Learning Teaching -The Essential Guide to English Language Teaching (CELTA course study material #2)

By Jim Scrivener

These are my notes and are pretty much an edit of the original text and was a bit more difficult due to being in the first person, which I negotiate by using Scrivener’s last name or ‘teacher’.

CH1 Starting out

This CH offers general intro to ways of working in a language class and to a range of teacher and learner roles. It also addresses some important questions about how people learn.

Classrooms at work - Task 1.1 Class snapshots - A friend who knows nothing about language teaching asks you to describe a snapshot of a typical moment in a language class, a picture capturing the look, atmosphere, the learners’ mood, the teacher’s attitude, etc. What would your instant snapshot show?

Commentary - Your image probably captures some assumptions you hold, about what a teacher’s job is, what learners can do and how they should work, etc. 

If you’re on a training course and haven’t started yet, your snapshot may be different from a teacher who’s been working 20 years. 

In this book we’ll look in detail at lots of lesson ideas, activities, methods and techniques, but before we do this, it may be useful to get a more general pic of what goes on in language teaching, to look round a few class doors and glimpse what’s going on.

Watching different classes - one of the most useful things is simply watching other people teach. Scrivener often takes away tangible things from this observation, such as ideas for specific activities, the pace they work at or a particular something the teacher said or did.

Some aspects of lessons can be difficult to interpret. Much of the magic which makes a good lesson often attributed purely to natural skill or personality is something which is almost always achieved by very specific actions, comments and attitudes, even when the teacher isn’t aware of what they’re doing, and due to this, we can study these things and learn from them.

Task 1.2 Different lessons - Read the following brief snapshot descriptions form different lessons in different locations. 

Which one, if any is most like how you see yourself as a teacher? Are there any characteristics or approaches you find interesting and would like to use yourself or would reject?

Classroom 1: Andrea

Andrea’s working with 34 14-yr-old learners. Although the large desks are fixed in their places, she’s asked the students to move so they’re sitting around both sides in ways they can work in groups of six or seven. 

Each group has finished discussing and designing a youth club on a sheet of paper and is now working on agreeing a list of ten good arguments to persuade the other groups to choose its youth club design rather than one of the others. 

Each group will have to make a presentation of its arguments in front of the class in about ten minutes’ time. There’s a lot of noise in the class and Andrea’s walking around listening in unobtrusively to what is going on in the groups. 

She smiles when hearing good ideas, but she isn’t intervening or taking any active part in the convos. She answers basic questions when a learner asks, if someone wants to know the word for something, but she avoids getting involved in working closely with a group, even with one group which’s getting stuck, in this case, she makes a quick suggestion for moving forward and then walks away to another group.

Class 2: Maia 

At a first glance, nothing much seems to be happening here, and Maia’s sitting down in a circle with her 8 students, and they’re chatting, fairly naturally, about some events from the previous day’s news. 

Although Maia isn’t doing much overt correction, after watching the lesson for a while it’s possible to notice she’s doing some very discreet teaching, she’s managing the convo a little, bringing in quieter students by asking what they think and helping all learners to speak by encouraging, asking helpful questions, echoing what they’ve said, repeating one or two hard-to-understand sentences in corrected English, etc.

Class 3: Lee

Lee’s standing at the front of a class of eleven young adult students. He’s intro-ing going to as a way of talking about predicted events in the future. 

He’s put up a large wall chart pic on the board showing a policeman watching a number of things in the town centre. 

The pic seems to immediately suggest a number of going to sentences such as They’re going to rob the bank, He isn’t going to stop and It’s going to fall down. 

Lee’s pointing at parts of the pic and encouraging learners to risk trying to say a going to sentence. When they do, he gently corrects them and gets them to say it again better. 

Sometimes he gets the whole class to repeat an interesting sentence. It’s interesting he’s actually saying very little himself; most of his interventions are nods, gestures, facial expressions and one- or two-word instructions or short corrections. 

Generally, the learners are talking rather more than the teacher.

Class 4: Paoli

Paoli’s lesson is teaching some new vocab to an adult evening class of older learners; the current lesson stage is focused on learner practice of the new items. Everyone in class is sitting in a pair, face to face. 

They’re using a handout designed by Paoli which gives the learners in each pair, known as A and B, slightly different info. 

The task requires them to use some of the new vocab in relatively natural ways to try and discover info from their partner. 

There’s a lot of talking in the room, though it’s clear not everyone’s participating to an equal degree. One or two pairs are almost silent, and one pair seems to be whispering in their own language rather than in English. 

Paoli’s moving round the room trying to notice any such problems and encouraging students to complete the task in the intended way.

Commentary - We’ve glimpsed four different lessons. The descriptions below summarize some distinctive features of each.

Some typical language-teaching classes - the first class, Andrea, described above involved groups working cooperatively on a task. 

The teacher saw her role as primarily managerial, making sure the activity’s set up properly and being done properly. 

She took care she allowed enough space, time to think and plan without interference or unhelpful help, so learners could get on and achieve the result. 

In the second class, Maia, we saw a teacher apparently doing fairly little which may be traditionally viewed as teaching. 

However, even at this glimpse, we’ve noticed something’s going on and the teacher was managing the convo and the language more than may have been apparent at first glance. Is this a valid lesson? 

We’ll look at possible aims for lessons like the 1st and 2nd snapshots in CH9.

The 3rd class, Lee involves a lesson type known as a presentation, the teacher’s drawing everyone’s attention to his focus on language. 

Interestingly, although the teacher’s intro-ing new language, he’s doing this without a great deal of over explanation or a high quantity of teacher talk. We look at grammar presentations in CH7.

In the 4th lesson, the learners are doing a pairwork vocab task. The teacher’s role’s initially to set up the activity, and at the end it will be to manage feedback and checking. 

At the moment, he can relax a little more, as nothing much requires to be done beyond monitoring if it’s being done correctly. 

Out of these four lessons, we’ve seen relatively little overt teaching in the traditional manner, although we’ve seen a number of instances of the teacher managing the seating and groupings, managing the activities, starting, monitoring, closing them, managing the learners and their participation levels, and managing the flow of the conversation and work. 

It’s reasonable to argue much of modern language teaching involves this class management as much or more than it involves upfront explanation and testing many people imagine as the core of a teacher’s job. 

This is partly to do with the peculiar subj matter we work with, the language we’re using to teach with is also the thing we’re teaching. 

Although there’s a body of content in language teaching, the main thing we want our students to do is use the language themselves, and therefore there’re many reasons why we mainly want our students to do more and therefore for us to do and talk less.

What is a teacher? - language learners don’t always need teachers, since they can set about learning in a variety of ways. 

Some DIY, or pick up the language by living and communicating in a place where the language is used, known as immersion. 

Of course, many student learn in classes with other students and a teacher, and much language learning will involve elements of all three ways: self-study, picking it up, and class work.

Task 1.3 Remembering teachers you’ve known - 1 think back to some teachers of any subj you’ve had in your life. What do you remember about them and their lessons? The teacher’s manner? How you felt in their presence? Can you recall any specific lessons? Specific teaching techniques? What it’s like to be a student in the room? What words or phrases characterize the atmosphere of the classes, eg. Positive, encouraging, boring, friendly, like an interrogation, sarcastic, humorous, respectful, scary, quiet?

2 To what extend do you think your personal style as a teacher’s based to some degree on these role models?

Commentary - ‘Entertainer’ teaching - learners come to class to learn a language rather than to be amused by a great show. 

Certainly no one would wish their lessons to be boring, but it’s important to check out if the classes of an entertainer style of teacher are genuinely leading to any real learning. 

It’s easy to get swept up in the sheer panache of one’s own performance; the teacher who constantly talks a lot, tells stories and jokes, amuses the class with their antics, etc can provide a diverting hour, but it may simply cover up the fact very little has been taken in and used by the students. 

The monologue may provide useful exposures to one way of using language, but this isn’t sufficient to justify regular lessons of this kind. 

Many teachers suspect this performer style is a goal they should aim for, partly due to an influence form films about teaching, but there’s a fine line between creating a good atmosphere and good rapport in class and becoming an entertainer. Rapport is crucial but entertainment is much less so.

Task 1.4 Traditional teaching - despite varying from country and cultures, there’s still many aspects of traditional teaching which’er familiar to many. 

List some of these characteristic features of traditional teaching, Where does the teacher stand/sit? How are students seated? How is the class managed? What do you think are the disadvantages of a traditional teaching approach for language teaching and learning?

Commentary - Traditional teaching comes in many varieties, but is often characterized by the teacher spending quite a lot of class time using the board to explain things, as if transmitting knowledge to the class, with occasional questions to or from the learners. 

After these explanations, the students will often do some practice exercises to test whether they’ve understood what they’ve been told. 

Throughout the lesson, the teacher keeps control of the subj matter, makes decision about what work is needed and orchestrates what the students do. 

In this class, the teacher probably does most of the talking and is by far the most active person. The students’ role is primarily to listen and concentrate and, take notes perhaps, with a view to taking in the info. 

Often the teacher takes as if by right, permission to direct, give orders, tell off, rebuke, criticize, etc, possibly with limited or no consultation. 

This transmission view of the role of a teacher’s relatively widespread, and in many cultures represents the predominant mode of education. 

Students will expect a teacher’ll in this way, and fellow teachers may be critical or suspicious of teachers who don’t. 

In such cases, it’s important to remember your choice oof methodology isn’t simply a matter of what you believe to be best, imposed at any cost, but it’s also about what’s appropriate in a particular place with particular people.

What you do in any school or with any learner will often represent your best compromise between what you believe and what seems right in the local context. 

You then have the interesting possibility of starting to persuade your colleagues and students to your ideas… or may learning from them about why their approaches work better. 

The process by which traditional teaching’s imagined as working is sometimes characterized as jug and mug, the knowledge being poured from one receptacle into an empty one. 

It’s often based on an assumption the teacher’s the knower and has the task of passing over knowledge to the students, and having something explained or demo-ed to you will lead to learning, and if it doesn’t, it’s due to the teacher having done this job badly or the student is lazy or incompetent.

In many circumstances, lecture or explanation by a teacher may be an efficient method of informing a large number of people about a topic. 

However, if our own educational experience has mainly been of this approach, then it’s worth pausing for minute and questioning whether this is indeed the most effective or efficient teaching method. 

Whereas most teachers will need to be good explainers at various points in their lessons, a teaching approach based solely or mainly on this technique can be problematic.

The importance of rapport - What creates the distinctive atmosphere of each teacher’s class? What makes the difference between a room where people are defensive and anxious, and a room where people feel able to be honest and take risks? 

Teachers and trainers often comment on the importance of rapport between teachers and students. The problem is, whereas rapport is clearly important it’s also notoriously difficult to define. 

Sometimes people equate it with being generally friendly to your students. While this is a reasonable starting point, a wider definition is needed, involving many more aspects to do with the quality of how teacher and learners relate. 

This does raise a problem though, if a significant part of a class’s success is down to how well the teacher and students relate, does this suggest successful teachers are born, and if they don’t naturally relate well to people, then they’re a write-off? 

Is your rapport 100% natural or is it something which can be worked on and improved.

Task 1.5 Creating a positive learning atmosphere - Fig 1.1 lists some features which may be important in creating a positive relationship and a positive learning atmosphere. Decide which items are inborn and which could be worked on and improved. 

In a positive learning atmosphere the teacher…

(In cloud bubbles) 

really listens to his/her students

shows respect

has a good sense of humor

inspires confidence

is honest

is patient

(More listed)

Fig.1.1

Commentary - Arguable, but all of the above are things which can be studied and improved on. Some ar more difficult than others. Of course, although a good start, a positive learning atmosphere isn’t everything. 

Being jokey, chatty, and easygoing doesn’t necessarily lead to good teaching, one teacher happened to be very friendly and funny, but his lessons ended in confusion. 

Contrastingly, lessons from one of the quieter, more serious teachers were often memorable. This is simply the first building block of teaching, but it’s important.

Respect, empathy and authenticity - 3 core teacher characteristics which help to create an effective learning environment are respect, a positive and nonjudgmental regard for another person, empathy, being able to see things form the other person’s perspective, as if looking through their eyes, and authenticity, being oneself without hiding behind job titles, roles or masks. 

When a teacher has these qualities, the relationships within the class are likely to be stronger and deeper, and communication between people much more open and honest. 

The educational climate becomes positive, forward-looking and supportive. The learners are able to work with less fear of taking risks or facing challenges. 

In doing this, they increase their own self-esteem and self-understanding, gradually taking more and more of the responsibility for their own learning themselves rather than assuming it’s someone else’s job. 

Out of the 3 teacher characteristics, authenticity is most important, to be yourself, not to play the role of a teacher, but to take the risk of being vulnerable and human and honest. 

The foundation of rapport is to learn yourself enough you know what style you have and when you’re being truthful to yourself.

Although there are some practical techniques to improve communication with others, real rapport’s something more substantial than a technique which can be mimicked. 

It’s not something you’d do to other people. It’s your moment by moment relationship with other humans. Similarly, respect or empathy or authenticity aren’t clothes put on being walking into the class, or temporary characteristics you take on for the duration of a lesson. 

You can’t role play respect or any other qualities, it’s rooted at genuine intentions. In order to improve the quality of our relationships in class, we don’t need to learn new techniques, we need to look closely at what we’re waning for our students, how we really feel about them. 

It’s our attitude and intentions rather than our methodology we may need to work on. This book can’t teach how to do this, so the main subject matter of the book concerns the more technical aspects of creating a successful class.

Three kinds of teacher - There’re obviously many ways of teaching, and part of the enjoyment of being a student in a good class is in sharing unique personality identity, style, skills, and techniques a teacher brings to a lesson. Having said that, it sometimes gives things a clearer perspective if we simplify. There may be three broad categories of teaching styles, summarized in Fig. 1.2.

The explainer - Many teachers know their subj matter very well, but have limited knowledge of teaching methodology. 

This kind of teacher relies mainly on explaining or lecturing as a way of conveying info to the students. Done with style or enthusiasm or wit or imagination, this teacher’s lessons can be very entertaining, interesting and informative. 

The students are listening, perhaps occasionally answering questions and perhaps making notes, but are mostly not being personally involved or challenged. 

The learners often get practice by doing individual exercises after one phase of the lecture has finished.

The involver - This teacher also knows the subj matter which’s being dealt with. In our case, this is essentially the English language and how it works, however, she’s also familiar with teaching methodology; she’s able to use appropriate teaching and organizational procedures and techniques to help her students learn about the subj matter. 

Teacher explanations may be one of these techniques, but in her case, it’s only one option among many she has at her disposal. 

This teacher’s trying to involve the students actively and puts a great deal of effort into finding appropriate and interesting activities which’ll do this, while still retaining clear control over the class and what happens in it.

The enabler - the third kind of teacher is confident enough to share control with the learners, or perhaps to hand it over to them entirely. Decision made in her class may often be shared or negotiated. 

In many cases, she takes her lead from the students, seeing herself as someone whose job is to create the conditions which enable the students to learn for themselves. 

Sometimes this’ll involve her in less traditional teaching; she may become a guide or counsellor or a resource of info when needed. 

Sometimes, when the class is working well under its own steam, when a lot of autonomous learning is going on, she may be hardly visible. 

The teacher knows about the subj matter and about methodology, but also has an awareness of how individuals and groups are thinking and feeling within her class. 

She actively responds to this in her planning and methods and in building effective working relationships and a good class atmosphere. Her own personality and attitudes are an active encouragement to this learning.

Subj matter Methodology People

Explainer ✓

Involver ✓ ✓

Enabler ✓ ✓     ✓

Fig. 1.2 Three kinds of teacher

These 3 descriptions of teachers, are of course very broadly painted, and there’s no way to categorize all teaching under 3 headings; meany teachers will find elements of each category are true for them, or they move between categories depending on day, the class, and the aims of a lesson. 

However, this simple categorization may help you to reflect on what kind of teaching you’ve mostly experienced in your life so far and may also help you to clarify what kind of teacher you see yourself as being now or in the future. 

On teacher-training courses, participants initial internal image of a teacher’s based on the explainer, but who’re keen to move to becoming an involver in their own teaching. 

Such a move may be your aim in reading this book, and the book’s mainly geared towards giving you info, ideas, options and starting points which may help you reach this goal. 

Essentially this is a book of methodology. Throughout the book Scrivener keeps in mind the important skills, qualities, values and techniques associated with the enabling teacher and to give guidance and info which may influence your role and relationships in the class.

When Scrivener thinks back on his experiences of being taught, it’s the teaching techniques I remember least. 

The teacher he remembered most was the one who listened, encouraged, and respected his views and decisions. 

Curiously, this teacher did the least teaching of the subj matter and was technique free, being himself in class. Scrivener was able to focus on his learning rather than the teacher’s teaching.

Task 1.6 Explainer, involver, enabler - think of some people you have been taught by in the past. Which of the three descriptions above best suits each one? This may give some idea about which images of teaching you’ve been exposed to and influenced by.

Teaching and learning - Let’s look outside the class for a moment. How do people learn things in everyday life? By trial and error? By reading a manual and following the instructions? By sitting next to someone who can tell you what to do and give feedback on whether you’re doing OK?

An experiential learning cycle - The process of learning often involves five steps, see fig. 1.3:

1 doing something;

2 recalling what happened;

3 reflecting on that;

4 drawing conclusions from the reflection;

5 using those conclusions to inform and prepare for future practical experience.

(In a circle)

Do→Recall→Reflect→Conclude→Prepare→back to Do

Fig. 1.3 an experiential learning cycle

Again, it’s important to distinguish between learning and teaching. Info, feedback, guidance and support from other people may come in at any of the five steps of the cycle as seen below Fig. 1.4, but the essential learning experience’s in doing the thing yourself.

Fig. 1.4 teaching and the experiential learning cycle

This cycle suggests a number of conclusions for language teaching in the class. For ex:

If this cycle does represent how people learn, then the jug and mug explanation-based approach may be largely inappropriate if it dominates class time. Giving people opportunities to do things themselves may be much more important.

If worrying less about teaching techniques and trying to make the enabling of learning the main concern, ie. The inner circle of the diagram rather than the outer one, one could become a better teacher.

Ensuring students get practical experience in doing things, eg. In using language rather than simply listening to lectures about language.

It may be being over-helpful as a teacher could get in the way of learning. The more the teacher does themselves, the less space there’ll be for the learners to do things.

It may be useful to help students become more aware about how they’re learning, to reflect on this and to explore what procedures, materials, techniques or approaches would help them learn more effectively.

It’s OK for students to make mistakes, to try things out and get things wrong and learn from it… and it’s true for the teacher as a learning teacher, as well.

One fundamental assumption behind this book and the teaching approaches suggested, is people learn more by doing things themselves rather than by being told about them. 

This is true both for the students in your classes and for you, as you learn to be a better teacher. This suggests, for ex, it may be more useful for a learner to work with others and role play ordering a meal in a restaurant, with feedback and suggestions of useful language, than it’d be to listen to a fifteen-minute explanation from the teacher of how to do it correctly. 

A second assumption is learners are intelligent, fully functioning humans, not simply receptacles for passed-on knowledge. 

Learning isn’t simply a one-dimensional intellectual activity, but involves the whole person, as opposed to only their mental processes such as thinking, remembering, analyzing, etc. 

We can no longer be content with the image of the student as a blank slate. Students may bring pen and paper to the lesson, but they also bring a whole range of other, less visible things to class: their needs, their wishes, their life experience, their home background, their memories, their worries, their day so far, their dreams, their anger, their toothache, their fears, their moods, etc. 

Given the opportunities, they’ll be able to make important decisions for themselves, to take responsibility for their learning and to move forward, although their previous educational experience may initially predispose them to expecting you, the teacher, need to do all this for them.

