1. Bloom’s Taxonomy:
Bitter honey for a language teacher
by Leslie Simonfalvi, director
International Teacher Training
& Development College
Quite a few years ago. a friendly American Foundation sent
some 500 to 800 teenage students to Budapest, Hungary every
summer for 10 years, as part of the Student Ambassador
Programme. The students were hand-picked from all the 50
States and they came in groups of 25 to 30. Every group was
accompanied by 4 to 5 teachers, also hand-picked from all the
States from Alaska to Florida.
The program included London, Rome and Budapest and the
main aim was to stay here for a week, learn as much as
humanly possible about the local, and through that about the
European Culture, and then go home and disseminate what you
have learned in your school, in your town, or in a wider
community.
The programme was extremely popular both with the Guests,
and with the Hosts, in the Budapest leg the students, the
teachers, and the non-teaching staff of the International
Language School Group. We were doing a massive Russian
Teacher Re-Training Programme at the time, and the re-
trainees had a unique chance of meeting decent native speakers
of English in a one-week live-in arrangement. The Guests were
living with the families of the students, the trainees, their
teachers, and the whole staff.
As part of the programme, we took them round in Budapest to
see the sights and learn about the history, the geography, and
many other aspects of the culture of the place, all wrapped up
in tales and anecdotes, and myths to make it more memorable

2. for the Guests, and more interesting for their then future
listeners back home.
We did the same at more places in Hungary in coach trips and
boat trips to old kings’ seats and places of famous battles. We
even had quiz-shows: about Hungary and Europe for the
Guests, about the USA, Canada, and the Americas for the
Hungarians, and about general knowledge for mixed groups. It
was great fun and I cannot tell how much we all laughed.
As the director of the International Language School Group, I
met all the students and all the teachers. and I had many of the
teachers as visitors in my classes. They were very interested in
how we teach English to our students to make them so
confident communicators in a foreign language. They tried to
relate our techniques and methods to their own, and they also
had many good questions. I guess both parties learned a great
deal from the exchange, and it is most definitely true for me.
There was one buzz-word that came up from practically all
American teachers, and I could not make head or tail of it. It
was the Bloom’s Taxonomy, and, most sincerely, I had never
heard of it. As a teacher and teacher trainer, I was quite well at
home in TESOL, i. e. Teaching English for Speakers of Other
Languages, and I was quite sure that the Bloom’s Taxonomy
had not entered the realm of language teaching.
I knew nothing about it, but the frequency with which the
American teachers mentioned it made it felt like a panacea, the
solution to all the educational world’s problems. The more I
heard about it, the more interested I grew. It was very clear
from the outset that it was not worked out for language
teaching, what is more, with language teaching in mind among
all other subjects.
I had a very strong feeling that the teacher and the teaching are
sort of left out if the Taxonomy starts with Knowledge. It was
not a general criticism since I knew quite well that there are

3. opposite requirements in learning anything in L1, i. e. the
mother tongue, and learning L2, i. e. a second- or foreign
language, through anything.
In the first case, you ’know’ the medium of communication,
and you learn new information, fact and figures, concepts and
relationships through that medium.
In the second case, you have some ’knowledge’ of the world
around you, and through that knowledge you learn a new
medium for communication, i. e. for the communication of old
knowledge through the new medium, but also some new
knowledge through the new medium.
All in all, the Bloom’s Taxonomy has not entered the field of
TESOL and the main reasons for this are as follows:
it starts late, neglecting steps that are unique for language
learning,
finishes early, without saving knowledge and
understanding for use in higher categories,
shows continuity where there is a gap,
disregards two important types of students,
the artist, who would not willingly spend time for analysis,
and
the language mathematician, who would want to analyse
anything any time before, and quite often instead of
anything else, and
it handles the developmental steps in the affective and
psychomotor domains as distinct from the cognitive.
I had a strong feeling that the Bloom’s Taxonomy, if we manage
to complement it according to the missing links above, might give
us a new insight into what we are doing, to be able to do it better
and develop further. It might also give us a chance to extend our
teaching to groups of students we were not able to teach, or else
were not able to teach well enough before, i. e.
drop-out students,

4. physically handicapped students,
the LD Child,
the Concrete Child,
mild cases of autism,
students with the Asperger Syndrome,
students with the Pragmatic – Semantic Disorder, and
mild cases of mentally handicapped students.
It is also very important to apply all our new insights in the
teacher training and development.
Because of this I started to analyse our teaching and teacher
training in relation to, among others, the Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Over the years, I have found 14 Problems, i. e. points that are
most definitely problem-spots in language teaching, but may or
may not be problems in the teaching of other subjects.
The solutions to these 14 Problems add up to 14 Theses and the
material related to this fills a DVD. It is enough for a 200-hour
series of workshops, or three semesters in teacher training.
It has been tried in Hungary, Italy, Belgium, Wales, and the
Netherlands, and also in the Africa Project in Islington, London,
UK. It has always worked where teachers and trainers really
wanted to change and were ready to apply a new paradigm.