefore may vary from country to country and culture to culture.

Let us analyse teaching classroom management issues when teaching listening and speaking.  which is always a challenge and often is most  problematic to master for adult learners. Difficulties the students face when they develop their communication skills are deeply rooted in the psychology of learning .

Summing up my experience of teaching in-service management students, I would say the problems are different at different levels. At the very low level the problems are connected with the fact that adult learners can speak about very serious matters and issues in their native tongue, but have very limited means to express their thoughts and ideas in English. This makes them shy to speak and creates a certain communication barrier. At intermediate level, when students are much more at ease with vocabulary and grammar, this barrier is much weaker, but it exists in situations when the conversation theme is less familiar. At this level overconfidence may sometimes constitute a problem, when students think they know what to say and how to put it, but in reality may impede effective communication, when their language knowledge and skills are not enough. Advanced level learners quite often may face a very specific problem. They can speak, but cannot talk to each other. They may be monologically very fluent, but are not able to listen to the others and be effective communicators and interlocutors, breaking one of the main rules of communication - co-operative interaction. Without interaction or without taking into account what your dialogue partner is saying communication is artificial and void. Strictly speaking, it is not communication. To all difficulties mentioned above we may add a gap between the position status of this or that participant of the programme in his/her real life and his/her status as a student.

To overcome these difficulties, one of the main things is to create friendly atmosphere in the classroom  and to develop positive classroom dynamics that would result in building a team of a group.

The questionnaire offered bellow and some other issues dealt with here are based on my reflections on teaching. They  were discussed  at workshops first at IATEFL ESPSIG Conference in Bielefeld (Germany) and at the conference of teachers working within the framework of Russian Management Training Initiative, in Golitsino (Russia) and the audience feedback was taken into account  when writing the article itself.

There are many definitions of management. I think its most striking feature is that it is both a science and  art, a philosophical concept and a skill. This characteristics of management relate it to language and communication. The main activities associated with management are goal-setting, planning, organising, motivating, controlling and decision-making. The same processes are associated with teaching and with learning, language learning in particular. When we are trying to use language for communication, more specifically a foreign language, we are first setting the goal, then plan what we are going to say, then choose the necessary language means, thus constantly making decisions, organising and controlling. This process is very quick, when we use our own native tongue, but is much slower when we speak a foreign language. If we are interested in our interlocutor we try to motivate them by making the talk interesting.

If we think of teaching, we shall see the same steps in the scene - as teachers we are planning the lesson and setting goals, we are motivating students, we are organising their work, and determine the combination and weight of controlling, planning and decision making. This is what classroom management is about - most effective organisation of the process learning and teaching. The questionnaire is built around the main issues of organising classroom work.

1. If the classroom setting is not «communication friendly», do you
a) accept it,
b) try to rearrange it,
c) another solution

2. You try to «rearrange» students and feel they are reluctant to do as they are told. Would you
a) try to persuade them
b) leave them as they are
c) try to press
d) another solution

3. Some of the students don’t get on well with others. Do you try :
a) to be  indifferent
b) to be a mediator
c) never mix them
d) another solution

4. You try to involve students into a conversation, but some of them remain silent,
What do you usually do in this case?

5. You give a group of students  a group work task (e.g. discussion), what is your reaction/ solution in case they:
a) speak L1
b) do the work individually
c) how do you manage different speed of the groups?

5. When your student comes to the class without preparing  his/her home task, (presentation) important for your lesson plan and goal, do you:
a) change your lesson plan ,
b) ask him/her to prepare it on the spot,
c) don’t react at all,
d) try a certain forfeit or «punishment» (specify what),
e) another solution

7. When students make accuracy mistakes, do you:
a) correct them immediately
b) write them down and then speak to each student about them
c) note only typical ones and then discuss together
d) other solutions

8. When the students are not fluent enough, do you
a) try to push them a bit
b) try to be at their speed
c) nterrupt politely/ give the floor to more fluent
d) other solutions

9. When students are not effective, do you
a) try to show them they are not, by conversational means
b)explain  their problems afterwards
c) other solutions

10. Do you ever discuss the issues above or other methodology points with your students?

The first question is connected with classroom setting. In my experience more often than not our classrooms are not communication friendly. They are designed for listening to lectures, but not for small groups discussions. If you do not rearrange classroom furniture, it might be difficult for the teacher to avoid the central position, the students may tend to speak not to each other, but to the teacher  or produce monologues without addressing anyone. This point is really critical if your students do not know each other well and one of the goals is to help them to work in a team and to know each other better as quickly as possible. Professor Widdowson wrote that communication is only possible in a shared community (Widdowson). Rearranging the classroom setting together, making it more communication friendly is the first step for building atmosphere of community.