New learning’s constructed over the foundations of our own earlier learning. We make use of whatever knowledge and experience we already have in order to help us learn and understand new things. 

Thus the message taken away from any one lesson is quite different for different people. The new learning has been planted in quite different seed beds. 

This is true both for your learners meeting a new tense in class and for you reading this paragraph and reviewing it in the light of your own previous experience and knowledge. 

You can check this out for yourself. Is the info you’re finding in this book being written in your head on a sort of blank slate or is it connecting in some manner with your previous knowledge, ideas, thoughts, prejudices?

The two assumptions listed above inform Scrivener’s teaching. They remind him his performance as a teacher’s only one, possibly minor, factor in the learning might occur. 

They remind him some of the teaching he does may actually prevent learning. They remind him teaching’s fundamentally about working with people and about remaining alive to the many different things which go on when people hack their own path through the jungle towards new learning.

Although this book concentrates mainly on teaching techniques, it’s important to bear in mind knowledge of subj matter and methodology are, on their own, insufficient. 

A great deal of teaching can be done with those two, but he suspects the total learning wouldn’t be as great as it could be. 

However, an aware and sensitive teacher who respects and listens to her students, and who concentrates on finding ways of enabling learning rather than on performing as a teacher, goes a long way to creating conditions in which a great deal of learning’s likely to take place. 

Methodology and knowledge of subj matter are important, but may not necessarily be the most important things.

We never know how much learning is taking place. It’s tempting to imagine if teaching’s going on, then the learning must be happening; but in fact, teaching and learning need to be clearly distinguished.

Here’s the great and essential formula, one which all teacher should probably remind themselves of at least once a day!

T≠L

Teaching doesn’t equal learning. Teaching doesn’t necessarily lead to learning. The fact the first is happening doesn’t automatically mean the other must occur. 

Learning, of anything, demands energy and attention from the learner. One person can’t learn anything for anyone else. It has to be done by your own personal effort. 

Nobody else can transmit understanding or skills into your head. It’s quite possible for a teacher to be putting great effort into their teaching and for no learning to be taking place; similarly, a teacher could apparently be doing nothing, but the students be learning a great deal. 

As we’ll find when talking to some students and parents, there’s a surprisingly widespread expectation which simply being in a class in the presence of a teacher and listening attentively is somehow enough to ensure learning will take place.

This suggests a very active role for the teacher, who’s somehow responsible for radiating knowledge to the class. Conversely, there’s an assumption of a more passive role for the student, whose job is mainly to absorb and store the received learning, but this isn’t an accurate view of how people learn. In a traditional class of say, 25 students, one less’s being taught, but we could equally think of it as a range of different lessons being received, as shown in Fig. 1.5:

(More ex’s given, 3 provided)

That’s really interesting. 

Ah-some of that makes sense now.

I’m not involved at all.

Fig. 1.5 Different perceptions of the same lesson

Perhaps some students are listening and trying to follow the explanations, but only one of them is able to relate it to her own experiences; some other students are making detailed notes, but not really thinking about the subj; one person is listening and not really understanding anything; one, having missed the previous lesson, thinks the teacher’s talking about something completely different; three students are daydreaming; one is writing a letter; etc.

Here, the teaching’s only one factor in what’s learned. Indeed, teaching’s actually rather less important than one may suppose. 

As a teacher, Scrivener can’t learn for his students, only they can do this, what he does is help create the conditions in which they may be able to learn. 

This could be by responding to some of the student complaints above, perhaps by involving them, by enabling them to work at their own speed, by not giving long explanations, by encouraging them to participate, talk, interact, do things, etc.

How useful are explanations? - Language learning, esp, seems not to benefits much from long explanations. 

If the explanation’s done in the language being learned, then there’s an immediate problem; learners have limited understanding of this new language, and therefore any lengthy or difficult explanation in the target language will be likely to be more difficult for them than the thing being explained, and even if the explanation’s done in their native tongue, explanations about how language works, while of some value, seem to be most useful in fairly brief hints, guidelines and corrections; language learners do not generally seem to be able to make use of complex or detailed info from lengthy lectures, not in the same way a scientist may make active use of understanding gained from a theoretical talk. 

Ability to use a language seems to be more of a skill you learn by trying to do it, akin to riding a bicycle, than an amount of data you learn and then try to apply. 

Language learners seem to need a number of things beyond simply listening to explanations. Amongst other things, they need to gain exposure to comprehensible samples of language, not just the teacher’s monologues, and they need chances to play with and communicate with the language themselves in relatively safe ways. 

If any of these things are to happen, it seems likely class working styles will involve a number of different Moses and not only an upfront lecture by the teacher. 

Of course, a lot of teaching work will involve standing and talking to or with students, but a teaching style predominantly uses this technique’s likely to be inappropriate.

Students need to talk themselves; they need to communicate with a variety of people; they need to do a variety of different language-related tasks; they need feedback on how successful or not their attempts at communication have been. 

So what’s a teacher for? Short answer: to help learning to happen. Methodology such as we discuss in this book’s what a teacher uses to try and reach the challenging goal.

Task 1.7 Learners’ expectations of teachers - Imagine you’re about to start studying a new language in a class with other beginners. 

Consider your expectations of the teacher’s role. What’re some of the general things they can do to assist your learning?

The subject matter of ELT - What exactly are we teaching? What’s the subj matter of language teaching? 

An outsider may imagine the content would comprise two major elements, namely knowledge of the language’s grammar and knowledge of lots of vocab. 

Of course, these do form an important part of what’s taught/learned, but it’s important to realize someone learning a language needs far more than in the head knowledge of grammar and vocab in order to be able to use language successfully. 

In staff rooms, you’ll find teachers typically classify the key subj matter of language teaching into language systems and language skills. 

There’re other important subj areas as well, including learning better ways of learning, exam techniques, working with and learning about other people.

Language systems - We can analyze a sentence such as Pass me the book in different ways. We could consider:

the sounds (phonology)

the meaning of the individual words or groups of words (lexis or vocab)

how the words interact with each other within the sentence (grammar)

the use to which the words are put in particular situations (function).

If we extend our language sample into a complete (short) convo, eg.

A: Pass me the book.

B: Mary put it in her bag.

then we’ve an additional area for analysis, namely the way communication makes sense beyond the individual phrase or sentence, analyzing how the sentences relate or don’t relate to each other known as discourse. 

Fig. 1.6 shows a brief analysis of the language sample from each of these viewpoints.

So we’ve five language systems, though all are simply different ways of looking at the same thing. If we’re considering teaching an item of language, one thing we need to decide is which system(s) we’re going to offer our learner info about.

We may plan a lesson focused on only one area, eg grammar, or we may deal with two, three or more. An ex of a commonly combined systems focus in many language lessons would be:

grammar+pronunciation+function

(ie how the language is structured, how to say it and how it’s used).

Phonological /pas mi: ds'buk/ or /pas m:i he 'buk/

The stress is probably on book, but also possible with different meanings on Pass or me.

Lexical Pass = give; hand over; present 

me = reference to speaker

the book = object made of paper, containing words and/or pictures and conveying info

Grammatical Verb (imperative) + first person object pronoun + definite article + noun

Function A request or order

Discoursal Although not a direct transparent answer to the request, we can still draw a meaning from this reply. The word it, referring to the book, helps us to make a connections to the request. Assuming Mary’s put it in her bag is intended as a genuine response to the request, it may suggest a reason why the book can’t be passed (eg I can’t because Mary took the book with her). In order to fully understand the meaning, we’d need to know more about the situational context (ie who’s talking, where, etc) and more about the surrounding convo (ie what knowledge’s assumed to be known or shared between the speakers).

Fig. 1.6 Analysis of a language sample

Task 1.8 Recognizing language systems - Imagine you intend to do some teaching using this piece of language: Can you play the guitar? Match some points you may focus on with the correct system name:

1 the construction can + pronoun

2 the meaning of play and guitar

3 variations eg strong  /kan ju:/ vs weak /kan je/, stress on guitar, etc.

4 asking about ability

5 typical question-and-reply sequences containing this language

a function

b discourse

c lexis

d grammar

e pronunciation

Answers

1 d 2c 3e 4a 5b

Task 1.9 Distinguishing language systems - You want to teach a lesson contrasting two potentially confusing areas of language. Classify each of the following teaching points as G for grammatical, L for lexical, P for phonological, F for functional.

Ex.: house compared to flat = L (lexical)

1 I went to Paris compared to I’ve been to Paris

2 Lend us a fiver compared to Could you possibly lend me $5?

3 library compared to bookshop

4 woman compared to women

5 Sorry compared to Excuse me

6 hut compared to hat

7 impotent compared to important 

8 some compared to any

Answers

1 G 2 F 3 L 4 G/P 5 F 6 P (changing vowel sound)

7 P (changing word stress) / L 8 G

Language skills - As well as working with the language systems (which we can think of as what we know, ie ‘up-in-the-head’ knowledge), we also need to pay attention to what we do with language. 

These are the language skills. Teachers normally think of there being four important macro language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing. 

Listening and reading are called receptive skills (the reader or listener receives info but doesn’t produce it); speaking and writing are the productive skills. 

Skills are commonly used interactively and in combo rather than in isolation, esp speaking and listening. It’s arguable other things (eg thinking, using memory and mediating) are also language skills.

Language systems Language skills

knowing doing

Phonology Productive | Speaking

Lexis       | Writing

Grammar Receptive  | Reading

Function        | Listening

Discourse

Fig. 1.7 Language systems and skills

The main four skills are referred to as macro due to any one of them being able to be analyzed down to smaller micro skills by defining more precisely what exactly’s being done, how it’s being done, the genre of material, etc. For ex:

Macro skills Listening 

Some micro Understanding the gist of what’s heard, eg Who’s talking?

skills Where are they? What are they doing? What’s their relationship? How do they feel?

Understanding precise info re quantity, reference, numbers, prices, etc when listening to a business telephone call where a client wants to place an order.

Compensating for words and phrases not heard clearly in an informal pub convo by hypothesizing what they are, based on understanding of the content of the rest of a convo and predictions of likely content.

Task 1.10 Listening to a radio weather forecast - Consider briefly how you listen to the radio weather forecast in your own language. 

What would be different if you listed to one in a foreign language you have been studying for a year or so?

Commentary  - Many of the skills we hav win our own native language are directly transferable to a foreign language, but we do need practice in a number of areas. 

For ex, I can listen to a weather forecast in my own language: I only half-listen until I hear the forecaster mention my part of the country, then I switch on and concentrate to catch the key phrases about it, then switch off again, but when I listen to a weather forecast in a foreign country in a different language, I’ll have problems, even if I know all the words and all the grammar the forecaster uses. 

Trying to decipher words in the seemingly fast flow of speech, trying to pick out what’s important and what’s not, is a skill which needs to be practiced; it’s work which needs attention it its own right, quite apart from the study of the grammar and vocab involved.

The importance of skills work - Don’t underestimate the importance of skills work. Not every lesson needs to teach new words or new grammar. 

Lessons also need to be planned to give students opportunities to practice and improve their language skills. Skills work is not something to add in at the end of a five-year course in English. 

There’s no need to wait for extensive knowledge before daring to embark on listening and speaking work. On the contrary, it’s something so essential it needs to be at the heart of a course from the start. 

Even a beginner with one day’s English will be able to practice speaking and listening usefully. For more on skills work see CH9 and CH10.

A purpose-based view of course content - Another way of looking at possible course content is to consider the communicative purposes students need language for. 

The Common European Framework see in later CH, focuses on what learners can do with language. For ex, can an individual learner successfully attend company planning meetings? 

Or take notes in physics lectures at uni? An analysis of such can-do requirements suggests a different kind of course content, one based around students planning, understanding and reflecting on tasks which reflect these real-life purposes. 

This course content would clearly include systems and skills work, but would be organized around this key idea of real-world uses.

Changes of emphasis - Traditionally, language teaching concentrated on grammar and vocab reinforced by reading and writing. 

The reading and writing’s primarily to help teach the grammar and vocab rather than help improve the students’ skills in reading or writing. 

Teaching approaches have varied over the years based mainly around oral language practice thought repetition and drilling. 

Nowadays, most interest is expressed in work on all language systems and skills, particularly emphasizing listening and speaking, due to everyday life we often do far more speaking and listening than reading and writing. 

Grammar ’s typically still the language system featuring most prominently on courses and course books, and at lower levels, also the are many students say they want or expect to study in most detail. 

Often course books teach grammar with an emphasis on communication of meaning rather than purely mechanical practice.

Despite the continuing predominance of grammar, the implications of a more lexical oriented view of language are increasingly having an impact on material and task design. 

The growing influence of the Common European Framework’s encouraged course designers, teachers, and examiners to increasingly see successful communication in real-world tasks as a more important goal than of accurate language use.

Task 1.11 Balancing systems and skills - Here are two teaching situations. What balance of systems and skills would make a useful course for these learners?

1 A 24-year-old Japanese learner has studied grammar at school for nine years; she can read and understand even complex texts well. She’s arrived in England to take a two-week intensive course. 

In her placement test which was mainly multiple-choice grammar questions, she scored very well, but at the initial interview, she had trouble answering even simple questions about herself and often haltingly asked the interviewer to repeat the question.

2 A group of 3 undergrads science students have enrolled for an English course at a language school in the Czech Republic. They know no English at all.

Commentary

1 The Japanese learner clearly needs a lot of work on the skills of listening and speaking. As she knows a lot of grammar, the course could concentrate on helping her activate this passive knowledge; the main thrust of the work could be on realistic listening and speaking activities to promote fluency and improve communicative abilities.

2 Most beginners need a balanced course which intro’s them to the five systems and four skills. In their future careers, these science learners may well need to read and write in English a lot, but may also need to visit other countries, listen to conference speeches and give them, greet visiting scientists, etc. If they’re likely to meet English-speaking and listening, alongside work to help them read and write more effectively.

The communicative purpose of language learning - It’s important to remember no one area of skills or language systems exists in isolation: there can be no speaking if you don’t have the vocab to speak with; there’s no point learning words unless you can do something useful with them. 

The purpose of learning a language’s usually to enable to take part in exchanges of info: talking with friends, reading instructions on a packet of food, understanding directions, writing a note to a colleague, etc. 

Sometimes traditional teaching methods have seemed to emphasize the learning of language systems as a goal in its own right and failed to give learners an opportunity to gain realistic experience in actually using the language knowledge gained; how many students have left school after studying a language for years, unable to speak an intelligible sentence?

Task 1.12 Recognizing skills or systems aims - Every activity is likely to involve some work on both language systems and skills, though, usually, the aim’s directed more to one area than the other. 

In the following list, classify each activity as ‘mainly skills’ or ‘mainly systems’ by ticking the appropriate box. Then decide which skills or which language systems are being worked on.

Mainly systems   Mainly skills

1 You write a grammar exercise on the board which learners copy and then do.

2 Learners read a newspaper article and then discuss the story with each other.

3 Learners underline all past simple verb forms in a newspaper article.

4 Learners chat with you about the weekend.

5 Learners write an imaginary postcard to a friend, which you then correct.

6 Learners write a postcard to a friend, which is posted uncorrected.

7 You use pictures to teach ten words connected with TV.

8 You say ‘What tenses do these people use?’ Learners than listen to a recorded convo.

9 You say ‘Where are these people?’ Learners then listen to a recorded convo.

Commentary - In activity 1, the students do read and write, but use few of the skills which we need when we read and write in our normal life. 

Certainly, comprehending the teacher’s handwriting and forming one’s own letters on the page may be quite demanding for some students, esp for those whose native language doesn’t use roman script, but beyond this, the activity’s main demand is on using grammar correctly.

Activity 2 involves the skills of reading and speaking in ways very similar to those in the outside world. Vocab and grammar will be encountered in the reading, but the main aim is for understanding rather than analysis and study. 

Compare this with activity 3, where the same material’s used, but now with a specific grammar aim. Compare then with activities 5,6, and 8,9. The aim in activity 4 is to encourage fluent speaking. 

The aim in activity 7 is to teach some vocab, and the speaking and listening and writing involved are of less importance.

Other areas that are part of language learning - The map of language systems and language skills is useful to keep in mind as an overview of the subj matter of English language teaching. 

However, it may well be an over-simplification. Elsewhere in this book, you’ll come across some doubts about it, for ex, when we ask if grammar is more fruitfully viewed as a skill students need practice in using rather than as a system to learn, and of course, there’s more to English language teaching than simply the language itself:

• Students may e learning new ways of learning: for ex, specific study skills and techniques.

• They’ll also be learning about the other people in their class, and exploring ways of interacting and working with them.

• They may be learning about themselves and how they work, learn, get on with other people, cope with stress, etc.

• They may be learning a lot about the culture of the countries whose language they’re studying.

• They may be learning how to achieve some specific goal, for ex, passing an exam, making a business presentation at an upcoming conference.

• They may also be learning about almost anything else. The subj matter of ELT can encompass all topics and purposes we use language to deal with.

Many teachers seem to become quite knowledgeable on the environment, business protocol, etc. This is probably what keeps the job interesting! 

Some course book texts seem to achieve nearly legendary status amongst teachers! (As a teacher who’s been in the business a few years if they know anything about a nun called Sister Wendy!) 

If we start using English in class to do more than simple mechanical drills, then the subj matter becomes anything we may do with language, any topic which may be discussed with English, any feelings which may be expressed in English, any communication we may give or receive using English. 

The people who use the language in class, and their feelings, are therefore, also part of the subj matter. This may be a little daunting and lead you to keep the uses of language in class at a more mechanical, impersonal level, without allowing too much ‘dangerous’ personal investment in what’s said or heard. 

This seems sad to Scrivener; he believes we need to give our students chances to feel and think and express themselves in their new language.

Methods - Task 1.13 Your own teaching method 

1 Would you be able to name the teaching method(s) you use?

2 What’re the key features of it and what’re its underlying principles?

Commentary - A method’s a way of teaching. Your choice of method is dependent on your approach, ie what you believe about:

• what language is;

• how people learn;

• how teaching helps people learn.

Based on such beliefs, you’ll then make methodological decisions about:

• the aims of a course;

• what to teach;

• teaching techniques;

• activity types;

• ways of relating with students;

• ways of assessing.

Having said this, some methods exist without any apparent sound theoretical basis!

Some well-known methods and approaches

including:

The Grammar-Translation Method - Much traditional language teaching in schools worldwide used to be done in this way and it’s still the predominant class method in some cultures. 

The teacher rarely uses the target language. Students spend a lot of time reading texts, translating them, doing exercises and tests, writing essays. There’s relatively little focus on speaking and listening skills.

The Audio-Lingual Method - Although based on largely discredited theory, the techniques and activities continue to have a strong influence over many classes. 

It aims to form good habits through students listening to model dialogues with repetition and drilling but with little or no teacher explanation.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) or Communicative Approach (CA) - This is perhaps the method or approach most contemporary teachers’d subscribe to, despite the fact it’s widely misunderstood and misapplied. 

CLT is based on beliefs which learners will learn best if they participate in meaningful communication. It may help if we distinguish between a stronger and a weaker version of CLT. 

With strong CLT students learn communicating, ie doing communication tasks with a limited role for explicit teaching and traditional practice exercises. 

In contrast, with weak CLT students learn through a wide variety of teaching, exercises, activities, and study, with a bias towards speaking and listening work. Most current course books reflect a version of weak CLT.

Total Physical Response (TPR) - A method mainly useful with beginner and lower-level students. Learners listen to instructions from the teacher, understand and do things in response, without being required to speak until they’re ready, see in CH ahead.

Community Language Learning (CLL) - A method based around use of the learners’ first language and with teacher help in mediating. 

