A Course in

English
Language
Teaching
Third Edition
Penny Ur

Consultant and editor:

Scott Thornbury

Published online by Cambridge University Press

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 Contents

Acknowledgementsviii
Introduction1
1 Teaching English today 3
1.1 EPIC: English for purposes of international communication  3
1.2 EPIC: some implications for teaching  7
1.3 Second language acquisition (SLA) and
English-teaching approaches and methods 9
1.4 Standards of proficiency  11
1.5 Online English teaching 12
2 The lesson15
2.1 The lesson: different perspectives 15
2.2 Functions of the teacher in the English
language lesson 17
2.3 Classroom organization  18
2.4 Lesson planning 21
2.5 Written lesson plans  24
3 Classroom interaction27
3.1 Teacher-led interaction  27
3.2 Group and pair work  33
3.3 Individual work  36
3.4 Varied interactions  38
4 Tasks41
4.1 The language-learning task 41
4.2 Task evaluation  42
4.3 Organizing tasks  46
4.4 Interest  47
4.5 Homework  50

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 Contents

5 Texts54
5.1 What is a text?  54
5.2 Teaching the text: the goals  55
5.3 Comprehension of content  58
5.4 Language learning from a text  62
5.5 The text as discourse  65
5.6 Follow-up tasks  68
6 Teaching vocabulary71
6.1 What is vocabulary?  71
6.2 What students need to learn  71
6.3 How best to teach vocabulary: some facts and figures  75
6.4 Presenting new vocabulary: selection and presentation  77
6.5 Vocabulary review  81
7 Teaching grammar85
7.1 What is grammar?  85
7.2 What students need to learn: standards of
grammatical acceptability 85
7.3 How best to teach grammar 87
7.4 Presenting grammar: explanations  88
7.5 Grammar practice exercises  91
8 Teaching listening99
8.1 Some basic features of listening comprehension  99
8.2 Listening activity design 1: the text  100
8.3 Listening activity design 2: the task 104
8.4 Types of activities 109
9 Teaching speaking113
9.1 Goals and problems in teaching speaking  113
9.2 Speaking activity design: some basic features  115
9.3 Getting them to speak: from beginner to advanced 117
9.4 Presentations  122
9.5 Pronunciation 124

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10 Teaching reading128
10.1 How do we read?  128
10.2 Beginning reading 1: phonemic awareness  131
10.3 Beginning reading 2: learning the letters  132
10.4 Beginning reading 3: reading tasks  134
10.5 Fluent reading  137
10.6 Extensive reading  142
11 Teaching writing146
11.1 What is writing?  146
11.2 Beginning writing: the letters  148
11.3 Tasks that promote fluent writing  151
11.4 Process writing  155
11.5 Spelling and punctuation  159
12 Feedback and error correction163
12.1 Error correction: some basic issues 163
12.2 Learner preferences: whether and how students
like to be corrected 167
12.3 Oral correction 169
12.4 Written correction  171
13 Assessment and testing176
13.1 Functions and types of assessment  176
13.2 Assessment tools 177
13.3 Giving a grade  179
13.4 Test design 1: testing accuracy  182
13.5 Test design 2: testing comprehension and fluency  188
13.6 Administering tests in class  192
14 The syllabus195
14.1 What is a syllabus?  195
14.2 Types of language syllabus  196
14.3 The CEFR and language syllabuses  199
14.4 Using the syllabus  200