The second question is connected with the  «ice-breaker» issue: how to help students to know each other quickly, how to help them to be flexible with every new communication partner, how to overcome shyness. When you ask students to change seats and pairs, mix them as often as possible, every time they find themselves in «ice-breaker» situation, which trains their skill of  starting a conversation in  an appropriate way. In some extreme cases, though rarely, some students may not like to work in pair with this or that partner (question three). Mixing them together might be dangerous. One of the solutions in this case could be arranging a group of three, but trying to mediate, to help them negotiate and avoid a conflict.

Question number four is a very difficult one. The solution in each group and at each lesson would depend on the topic of conversation, on personal  characteristics of the student, on group dynamics, on the proficiency level. If a student is silent during every discussion, one of the techniques may be to ask him/her direct questions, check his/her comprehension or choose him or her a person to give feedback from the group. However, it might be better to leave him/her participate by listening to others. The process of learning would still go on and one day this participant may surprise you when he/ she starts talking  to others.

Fifth question offers to think over the discussion organisation. Using L1 very often cannot be avoided altogether, at low levels the discussion is usually a mixture of L1 and L2. If a teacher tries to forbid L 1, it may break friendly atmosphere and make fairly strong language barrier even stronger. It seems better to encourage students to use more L2, helping them with some words or structures, but not criticising them directly.

The next three questions are connected with a large area of methodology, i.e. mistakes correction. It might be a good idea to discuss this controlling function with them and understand what they would like. Certain rules must be offered. Also it is usually very helpful to let peers correct each other and ask them to be observers, each member of the group in turn, to show them that they are equal and they all may have problems. If we speak of controlled practice exercise, it might be better to correct accuracy mistakes immediately. If the task is aimed at developing fluency, accuracy mistakes should be somehow registered, but discussed after the speaker or presenter completed his oral piece. Effectiveness mistakes are most difficult ones, here explanations and discussions at the end of the lesson may help. The best means to show the students problems with their fluency and effectiveness is to videotape them and then let them see it. If video camera is not available, tape-recorder may help. One more technique is to accept inappropriate phrase as if it is appropriate and build the consequentional conversation on it which sooner or later would reveal communication failure and obvious misunderstanding, showing that there was some communication error at an earlier stage.

Discussing  errors and slips, and communication failures, and other methodology points would show the students that  teacher and learner are sharing responsibility for the result of the learning process. This would give base for further involvement and as a result stronger motivation for learning. Increasing the degree of commitment and responsibility may help to avoid  the situations described in question six, when students fail to prepare the classroom task. If this happens, the best way is to make students feel uncomfortable and show them that they are letting down their fellow participants, the teacher and themselves.

The explanations offered are only sample answers. In fact all the questions were meant as open-ended ones and every teacher may try to find his or her own solution for the problems mentioned. Even problems themselves may vary from classroom to classroom and some of them  maybe unimportant. However, the results of discussions during workshops show that teachers from different countries find these issues important. The reason why these particular ten questions were chosen is that they seem to be a good illustration of the fact that  classroom management as any other management is determined by cultures and traditions of this or that country and is closely connected with  participants’ and teachers’ mentality.

Among hundreds of definitions for culture two are most relevant to the topic and issues of this article: 1) the way we do things here, 2) mental programme of the group of people (be it a nation, a city, a region, a firm or a school). Learning a foreign language always implies some degree of cultural learning. This is an axiom that few among ELT professionals would dispute or deny. At the same time learning and teaching communication across cultures  very often means examples of  obvious, «surface» things like giving and accepting gifts, exchanging business cards, dress codes. More careful studies of various materials show that practically everything connected with social behaviour is culture based. Let us take queuing, for example. In England, it is very orderly with the strong notion of the idea of first come first served and jumping the queue is socially unacceptable. In Denmark, the idea is the same, but at the bus stop people are less orderly, though polite. One woman from Norway told me that in Norway standing in a line is not typical, usually people stand in a disarranged group and no one would be stressed or nervous  if another person is served a bit earlier, they are very calm. In Russia, the long history of shortages and really time-consuming queues made it typical that some privileged categories are served without any queueing, while a lot consider it normal to join somebody they know at the beginning  of  a queue. Jumping the queue is quite often, though it gradually changes. At some stops for mini-buses («marshrutka»), the queues are much more orderly.