It aims to lower anxiety and allow students to communicate in a more genuine way than is typically possible in classes.

The natural approach - a collection of methods and techniques from many sources, all intended to provide the learner with natural comprehensible language so the learner can pick up language in ways similar to a child learning their first language.

Task-Based Learning (TBL) - A variant of CLT (see above) which bases work cycles around the prep for doing of, and reflective analysis of tasks which reflect real-life needs and skills.

The Silent Way - This method requires the learner to take active ownership of their language learning and to pay great attention to what they say. 

Distinctive features include the relative restraint of the teacher (who’s not completely silent!) and the use of specially designed wall charts. 

The use of Cuisenaire rods in mainstream ELT arose from this method, see CH below.

Person-centred approaches - Any approach which places learners and their needs at the heart of what’s done. Syllabus and working methods won’t be decided by the teacher in advance of the course, but agreed between learner and teacher.

Lexical approaches - On the back of new discoveries about how languages really used, esp the importance of lexical chunks in communication, proponents suggest traditional present-then-practice methods are of little use and propose a methodology based around exposure and experiment.

Dogme - back-to-basics approach where teachers aim to strip their craft of unnecessary technology, materials and aids and get back to the fundamental relationship and interaction of teacher and student in class.

Some schools, or individual teachers follow one of these named methods or approaches. In naming a method, a school suggests all or most work will fit a clearly stated, recognizable and principled way of working. 

Other schools sometimes advertise a unique named method of their own, eg the Cambridge Method. These are usually variations on some of the methods listed above, or not a method at all but something else, eg simply the name of the course book series being used, eg. the Headway Method, a way of dividing levels according to a familiar exam system, or an eclectic contemporary lucky dip.

Personal methodology - Despite the grand list of methods above, the reality is very few teachers have ever followed a single method it its entirety, unless they work in a school demanding they do and carefully monitors adherence.

Many teachers nowadays would say they don’t follow a single method. Teachers don’t generally want to take someone else’s prescriptions to class and apply them. 

Rather they work out for themselves what’s effect in their own classes. They may do this in a random manner or in a principled way, but what they slowly build over the years is a personal methodology of their own, constructed from their selection of what they consider to be the best and most appropriate of what they’ve learned about. 

The process of choosing items form a range of methods and constructing a collage methodology is sometimes known as principled eclecticism.

*******First lessons - hints and strategies *********

Key hints when planning your first lessons

• Use the course book, if there is one Don’t feel you have to come up with studding original lesson ideas and creative new activities. 

• If you’ve a course book, then you have an instant source of material. It’s fine to rely on the longer experience of the course book writers and do the lesson exactly as it’s written. 

• Take your time before the lesson to read carefully through the unit, and give the same attention to the Teacher’s Book, if you have access to one. 

• There’s a reasonable chance you’ll end up with a workable lesson. Many teachers also use ideas books, known as recipe books, which do exactly what the nickname suggests - give you everyone needed to know to be able to walk into class with the right ingredients to cook up a good activity.

• A lesson is a sequence of activities Think of the lesson as a series of separate but linked activities. 

• Your first planning job is to select some appropriate activities. Read CH2 and be clear what an activity is and how you can organize it in class.

• Learn something about your students    If possible, talking to other teachers and find out something about the class and the people in it.

• Plan student-focused activities        Don’t plan first lessons will put you upfront in the spotlight feeling the need to burble. It leads to panic and muddle. Plan activities which are based on the following route map:

• 1      Lead-in, a brief intro to the topic, eg you show a picture to the class and invite comments.

• 2      Set up the activity, ie you give instructions, arrange the seating, etc.

• 3      Students do the activity in pairs or small groups while you monitor and help.

• 4      Close the activity and invite feedback from the students.

•         Steps 1,2, and 4 should take relatively little time. The heart of this sequence is Step 3. This route-map lesson plan is looked at in more detail in CH2.

• Make a written plan of the running order of your activities Write out a simple list showing the activities in order. 

• You don’t need to include a lot of detail, but make sure you have a clear idea of your intended sequence of stages, perhaps with estimated timings.

• Consider aims Thinks about what students will get from your lesson, ie what’s the point of them spending their time in this lesson?

• Fluency or accuracy? Decide for each stage in the lesson if you’re mainly working on fluency or accuracy - this is a key choice for many activities, see CH9

• Get the room ready; get yourself ready      If the timetabling and organization of your school allows it, take time before any students arrive to make sure everything’s ready before the class starts. 

• Make sure the room’s set up as you wish, eg how’ll you arrange seating?. Make sure you have everything you need, chalk or board pens, don’t expect them to magically be there! 

• And most importantly, feel what it’s like to be in the room. Start to settle into it, to exercise ownership over it. For the length of the lesson it’s your space.

• Have at least one emergency activity! - Prepare your own personal emergency ‘Help, I’ve run out of things to do and still have five minutes left’ activity, eg. A word game, an extra photocopied game, etc. Keep this and add more emergency ideas day by day.

Key hints when starting to teach

Talk to the students as they come into the room - Don’t hide or do not-really-necessary ‘business’ while you wait for all students to arrive. 

This quickly builds up a tension and distance between you and the students and makes the start of the lesson much more demanding. 

Instead, think of the lesson as starting from the first moment a student arrives in the room. You can calm your own nerves and break the ice with students very quickly by chatting with each of them as they come into the room. 

Try sitting with them, even just for a minute or two, rather than standing in front of them. Welcome them. Ask them their names. 

You’ll immediately start to learn something about them as real people rather than as generic students, and you’ll find you can start to relax a little.

Learn names as soon as possible - There’s a huge difference in comfort levels if you know people’s names. They stop being scary anon. entities and start to become humans. 

In class it’s a very important teacher skill, and you should aim to internalize names as soon as possible. It’s a bit embarrassing if you have to ask people their names over and over. Don’t say I’m bad at remembering names. 

Make learning names quickly and accurately your first priority. If for any reason the pronunciation of names is a problem, take time to get the sounds right; if you’re teaching in another country, maybe get a local speaker to help you.

1 As you ask each student for their name, write it down on a mini-sketch-map of the class. When you have all the names, test yourself by covering the map, looking at the class and saying the names to yourself. 

Check and repeat any names you don’t yet know.

2 Ask students to make a small place card for themselves by folding a piece of paper in half. They should write their names on this so every name’s visible to you at the front. 

As the lesson proceeds, turn individual cards around when you think you know the student’s name. Some teachers use cards like these through whole courses; Scrivener finds it lazy. 

This strategy’s to help you learn names, not sub for learning them.

3 Use name games from CH15. If it’s not only you the teacher, who’s new, but your students are also new to each other, then using some of these name-game activities will definitely be a good idea.

Be yourself - Don’t feel being a teacher means you have to behave like a teacher. As far as possible, speak in ways you normally speak, respond as yourself rather than as you think a teacher should respond. 

Students, whether children, teens, or adults, very quickly see through someone who’s role playing what they think a teacher should be. Authenticity in you tends to draw the best out of those you’re working with.

Teaching doesn’t mean ‘talking all the time’ - Don’t feel when you’re ‘in the spotlight’, you’ve to keep filling all the silences. When you’re teaching a languages he priority is for the learners to talk, rather than the teacher. 

Start to notice the quantity of your own talk as soon as possible - and check out how much’s really useful. High levels of teacher talk is a typical problem for new teachers.

Teaching doesn’t mean ‘teaching’ all the time - Don’t feel being a teacher mean you have to be doing things all the time. It may feel a little odd, but it really is quite ok to sit down and do nothing when students are working on a pair or group task. 

There’re times when your help will actually be interference. Take the chance to recover from your exertions, check your notes and enjoy watching your class at work.

Slow down - A large number of new teachers tend to do things much too fast. They often seriously underestimate how difficult things are for students, or are responding to a fear students will find things boring. 

Learning to really slow down takes time, but it’s worth bearing in mind from your first lesson onwards. For ex, don’t ask a question and then jump straight in again due to thinking they can’t answer it. 

Instead, allow three times the length of time you feel students need, this is sometimes called wait time.

Key hints for starting to teach better (once you’ve got past the first few classes) 

Turn your radar on - You’re likely to be a little self-focused during your early lessons, but as soon as you can, start to tune in more to the students. Start to ask for comments and brief feedback on things you do. 

Watch the students at work and learn to notice what’s difficult, what’s easy, what seems to engage, what seems boring. Study your students.

Don’t teach and teach… Teach then check - Practice’s more important than input. Checking what students have understood and testing if they can use items themselves is usually more important than telling them more about the new items. 

Don’t do endless inputs. Teach a very little amount… then check what students have taken in. Give students the opportunity to try using the items, eg. A little oral practice, a written question or two, or even simply repeat. 

(Here’s a rule-of-thumb ratio to experiment with: input 5%, checking and practice 95%.)

Are you teaching the class… or one person? - When you ask questions / check answers, etc, are you really finding out if they all know the items… or is it only the first person to call out? 

If one person says an answer, does this mean they all know? What about the others? How can you find out?

CH2 Classroom activities

This CH looks at some things you need to consider when you first start planning and running activities. We also look at some basic class management issues, such as how to arrange students in working pairs on groups.

Planning an activity  - the basic building block of a lesson’s the activity or task. We’ll define this fairly broadly as ‘something learners do which involves them using or working with language to achieve some specific outcome’. 

The outcome may reflect a ‘real-world’ outcome, eg. learners role play buying train tickets at the station, or it may be a purely ‘for-the-purposes-of-learning’ outcome, eg. learners fill in the gaps in twelve sentences with present perfect verbs. By this def, all of the following are activities or tasks:

• Learners do a grammar exercise individually then compare answers with each other in order to better understand how a particular item of languages formed.

• Learners listen to a recorded convo in order to answer some questions, in order to become better listeners.

• Learners write a formal letter requesting info about a product.

• Learners discuss and write some questions in order to make a questionnaire about people’s eating habits.

• Learners read a newspaper article to prepare for a discussion.

• Learners play a vocab game in order to help learn words connected with cars and transport.

• Learners repeat a number of sentences you say in order to improve their pronunciation of them.

• Learners role play a shop scene where a customer has a complaint.

Some things happen in the class aren’t tasks. For ex, picture a room where the teacher’s started spontaneously discussing in a lengthy or convoluted manner the formation of passive sentences. 

What’re students doing which has an outcome? Arguably, there’s an implied task, namely students should ‘listen and understand’, but by not being explicit, there’s a real danger learners aren’t genuinely engaged in anything much at all.

This is a basic, important and often overlooked consideration when planning a lesson. As far as possible, make sure your learners have some specific thing to do, whatever the stage of the lesson. 

Traditional lesson planning has tended to see the lesson as a series of things the teacher does. By turning it round and focusing much more on what the students do, we’re likely to think more about the actual learning may arise and create a lesson is more genuinely useful, and if you plan everything in terms of what the students will do, you may find you worry less about what the teacher has to do! 

Even for stages when you’re ‘presenting’ language, be clear to yourself what its students are supposed to be doing and what outcome it’s leading to. 

Think of a complete lesson as being a coherent sequence of such learner-targeted tasks.

Task 2.1 Using course book material - Here’s some material from a student course book.

Speaking 

Which of these ‘firsts’ do you remember best?

your first home your first friend your first hero your first crush

your first date your first love your first English lesson your first kiss

your first dance your first holiday your first broken heart

In using it as the basis for a class activity, which of the following working arrangements would be possible?

1. Students think and then write answers on their own.

2. Students prepare a short monologue statement of their own views which they then present to the whole class.

3. A whole-class discussion of ideas and answers.

4. Pairwork discussion.

5. Small-group work.

6. Students walk around and mingle with other students.

7. Written homework.

Commentary - Even a simple task like this can be used in a variety of ways, and all the suggested uses are possible. 

Combos of ideas are also possible; for ex, students could first think on their own for a few minutes and then compare in pairs. 

Whatever you choose, there’re then further options as to how you do the task; for ex, you could ask students to compare, discuss and question each other’s views or to reach a consensus compromise solution. 

These variations lead to two very different types of speaking activity. More variations are possible when considering the stages immediately precede or follow the activity. 

Your choices as to how the task will be done depend partly on the aim of the activity, ie. what you want students to get out of it.

Teacher options - bear in mind, even where course book tasks include explicit instructions such as Compare answers in pairs or Work in small groups, you always have the option as a teacher to give a different organizational instruction. 

For ex, you  may feel a ‘work in pairs’ exercise may be more interesting done in small groups, and even if you follow the book’s instruction, you still have the possibility of manipulating the organization a little, for ex:

• tell each student who they must work with, eg ‘Petra, work with Cristina’;

• the students can choose partners for themselves;

• the pairings can be the result of some random game or humorous instruction, eg. Find someone whose shoes are a different color from your own.

The course book provides the raw material which only comes alive in class. You have important choices as to how to do this. 

Fig. 2.1 Activity options (seen below) summarises some basic options you could consider for many basic short course book activities, eg. for short discussion tasks such as the ‘firsts’ task above.

What arrangements can you use? A few variations on the arrangements

Individual work Students talk together and write nothing; they’re permitted to write.

Pairwork You choose pairs; students choose pairs; pairs are randomly selected, eg from a game; face to face; back to back; across the room, shouting’ communicating in writing only.

Small groups, 3 - 6 people Groups have a secretary, note-taking duty; groups have an appointed leader; memberships of groups’s occasionally rearranged; groups are allowed to send ‘ambassadors’ / ‘pirates’ to other groups, to compare / gain / steal ideas

Large groups (as above)

Whole class: mingle, all stand up, Students may only talk to one other person at a time; groups may meet walk around, meet and talk up to max of 3 / 4 / 5 people; time limits on meetings; you ring bell / stop background music, etc to force rearrangements

Whole class: plenary The convo / activity’s managed by you / a student / a number of students; whole-class work with brief ‘buzz’ intervals of pairwork / small- group discussion.

A few more variations for running an activity

• Do it at speed, with a very tight time limit.

• When a group finishes, they disperse and join other groups.

• Each person makes a quick answer which’s noted but not discussed; then, when all have spoken, the discussion begins, using the notes as a starting point.

• Require compromise / consensus single answers.

• Intro task by dictating instructions / problem, etc; individuals dictate answers back to the whole class.

• Students prepare a report-back presentation summarizing their solutions.

• Students prepare a role play dialogue incorporating their answers.

• Students do the exercise as homework.

Activity route map - Here’s a basic route map plan for running a simple activity. In some bigger activities, there may be a number of clearly separate ‘sections’ within the task, in which case you’d go through Steps 3,4 and 5 a few times.

1. Before the lesson: familiarize yourself with the material and activity; prepare any materials or texts you need.

2. In class: lead-in / prepare for the activity.

3. Set up the activity (or section of activity), ie give instructions, make groupings, etc.

4. Run the activity or section: students do the activity, maybe in pairs or small groups while you monitor and help.

5. Close the activity or section and invite feedback from the students.

6. Post-activity: do any appropriate follow-on work.

Looking at each step in more detail:

Before the lesson 

• Familiarize yourself with the material and the activity.

• Read through the material and any teacher’s notes.

• Try the activity yourself.

• Imagine how it’ll look in class.

• Decide how many organizational steps are involved.

• What seating arrangements / rearrangements are needed?

• How long will it probably take?

• Do the learners know enough language to be able to make a useful attempt at the activity?

• What help may they need?

• What questions may they have?

• What errors, using the language, are they likely to make?

• What errors, misunderstanding the task, are they likely to make?

• What’ll your role be at each stage?

• What instructions are needed?

• How will they be given, explained, read, demo’d?

• Prepare any aids or addt’l material.

• Arrange seating, visual aids, etc.

• Most importantly, you need to think through any potential problems or hiccups in the procedures. For ex, what’ll happen if you plan student work in pairs, but there’s an uneven number of students? Will this student work alone, or will you join in, or will you make one of the pairs into a group of three?

Lead-in / Preparation - this may be to help raise motivation or interest, eg discussion of a picture related to the topic, or perhaps to focus on language items, eg items of vocab, which may be useful in the activity.

Typical lead-ins are:

• Show / draw a picture connected to the topic. Ask questions. 

• Write up / read out a sentence stating a viewpoint. Elicit reactions.

• Tell a short personal anecdote related to the subj.

• Ask students if they’ve ever been / seen / done, etc

• Hand out a short text on the topic. Students read the text and comment.

• Play ‘devil’s advocate’ and make a strong / controversial statement, eg I think smoking is very good for people, so students’ll be motivated to challenge / argue about.

• Write a key word, maybe the topic name, in the centre of a word-cloud on the board and elicit vocab from students which is added to the board.

Setting up the activity

• Organise the students so they can do the activity or section. (This may involve making pairs or groups, moving the seating, etc.)

• Give clear instructions for the activity. A demo or ex is usually much more effective than a long explanation.

See Giving clear instructions and Demo-ing tasks teaching techniques on the DVD or research online

• You may wish to check back the instructions have been understood eg, So, Georgi, what are you going to do first?

• In some activities, it may be useful to allow some individual work, eg thinking through a problem, listing answers, etc, before the students get together with others.

Running the activity

• Monitor at the start of the activity or section to check the task has been understood and students are doing what you intended them to do.

See Monitoring teaching technique on the DVD or research online

• If the material’s well prepared and the instructions clear, then the activity can now largely run itself. Allow the students to work on the task without too much further interference. Your role now is often much more low-key, taking a back seat and monitoring what’s happening without getting in the way.

• Beware of encumbering the students with unnecessary help. This is their chance to work. If the task’s difficult, give them the chance to rise to the challenge, without leaning on you. Don’t rush in to ‘save’ them too quickly or too eagerly. Though, having said this, remain alert to any task which genuinely proves too hard, and be prepared to help or stop it early if necessary!

Closing the activity 

• Allow the activity or section to close properly. Rather than suddenly stopping the activity at a random point, try to sense when the students are ready to move on.

• If different groups are finishing at different times, make a judgement about when coming together as a whole class would be useful to most people.

• If you want to close the activity while many students are still working, give a time warning, eg Finish the item you’re working on or Two minutes.

Post-activity - It’s usually important to have some kind of feedback session on the activity. This stage’s vital and is typically under-planned by teachers! 

The students have worked hard on the task and it’s probably raised a number of ideas, comments and questions about the topic and about language. 

Many teachers rely on an ‘ask the class if there’re any problems and field the answers on the spot’ approach. While this will often get you through, it can also lead you down dark alleys of confusing explanations and long-winded spontaneous teaching. 

It can also be rather dull simply to go over things which’ve already been done thoroughly in small groups. So, for a number of reasons, it’s worth careful planning of this stage in advance, esp to think up alternatives to putting yourself in the spotlight answering a long list of questions.

• Groups meet up with other groups and compare answers / opinions.

• Students check answers with the printed answers in the Teacher’s Book, which you pass around / leave at the front of the room / photocopy and hand out, etc.

• Before class, you anticipate what the main language problems will be and prepare a mini-presentation on these areas.

• During the last few minutes of a long task, go round the groups and warn them each group’ll be asked to ‘report back’ to the whole class. Ask them to appoint a spokesperson and to agree on the main message they want to say. You could ask them to choose only one point from their discussion which they think’s worth sharing.

• When checking answers, ask for groups to exchange and compare their answers across the room themselves…

• …or get a student to come up front and manage the answer-checking, rather than doing it all yourself, you could give this student the answer sheet!

• Collect in all answer sheets then redistribute them for ‘correcting’ by other students. When everything’s been checked, students pair up with those who marked their paper and listen / explain / justify / argue, etc.

• Correct one student’s answers; this student then goes on to correct other answers, etc.