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15 Teaching/learning materials204
15.1 The coursebook: approach, components, presentation 204
15.2 How necessary is a coursebook?  206
15.3 Evaluating the coursebook  208
15.4 Using course materials  211
15.5 Other materials and resources  216
16 Teaching content221
16.1 Different kinds of content  221
16.2 Cultural content  223
16.3 Teaching subject matter through English: CLIL and EMI  225
16.4 Literature as a component of the English course  228
16.5 Underlying messages  230
17 Classroom discipline234
17.1 What is classroom discipline?  234
17.2 What teachers can do to create a disciplined classroom  236
17.3 Dealing with discipline problems  239
18 Digital technology and online teaching245
18.1 Digital literacies  245
18.2 The place of digital technology in the classroom 249
18.3 Teaching different aspects of language using
digital technology  251
18.4 Teaching online  256
19 Learner differences 1: age262
19.1 Differences between younger and older learners  262
19.2 Teaching young learners  265
19.3 Teaching adolescents  269
19.4 Teaching adults  273
20 Learner differences 2: diversity and inclusion277
20.1 Diversity in groups of learners  277
20.2 Problems and advantages 279
20.3 Practical principles  281
20.4 Teaching high and low achievers  287

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21 Teacher development290
21.1 The first year of teaching  290
21.2 Lesson observation 291
21.3 Ongoing development  295
21.4 Development through reading and further study  298
21.5 Further development  300
Glossary305
References310
Index320

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 Acknowledgements
I should like to thank all those who have contributed in their different ways to the new
edition of A Course in English Language Teaching.
To the commissioning editors at Cambridge University Press, Karen Momber and Jo
Timerick who first came up with the idea of a third edition, and have supported its writing
all the way through to publication.
To Scott Thornbury, who agreed to look over my shoulder as I was writing, providing
essential input in the form of suggested updates, amendments, additions, deletions, and
generally constructive criticism.
To Alison Sharpe, my meticulous content editor, whose eagle eye has led to the
elimination of inappropriate content or wording, and got me to express what I wanted to
say more clearly and succinctly.
To the in-house team at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, responsible for
proofreading, permissions, design, indexing and more.
Finally, to all those from whom I have learned over the years: students, colleagues, ELT
lecturers and writers, critics, researchers: I could not have begun to write the first edition
of this book, let alone a second and third, without the knowledge and insights I have
gained from them.
Penny Ur
The authors and publishers acknowledge the following sources of copyright material
and are grateful for the permissions granted. While every effort has been made, it has
not always been possible to identify the sources of all the material used, or to trace
all copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice, we will be happy to
include the appropriate acknowledgements on reprinting and in the next update to
the digital edition, as applicable.
Key: C = Chapter.
Text
C5: Poem adapted from ‘The Purist’ by Ogden Nash. Copyright © 1938 by Ogden Nash,
renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd and Welbeck Publishing Group
Ltd; C13: Rubrics taken from ‘B2 Cambridge English First Handbook for teachers for
exams’. Copyright © 2015 Cambridge English Language Assessment. Reproduced with
kind permission; C17: Text adapted from Classroom discipline, Oranim School of Education,
unpublished research project by Sarah Reinhorn-Lurie. Copyright © 1992 Sarah Reinhorn-
Lurie. Reproduced with kind permission; C18: Text adapted from ‘Digital literacies’ by
Mark Pegrum, Nicky Hockly, Gavin Dudeney. Copyright © 2022 Taylor and Francis Group,
LLC. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of lnforma
plc via the Copyright Clearance Centre.
Illustration
QBS Learning
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Typesetting by QBS Learning
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 Introduction