Special research shows that there are cultural differences in the style of scientific articles, grant proposals, letters of recommendation, addressing people, meetings. However, we sometimes do not realise that a lot of things we do in the classroom, both as teachers and students, are no less obviously characterised by  certain cultural parameters. Famous Dutch management guru Geert Hofstede  wrote about cultural dimensions of management and introduced four main parameters of  culture: power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance. If we come back to our management questionnaire problems we may see that they can be explained by these parameters. Hofstede studied cultures of 50 countries all over the world and three regions. For each parameter, he determined a system of indices: index 50 means maximum index 1 - minimum.

Hofstede did not study Russia, but we may make certain conclusions, based on our own knowledge of Russian culture. Power distance is rather large. Status differences are very strong. More often than not we look up to people in power of any type or level if we ourselves have lower or no power at all. In our daily routine it may happen when you visit a doctor (they have expert power) or  speak to the dean. If not very educated people have power, they are eager to show it to others. We all are unhappy about it, and yet it is accepted in the culture. The teacher traditionally has had two types of power - expert power - he/she has knowledge of the subject, some expertise that students don’t have and reward-punishment power, as teacher could recommend, access, expel etc. Traditional arrangement of the classroom with  one row after another and teacher in the front also reflected teacher centred idea. It is typical for other countries with relatively high power distance, for example, Japan (their power index is in the middle, it is 21).

Hofstede stresses the idea that models of behaviour are carried over from one domain of life to the other. «Thus if we compare cultures we find within each a certain consistency between superior-subordinate relationships at work, teacher-student relationship at school and parent-child relationships in the family. In cultures lower on the Power Distance Scale ...teachers encourage independence in students who are free to contradict them.» (Hofstede, 89). In cultures higher on the scale, «students are expected to show respect to teachers and to treat them as sources of wisdom, never openly disputing their teachings. One-way, ex-cathedra teaching is customary in such a cultural setting» (Hofstede, p.90) High power distance makes participation in discussions more difficult for some cultures than for others. In Latin American countries, high power distance cultures, it is not considered polite to ask questions and give your opinion to the teacher. This used to be a feature of Russian culture, though I think, it is not so strong as in Venezuela  and Mexico where power distance is 45-46 or Panama and Guatemala at the top of the list with the power distance index of 49! For comparison - power distance in Great Britain is much lower (10-12), though it is not the lowest. The leading country is Austria, where it is only 1. (Hofstede, p.85).

If you look back at our little questionnaire, you will see the questions connected with this parameter of culture. You can see its influence in failure or reluctance to prepare the home task as people with little or no power do not take responsibility and leave it to the boss.
Another factor,  uncertainty avoidance, manifests itself in  behaviour models described in questions 2,  4, 5. The students may want to avoid uncertainty  at any cost and stick to rules (typical for countries where uncertainty avoidance is high). As a result, they would prefer to learn the rules first and ask to be corrected  to know for sure whether they are right or wrong. The tradition of putting the theory first, of thorough learning of rules could be the evidence of Russian or Slavonic intellectual style, that scholars include into a bigger group of Teutonic style (another example is Germany) in contrast to Saxonic (typical for Great Britain, the US and Canada),Gallic style (connected with France and other Romance cultures, like Italy) and Nipponic style(the most typical culture is Japanese) (Clyne).

In conclusion,  I would like to stress that  the variety of cultures influencing the ways of classroom management may create  gaps between students’ expectations and textbook authors’ or teachers’ expectations especially when teachers, textbook writers and students belong to different cultures. Classroom management views and teaching-learning process ideas cannot be simply transferred, and may become a dilemma hampering the achievement of  the goals of the lesson. The best solution is to take all cultural considerations into account, explain the needs and expectations to each other and negotiate the details of the process of learning.

References
1. Clyne Michael. Intercultural communication at work. Cultural Values in discourse, CUP, 1994, 250 p.
2. Hofstede Geert. Cultural Dimensions in Management and Planning// Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Jan.1984
3. Widdowson Henry. Communication and Community: The Pragmatics of ESP // English For Specific Purposes, Vol.17, #1, pp.3-114, 1998

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