• Divide the board up into spaces for answers and throw pends to different students who fill the board up with their answers, each answer written by a different student. The whole group looks at the finished board and comments / corrects.

Task 2.2 Planning a procedure for a course book activity - plan a basic procedure of using the following material in class, using the steps described above.

Starting up A In your opinion, which factors below are important for getting a job?

  Choose the five most important. Is there anything missing from the list?

appearance hobbies experience sex

intelligence marital status personality qualifications

references age astrological sign handwriting

blood group sickness record family background

contacts and connections

Exploiting an activity - In this section, we look at one simple activity in detail. This may help you to similarly analyze your own teaching material in future.

Task 2.3 Analyzing a course book activity - Read this activity from a student course book and answer the following questions on content and class procedures.

Anecdote 4 Think about your life at the age of eight. You’re going to tell your partner about it. Choose from the list the things you want to talk about. Think about what you’ll say and the language you’ll need.

(4 listed, more given)

• Did your life use to be very different to how it is now?

• Where did you used to go to school? How did you get there?

• Do you remember any of your teachers?

• Were there any you particularly liked or disliked? Why?

Analysis of Questions

1 Language content What language systems and skills will the students probably be practicing when they do this activity?

2 Other content What other purposes, apart from getting students to practice language, may this activity serve?

3 Preparation What prep needs to be made? Are any special materials or visual aids needed?

4 Steps As with many activities, it’s important to note there’re actually quite a number of separate steps bundled within the single printed instruction. What’re the steps in this task?

5 Instructions You could simple tell the class to read the course book instructions and do the activity, without further guidance, but if you wanted to give instructions orally, what’re some important considerations?

6 Organization What organizational arrangements could you use in class?

Commentary 

1 The main language areas are:

• preparing and giving a ‘long turn’ monologue describing their memories of school life;

• using would and used to to talk about things which’er regular habits in the past but aren’t true now;

• using other past tense forms, past simple and past progressive, esp asking and answering questions about the past.

2 As well as working on language, the activity involves students in:

• talking and listening to one another on a personal level. This may help to build good relationships within the class and help create a good working atmosphere;

• recalling and reconsidering some quite specific personal memories; students may find they’re thinking about things forgotten til now. This degree of personal investment and self-discovery tends to be a frequent element in many contemporary coursebook units and may lead students to find they’re also learning about themselves, others and the world as much as about the language. (Some teachers feel uncomfortable with this kind of work and try to keep the focus on language work rather than what they see as more intrusive general and personal education, but of course languages intertwined with our lives and our understanding of the world, and any teaching approach which seeks to disentangle the two may be hard to implement and may miss out on some essential elements.)

3 No special prep is necessary and no special materials or visual aids are needed.

4 This is one possible analysis:

a) Students think about their life at the age of eight.

b) Students read list in book and select some or all topics to deal with in detail.

c) Students consider their own answers for questions and maybe make notes.

d) Students plan language to express these ideas.

e) Students tell their partner about their thoughts.

f) Students listen to their partner’s ideas.

  Other interpretations of stages and sequence are possible. The fact there’re possibly six sub-   steps within a single task reminds us a teacher does need to take care in (a) checking activities    before offering them to students, and (b) preparing clear uncomplicated instructions.

5 Instructions need to be simple, short, and clear

If a task has a number of separate steps or stages within it, it’s sometimes a good idea to give instructions for these stages one at a time, and wait til this stage’s completed before giving the next instruction. With this task, you could first ask the class to ‘Think about your life when you’re eight years old’, then allow thinking time or maybe even elicit a response or two from students before going on to the second part of the task and the second instruction. Separating activities and instructions into different steps is an important technique. At each point, the learners know what they need to know without possible confusion from instructions for later parts of the activity.

Demos are often a better way of intro-ing a task than a wordy explanation. In this ex, there may not seem to be very much to demo, but you could still work through an ex sentence or two, maybe saying your own answers aloud, rather than simply explaining the instructions. By doing this, the learners may become clearer about what the activity involves.

6 This task would work in many arrangements. It’s likely to start with individual thinking and note-taking, which may then be followed by comparing in pairs, small groups or whole class.

Pairwork

Type 1: pairwork info gaps - In the Learning Teaching resources section on dvd, you’ll find materials for pairwork info gaps and pairwork grammar activities (see next section). 

All are potentially suitable for early lessons in your teaching; all should be relatively straightforward to set up in class, yet they’ll stand a reasonable chance of not flopping! 

For the students’ perspective, the activities should be engaging and useful. Even if you don’t use the specific material, you may feel you can draw something from the general ideas and devise similar activities yourself.

The tasks are all based around getting the students to speak and exchange info and ideas, ie using language to communicate. 

There’s some possibility for you to input some language, but speaking rather than learning new items is the primary aim. 

This section offers detailed instructions for using the Beach picture resource from the Learning Teaching resources on the dvd, a pairwork info exchange suitable for a range of learners from Elementary to Intermediate levels.

Task 2.4 Defining ‘info gap’ - What’s an info gap? If you don’t already know, work it out by studying the Beach picture, Office scene and European holiday resources on the dvd.

Commentary - When one person knows something another person doesn’t we can say there’s a gap of info between them. 

Most real-life communication comes about due to such gaps of info, or of opinions or ideas, etc. When someone knows something we don’t, there’s a reason for talking, or writing / reading. 

By creating class activities which include such info gaps, we can provide activities which mimic this reason for communication, and this may be more motivating and useful to language learners than speaking without any real reason for doing so.

Task 2.5 Predicting uses for material: pairwork info gap - Have a look at the Beach picture resource on the dvd. 

Before you read the commentary below, work out your own way to use the activity route map, see below summary, with this material.

Activity route map 

1 Before the lesson: familiarize yourself with the material and activity; prepare any materials or texts you need.

2 In class: lead-in / prepare for the activity.

3 Set up the activity.

4 Run the activity: students do the activity (maybe in pairs or small groups while you monitor and help).

5 Close the activity and invite feedback from the students.

6 Post-activitys: do any appropriate follow-on work.

Commentary - Here are Scrivener’s own instructions and guidelines, using the activity route map.

Route map Instructions

1 Before the lesson: familiarize yourself The material consists of two similar but not identical pics; 

   with the material and activity. Prepare there’re 15 differences between the pics. The task is ‘Spot

   any materials or texts you need. the difference’, but each student’ll only see 1 of the pics. Students’ll work in pairs. Without looking at each other’s pics, they should describe their pics and compare details, trying to discover as many differences as they can. Photocopy enough pics so you’ve one ‘A’ and one ‘B’ for every pair of students.

2 In class: lead-in / prepare for the activity. Draw a simple picture of a beach on the board.

Ask students where it is. Ask what people do there. If students are in a country where people take beach holidays, you could ask for their opinions, eg whether they like beaches. Ask students to tell you some things you find at the beach. Write the words on the board as they come up. If necessary, add new things to the pic (eg ice cream). Make sure a number of useful words from the task pic are mentioned. (NB you don’t have to exhaustively ‘pre-teach’ everything.) You could ask students to copy the pic and labels.

3 Set up the activity. Rearrange students into pairs, facing each other. Hand out the pics, making sure in each pair there’s one ‘A’ and one ‘B’ pic. Students must understand they can’t look at each other’s pics. (Saying the word secret with a ‘hiding-the- picture’ mime may help make this clear.) Explain the task simply and clearly, ie the students must find what’s different between the two pics by talking and describing, not by looking.

4 Run the activity. As students start doing the activity, walk around unobtrusively, only to check they’re following the instructions correctly, ie they understand the task and are doing it in English. After, you can continue with discreet monitoring or maybe sit down and wait for students to finish the task. If you monitor, you could collect overheard examples of good or problematic sentences. Don’t feel the need to join in or take an active part in the work; this stage’s for students to work together.

5 Close the activity and invite feedback from Keep an eye on students as they finish (the task will take 

   the students. different lengths of time). When about half of the pairs have finished, announce everyone has one minute to finish. After you stop the activity, ask students what was easy or difficult; help them with expressions or vocab they ask for - or use other feedback ideas.

6 Post-activity: do any appropriate follow-on If you collected any sentences while you’re monitoring, 

   work. write them up on the board. Ask students to work in pairs again and decide which sentences from your list are good English and which not. They should also work out corrections for any errors. Alternatively, use any other follow-on activity, eg ‘You’re one of the people in the pic. Work in pairs and write a paragraph describing your day at the beach.’

Task 2.6 Deciding on the aims of an activity - When the activity has finished, what may the students have learned or be better able to do, ie what’s the aim of the activity?

Commentary - Amongst other things, students may be better able to:

• speak more fluently;

• describe objects, their location, decoration and shape in precise detail;

• listen carefully and decide which info is important;

• ask for further clarification of info;

• name some typical objects and activities associated with the sea, holidays and beaches;

• interact effectively and use time efficiently to solve a specific puzzle.

It’s worth noting the students are practicing fluent speaking under some degree of pressure. They’ve limited time to prepare what they’re going to say and can’t worry about getting their grammar 100% accurate. 

Students will become more focused on the message they wish to communicate and on getting across successfully. 

This shift of values from ‘getting the grammar right’ to ‘achieving successful communication’ is an important one for many students to come to terms with. 

White a fair degree of good grammar’s necessary to succeed in the task, successful communication’s a more important real-world goal than simply being perfect. For more on fluency and accuracy, see CH9.

Task 2.7 Planning further lessons using the route map - The office scene and European holiday resources in the same section are similar to the Beach pic resource and are designed around the same idea of pairs exchanging info. 

In What happened?, the learners are two people who witnessed the same incident. They must share info and decide exactly what happened. 

In What shall we do tomorrow?, the learners have info about some events on in town. They should discuss the various possibilities and agree their favorite event to recommend to other people in class as a good day out. 

Refer to the detailed instructions for Beach pic above and use the route map to plan your own exploitation of the material in the other resources.

Type 2: pairwork grammar activities - This section offers detailed instructions for using the What’s happening? resource on the dvd, a grammar lesson involving quite a lot of pairwork suitable for Elementary- or Pre-intermediate-level learners.

Task 2.8 How students learn to use grammar - If you don’t ‘explain’ grammar points to students, what other ways are there which they could become better at using grammar?

Commentary - One answer is learners can try using language which they already know, or half-know, and experimenting with it, as in a chemistry lab, mixing components together and seeing what kinds of outcomes arise. 

As we’ll see in CH7, studying grammar only partially involves a need for teacher explanation; the essential heart of learning grammar seems to be students have lots of opportunities to try things out themselves. This is a ‘trying things out themselves’ kind of lesson.

Task 2.9 Predicting uses for material: grammar - Have a look at the pics in What’s happening? and think of a way to use them for working on grammar.

Commentary - The heart of this task is based around learners making sentences and questions in a range of tenses, which you can specify in the task instructions. 

To some extent, the activity’s level is self-grading. If the students don’t know some language items, they simply won’t use them. 

The basic activity involves pairs looking at a pic and making sentences, passing on the sentences to another pair and receiving another pair’s sentences, about a different pic, themselves. 

Each pair must now try to recreate the other pair’s original picture from the info they’ve received. Here are Scrivener’s instructions and guidelines, using the activity route map. 

By the way, this activity has two sections and therefore goes through Steps 3, 4, and 5 twice.

Route map Instructions

1 Before the lesson: familiarize The material consists of various pics showing events happening.

   yourself with the material and Decide whether you want students to mainly work on present prog-

   Activity. Prepare any materials ressive (to describe what’s happening now) or past simple (to describe

   or texts you need. what happened yesterday). 

Students will be able to use more than these tenses, but it’s important you establish whether the events are now or in the past. 

Prepare a large copy of the first pic and copies of the other pics - one for each pair. 

If you’ve more pairs than pics, reuse them, but be careful not to hand out the same pic to two pairs sitting next to each other.

2 In class: lead-in / prepare for Display the first pic on the board.

   the activity. Tell then it shows what’s happening now (or yesterday afternoon if you want learners to work using past tenses).

Invite learners to think up good sentences about the pic. 

When a student suggests one, write it up without acknowledging whether it’s good or bad English.

Invite students to check and suggest amendments or improvements.

Collect ten sentences. If students produce over-simple ones, upgrade the challenge by asking, for ex, for ‘sentences at least seven words long’ or ‘exactly 13 words long’ or ‘you must include the word although.’

This has effectively been a demo of the task students will now do in pairs.

3A Set up section 1 of the activity.Put students into pairs.

Hand out the other pics, one to each pair.

Emphasise pics are secret. Pairs should take care other pairs don’t see their pic. 

Give task instructions.

4A Run section 1 of the activity: Students work in their pairs and make ten sentences (as in the demo).

      students do the activity You may set minimum sentences lengths or other requirements.

      (Maybe in pairs or small Go round and point out any obvious errors or problems. Try not to

       groups while you monitor ‘over-help’.

       and help). Make sure students are writing clearly on a separate piece of paper.

5A Close section 1 of the activity. When students have all finished, ask them to turn over their pics.

3B Set up section 2 of the activity. Ask pairs to pass on their sentences (but not pics) to another pair.

Each pair receives sentences from the pair they gave theirs to.

Give instructions for the next section. (This hasn’t been demo’d!)

4B Run section 2 of the activity: Pairs read the sentences they’ve received.

      students do the activity They have a new blank piece of paper.

      (Maybe in pairs or small Students interpret the ten sentences and work out what the original pic

      groups while you monitor must’ve been, drawing it as best they can on the paper.

      and help).

5B Close section 2 of the activity. Stop the activity when most pairs seem to have a reasonable pic.

Go pairs to meet up. They compare pics and sentences.

There may be some amusement at misunderstandings and alternative interpretations.

6 Post-activity: do any You could now extend the activity by collecting a range of sentences

   appropriate follow-on work. (from different pairs) down the left-hand side of the board and inviting different students to draw on the right-hand side, slowly building up a composite pic with features from different originals.

Alternatively, redistribute the pics and repeat the original activity ‘live’, ie basically the same, but have pairs work with other pairs from the start and say the sentences to them as they think of them (rather than write them down).

Task 2.10 Exploiting material differently - Can you think of any completely different way to exploit these pics?

Small group work - This section offers detailed instructions for using the Small-group discussion resources on the dvd, a small-group discussion task (board game) suitable for a range of learners from Intermediate to Upper intermediate levels.

Task 2.11 Predicting uses for material: board game - Look at the board game handout. Before you read the full instructions, think how you may use such material in class.

Commentary - The activity uses a board game to get students discussing in small groups. The game element helps focus attention, and students may find it adds something exciting and humorous to a more serious discussion topic. 

The activity’s adaptable for a wide range of topics. One ex. set of cards on general discussion topics for Intermediate level and above’s given in the resources section of the dvd under Topic cards for board games.

Route map Instructions

1 Before the lesson: familiarize Photocopy one game board for every four students in your class. You’ll 

   yourself with the material and need a die for all groups and a counter for each player (these could be

   activity. Prepare any materials coins). Cut some paper into a lot of small blank cards. Decide what 

   or texts you need. topic you want the students to discuss and prepare a list of interesting discussion questions (or use the set of sample discussion cards from the Resources section of the dvd). Photocopy and cut up one set for each group.

2 In class: lead-in / prepare for Obviously, your lead-in will depend on which topic you’ve chosen. If you

   the activity. have chosen a single topic (eg globalisation), it may be an idea to first clarify exactly what the terms means. You could do this by writing the word on the board and eliciting definitions and ex’s of one or two arguments for and against. Or you could choose one of the more extreme viewpoints from the cards and say it to the class, hoping to get a reaction. This initial mini-discussion will prepare them for the convo in the game itself.

3 Set up the activity. Form small groups of four to five students and hand out a pack of cards to each group. Students keep the cards face down. Explain students should take it in turns to throw the die and move their counter around the board. If they land on a square with a ‘?’, they should take a card, read it out and ask the group to discuss it for at least two minutes. If they land on a ‘Talk’ square, they should express their own opinion about it for at least two minutes. Everyone else in the group can then join in a short discussion about the question. Every time a learner passes ‘Bonus’ (ie having circled the board once), they get a point. The winner at the end is the one with most points.

4 Run the activity: students Monitor as usual.

   do the activity (maybe in

   pairs or small groups while

   you monitor and help).

5 Close the activity and invite It may be tricky to decide when it’s appropriate to stop the activity. 

   feedback from the students. Some teams may really get into the discussion; others may race through it faster. The best thing to do is watch and judge when most groups have had the most value from it. If any groups finish very quickly, go over and tell them to play another round. It seems natural to extend the group work into a whole- class comparison of views (if students aren’t sick of the subj already).

6 Post-activity: do any Writing follow-ups may include writing a summary of each individual’s

appropriate follow-on work. own opinions, preparing a poster or newspaper article or writing a letter to a politician. You could link the discussion into reading a relevant magazine article. The topic may provide a useful context for working on some grammar points, eg globalisation could help introduce We should…, The government ought to…, If we don’t…, etc.

CH3 Classroom management 

This CH provides the basics of class management for you as you teach your first few lessons. Issues such’s seating, gestures and ways of using the board effectively are covered so you’re well-equipped. 

We’ll look at some common ways in which teachers can inadvertently prevent learning from taking place.

What is classroom management? - Your most important job as a teacher’s perhaps to create the conditions in which learning can take place. 

The skills of creating and managing a successful class may be the key to the whole success of a course. An important part of this is to do with your attitude, intentions and personality and your relationships with the learners. 

However, you also need certain organizational skills and techniques. Such items are often grouped together under the heading of ‘class management’. Common class management areas include:

Activities

• Setting up activities

• Giving instructions

• Monitoring activities

• Timing activities (and the lesson as a whole)

• Bringing activities to an end

Grouping and seating

• Forming groupings (singles, pairs, groups, mingle, plenary)

• Arranging and rearranging seating

• Deciding where you’ll stand or sit

• Reforming class as a whole group after activities

Authority 

• Gathering and holding attention

• Deciding who does what (ie answer a question, make a decision, etc)

• Establishing or relinquishing authority as appropriate

• Getting someone to do something

Critical moments 

• Starting the lesson

• Dealing with unexpected problems

• Maintaining appropriate discipline

• Finishing the lesson

Tools and techniques

• Using the board and other class equipment or aids

• Using gestures to help clarity of instructions and explanations

• Speaking clearly at an appropriate volume and speed

• Use of silence

• Grading complexity of language

• Grading quantity of language 

Working with people

• Spreading your attention evenly and appropriately

• Using intuition to gauge what students are feeling

• Eliciting honest feedback from students

• Really listening to students

Class management involves both decisions and actions. The actions are what’s done in the class, eg rearranging the chairs. 

The decisions are about whether to do these actions, when to do them, how to do them and who will do them. At any class moment, there’ll be a range of options as to possible actions. 

To say one thing or to say something different. To stop an activity or to let it continue for a few more minutes. 

To take three minutes to deal with a difficult question or to move on with what you’d previously planned. To tell off a latecomer or to welcome him. To do something or to do nothing. 

These options continue throughout the lesson; at every step, your decision will take you forward on your particular route. No one can tell you the ‘right’ way to do something. 

There’s no perfect lesson, no single correct answer, no single route through a lesson, though some routes may in the end prove to be much more effective than others. 

Different people or different situations create different solutions. Your total lesson’s created by your choices. 

You can’t know whether alternative routes may have been more effective, but, post-lesson, it’s useful to reflect on what you did and didn’t do - and let this inform your future lessons. 

The essential basic skill for class management’s therefore to be able to look at and read class events as they occur and think of possible options available to you, to make appropriate decisions between these options, and to turn them into effective and efficient actions.

As you grow in experience, your awareness of possible options will grow. Thus the basic skills of class management can be summarized as follows:

Look Options Actions

Looking at class Finding options → ? Doing the chosen 

events minute by → Making decisions between one option → ? → action

minute and another → ?

