Dogme: learning is socially motivated and socially constructed, so teach with the language that emerges from the needs, interests and desires of the people in the room.
Claim
History and closure notice for the Dogme ELT Yahoo list (started 9 March 2000, an idea of David French; about 15,000 posts in 10 years). Core tenets from the masthead: materials-light; language learning is “socially motivated and socially constructed”; content comes from the people in the room. Book form: Teaching Unplugged (Meddings & Thornbury 2009). The name is an analogy with the Dogme 95 film rules.
Mechanism / theory
Social-constructivist (implicit, uncited in the post). Motivation argument: students want to speak because the content is theirs.
Classroom moves
Conversation-led lessons; attend to emergent language (see The 5 Rs of reactive teaching); learners’ lives supply content.
Limits & critique
- Self-referential; makes no empirical claims.
- Hard for inexperienced teachers (comment); the list felt like an “in crowd” (Renshaw).
- Thornbury retracts a misrepresentation of Sylvia Ashton-Warner in his exchange with Harmer (the “book-burning” charge).
Apply in my context (Claude)
- Full Dogme clashes with Prepare 2e plus a school-wide coursebook ladder. Use it as a slot instead: a 10–15 min unplugged opener or a weekly “unplugged” lesson. Your Wednesday speaking challenge group is a natural home for it.
- YL boundary: very young learners lack the L2 resources for conversation-driven lessons. Stories and routines do the “learner-centred content” job there (see Stories as shared contexts for language).