The first edition of this book, entitled A Course in Language Teaching, was published in
1996, and updated to A Course in English Language Teaching in the 2012 second edition.
This third edition includes much of the content of the previous one, but has been
extensively rewritten and updated, taking into account recent research and thinking in
the field and developments in digital technology, as well as changes in my own thinking.
It retains, however, the same basic rationale underlying the first two editions: that good
teaching is that which results in significant learning outcomes. A good teacher is not
necessarily someone who is charismatic, or memorable, or loved, or who uses the latest
teaching methods. A good teacher is defined first and foremost by results: first, how well
their students learn the subject being taught, and second, how motivated they are to learn
and continue learning.
The main criterion for my choice of methods or procedures recommended in this book,
therefore, is how likely they are, as far as I can judge, to lead to good language learning
outcomes and motivation, rather than whether they accord with a particular currently
fashionable approach or method.
The book is appropriate for the needs of students in a teacher-preparation course, or for
novice teachers in their first year(s) of teaching. It can be used, therefore, as the basis for a
trainer-led course, or as a self-study text. Its goal is to equip the beginner teacher with the
knowledge and skills needed to perform competently in the classroom: to plan and run
interesting and learning-rich lessons, use texts and tasks effectively, and more.
Each chapter is framed by introductory and concluding summaries of content. The
introductory Overview gives brief descriptions of the topic(s) treated in each section of
the chapter; the concluding Review: Check yourself consists of a list of questions which
may be used to help recall of the content of the chapter, and/or to test understanding.
Following the review there are annotated suggestions for Further reading, and a
References list, which provides details of publications mentioned in the course of
the chapter.

Chapter content
The main sections within each chapter provide:
• Evidence-based information on the theory and practice of English language teaching;
• Practical guidelines on how to teach the different aspects of the language in a variety
of contexts;
• Samples of classroom procedures or teaching strategies;
• ‘Pause for thought’: Reflection and discussion tasks with following commentary.

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 Introduction

Organization of content
The chapters may be studied in the order in which they are laid out in the book, or in a
different order, or selectively, according to the preferences of the user.
1 The English language and how it may be taught/learned
1 Teaching English today

2 Basic processes and components used in English language teaching

2 The lesson; 3 Classroom interaction; 4 Tasks; 5 Texts

3 Language components and skills

6 Teaching vocabulary; 7 Teaching grammar; 8 Teaching listening;
9 Teaching speaking; 10 Teaching reading; 11 Teaching writing

4 Response to learner performance

12 Feedback and error correction; 13 Assessment and testing

5 Resources for organization of course content

14 The syllabus; 15 Teaching/learning materials; 16 Teaching content

6 Specific pedagogical issues

17 Classroom discipline; 18 Digital technology and online teaching; 19 Learner
differences 1: age; 20 Learner differences 2: diversity and inclusion

7 Continuing professional development

21 Teacher development

8 Endmatter
A Glossary of terminology and abbreviations used in the book
A cumulative list of References
A comprehensive Index

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 1 Teaching English today

Overview

1.1 EPIC: English for purposes of international communication. The variety

of English usually taught: that which is likely to be understood and used
internationally, including different modes, registers and domains of use;
English for specific purposes.
1.2 EPIC: Some implications for teaching. The teacher’s knowledge of English;
language and culture; the place of the first language (L1) in the teaching/
learning process.
1.3 Second language acquisition (SLA) and English-teaching approaches
and methods. A brief overview of SLA theories; twentieth-century approaches
and methods; the communicative approach and associated methods.
1.4 Standards of proficiency. The Common European Framework of Reference
(CEFR) descriptors of levels of language proficiency.
1.5 Online English teaching. A brief discussion of the rapid increase in online
teaching resulting largely from the ban on face-to-face teaching during the
COVID pandemic.

1.1 EPIC: English for purposes of international communication

Perhaps the most dramatic development that has taken place in the field of English
language teaching in my lifetime has been the shift in its primary function: from
being mainly the language of nations such as the UK or USA or an intra-national
means of communication in countries that were formerly colonies of English-speaking
countries, such as India or the Philippines, to being mainly a means of international
communication. English today is primarily used worldwide in a variety of spheres of
activity: professional or business interactions, study and research, travel and tourism,
entertainment, personal relationships, and more. The number of speakers of English
whose first language (L1) is another language already vastly exceeds that of those whose
L1 is English, and the gap will only widen in the foreseeable future. For most of its
learners, English is therefore no longer a foreign language (i.e., one that is owned by a
particular ‘other’ nation or community) but first and foremost an international language:
one that has no particular national owner. This development has brought with it a
number of changes in the principles and practice of English language teaching.