Fig. 3.1 Basic skills of class management

Task 3.1 Choosing class management options

Write two or more options for the following situations:

1 A student says I don’t want to do this exercise.

2 You expected an activity to take five minutes. It’s taken 20 so far, and the students still seem to be very involved. There’s something else you’d like to do before the lesson ends in ten minutes.

3 The students are working in groups of 3. Two groups have finished the task you set them and are now sitting looking bored. The other groups still seem to have a long way to go before they finish.

Commentary 

Here are a few possible options:

1 You could say Fine.

   You could say loudly Do it!

   You could ask why the student doesn’t want to do it.

   You could offer an alternative exercise or activity. You could say Choose something you’d like to do.

   You could explain the point of the exercise.

Note in all the above options, you also have further options regarding your attitude and behaviour: ie you could be patient or impatient, defensive or open, sound as if you mean it or sound as if you don’t.

2 You could stop the activity.

   You could let it continue (postponing the next activity).

   You could announce a time for finishing (eg Two more minutes).

   You could ask the students how much longer they need.

   You could offer the students the option of stopping and doing something else.

3 You could tell the groups which have finished they can chat or do something else while the other groups finish.

   You could give the groups which have finished a short extra task to keep them busy until the rest finish. 

   You could set a time limit (say two minutes) for the others to finish.

   You could bring the groups which have finished together to compare their answers with each other.

Task 3.2 Selecting alternative options

Read this description of a class situation and consider any alternative options available to you at points (a) and (b).

You come into the class at the start of the lesson. There’re 25 teen students in the room. About half of them seem very involved in a loud discussion (in their own language, not English) about a current political situation. (a) You shout out OK, OK, let’s start the lesson; you can continue what you’re doing now later. The room quietens down a bit; some people continue whispering animatedly to each other. Now, today we’re going to look at ways of talking about the future, you continue. One student asks, But this subj is very interesting. Could we continue the convo if we use English? (b) You say, I’m sorry, but we have to get through Unit 9 of the book today. Perhaps we can have a discussion next week. Open your books at page 47.

Commentary - The following are a few of the many possible options for (a):

• You sit down and wait for the class to conclude the discussion in its own time, waiting until they indicate they’re ready for you to start.

• You join in the convo, but using English.

• You join in the convo using English and subtly manipulate the discussion so the students are involved in using the language items you’re planning to work on in the first place. You join in the convo using English. After a while you slip into your convo one or two examples of the language items you’d planned to focus on in the lesson. Draw students’ attention to these items and slowly change the focus of the lesson so the students get involved in using the language items you’re planning to work on in the first place.

• You stand in front of the class in a way which indicates you want their attention (making eye contact with as many people as possible, looking authoritative, etc) and wait for silence. Having established silence, you put to the class the decision about what to do: We can either continue the discussion or do what I’ve planned to do. Which would you prefer?

Here are some options for (b):

• You say OK.

• As in the fourth option above, you ask the class to make the decision about what to do.

• You explain your aim for the lesson and then offer the possibility of continuing the discussion after some other work. You suggest allowing ten minutes at the end of the lesson and ask the students for their opinion.

How can you decide what’s best to do?

What influences and informs your decision between different options? The following are some factors to bear in mind:

• What’s the aim of this activity?

• What’s the aim of the whole lesson?

• What’s hindering the effectiveness of what we’re doing?

• What have I planned to do?

• What would be the best thing to do now?

• Is it time for a change of mood or pace?

• Are we using time efficiently/

• How do the students feel?

• How do I feel?

• What’re the possible outcomes of my doing something?

I could add two further factors which are frequently involved in teacher decisions and actions:

• I don’t know any other options;

• I know some other options, but I’m avoiding them due to they’re difficult or troublesome or nerve-wracking.

Class decision and actions are also greatly determined by your own attitudes, intentions, beliefs and values. What do you believe about learning? What’s important for you in learning? What’s your genuine feeling towards your students? For ex, you may ask a student to write their response on the board. This decision may have grown from your intention to involve students more in the routine duties of the class. This may itself have grown from your belief trusting your students more and sharing some responsibility with them’s a useful way of increasing their involvement in the learning process.

You could now use Observation Task 5 on dvd to look at the options and decisions made in the class.

Class interaction 

Some common types of student grouping in the class include:

• whole class working together with you;

• whole class moving around and mixing together as individuals (a ’mingle’);

• small groups (three to eight people);

• pairs;

• individual work.

In any one lesson, you include work involves a number of these different arrangements. Varying groupings is one way of enabling a variety of experiences for the learners. 

In this sections, we examine the rationale for making use of pairs and small groups as well as whole-class work. There’re some suggestions and guidelines for maximizing useful interaction in class.

Teacher talk and student talk

The language class is rich in language for learners, quite apart from the language which’s the supposed focus of the lesson. 

Students learn a lot of their language from what they hear you say: the instructions, the discussions, the asides, the jokes, the chit-chat, the comments. 

Having said this, it’d be unsatisfactory if your talk dominated the lesson to the exclusion of participation form as many learners as possible.

Task 3.3 Class interaction

In the list of states below, tick any you feel you can agree with.

1 a It’s more important for learners to listen and speak to you than for learners to listen and speak to each other

   b Students should get most convo practice in interacting with other learners rather than with you.

2 a People usually learn best by listening to people explaining things.

   b People usually learn best by trying things out and finding out what works.

3 a The teacher should speak as much as possible in class time.

   b The teacher should speak as little as possible in class time.

Commentary 

The arguments for statement 1a usually grow from the idea you know more of the target language and by listening to you, the learner’s somehow absorbing a correct pic of the language; by interacting with you, the learner’s learning to interact with a competent user of the language; this is far more useful than talking to a poor user. 

Thus, by this argument, time spent talking to another learner’s not particularly useful time. This is OK as far as it goes, but there’re a number of challenges to the statements. 

Some are to do with available time: if you talk most of the time, how much time will learners get to speak? If the only convo practice learners get is one-to-one with you, they’ll get very little time to speak at all. 

In a class of 25 learners, how much time will you have available to speak to individuals? Divide a one-hour lesson by 25 and you get only over two minutes each, which doesn’t sound very much.

Statement 1b suggests we could maximize learner speaking time at certain points of the lesson by putting them into pairs or small groups and getting them to talk to each other. 

Thus, instead of two minutes’ speaking time in a whole lesson, they’ll get a lot of speaking practice within a short space of time. 

You could use this time effectively by discreetly monitoring what the students are saying and using the info collected as a source of material for future feedback or other work. (Scrivener states, he’s making other assumptions and assuming it’s important to give learners opportunities to have useful interaction with others.)

Statements 2a and 2b are about different ways of learning. From Scrivener’s own learning experiences and from observing teachers at work, the most efficient way of learning’s for a student to be really involved in a lesson. 

Explanations, esp long ones, tend to leave me cold; getting bored, switching off (A learner may also have real problems in following what’s being said.), but challenge the teacher, give a problem to do or a task the teacher wants to complete, and you’ll learn far more, by experimenting, by practicing, by taking risks.

Scrivener believes it’s guessable his views on statement 3a and 3b by now. (Neither the extremes of (a) nor (b), but closer to (b) than (a).) Observers who watch new teachers at work often comment they talk too much. 

An essential lesson every new teacher needs to learn’s ’talking at’ the learners don’t necessarily mean learning’s taking place; in many cases, TTT (Teacher Talking Time) is actually time when the learners aren’t doing very much and are not very involved. 

Working on ways to become aware of unnecessary TTT is something to add to your list of priorities.

Task 3.4 Increasing student-student interaction

When working in a whole-class stage, a large amount of interaction tends to go from teacher to student and student to teacher, as shown in Fig. 3.2. How could you get more student-student interaction?

         ST ST ST ST

         ST ST ST ST

↖↘ ↗↙

             T

Fig. 3.2 Interaction between teacher and students

Commentary

Some ideas for maximizing student interaction in class:

• Encourage a friendly, relaxed learning environment. If there’s a trusting, positive, supportive rapport amongst the learners and between learners and you, then there’s a much better chance of useful interaction happening.

• Ask question rather than giving explanations.

• Allow time for students to listen, think, process their answer and speak.

• Really listen to what they say. Let what they say really affect what you do next. Work on listening to the person and the meaning, as well as to the language and the mistakes.

• Allow thinking time without talking over it. Allow silence. 

• Increase opportunities for STT (Student Talking Time).

• Use gestures, seen below, to replace unnecessary teacher talk.

• Allow students to finish their own sentences.

• Make use of pairs and small groups to maximize opportunities for students to speak. Do this even in the middle of longer whole-class stages, eg ask students to break off for 30 seconds and talk in pairs about their reactions to what you’ve been discussing and also allow them to check answers to tasks before conducting feedback.

• If possible, arrange seating so students can all see each other and talk to each other (ie circles, squares and horseshoes rather than parallel rows). (See below on seating.)

• Remember you don’t always need to be at the front of the class. Try out seating arrangements which allow the whole class to be the focus (eg you take one seat in a circle).

• If a student’s speaking too quietly for you to hear, walk further away, rather than closer to them! (This sounds illogical, but if you can’t hear them, then it’s likely the other students can’t either. Encourage the quiet speaker to speak louder so the others can hear.)

See Encouraging quiet students teaching technique on the dvd

• Encourage interaction between students rather than only between student and you, and you and student. Get students to ask questions, give explanations, etc to each other, rather than always to you. Use gestures and facial expressions to encourage them to speak and listen to each other.

• Keep a diagram like the one in Fig. 3.3 in your head as a possible alternative to the one in Fig. 3.2. Think ‘How can I get students speaking and listening to each other as well as to me?’

Fig. 3.3 Interaction between students

Task 3.5 Your skills in enabling interaction

Carry out a self-assessment, comparing yourself against some of the guidelines on these pages. What skills do you have in enabling effective class interaction? What do you intend to work on?

You could now use Observation Task 4 on dvd to analyze interaction in an observed class.

Seating - However your class’s laid out and whatever kind of fixed or moveable seating you have, it’s worth taking time to consider the best ways to make use of it.

• What different seating positions are possible without moving anything?

• Are any rearrangements of seats possible?

• Which areas of the room are suitable for learners to stand and interact in?

• Is there any possibility the room could be completely rearranged on a semi-permanent basis to make a better language class space?

Important considerations are:

• Can learners comfortably work in pairs with a range of different partners?

• Can learners comfortably work in small groups with a range of other learners?

For each activity you do in class, consider what grouping, seating, standing arrangements are most appropriate. 

Changing seating arrangements can help students interact with different people, change the focus from you when appropriate and allow a range of different situations to be recreated within the class, as well as simply adding variety to the predictability of sitting in the same place every time. 

It’s difficult to sit still for a long time; it’s worth including activities involving some movement, even if only to give people the chance to stretch their legs. 

Students may not like it if there’s a constant movement every five minutes, but some variety of working arrangements is often helpful. 

In some cultures, students may have clear expectations as to what’s acceptable. For ex, asking students to sit on their desks may be taboo; a teacher who sits on the corner of their desk may be considered unprofessional. 

Respect cultural constraints, but don’t let them put you off experimenting a little. Be clear about what’s genuinely unacceptable and what’s merely unknown or unexpected. 

Remain aware of the possibilities of using the space you’re in; sometimes a complete change in the room can make all the difference. 

Even with the most immovable of fixed seating, it’s often possible to be creative in some way.

Fixed, semi-fixed and large seating

You could ask students to:

• turn around and sit backwards, working with the people behind them;

• sit on the ends of their row and work with people in the next row;

• sit on their desks and talk with people nearby;

• stand up, move around and return to a different seat;

• stand in the aisle space between rows;

• all come to the front (or another open space) to talk.

In the long term, if you’ve exclusive use of a class, or share it with other language teachers, it’s worth considering whether a longer-term rearrangement may be useful. 

Fig. 3.4 shows a school Scrivener worked in which had large, one-piece seats / desks for three people fixed in every class. They’re always used in rows due to, although only lightly fixed, there seemed to be no other way to arrange them.

Fig. 3.4 Original seating plan

However, when we started thinking about it, we found a number of other arrangements were possible, see below. The horseshoe arrangement, particularly proved very suitable for the English classes.

Fig. 3.5 Alternative seating arrangements

Task 3.6 Standing and sitting

1 Why may a circle or horseshoe shape be more effective for language teaching than straight rows?

2 What difference does it make if you sit in a circle with the students rather than standing in front of them?

Commentary

1 In a circle or horseshoe, learners can make eye contact with everyone else in the group and thus interact much more naturally. 

There’s also a much greater sense of equality. Weaker students tend to hid away less and stronger students to dominate less.

2 Having you in the circle helps to clarify your role as an equal rather than as someone separate and different.

Moveable seating 

Some ideas for investigating and exploring the possibilities of moveable seating:

• As students to move seats when you create pairs or small groups. Don’t let students get stuck in unsuitable seating arrangements when a move’s preferable.

• If it’s really too noisy, make the discussion of that (and the finding of a solution) part of the lesson as well.

• Fig. 3.6 shows some patterns to think about.

• If the students normally sit in rows, try forming a circle.

• Turn the class around so the focus is on a different wall from normal.

• Make seating arrangements which reflect specific contexts, eg a train carriage, an airplane, a town centre or whatever.

• Push all seats up against the wall and make a large, open forum space in the middle of the room.

• Deliberately place your seat off-centre (ie not at front). This is an interesting subversion of expectations and immediately challenges expectations about who a teacher is and what a teacher should do.

• Divide the class into separate groups at far corners of the room.

• Ask How can we reorganize this class to make it a nicer place to be? Let the class discuss it and agree, then do it.

• Push the seats or desks up against the wall. Sit on the floor, only if it’s clean!

Task 3.7 Seating options in the classroom

Look at Fig.3.6. Which of these ideas for arranging seating have you not tried? Which would be worth trying? Draw a simple sketch of your class. Mark in the seats for one new arrangement. 

When may you use such an arrangement? How can you organize it in class? What may be the benefits? The problems?

Fig. 3.6 Seating possibilities in a standard class

Giving instructions

In a multilingual class you have to use English for instructions, but, in monolingual classes you have a choice: English, native language - or some mix of both. 

Scrivener’s met a number of teachers who say they’d like to give instructions for activities in English rather than their students’ own language, but find there’re often so many problems with comprehension it seems impossible. 

It’s certainly possible to use only English (and it’s often really helpful in creating an ‘English’ atmosphere in the class), but it’s often problematic due to the quantity and over-complexity of language used.

Task 3.8 Complex instructions

Why did the class have problems with the following instruction?

Ok, everybody, would you, Maria, sit down. Now what you have to do is, when you, you take this sheet of paper I’m handing out now and keep it secret, and some of you are ‘A’, it’s written at the top, and some are labelled ‘B’. 

OK, can you see that? Don’t show your paper to anyone and then you have to describe to your partner; sit face to face. 

Could you move your chairs around and describe what’s on your paper so your partner can find out what’s different, and you must agree; when you find something, draw it on your paper? 

OK. Do you understand?

Commentary

This may sound like a joke, but in fact it’s quite typical of an unplanned instruction. Teachers’re often unaware they’re talking in this way until they stop and try to listen to what they’re saying. 

A video (or audio) recording of them in action can be very helpful here. It’s clear this type of instruction’s very hard for students to follow. 

The essential info about what to do is embedded in confusing and unnecessary babble. An essentially simple activity can become impossible, not due to the students unable to do it, but due to they not understanding what to do. 

Often students are judged to have failed when it’s actually the teacher who failed to clarify what was required.

How can I give clearer instructions?

Scrivener proposes five steps towards better instructions:

1. Become aware of your own instruction-giving (listen to yourself; record yourself; ask other to watch you and give feedback).

2. For a while, pre-plan essential instructions. Analyze the instructions beforehand so as to include only the essential info in simple, clear language, and sequence it in a sensible order. Use short sentences - one sentence for each key piece of info. Don’t say things which’er visible or obvious (eg I’m giving you a piece of paper). Don’t give instructions which they don’t need to know at this point (eg what they’ll do after this activity is finished).

3. In class, separate instructions clearly from the other chit-chat, telling off, joking, etc which goes on. Create a silence beforehand, make eye contact with as many students as possible, find an authoritative tone, make sure they’re listening before you start. Use silence and gestures to pace the instructions and clarify their meaning.

4. Demo rather than explain wherever possible.

5. Check students have understood what to do. Don’t assume everyone will automatically understand what you’ve said. Get concrete evidence from the students they know what’s required. Getting one or two students to tell you what they’re going to do is one very simple way of achieving this.

Task 3.9 Planning simpler instructions

Look back at the ex instruction given in Task 3.8.

1. Identify the essential instructions the teacher wanted to give.

2. Delete unnecessary language.

3. Write out the instructions in the right order.

Commentary

Here’s a pre-planned version of the instruction in Task 3.8.

• Say Sit opposite your partner.

• Wait while they move.

• Some of you are ‘A’ (gesture to letter A on the handouts).

• Some are ‘B’ (gesture).

• Don’t show your paper to anyone (mime hiding).

• Distribute the handout.

• Some things in pic A are different from pic B.

• Describe your pic.

• When you find something different, draw it (mime).

• Check understanding of instruction: What’re you going to do? Students answer with brief explanation.

Here’s another version of the same instruction. This time, it involves demo rather than instruction:

• Ask one student to come out in front of the class and sit opposite you.

• Give the handout to the student and take one yourself, making a big show of keeping the handouts secret from each other.

• Pretend to be student A and do one complete ex with student B so the whole class can hear (eg A: Have you got a tree in your pic? B: Yes. A: Is there a bird on top of the tree? B: No. A: Oh, so one difference in my pic: there’s a bird on the tree.).

• Distribute handouts to the class: Now you do the same. A and B. Find ten differences.

Task 3.10 Improving instructions

Simplify the following instructions using less confusing language or a gesture.

1. Now, actually, I’d like you to, if possible stand up, yes everyone please.

2. It’s the unit on, uh travel, somewhere - it’s near the middle, pages 35 and 36, can you find that? Have you got it? No, not that one, the next unit, and take look at the intro, read it through quickly and jot down your answers to the questions at the top of the page over there, above the illustration.

3. If I were to ask you for you opinion on smoking, what do you think you may say to me in your reply?

4. Would you like to tell everyone the answer you were thinking of again due to not thinking they heard it when you spoke so quietly, and I’m sure we’d all be interested in hearing it if you could, please?

5. Well, that wasn’t really what I was hoping you’d say when I asked that question. I was actually looking for the name of the verb tense, not an example sentence, but what you gave me was fine, only does anyone I wonder have the answer I’m looking for?

Commentary

1. Gesture (or Stand up).

2. Page 35. (Wait quietly til they have found page.)                                                    Read this. (Show text.)                                Write your answers.

3. What do you think about smoking?

4. Louder.

5. What’s the name of the tense?

How to get the learners’ attention

One important reason why learners may not successfully follow activity instructions (or understand your explanations of something) is they didn’t actually hear them, perhaps due to they not fully paying attention when they were given. 

Whereas teachers often invest energy into finding better ways to word their instructions, they may overlook the need to win attention before the instruction’s given. It’s a vital step. 

An instruction given over student chatter, or when students are looking the other way, stands little chance of working. 

If this has been a problem for you, here’s one strategy for getting learners’ attention you may wish to experiment with.

• Start making eye contact with as many people as possible.

• Establish a gesture which means you want to speak (eg cupped hand to your ear or holding you hand up).

• Just wait.

• Don’t look impatient or anxious. Keep moving your eyes around the room form person to person, patiently.

