It happened long before the pandemic hit us. I was only 5 months into EFL teaching when Teacher P walked in the staff room and recommended the book Teaching Unplugged to me.
I then read it over the summer months - I'd started out properly as an EFL teacher in March 2019. Since then, I've incorporated some Dogme elements in my lessons. Dogme, an approach proposed by Scott Thornbury, is largely based on the socio-cultural theory of learning. One of Dogme's signature characteristics is 'relevance to the learners' through the use of learner-generated, not coursebook-imposed, contexts.
While I've never taught a proper lesson in the Dogme approach, I've frequently provided personalised contexts to my language practice activities. I call this 'Dogme Lite' - a kind of soft Dogme. I've also worked with some Business English learners who came to the lesson with their immediate needs and material, from which I would try to identify any (pattern) of emergent language or language which is crucial to giving them the tools to succeed. Having taught quite a few lessons like these, I think it's time to start thinking how I can deal with emergent language in a more systematic way.
Incidentally, I was teaching a Conversation class last Saturday. It was the first conversation class of the year, and the participants started with some 'catching up' (What are you up to? - that sort of stuff). At some point, the topic of soaring energy prices came up in their conversation. Instead of detecting the participants' emergent language, I think I jumped the gun by exploiting the topic for a role play. In this role play, the participants as government minister, representative of a consumer rights group, and CEO of an energy company had the objective of reaching a mutually satisfactory agreement from their differing positions. The activity took off and the discussion went for a good 15 minutes - feedback was duly given.
With hindsight, I think the Conversation lesson looked more like a strong-end Task Based Learning one. The original idea of Dogme is that once the emergent language has been identified, there will be some sort of focus work (cognitive theories come into play here) and practice activities devised on the spot. The Dogme journey continues ...