A、she wants to sound polite B、she thinks language teaching is not a right-or-wrong matter C、she thinks they are doing their best

Diane Larsen-Freeman is a well-known American professor of applied linguistics.  This interview was conducted by the editor-in-chief of the Forum.
M: How did your career in language education begin?
F: Like many Americans getting started in EFL, my first opportunity was with the Peace Corps. I finished my university education, decided I wanted to be of service and to see a bit of the world, so I applied to the Peace Corps and was accepted to be an EFL teacher in Malaysia in Sabah, Borneo. I was there from 1967 until 1969. I had been a psychology major as an undergraduate primarily because I was interested, even then, in how people learn. When I found English language teaching and language in general, I became absolutely fascinated with the language learning process.
M: What advice can you give to teachers just beginning their careers in English teaching?
F:  Because I’m so interested myself in learning, I would say the essence of good teaching is learning to watch your students, learning to read your students’ interests, their attention, their engagement, knowing when to move on and when to stay. All of that comes from watching your students, monitoring what they are doing, trying as best you can to see the learning in their faces, in their behavior, and in their demeanor.
M: What do you most enjoy about teaching?
F: I have to repeat: watching learning take place. I suspect a lot of teachers can relate to this. There are those moments, and they don’t happen every day, when you can see the penny drop. You’ve been working on teaching a particular tense or a reading passage, and all of a sudden, there is that moment of awareness. When you can actually see people go, "Ahh! I see!" Those are the moments I live for as a teacher. Those are the things that keep me going. It’s the joy of watching others learn.
M: Along these lines of what goes on in the classroom and moments of awareness, what do you most often see teachers doing wrong in their language classes?
F: I hesitate to label anything "wrong" because I think it is really important to see from the teacher’s perspective. Learning to teach is a lifelong process, and you can only do what you know how to do at that time. If you’re in a particular stage of evolution, it’s not "wrong," it just means that perhaps you yourself haven’t cultivated the awareness or developed the skills that you need, but you are doing the best you can do.
M: In the past, I am thinking of audiolingualism, the focus really was on the teacher and almost a performance of drilling.
F: That’s a very good metaphor for the teacher, the teacher as a performer, the teacher as drill conductor, but a teacher self-absorbed. I don’t mean that in negative way. I just mean a teacher who is caught up in his or her own performance could be missing the very point of being in the classroom, which is to be watching students’ learning and taking cues from the students as opposed to from the lesson plan.
M: Teacher as performer, teacher as orchestra conductor. There are other metaphors of the teacher we come across in the literature, teacher as coach, teacher as consultant. How do you respond to the skeptic who says, "What good are these metaphors of teaching? What I need is something to do in my class on Monday morning!"
F: It may surprise you, but I am rather sympathetic to such skepticism because I’ve been there. You have to do something! Having said that teachers shouldn’t be caught up in their performance, it is true that they just can’t go in the classroom and let students run the show. You have to come in with some kind of activities, but activities that will remove the focus from you.
   Now getting back to the question about metaphors, I think teachers need to know what to do on Monday mornings. However that, to some extent, is a short-term view. I think having a good metaphor can sustain your teaching in the longer term. Instead of metaphor, I would suggest a theory of language learning and language teaching can sustain your teaching practice for a long, long time. Accompanying that theory is a metaphor, is a role for a teacher.
M: A metaphor or theory can provide guidance in terms of the activities you are likely to use and those you won’t be using.
F: That’s right. It acts as a guide. Coherence between one’s theory and one’s practice is essential for a good teacher.
M: Have you got a favorite piece of teaching technology?
F: I’m pretty old-fashioned. I like chalk and white board markers. I like euisinaire rods to make particular points of language salient. I am very fond of the overhead projector. I am kind of a low-tech person. I am not afraid of technology. I use it in other parts of my professional life, but I think the reason I like these low-tech things is that I can be more spontaneous and interactive with the students who are in front of me. For example, with an overhead projector, I can write down a thought I had or select a relevant article I saw that morning, make a transparency, and use it that day in my class. Or I can take some of my students’ errors or questions and create a transparency, and we can look at them together as a class in order to have people learn from each other’s learning challenges. An OHP is nice too because, at least in theory, it allows you to direct the learners’ attention, to focus learners’ attention. I find that very helpful.
M: Diane, let me ask a question about you as an individual. If you weren’t a professor and author, what would you be doing?
F: I would probably be an organic gardener. I’d have a small plot of land. I love to garden and get my hands in the dirt, play around and get out of my head sometimes. I love nature. But to tell you the truth, I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. I remember when I was a little girl, I was the oldest in the family, and I would get my brother and my sisters and make them be the students. My parents even put a small blackboard in my bedroom behind my bedroom door. I would call my brother and sisters, I would have them sit on the bed, and I would close the door and there was the blackboard. So I think I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. If I weren’t a teacher I would like to do something in the natural world.
M: Are teachers made or born? In your case, I guess born. What do you grow?
F: I grow a little bit of everything, I live in Vermont, so we have a rather short growing season. I grow vegetables and flowers. I usually teach in the summer and nothing pleases me more than coming home from teaching, going down to the garden, and picking that evening’s salad.
M: I know you travel a lot internationally. In your work with teachers in the United States and other countries, that is, in second language and foreign language settings, do you perceive a gap between TESL and TEFL?
F: Most definitely. I think at the psychological level, at the learning process level, we humans around the world have something very much in common with our learning. People may take me to task for this, but I don’t see the language learning process, which seems to me to be uniquely human, is going to differ very much. We have a lot to learn from each other in this regard. But the social, contextual, political, and resource issues loom very large when we compare the amount of exposure to the language and the resources we invest. So at the social level, I think there is a great deal of variation. At the political level, clearly there is. At the economic level, clearly there is. And they all impact on language learning and its accessibility. At the psychological level, the learning process to my way of thinking is, I hesitate to use the word, but I’m going to: universal. There is something about us as humans and our relationship to language that I think is going to transcend individual situations and context, but you should know that’s a highly volatile issue right now.
M: Tell us something that most people don’t know about you.
F: I have a wonderful family. We have two sons, one of whom is about to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, which was his choice. It looks like he will be going to Central Asia. We’ve traveled a lot as a family. I like to think that my sons have been educated with some knowledge of the world, that they still consider world travel to be a privilege, and that they have some sense of a need to give back because we are very privileged in this country.
M: I feel privileged to have met you and done this interview. On behalf of the readers of the English Teaching Forum, thank you very much, Diane!