• Think of this as ‘gathering attention’. Enjoy it.

• Wait as long as necessary until there’s silence and people are looking your way. 

• If this doesn’t work, don’t alter it dramatically. Just add in a clear attention-drawing word such as Ok. Say it once and then go back to the waiting.

In general, you need to establish your authority and use it appropriately. Project your voice clearly, but speak rather than shout. Control the quantity and complexity of what you say. Say what you need to as simply and clearly as possible.

Monitoring

Task 3.11 You role in pair and group activities

What’s your role once you’ve set up an activity in which students will mainly work on their own in pairs or groups?

a Sit down and read a book?

b Go out of the room and have a coffee?

c Wander round and look at what students are doing?

d Sit down and work with separate groups one by one, joining in the tasks as a participant?

e Listen carefully to as many students as possible, going over and correcting mistakes when you catch them, offering ideas when students get stuck, etc? 

Commentary

Well, Scrivener thinks all of these answers are possible, even the first two (which we may have dismissed as unlikely). 

It all depends, of course, on the nature of the specific activity and on its aims. The next section suggests a general strategy for making decisions about what to do.

Deciding on your role while students do an activity

Let’s distinguish two steps.

Step 1: The first 30 seconds: are they doing the task set?

Immediately after you’ve given the instructions for a task and students start doing it, there’s often an immediate need to check to make sure students are doing the activity you asked them to do and have understood the basic instructions and the mechanics of the activity.

You could do this quietly and relatively inconspicuously wandering around the room, listening in briefly to snatches from many groups and assuring students are doing what they’re supposed to. 

We could call this ‘monitoring to check the mechanics’.

Step 2: The task itself

In many activities, the prime aim’s for learners to get a chance to work on their own, speaking fluently and trying out things without too much interference and correction. 

If they’re doing the task correctly, then possibly they don’t need you any more once the task’s under way. Your presence may actually be an interference. 

If you’re around and very visible, they may look to you for language items and help whenever they hit a problem, whereas it may be more useful for them to struggle a little and learn to make use of their own resources. 

So once an activity’s safely under way, your options often boil down to the following choices: monitor discreetly or vanish. 

In some tasks - esp those in which students may not move forward quickly, but need ongoing advice, support, input and encouragement - you may find some kind of more active role’s called for. 

In these cases, your best options are probably monitor actively or participate.

Monitor discreetly

Discreet monitoring’s when you maintain a presence in the room, but don’t overtly offer help, interfere, correct, etc. 

Your aim is the students know you’re there, but your watching and listening doesn’t in any way disturb them. 

They won’t feel tempted to call on you unless there’s a significant problem - and when they do ask for help, do this swiftly and effectively, then return to the discreet monitoring role. 

You’re sending a message you’re interested, but the main task’s for them to do using their own resources as much as possible.

Vanish

There’re cases when any teacher presence can actually interfere with and diminish the usefulness of work being done. 

Sometimes the best option for you is to vanish, ie get out of immediate eyeshot. You could go into a corner of the room and sit quietly.

It’s often an idea to have something concrete to do (eg read something) in order to prevent yourself from constantly worrying about how students are doing and getting drawn back into it. 

You need to keep a small percentage of attention on the room, in order to know when the activity’s reaching an end or a crisis point, but otherwise restrain yourself from doing too much. 

Relax and stop being a teacher for awhile. In a few specific cases, you may want to emphasis the point students need to work without your help, and in such cases even leaving the room for a few minutes may be an option. 

(Whenever I’ve done this, I’ve been interested to learn most students don’t even notice I was out of the room.)

Monitor actively

You can monitor as described above, but be more visible and allow students to be more aware of your presence and of the possibility of calling on you for help and advice. 

A teacher who’s actively monitoring will be walking around, viewing and listening in to many different groups and frequently offering spontaneous advice and corrections, as well as responding to requests and questions from students.

Participate

You may sit down and join a group (temporarily or for the whole task) and take part as if you’re one of the group, offering ideas, helping with questions, joining in discussions. 

You could quietly move on to another group. By the end of the task, you may have worked with a number of groups. 

Of course, while you’re monitoring or working with one group, you’ll need to remain alert to what others are doing and if there’re any problems.

See Monitoring and Giving full attention teaching techniques on the dvd

Gestures 

Try to develop a range of gestures (and facial expressions) to save yourself repeating basic instructions and to increase opportunities for learner talk. 

For ex, Scrivener’s seen many teachers using a set of gestures to indicate ‘time’. This helps them quickly correct learners who use tenses inaccurately. 

Pointing to the ground indicates the present; pointing ahead is the future; pointing behind, over the shoulder, indicates the past.

Remember learners will need to learn the meanings of your gestures; they’ll not magically know your pointing means ‘Use the past tense’, but if you give the oral instruction a few times while also gesturing, they’ll soon associate the gesture alone with the instruction.

Bear in mind gestures can mean different things in different countries. If you’re teaching away from your own culture, learn which gestures to avoid, and always keep alert to the possibility you may be giving offense!

Task 3.12 Gestures

Think of gestures you could use for the following instructions:

1 Stand up.

2 Work on your own.

3 Five minutes left.

4 Quieten down.

5 Listen to me.

6 Listen to her.

7 Give a longer answer.

8 Please stop talking now.

9 Stop a noisy student talking (to enable somebody else to speak).

Commentary

Now watch the Using gestures teaching technique on the dvd.

Task 3.13 Creating new gestures

Now decide on some personal gestures for each of the following:

1 Ask the other learners.

2 Repeat.

3 The intonation was very dull.

4 Please stop talking now.

5 Come here! (polite)

6 Listen to each other.

7 Don’t show your info sheet to your partner.

A lot of teachers also develop and use gestures quite spontaneously, even without noticing. Do you? If so, which?

Using the board

Organization

One resource almost every teacher has is a board, whether it’s a small board on an easel or a wide chalk board, pen board or iPad. 

Although it’s possible to write randomly on the board as things occur in class, you’ll often find it’s worth paying a little attention to organizing items. 

Scrivener isn’t naturally a tidy board user, but he’s found the following idea does make a difference. At the start of the lesson, draw a few dividing lines on the board, eg to form three working areas, like this:

Review section Scratchpad for drawing, displaying words Key vocab & grammar

(for key points as they come up, etc.

from last lesson)

Use these areas to help you organize different content as you write it up, keeping different kinds of things to separate sections of the board, for ex:

• a vocab column for new words, with a second column for ex sentences and notes;

• a substitution table for a new grammar item;

• a space to stick up sketch pics to help when telling a story;

• questions for students to think about when listening to a recording.

Here are a few more board thoughts:

• Try to avoid long teacher-writing times while students are watching and waiting.

• Whenever possible, find opportunities to write things up on the board while students are working on other things, so you’re ready when they finish.

• It seems natural enough to write standing in front of the board. Unfortunately, this blocks the view of what you’re writing for the class and they can’t read it til you’ve finished (Fig. 3.7a). 

• You also can’t talk to them easily. When you get a chance in an empty class, practice writing on the board in a way your body doesn’t block the view for everyone and you can make eye contact with the class (Fig.3.7b). 

• This requires a slightly sideways position, which’ll feel odd at first, but allows you to talk to students, ask questions and look around, all of which can be very helpful in maintaining a good working atmosphere. 

See Writing on the board teaching technique on the dvd.

Fig. 3.7 Alternative positions when writing on the board

Remember it’s not only teachers who can write on boards - where appropriate, get learners to write up answers and ideas, draw pics and timelines, etc. 

The division of the board into sections can also help them to write more tidily. Watch out you don’t use your own writing on the board as a lengthy time-wasting way to avoid real teaching.

Board drawing

Don’t say you can’t draw! No matter how unprofessional your artistry, one pic is often worth many unnecessary words. 

For the quick explanation of vocab items, for setting up a discussion, a dialogue or role play, for story-building, you need pics. 

Clearly the basic skill’s to draw people in some form, and stick people are in many ways better than detailed figures due to quick to create. 

Add character by giving different shapes of head, fattening up the bodies a little, drawing in simple clothes, if possible, adding expression in the mouth and eyes. 

Add locations by a few simple props: for ex, a railway line and a platform makes a station; a table, knife and fork and a vase of flowers makes a restaurant.

Remember the pics alone are usually only a starting point. They don’t need to do all the work - build from them with questions and discussion, and even if they end up looking like nothing on earth, badly drawn pics can actually be a rich source of language and humor in the class. If they don’t understand what on earth you’ve drawn, whisper the word to a student and get them to draw it.

See Drawing people teaching technique on the dvd

Task 3.14 Practice in quick board sketches

1 Draw quick pics (single images or a sequence) to illustrate some of the following: swimming pool, London, happy, escalator, mouse, exhausted, robbery, whale, planet, overtake.

2 What questions could you ask your learners about the sketches to establish they actually see what you intend them to?

Eliciting

Eliciting means drawing out info, language, ideas, etc from the students. It’s a technique based not he principles:

• students probably know a lot more than we may give them credit for;

• starting with what they know is a productive way to begin new work;

• involving people in a question-and-answer movement towards new discoveries is often more effective than simply giving ‘lectures’.

Eliciting enables us to start from where the learners are and then to work forward from there. The learners have a real effect on the outcomes of the lesson in terms of ideas, language and pace. 

With constant learner involvement, Scrivener can work more at their speed rather than his own. Scrivener can find out where the real difficulties and problems are. There are three steps to eliciting:

1 Scrivener conveys a clear idea to the students, perhaps by using pics, gestures or questions, etc.

2 They then supply the appropriate language, info or ideas.

3 Scrivener gives them feedback.

The teacher can elicit: language, ideas, feelings, meanings, contexts, memories, etc. and can’t elicit: things they don’t know.

Here’s an ex. from a lesson:

The teacher’s working on the present simple tense for daily routines. On the board, she’s written the words Every day and drawn a house. She adds a bed to one room.

She looks at the students and gestures she wants the word. One says bed. The teacher doesn’t repeat it, but gets other students to repeat the word. Students who didn’t hear ask the first student to repeat it.

The teacher does the same procedure with a clock and with the time (seven o’clock). She then draws a stick man and mimes yawning and climbing out of bed. 

She looks to the students and gestures to encourage them to say a sentence. He get up seven o’clock, says one student. The teacher thanks him for the sentence, but doesn’t repeat it. 

Instead, she uses finger correction (see CH12) to establish a corrected version from him (with the help of other class members). When it’s correct, she gets the class to repeat the sentence a number of times.

In the sample lesson, the teacher didn’t model the vocab or grammar herself; in fact, she didn’t even say the vocab or sentence being worked on. The vocab was known by at least one student. 

The grammar, though not accurate, was close enough to be useful to work on. If no student had known bed or clock or get up, then the teacher would’ve said these herself, having found out they’re really new and needed. 

As it was, she was able to elicit most of the language from the students and hardly needed to speak at all herself. 

With this technique, there’s a reduction in unnecessary teacher talk and a maximization of student talk. 

The students take an active part in the learning, being involved even in the part of the lesson which may otherwise be only teacher explanation. 

The teacher’s able to pinpoint precisely what students know and what they still need to work on. The language’s learned through a process of guided discovery, and it seems likely it’ll be more memorable due to the degree of student involvement in the learning. 

Confidence is built due to their use of the language’s continuous and doesn’t have to wait for the end of teacher exposition.

Task 3.15 Advice when eliciting

Here’s some advice for elicitors. Two pieces in the list are spurious: which ones?

1 Give sufficient info. Eliciting doesn’t mean ‘Guess what’s in my head’. Don’t try to elicit your grandmother’s maiden name.

2 Use hand gestures to indicate who’s being asked to speak, either a gesture for ‘anyone’ or to a specific individual. 

If everyone speaks at once, it can be hard for students to know which answer was Ok and which not.

3 Give very clear feedback on each student utterance. They want to know if what they said was acceptable. You could use simple gestures or facial expressions to register ‘Ok’ or ‘Not Ok’ to students.

X 4 If someone gives an incorrect answer, get them to repeat it two or three times and then say the correct answer yourself.

5 If they can’t provide an answer, don’t stretch the eliciting out too long. Silence or wrong answers are evidence they need your input.

6 When you have an appropriate answer, make sure it’s clearly established as a good answer, perhaps by getting it repeated by a variety of individuals. 

X 7 Don’t use eliciting with monolingual classes.

8 Use eliciting regularly as a basic technique in most lessons for keeping your class active and involved.

Commentary

Points 4 and 7 are the wrong answers.

Task 3.16 ‘Lead-in’ questions

You’re planning a lesson on language used when meeting people at parties. What questions could you ask at the start of your lesson in order to interest the learners and to elicit some of their personal feelings and reactions?

Task 3.17 Planning questions to elicit specific things

Consider the next lesson you need to teach. Write down one specific item of factual info the students will need to know: maybe a grammar rule, a fact about the topic, what a pic on the board represents, etc. 

Write a sequence of question you could use to lead the students step by step towards finding out the same info for themselves. If possible, work with someone else to try out your sequence of questions. 

Practice drawing out the info rather than explaining yourself.

See Eliciting from a pic teaching technique on the dvd

How to prevent learning - some popular techniques

Here’re some ways teachers unintentionally hinder or prevent learning.

TTT (Teaching Talk Time)

Teacher: When nothing else is happening in the class, I open my mouth. I’ve no idea what I say most of the time, but it stops those horrible silences. It’s probably useful for them to listen to me speaking English. After all, I…

The more you talk, the less opportunity there is for the learners. They  need time to think, to prepare what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it. 

Allow them the time and the quiet they need. Don’t feel the need to fill every gap in a lesson. Explore the possibilities of silence.

Echo

Student: Went to the cinema.

Teacher: You went to the cinema. You went to the cinema.

Who gets more language practice here - the student or the teacher? If you become aware of your echoing and then start to control it, you’ll find learners get more talking time and they start to listen to each other more. 

When you echo, they soon learn they don’t need to listen to anyone except you, due to they knowing you’ll repeat everything! This has a dramatically negative effect on interaction patterns within the class.

Helpful sentence completion

Student: I think that smoking is…

Teacher: …a bad thing. Yes, I agree. When I went into the pub…

You can be so desperate for a student to say what you want them to say (so the lesson cam move on to the next stage) you’re already predicting the words the student will produce and eagerly wishing for them to be said - so much so you often find yourself adding ‘tails’ to sentence after sentence, but this kind of ‘doing the hard work for them’ is often counter-productive. 

People need to finish their own sentences. If students can’t complete the sentence themselves, they need help - but help to produce their own sentence, using their own words and their own ideas. 

By letting students finish what they’re saying, you also allow yourself more time to really listen to the student and what they’re saying.

Complicated and unclear instructions

Teacher: Well, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna ask you to get into pairs, but before that there’re some things we’ve gotta work out. So just jot down if you’ve got a pen, could you write this, then when we’ve finished that we’re going to do the next thing which involves more…

Unplanned, unstructured instructions are extremely confusing to students. They probably understand only a small percentage of what you say - and guess what you want them to do from one or two key words they did catch. 

Work out what’s essential for them to know and tell them that, without wrapping it up in babble.

Not checking understanding of instructions

Teacher: My instructions were so clear - but all the students did different things, and none of them did what I asked them to do.

Even the clearest instructions can be hard to grasp so, after you’ve given them, it’s worth checking they’ve been understood. 

A simple way is to ask a student or two to repeat them back to you: So, Jose, what are you going to do? In this way, you satisfy yourself the task has been understood. 

Having done this, make sure you monitor the start of the activity to see if they really do what you wanted!

Asking Do you understand?

Teacher: Do you understand?

Student: …er…yes…

When you want to check learners’ understanding, questions such as Do you understand? Are often useless. 

If you get a Yes reply, it could mean ‘I’m nervous about seeming stupid’ or ‘I don’t want to waste the class’s time any more’ or ‘I think I understand, but…’.  

You often need to get clear info about what students have taken in. The best way to do this is to get students to demo their understanding, for ex. by using a language item in a sentence, or by repeating an instruction, or by explaining their interpretation of an idea.

This provides real evidence, rather than vague, possibly untrue info.

Fear of genuine feedback

Teacher: Did you like my lesson?

Student: …er…yes…

In an active, forward-moving class, the learners will constantly be giving you feedback on what they have understood, what they think, what they need, how they feel, etc. 

Many teachers believe in the importance of open, honest feedback, but find, in practice, it can be hard to get. 

This is partly to do with the class atmosphere, partly to do with the questions asked, and mainly to do with the attitude and response to feedback received. 

The more you see feedback as a threat to you and to your position and your confidence the more you’ll attempt to avoid feedback, or to defend yourself against perceived attack when you do get feedback.

If you can open yourself up to the possibilities of really listening to what students have to say with a view to simply hearing them - without self-defense, justifications or arguments - then you may find you can start to find out what they’re really thinking, and you can work on responding appropriately to it.

Insufficient authority / over-politeness

Teacher: So if you don’t mind, it’d be very nice if you could only stop the activity if you feel it’s OK.

This kind of pussyfooting’s a common way in which teachers undermine themselves. Be clear. Say what you need to say without hiding it. 

If you want to stop an activity, say Stop now, please. Feel your own natural authority and let it speak clearly.

The running commentary

Teachers: So now what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna move my chair over here and sit down and just get comfortable an now I’m gonna tear up these pieces of paper, and I had to use these because I couldn’t get any card, so I found these at the back of the teacher’s room, and I’m gonna tear them up now and when I’ve done that what I’m gonna ask you to do is if you don’t mind…

Don’t give a running commentary about the mechanics, of past, present and future activities. Boring, hard to follow, unnecessary. Tell students what they need to know - and stop.

Lack of confidence in self, learners, material, activity / making it too easy

Teacher: I wonder why they look so bored?

A common cause of boredom in classes is when the material used is too difficult or too easy. The former isn’t hard to recognize - the learners can’t do the work. 

A more difficult problem’s when work’s simply not challenging enough. Teachers often have rather limited expectations about what people can do, and keep their classes on a rather predictable straight line through activities which’er safe and routine. 

Try to keep the level challenge high. Be demanding. Believe they can do more than they’re aware of being able to do - and then help them to do it.

Over-helping / over-organizing

Teacher: Yes, now you can ask her your question. Mmm, that’s a good question. What do you think? What’s your answer going to be, Silvia? Yes. Go on - tell her what it is…

When you give students a task to do in a group, it’s often best to let them get on with it. A lot of ‘teacher help’, although well intentioned, is actually ‘teacher interference’ and gets in the way of students working on their own. 

As long as you are around, they’ll look to you for guidance, control and help. If you go away, they’re forced to do the work themselves. This is when learning may happen. 

It can be a difficult lesson to learn, but sometimes our students will do much better without us, if only we have the courage to trust them.

Flying with the fastest

Teacher: So - what’s the answer?

Student A: Only on Tuesdays unless it’s raining.

Teacher: Yes, very good - so, everyone got that? And why did he buy the elastic band?

Student A: So he wouldn’t lose his letters.

Teacher: Good. Everyone understands then!

If you only listen to the first people who speak, it’s very easy to get a false impression of how difficult or easy something is. 

You may find the strongest and fastest students dominate, and you get little idea of how the majority of the class finds the work. 

This can lead you to fly at the speed of the top two or three students and to lose the rest completely. Make sure you get answers and feedback from many students. 

Try directing questions at individuals (eg What do you think, Dominic?) and sometimes actively ‘shh!’ The loud ones - or simply ‘not hear’ them.

Not really listening (hearing language problems but not the message)

Student: I am feeling bad. My grandfather he die last week and I am…

Teacher: No, not ‘die’ - say ‘died’ because it’s in the past.

Student: …he died last week…

Teacher: Excellent. Now, did anyone else’s grandfather die last week?

Because we’re dealing in language as the subj matter of our courses, it’s very easy to become over-concerned about the accuracy of what’s said and to fail to hear the person behind the words. 

The ex. above is an extreme one, but on a minute-by-minute basis in class, teachers frequently fail to hear what learners say. 

The only point in learning languages to be able to communicate or receive communication - it’s vital to work on the mechanical production of correct English doesn’t blind us to the messages conveyed. 

Check yourself occasionally - are you really listening to your students, or only to their words?

Weak rapport: creation of a poor working environment

Teacher: I try to be nice - buy my classes always seem so dull.

If rapport seems to be a problem, then plan work specifically designed to focus on improving the relationships and interaction within the class (rather than activities with a mainly language aim). 

Until the relationships are good within a class, the learning is likely to be of a lower quality, so it’s worth spending time on this. 

Bear in mind the three teacher qualities help to enable a good working environment: authenticity, respect and empathy. Don’t be too worried by this terrible list! These are the kinds of problems we all have. 

You’ll find yourself doing these things, so notice yourself doing them and note the ways in which they do or don’t seem to ‘prevent’ learning, but also accept this is a part of the natural process of your own learning and development. 

As your awareness and confidence grow, you’l find you not only become more able to recognize such problems in your own teaching, but you can also start to find effective alternative options which enable rather than hinder learning.

Intuition

Use of intuition is fundamental to teaching. It’s the skill of spontaneously understanding something, bypassing the supposed conventional route of thinking carefully and reaching a considered decision.

Although it sounds somewhat ‘magical’, it’s a quite down-to-earth, if rather unexplored, part of our teaching work. 

It’s something all teachers exercise to a greater or lesser degree, and it’s learnable and improvable. Intuitive responses are important in teaching due to things happening so fast in lesson time and there’s so much to notice, flying at us all at once: how the activity’s proceeding, how each student’s reacting, etc. 

On-the-spot in class, you don’t have much thinking space. Fluent teaching depends on being able to quickly read the class situation moment-by-moment and respond (or choose not to respond) appropriately.

Task 3.18 Intuition

Do you recognize yourself in any of the following ex’s?

a You’re teaching (or planning teaching) and know suddenly or instinctively what to do or how to do it.

b In class, you decide to do/not to do something without having explicitly thought through ‘why’; something just comes to mind.

c You’ve an understanding of what the learners need doesn’t seem the result of logical reasoning.

d You make a connection between two aspects of the lesson had not seemed connected before.

e You suddenly realize a sense there’s an overall system, structure or pattern to some things you previously thought unrelated.

f Pieces of a solution reveal themselves as metaphors, images, puns, etc.

g You know something you had no apparent way of knowing.

h You get a sudden understanding or insight into a student’s character.

i You look at a student (or students) and get a sense of what they’re thinking.

j You feel some embarrassment, due to your way of working seems to run counter to training and to messages you get from respected peers.

Origins of intuition

Where does intuition come from? How can it be improved? I think intuition’s your ability to smoothly access the quantity of experience you have stored inside you to help you interpret what’s happening in the present moment. 

We can get better at it by gaining more (and a wider range of) experience and storing it away. 

We do things

We recall them and reflect on them.

This adds to our store of experienced situations.

Processed and unprocessed memories mix, overlap, 

synthesise, get confused, cross-fertilize, etc.

Intuitive insights

Fig. 3.8 How we use intuition

Task 3.19 How you learned to teach

Recall how you learned to be a teacher on your teacher-training course. Scrivener doesn’t mean how you learned the theory, but what your first lessons were like, how much you could apply what your trainers had taught you to do in class.

Intuition and teaching

If your initial experience of teaching was anything like my own, you had a whole pile of things weighing on your shoulders when you went into class: books you’d read (like this one!), seminars you’d attended, helpful advice you’d been given.

Yet on stepping into the live, real-time situation in class, you probably found you couldn’t only apply these things, like assembly instructions for putting together some bookshelves. 

It didn’t work like this, because teaching isn’t like DIY or cookery. If I’m learning to cook, I can read some TV chef’s book and find out precise step by step instructions for making a new dish and get to something similar to the original target dish. 

There’ll be some call on my intelligence and some degree of luck and some local variation in terms of what my cooker is like, ingredients used, etc, but it’s by and large a relatively predictable task.

Teaching isn’t like this, the instruction book doesn’t work, due to every teaching event being significantly different, and it happens too fast before your eyes. 

You very quickly find you have to use something else, from Lesson one onwards, when the handed-down guidelines break down in the face of real people with real unpredicted responses. 

You’re already working on intuition: taking risks, trying things out, learning not to be scared, realizing this is the way to move forward, the things which go wrong contribute to you being better able to do it next time, and recalling and reflecting on what you do after you do it seems to add to the pool from which this intuition draws. 

You don’t have to process the learning very deeply to draw specific conclusions - it may often be enough to recall it, sift through it.

So, new teachers starting out make a lot of use of intuitive decisions - deciding to do something on the spur of the moment. 

What happens as a result then itself feeds into the stock of data available to them for future decisions. New teachers also make intuitive readings of how people are reacting. 

Interestingly, their intuitive readings are often incorrect; for ex., trainees often ten dot misread whether students are bored with an exercise or how difficult a listening task is. 

New teachers often transfer their own nerves, doubts, worries and expectations about how students’ll respond and then find what they expected to find in the learners’ faces, body language, voices, etc.

There’s a danger such incorrect readings may get set in concrete. One needs to constantly challenge and consciously upgrade one’s intuition - and Scrivener suspects much of the process of learning to be a better teacher is a process of collecting concrete feedback and info (about learners, language, teaching ideas, etc) in order to become more spontaneously and accurately intuitive in class, ie becoming a ‘learning teacher’. 

Training courses tend to expect trainees to put into practice certain ways of working propounded by the course. 

Teachers often try to do what they’re asked to do and come badly unstuck - tripping up on the sheer difficulty of following prescribed steps through a dance which in reality has no fixed pattern.

The ‘painting by numbers’ approach to teaching’s possible, but with very limited outcomes. Yet, some trainees dare to put the training requirements to one side - muffling the trainer’s voices int heir head - and manage to reach back to their own natural intuitive skills.

They start to feel the buzz which teaching brings; the shiver of excitement when an activity starts working, the thrill which pushes them on to experiment more and to enjoy it more. 

This isn’t an argument against training or against academic input, but it’s a reminder, only as teachers can’t do the learning for their students, trainers can never directly hand over their own teaching skills to their trainees.

We need to study things, but we also need to put them to one side; we need to forget things, we need to lose things inside us, we need to worry less about the exact instructions.

If we hold other people’s guidance in front of us as infallible route maps to follow, we’re likely to get lost, and this same process, is how we then go on to become the teachers we are.

Most people’ll discover they didn’t learn to be teachers from seminars or books or conferences or observation feedback, though all of these have a very definite impact. You learn to teach by teaching. You learn to teach by doing it.

Task 3.20 Your use of intuition

As a teacher, how much do you make use of intuition to know what your students are thinking, to read their reactions to things, to decide if they like a task or not, to determine if they’re bored, etc? What informs your intuition?

CH4 Who are the learners?

This CH look at ways learners (and classes) differ, and asks what you can do to work with such differences.

Individuals and groups 

Task 4.1 First meeting with a class

You walk into the room, and there in front of you is your new class.

1 What can you learn about a class at first glance?

2 How can you learn more about them and what they may be thinking about you?

3 What kind of relationship do you hope to achieve with them?

Commentary

At first glance, we can discover some basic facts, such as: the apparent age of learners, how many there’re, the male / female ratio, whether or not they have books, materials, pens, how they’re seated, whether they’re silent or talking or actively doing something, what they do in reaction to your presence.

Beyond this, we can gain a number of more intangible, intuitive impressions based on our interpretation of eye contact, body posture, comments overheard, etc. Do they know each other? 

Do they like each other? Are they happy and positive? Do they seem to be ready for a language lesson? Does their reaction feel challenging to me in a positive way or threatening in a negative way? 

Are the learners waiting for me to say or do something? Is there a ‘good buzz’ about the room? Of all these, teachers are often initially most concerned with their perception of what the learners think of them. 

‘Do they like me?’ and ‘What do they expect from me?’ seem to be fundamental issues for many teachers - and until they’ve been positively resolved, teachers often feel unable to work successfully. 

Meeting a class is an important moment. It involves meeting a number of people at once, and many initial impressions may be formed, by both teachers and students, in those first few seconds.

Task 4.2 I wanted them to love me

Here is Yvette - an experienced teacher - talking about what she used to worry about when she first met a class. Do you relate to her feelings at all?

‘When I started teaching, I seemed to spend a lot of my time worrying about whether the class liked me or not - well, I could almost say I was desperate they should love me. 

I felt as if I couldn’t do anything unless they’re on my side, as it were. I think this got me spending too much time trying to entertain the class - which led to some funny lessons and we all had a good laugh - but I’m not sure they got what they really need from me. 

I think nowadays I still want to have a good relationship with my students, but  somehow I’ve come to terms with the fact whatever I do, some people probably won’t adore me or what I do. 

This sort of sets me free to worry about the lessons and the students and what they’re learning - more than working too much about my own feelings.’

Task 4.3 Changes in class mood

List some possible factors which may explain a change in class mood from one teacher to the next.

Commentary

This is clearly a basic, essential question - and is probably more to do with teacher attitude than with the tasks, games, methodology, etc used. Students respond to the way you respond to them. 

If they find you unhelpful or not listening to them, then no amount of jolly games will put back the sparkle. Whatever you find when you enter class, remember part of what you see and understand’s related to what you yourself bring into the room, ie you often find what you expect to find. 

Teachers who go in thinking a group of students’ll be ‘keen’ or ‘motivated’ or ‘dull’ or ‘unhelpful’ may tend to find exactly what they look for.

Task 4.4 Group characteristics

1 Do groups have a character distinct from those of the individuals in it?

2 In what ways are people in a language class similar to each other?

3 How may a teacher’s description of a ‘homogenous group’ be a simplification?

Commentary

Groups do have characters and moods. Scrivener’s certain you’ve heard fellow teachers in a staff room saying things like, Oh, they’re a lovely group or The group seems to have gelled or They’re so open - happy to do anything. 

Of course, you may also hear negative interpretations of group character as well: It’s like stirring mud in there today or They’re very negative.

It’s interesting to notice how different teachers may evoke a markedly different response form the same group. Such variation can be particularly noticeable on training courses when maybe two or three teachers teach the same class, one after the other. 

You can sometimes watch the class has only been active and engaged ‘close down’ when a new teacher starts - speaking less and looking down all the time as if some switch had been turned off inside them.

It’s tempting for a teacher (or a school) to view a class as a fairly homogenous group with a single ‘level’ and similar behavior, preferences, interests and ways of working. 

The individuals in a class may have a number of things in common with each other. Some may be friends with others; they may come from the same geographical district or work in the same place. 

The one thing everyone has in common is they’re in a language-learning class (though of course they may not have chosen to be there). 

Often these peopler’s in the same room at the same time with strangers only due to they having been placed there by the school. 

Beyond any common features, there’ll be significant differences between people; it’s not only age or level which differs in learners - they may also have different (4 rows of reasons given, a few provided):

reasons for needing English

personalities and ways of relating to and working with other people, etc

ability to remember things

sensory preferences

jobs, home lives, health, friendships, etc

Fig. 4.1 Individual differences

Motivation

Many learners have strong external reasons why they want to study (to get an exam pass, to enter uni, to get a promotion, to please their parents, etc). This is often called external motivation. 

Others may be studying only for rewards within the work itself (the fun of learning, setting oneself a personal challenge, etc), often referred to as internal motivation. 

In either case, the strength of their motivation will be a factor in determining how seriously they approach the work, how much time they set aside for it, how hard they push themselves, etc. 

You may see this reflected in things such as how often homework’s done, how thoroughly new items are revised between classes, how ‘tuned in’ students are during lesson times. 

A frequent cause of difficulties within classes is when there’s a significant mismatch of motivation levels amongst the course participants, eg some students who desperately need to pass an exam next month alongside others who want a relaxed chance to chat and play games in their new language.

Multiple intelligences

The traditional idea of humans having a single, unified ‘intelligence’ may be rather limiting. People could have seven ‘intelligences’ (maybe more!) is what’s suggested:

1 linguistic

2 visual

3 musical

4 logical / mathematical

5 bodily / feeling

6 interpersonal (contact with other people)

7 intrapersonal (understanding oneself)

It’s suggested we probably all have these 7 intelligences but in different proportions. So one person may be strong in musical and bodily intelligence, and others a different couple. 

Traditional education systems may have tended to focus on some intelligences over others, esp on language and logical intelligences.

Sensory preferences

Writers in the field of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) have noted humans tend to have different sensory preferences, ie some people respond best to hearing things (auditory), others to seeing them (visual), while others learn best when they can touch and feel tangible, physical objects (kinaesthetic). 

When planning classes, you may naturally bias lesson ideas towards your own sensory preferences, so it’s worth remembering to ensure, over time, there’s a range of working modes appealing to visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners.

Task 4.5 Working with individual differences

What implications does the list of individual differences above have for the teacher? Here’re three different teachers’ views. As a generalisation, do you feel more in common with Gyorgy, Tibor or Edit?

Gyorgy - “You can’t really take all these individual differences into account. The important thing is to ‘teach the class’.”

Tibor - “I teach very little to the class as a whole - but my class has lots of individual tasks and small-group work. I think the class’s always a set of private lessons - as many as there’re individuals.”

Edit - “You can adapt class lessons to respond to many individual needs and differences within the group.”

Commentary

There’s no right answer, but classes certainly seem to have their own character 0 one often surprisingly different from the sum total of individuals in it. 

Many teachers (like Gyorgy) pitch their lessons at the perceived character, level, needs and likes of a generalist feeling of this group identity. 

They may not be concerned with any individual differences and feel their primary task’s to work with the class ‘as a whole’, maybe using a supplied syllabus or course book and interpreting their job as aiming ‘to cover’ the required material in a certain period of time.

Such teachers may be responsive to some kinds of feedback form the class as a whole, mainly tending to pick up on whether the majority of students are keeping up or not and perhaps providing extra practice if they aren’t or less if they are. 

They expect and accept some of what’s done will be unsuitable or uninteresting or impossible to follow for some members of the class, but they feel this is ‘the price to pay’. 

Esp with large classes, the priority seems to be to maintain the sense of progress and to hope as many people can keep up as possible. 

Such an approach may be problematic, as there’s a danger in ‘teaching’ without close reference to the individuals are doing (or not doing) the learning.

Tibor takes the opposite position - the whole-class lessons generally won’t work due to the variety of people in a class. If he can pull it off, such an individualized approach would probably be a very valuable class to be a part of.

Many other teachers may find his goal of trying to respond to the range of different individuals in a room quite demanding for a teacher, requiring a greater quantity of planning beforehand and, in class, perhaps a constant moving around with some careful listening and focused individual help. 

Edit’s solution’s to compromise position involving working with the class as a whole while attempting to also take individuals into account. 

Teachers such as Edit may aim to teach the class by pitching the lessons to what they perceive as the majority of the group, but ‘keeping in touch’ with the others - by asking questions, adding extra comments and explanations, offering special tasks for some students, dividing the class to work on different things at some points, choosing topics which appeal to different groups of learners, designing tasks which appeal to different learning styles and preferences, etc.

Edit’s position is one of the classic balancing acts of teaching - to maximize working at every individual’s level, fulfilling as many wishes and needs as possible while also keeping the entire group engaged.

How can we pull off this balancing act? There’re no easy answers, but it probably involves a combo of gathering useful feedback from learners (find ‘feedback from learners’) and using your intuition (see CH3).

It’s hard to know how best to work with individuals if you know nothing at all about them. However, even to find out a little basic info (say even about one tenth of the items in the ‘individual differences’ list above) for each person in our class may seem an overwhelming, unrealistic, unachievable task.

It may still take the whole school year to do this, and even if we did know the answers for the entire list, there may seem to be no way we could effectively apply this knowledge.

However, many impossible things turn out to be all right when Scrivener tries them! Despite the apparently daunting nature of the task, it’s still worth a go - as even learning one new thing about a learner can dramatically affect future classes, and the more Scrivener manages to find out, the better tuned his lessons become. 

If you’d like to quiz your students about their difference, try using the Questionnaire for learners resource on the dvd.

What level are my students?

Task 4.6 Organizing students into levels

1 What’s your school’s structure of class levels?

2 Do you know of any other ways of organizing students into classes?

 Common level structures in schools

Many schools divide learners into classes at named language levels, often using course books labelled for those levels. A common structure is:

↑ Advanced

↑ Upper intermediate

↑ Intermediate

↑ Pre-intermediate

↑ Elementary

↑ Beginner

Each of these levels may be subdivided, eg into Intermediate 1, Intermediate 2, etc. Schools often plan progress on an assumption it’ll take the average learner a certain period of time to move from one level to the next, eg 45-60 hours of class time (plus homework) to move through a third of one of the named levels.

Only to add to the confusion, an hour may mean different things in different places: for ex., a period of 45-50 minutes is referred to as an hour in many countries.

There’re other level systems you may come across. An influential one from the Council of Europe categories learners as follows (with approximate indications of their correlation with the earlier level scheme):

C2 Mastery (= Nearly native-speaker level)

C1 Operational proficiency (= Advanced)

B2 Vantage (= Upper intermediate / Post-intermediate)

B1 Threshold (= Intermediate)

A2 Waystage (= Pre-intermediate)

A1 Breakthrough (= Beginner / Elementary)

Other educational institutions may structure class levels around exams which students take, naming classes after the exam they’re preparing for, eg using the Cambridge ESOL exam suite of KET, PET, FCE, CAE, CPE, etc.

IELTS is another important exam, often taken by people who want to go to another country for employment or to study. 

However, unlike the earlier exams it aims to test a broad range of levels - so a learner who’s in an IELTS prep class may be anywhere between Intermediate and Adv’d.

Whereas, with adults, class make-up is typically organized on the basis of their perceived language level, in children’s courses classes are more often based on students’ ages.

Of course, all of these concepts of level are quite broadly painted. We now need to look more closely at the idea of ‘level’.

Task 4.7 Mixed-level classes

1 Have you ever said This class is very mixed level? What are some of the causes of mixed-level classes?

2 Do students in your school automatically move up from level to level at the end of a period of time? What problems can this cause?

Commentary

It’s tempting to see all learners in one class as at a certain named level, eg Pre-intermediate. Yet teachers often come out of class complaining the students seem to be very mixed in level, and they may blame teachers who designed the placement tests or the school policy of class creation. 

The most common reasons are:

Grouping by age: In secondary schools, students are often grouped by age, and this seems very likely to lead to problems if some learners are significantly stronger or weaker than others.

Keeping groups together: A typical problem in many schools is caused by the fact it’s often less troublesome for school admin to keep learners together as a class, course after course, rather than to keep separating them and mixing them up, due to learners progressing at different speeds, meaning, even if a group’s similar in level at the start of a course, there may be different ‘exit levels’ at the end.

If this class now continues en masse to the next course level, the differences between participants will become more and more pronounced.

Placement testing: procedures are another cause of ‘mixed-level’ problems. Placement by language level sounds sensible, but even this can be problematic, due to an overall ‘level’ only gives a very general idea as to how good someone will be at, say, listening to a uni lecture or how much vocab they can use. 

Placement testers sometimes give priority to friendship or personal requirements rather than level when creating classes.

Insufficient levels: Learners may be together in the same class due to the school doesn’t have sufficient levels to fine-tune the classes more.

‘What level is the class?’

When Scrivener hears a teacher asking about the level of a class, he’s reminded of the question ‘How long is the coastline of Britain?’, to which the answer is ‘It depends how long your ruler is.’ 

The more closely and carefully you measure, the more complex the answer becomes. So, concerning level, how close are you looking? 

If you look from a kilometer away, maybe seeing the class as a group of people when we can’t make out any of the individuals, then calling a class ‘Pre-intermediate’ can make sense - it’s a useful general classification gives a reasonable overall picture of what they may know and what they may be able to do.

It suggests material we can  use and activities we can plan, and will probably allow us to teach (and survive) at least until we have a more accurate picture to guide us.

However, as soon as we move in a bit closer, say, to stand a few meters away from them, we notice this group of people’s made up of some very different - looking individuals.

If we check the overall abilities of each person, we find some are ‘weak Pre-intermediate’, some ‘mid-Pre-intermediate’ and some ‘strong Pre-intermediate’. 

Maybe there’re even some people who seem to belong to another level classification, say ‘Elementary’ or ‘Intermediate’.

If we move in even closer and stand next to one of these people (and talk to her), we may find out even more. 

We may discover this person’s general ‘level’ masks the fact she has a range of levels over the different language systems and skills, eg perhaps her knowledge of grammar’s very good, her vocab is a little weaker and her speaking and listening are very much poorer.

We could look even closer than this, of course, and find the specific kinds of tasks she is competent in or weak in, eg she can fill in an application form, but uses an inappropriate style for writing a formal letter requesting info.

General idea of General idea of Individuals’ levels Individuals’

overall class level individuals’ levels levels in various levels over

systems and skills specific tasks

→ → → → →

Closer

Fig. 4.2 Level: how close are you standing?

Conclusions about level

What conclusions can we draw?

Every learner has an individual range of levels.

Every class’s a mixed-level class.

When we plan lessons, we need to remember we’re plannings something may not be appropriate for some and may be easy or difficult for others, etc, which is why the planning’s only one part of structuring a lesson. 

In the act of teaching, we need to constantly notice and respond to feedback in order to adjust and redirect work moment by moment to make it as effective for each individual as possible.

Learners and their needs

Learners have distinct, individual reasons for being in a class and learning English - even when these aren’t consciously known or recognized. We can teach better if we know more about these.

Task 4.8 Ways to find out about learners’ needs

What are some practical ways we could find out useful data about learners’ needs for learning a langauge?

Commentary

The various tools, procedures and materials used for finding out about learner needs usually come under the heading of ‘Needs Analysis’. 

Often a Needs Analysis includes not only info about why learners may need language in the future, but also info about:

• where learners are starting from: their present language level, current problems;

• what learners would like to learn (which may be different form what they need);

• how they want to study it (people have very different preferences about how they learn things).

We may use formal gathering procedures (eg setting questionnaires or tests) or approach it more informally (eg gleaning info from chats and activities over a period of time).

Some key tools would be:

• writing: the learner writes comments, info, answers to questions, etc;

• speaking: the learner speaks with you or with other students;

• observing: you observe the learner at work (in class or at the workplace).

If we expand on those general headings, we can generate ideas for creating a variety of Needs Analyses (NB you’re likely to want to combine a few ideas, rather than use one exclusively).

Needs Analysis

Writing 

The learners are asked to:

• fill in a questionnaire (eg about their work, interests, previous study);

• choose the best answer from a selection (eg ‘I like doing written work for homework’,’I like to do reading for homework’, ‘I like to go over classwork for homework’, ‘I don’t like homework’);

• gap-fill (or complete) sentences (eg ‘In class, I particularly enjoy working on…’);

• delete the things which aren’t true for you (eg ‘I never / sometimes / often have to write in English’);

• take a language test;

• tick the picture / diagrams which represent their use of English (eg pictures of office telephoning, greeting customers);

• write a paragraph about topics set by teacher (eg ‘You successes and difficulties with speaking English’);

• write a letter / an email / a note to your teacher (eg ‘Your hopes for this course’);

• write a homework essay about what you want to learn and why.

Speaking

You can:

• interview learners individually or in pairs;

• plan activities to focus learners on specific issues, leading to discussion’

• ask learners to select (and reject) items from a menu or a set of cards, discussing their reasons with each other;

• ask informally for advice about what’d be useful to work on next lesson;

• collect oral (or written) feedback comments (eg about usefulness of work you’re doing) at the end of lessons;

• show the intended coursebook for the course and discuss it together with the class (eg Shall we use it? How? How much? Pace? etc.);

• get learners to help plan the course, the week or the next lesson;

• organize a social even at which informal discussions on needs arise;

• ask learners to describe / draw / make a model of their workplace or a diagram of their company structure, etc.

Observation

You can:

• set the students tasks to do in class which’ll allow you to observe them working, speaking and using language. This’ll give you a chance to diagnose their language / skills problems and discover more about what they need;

• if you  have a one-to-one student, it may be possible to observe him at his workplace and get a realistic idea of what he needs to do with English;

• ask each learner to bring in samples of material they work with (or expect to work with in the future): leaflets, letters, tasks, professional magazines, etc.

NB If the learners’ language level’s low, many of the Needs Analysis ideas could be used in their mother tongue. 

Or here’s a quick answer, copy the Needs Analysis cards or the Needs Analysis questionnaire resources on the dvd to help you find out more about your learners.

Task 4.9 Using data from a Needs Analysis

You’ve done a Needs Analysis with your learners, using a few of the ideas from the list above. You’re hoping the data’ll be useful to you, but you’re also aware Needs Analyses can be problematic.

1 Think of some reasons why the info you’ve obtained may be unhelpful or even untrue.

2 If the info is useful, what could you do with it now you’ve got it?

Commentary

Needs Analyses aren’t always as useful as teachers hope they may be. This may be due to learners (for some reason) haven’t taken their task seriously enough and have produced little info, or info they’ve not thought very carefully about, or even untrue info. 

This suggests it’s essential to carefully intro a Needs Analysis task so learners understand the importance and value of what they’re doing and take an appropriate amount of time to complete it.

One useful purpose in doing a Needs Analysis (even if you entirely ignore the resulting data!) is to allow learners to discover other people in the room have different views, expectations and needs than themselves.

It’s natural a student may imagine everyone in class has approx. similar ideas to his own; to discover the breadth of different views can be an important ‘light-bulb’ moment, and thus a Needs Analysis can be a vital awareness-raising activity, quite apart from any data which comes out of it.

‘But, teacher - you know best’

Students may find the concept and practice of Needs Analysis difficult. They may greet it with comments such as You are the teacher - you know best or You decide. I trust you. 

This may be due to the learner genuinely not knowing what he wants or needs, or it may be due to not being bothered or doesn’t think it’s a student’s job to think about things like this.

Many students may’ve spent their whole educational career being told what to do all the time, constantly presented with work which’s included minimal elements of choice.

They may never have stopped to realize what they learn and how they do it involves their own personal choice, and it’s their own time and energy they’re investing. 

It may be a real surprise to be asked what they want or need, and not surprisingly they may need a clear explanation as to the purpose of it - and guidance as to how to start thinking about and conveying their ideas.

Humans don’t necessarily think first and then write down their ideas. Often Scrivener doesn’t know what he thinks about something until he starts writing his ideas down; then finds during the process of writing his thoughts are becoming clearer and more structured. 

Maybe then he has to cross out the first two paragraphs, but needs to write them to get him to paragraph 3 (which’s a cracker!). 

Your students may find the same thing happens to them when they start to wonder what their needs are. 

The process of writing (or talking) about things helps to give some form to thoughts which maybe didn’t exist in any clarity until then. 

(Scrivener often finds himself saying something like the content of this paragraph to suspicious learners; it sometimes helps!)

You may still come across the 100% abdicating student - one who gives up the right to make any decision about his own future. 

It’s worth pointing out to such student they’re crediting Scrivener, the teacher, with magical, wizard-like ‘mind-reading’ abilities. 

The teacher’s response will probably be to state, yes, I do know something about language and teaching, but I’m not an expert on them and has no insight into the inside of their head, their past life and learning, and their preferences or future plans.

Scrivener hopes - by means of explaining why it’s important - to encourage this learner to realize ‘learning’ is not another product one buys ready-made off the shelf, but is something has to be adjusted and remade every time. It’s a ‘living’ thing, not a piece of dead meat. 

Scrivener doesn’t always manage to persuade every learner, but it’s worth trying! Curiously, the hard-line abdicator is often the very same student who complains at the end of the courses, saying how unsuitable and useless the course was, and how the teacher knows nothing about what students needs.

Other problems with Needs Analyses

Other problems with Needs Analyses may arise when the learners haven’t themselves chosen to do the course (eg due to the students have to attend secondary school or due to a course having been chosen and paid for by an employee’s company). 

Of course, in these circumstances, a Needs Analysis may serve an additional purpose: encouraging the course participants to start taking ownership of their course, making choices about what they want or need (rather than assuming everything’s already been decided and is cut and dried).

When people feel they’ve some power or responsibility over what happens to them, it can really change their attitude to it. 

Of course, with any Needs Analysis, there may be a danger which, in asking people what they want or hope for, you may lead them to expect everything they ask for will happen.

Having said this, Scrivener guesses it’s much better to find out rather than to pretend the differences don’t exist.

What can you do with the data?

Anyway, let’s assume the info you get is true and useful. There’re still potential problems. What can you do with it? 

Maybe you consider the learners’ wishes are inappropriate or not realistic or not possible, or the range of needs stated are too wide-ranging within the group. 

What are the options for making use of this data?

Task 4.10 Balancing course plans and needs

Imagine a situation where you’re a class teacher and you’ve already devised (or been presented with) a course plan before the course starts. 

How could you let the data obtained from a Needs Analysis influence or change this plan?

Commentary

This largely depends on your own attitude as a teacher: how much do you want the course plan to be changed? Do you’ve the time or resources to take up all the ideas? 

There’re a range of possibilities, some of which are listed below in an approx. order from taking least account of the data to taking most account.

Least Take no account of the Needs Analysis data. Continue with the course as if the data hadn’t 

   ↓ been collected.

   ↓

   ↓ Review the data, but decide your original course plan’s likely to achieve something very

   ↓ close to the desired outcomes, so continue using the original plan.

   ↓

   ↓ Continue with the course as before, but allow the data to influence small aspects of how

   ↓ you help or deal with individuals in class.

   ↓

   ↓ Continue with the course as before but add in a limited number of extra activities, lessons 

   ↓ or variations to satisfy some stated needs or for certain individuals to do for homework (or 

   ↓ in class).

   ↓

   ↓ Replan the course, much as before, but aiming to cover the material in faster time (or drop

   ↓ elements) in order to add in a larger number of extra activities or lessons to satisfy some

   ↓ stated needs.

   ↓

   ↓ Replan the course to incorporate substantial elements of the needs alongside relevant

   ↓ elements from the original plan.

   ↓

   ↓ Put the original course plan to one side and base a new course plan entirely.

Most

Of course, your original Needs Analysis may itself have incorporate an element in which learners themselves helped replan the course, in which case, your best option’s probably to try using this!

The options towards the top of the list will probably seem to be (initially, at least) less troublesome to you. 

In many cases, you’ll consider it simpler and more straightforward to teach directly form a ready-made course plan or a course book with only minimal or no reference to learner needs, and it’s quite possible a satisfactory course will ensue, achieving the intended aims for a number of learners, but although there’s this chance of success, this type of course is also likely to produce learner feedback at the end along the lines of ‘It’s OK, but it wasn’t really what I wanted.’

You’ll only be able to offer learners what they really want or need if you find out what this is (even if they don’t think they know what this is themselves) and by doing coursework which directly addresses this.

This isn’t to say addressing needs won’t be tricky - it may mean seeking out new materials, varying cherished routines and activities, finding ways to satisfy apparently conflicting wishes of different people, etc - but, it the long run, learners will probably notice and appreciate the way the course is addressing what they need, rather than simply offering up some ‘off-the-peg’ solution.

Getting feedback from learners

Teaching’s primarily an act of alert ‘tuning in’. By this, Scrivener means the more you’re able to understand the group, the more successful the lesson is likely to be.

The classroom you create

Many teachers operate their lessons as if the class were a machine into which raw materials can be fed and which, when used with certain techniques, will produce predictable outputs. 

This can lead to classes which move forward through a course book or syllabus, but may not lead to much learning which’s significant or useful for many of the individuals in the class. 

It’s at this level many teachers operate on a  day by day basis. Materials and techniques on their own are sufficient to run a course in a superficially successful way, but although authorities may be satisfied at recordable data (pages turned, books finished, syllabus covered, exams passed, etc), the learning has been achieved may be largely illusory. 

It’s all too easy to spend one’s entire teaching career in this kind of teaching and never to risk the breakthrough through the invisible ceiling into another kind of class, where you approach the class as a living being rather than as a machine. 

It’s this second kind of class which this book encourages you towards.

In observing lessons, it often seems to me the least successful teachers are those who:

• work at right angles to the class (ie they don’t notice and take into account the needs and wishes of the learners, but work to their own priorities and in their own choice of ways);

• create a physical and psychological distance between learners and teacher;

• don’t pick up (sometimes subtle) signals from learners about what they think, what they want;

• don’t elicit feedback about opinions on course, content, methods, working styles, etc.;

• don’t deviate from their own plan / agenda;

• keep up their own ‘radio babble’ (ie a constant stream of space-filling, though often low-quality, talk) to block out the incoming signals from the class;

• find time-filling activities (such as writing at length on the board) to save them from having to communicate more with learners.

Ineffective, unhelpful teaching’s teaching which proceeds forward (perhaps according to a plan, according to what you wanted to do, according to what the books says, according to a syllabus, according to whatever) without reference to what impact this is having on the learners in class.

The essential engine of a richer, more productive learning environment’s communication, two way feedback from learners to teachers and vice versa.

You could now use Observation Task 6 on the dvd to examine the teacher’s role in the learning environment.

Why’s it hard to tune in?

When you start teaching, it’s hard to think very much about anyone other than yourself. If you’re anything like Scrivener was, you may have a tape recorder of worries echoing in your head, even more so if you’re being observed. 

When he watched new trainee teachers in the class, he often noticed how they’ve so many concerns about their own actions and words as a teacher they find it very hard to tune in to the other people in the room. 

These are a few of the worries you may feel: 

• I hope I don’t say anything silly.

• What on earth can I do next?

• Do they like me?

• This activity only lasted 3 minutes, and I thought it’d last 45.

• This is lasting forever, and I thought it’d take 3 minutes.

• I feel so confused.

• I don’t really understand this thing I’m teaching.

• Is the observer going to catch me out? What’s she writing?

• This activity’s so boring.

Finding a way to turn off this internal noise and start listening to the genuine voice of feedback from outside is often a difficult, slowly acquired but important teaching skill. 

In gaining feedback info from learners, we learn to adjust and fine-tune our intuitive responses.

Avoiding feedback

Many teachers never ask for feedback from learners. Some teacher ask for feedback occasionally, often in a way which elicits what they want to hear. 

Some teachers get feedback which they allow to affect and alter what they’re doing. Teachers may avoid feedback due to fear of hearing comments about their work.

The more they avoid it, the more dangerous it becomes, due to ungiven feedback piling up like floodwater behind a dam. 

When they do request feedback, it can be mostly token, to feel as if they’ve done some feedback and found out what they wanted to hear.

(A few ex’s provided,10 listed)

Teacher’s internal monologue:

“I hope if they have any problems, they’re only small ones.”

“I want to hear confirmation I’m doing a good job.”

“I will want to explain and defend comments made about me.”

“I want to collect a quantity of useful info.”

“What will I do if they ask for things I can’t provide?”

Of course there may be many reasons why learners don’t give useful, honest feedback.

(A few ex’s provided, 8 listed)

Student’s thoughts:

“Whatever I say won’t many any difference.”

“Doesn’t she know what we need? (If not, why not? It’s her job!)”

“Surely she must have noticed how I feel.”

“She’ll take it out on me if I criticize anything.”

Feedback’s probably only really useful when the channels are open all the time, which suggests a different way of working from many traditional teaching situations - and a different relationship. 

Can you imagine a course in which the students genuinely direct or influence or affect the program on a consistent basis and with positive outcomes? How could this come about?

Getting useful feedback - some starting points

• Don’t think of feedback as a once a term thing or only as a formal requirement from your school. Visualize it as moment by moment need to find out whether you and the class are on track.

• Clearly you can overdo it - you don’t want the class to groan at being asked How useful was this activity? again and again - but don’t let this worry prevent you from even starting to explore their reactions and responses.

• Whether you go for oral or written feedback, vary it. Don’t turn it into a ritual.

• Some common feedback opportunities: feedback at the start of a lesson, at the end of a lesson, at the end of a week, at the start of a new course book unit, at the end of a unit, before the class does an activity, after an activity, as the core topic of an activity, written at home.

• Ask students write you a letter about the course. Specify exactly what you’d like them to discuss, or leave it open for students to raise any issues they want to.

• Set aside some time, ask open questions which enable them to say what they want to say, and gear yourself simply to listen and learn (rather than to defend yourself, argue or contradict). Ask them what they really think. If your intention is only to hear nice things, then this is probably all you’ll get.

Doing feedback of any sort may be difficult for you the first time, but the end result of increased honesty, openness and mutual respect’ll almost certainly have a great long-term benefit, the more so if you implement changes in yourself, the class or the course which are responses to the feedback.

Learner training 

For me, learner training means raising student awareness about how they’re learning and, as a result, helping them to find more effective ways of working, so they can continue working efficiently and usefully, even when away from their teacher and the class’. 

More simply, it means ‘working on teaching learning as well as teaching English’.

Learner training, therefore, includes:

• work on study skills, eg use of dictionaries (dics), reference material, workbooks, notebooks, filed material;

• student examination of the process of learning and reflection on what’s happening, eg of teaching strategies you use (and the reasons why you use them).

In both cases, it seems important to include these as strands throughout a course.

Three ideas to start learner training

1 Integrate study-skills work - Include study-skills work as an integrated feature of your lessons, eg when working on vocab, include a short exercise which involves efficiently looking up info in a dic. 

Similarly, when the students have found some new words to learn, you could make them aware of the variety of ways of recording vocab in their notebooks (see CH8).

2 Let them into the secret - Teachers sometimes prefer the surprise approach to teaching methodology; often students don’t really know why they followed a particular procedure or did a particular activity. 

Teachers often assume their own reasoning will be transparently obvious to their students, but it rarely is. So it can be very useful to tell students before a lesson what’s going to happen and why. 

At the end of the lesson, you can review not only the content, but also the way it was studied. For ex., after a listening skills lesson, talk through the procedure with the students: 

Why did I set a task first? Was it necessary to understand every word? What did we do next? What helped you learn? What didn’t help?

In this way, they’ll also be learning a methodology which they can repeat for their own use when they listen to audio recordings at home or in a language lab.

3 Discuss process as well as content and procedure - The content of your lessons is the English language. 

The procedures are your methodology (which, as Scrivener suggested above, is worth talking about with students). The third area’s process. 

By this, Scrivener means the lesson as viewed from the learners point of view. You’re doing certain things as a teacher, but what’s going on for each individual student?

It can be very valuable to set aside time in class simply to discuss the subject of learning on this course in order to recall what’s happening and reflect on it. 

This process review will allow you and the learners to clarify what’s happening. Simply talking about what’s going on seems to have a very beneficial effect, quite apart from any new ideas or solutions which arise from it.

You could now use Observation Task 7 on the dvd to examine a lesson from a learner’s pov.

I’ll be cutting this off here, since there's more pictures I’d have to edit in.

This text definitely continued where my previous CELTA suggested reading left off and helped give more detail in the same and more concepts.