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 1 | Teaching English today

Pause for thought

How many of the people you have spoken or written to in English recently spoke
the language as their L1, and how many were speakers of other languages, using
English as a means of communication?

Comment
The answer to this will depend of course on where you are living as you read this; but
unless you live in an English-speaking country, it is likely that most people you interact
with in English are bi- or multilingual speakers using it as an additional language.

There are several implications of this development.

The variety of English to be taught

A question which many teachers used to ask was: ‘Which English should I teach: British
or American?’ This is no longer a relevant question, unless the students are learning the
language specifically in order to study, work or live within one of the (American or British)
English-speaking communities. In the vast majority of situations, this is not so: English is
being taught instead for purposes of international communication.
An additional complication is the existence of multiple Englishes in the world. Some
varieties, such as British or American English, are the first languages of English-speaking
communities; in other cases, English is the official language (or one of the official
languages) of a multilingual country such as India; elsewhere it may be learned, but
has no official status (as in mainland European countries or Latin America). These are
the three contexts famously defined by Kachru as the ‘three circles’ of world Englishes
(Kachru, 1985). In any of these, the language may develop its own specific forms or
meanings: in pronunciation (for example, the pronunciation of the word my as /mɑ:/ in
Black English); in vocabulary (the words lakh and crore in Indian English); or in grammar
(the use of ain’t for isn’t, aren’t and am not in some American and British spoken varieties).
Some would suggest that we need, therefore, to teach a flexible model of the language,
allowing for different varieties. This is not, however, a very practical option. Teaching
different varieties of pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary or grammar is, first of all, very
time-consuming. Second, many of these are not very useful: it is not likely that students
will in fact encounter them, still less need to use them.
We cannot avoid the conclusion that there has to be a standard basic variety of English
variously termed English as a global language, English as an international language (EIL) and
English as a lingua franca, whose forms, meaning and uses can be understood and produced
by speakers of English engaged in communication worldwide for purposes such as those
listed above (McArthur, 2006). I shall refer to this variety as EPIC: English for purposes
of international communication. EPIC forms and usages, I would suggest, need to be
related to as standard by teachers and learners. This is not because they are those used by
speakers of English as their L1, but because they are the ones used by the vast majority of

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English speakers who employ the language for various purposes in international contexts,
regardless of what their first language is, or was.
This does not mean, of course, that we should ban from the classroom variant forms such as
ain’t: but it does mean that such forms do not need to be part of the basic language features
we teach our students to use, but rather only taught if we encounter them incidentally in a
text or task. In such cases, we need to make it clear to students that these are features that
they may come across, but should not normally be part of their own speech or writing.
Our choice of language features to teach will be based on the criterion: is this likely to be
clearly understood and seen as acceptable worldwide? For example, it is better to teach two
weeks than fortnight, as many English speakers would not understand fortnight. It is useful
to encourage, or at least allow, students to pronounce the /r/ in words like girl, teacher, as
this pronunciation is probably more widely used, easier to understand and corresponds
more closely with the written form. And it is likely to be more useful to teach the spelling
organize1 than organise – again for reasons of clarity, frequency and general acceptability.

Pause for thought

Of the following pairs of items, which do you think we should prioritize in teaching for
EPIC (i.e., are more likely to be understood and used by English speakers worldwide)?
fall or autumn
truck or lorry
do you have or have you got
program or programme
elevator or lift

Comment
Many would respond: ‘Can’t we teach both?’ Yes, of course you can, and more
advanced learners will eventually learn both, as they encounter more varied types
of input. But it’s useful to know which is more likely to be familiar to an international
audience; and if you are teaching a class of beginners or elementary learners
(A1–A2), it’s best to teach the more widely used form first. Why overload them with
unnecessary synonyms? You can always add the other later. My choices would be:
autumn (fall is only used in informal American English, and is potentially ambiguous;
autumn is used worldwide); truck (far more used worldwide than the British English
word lorry); do you have (again, more widely used; have you got is mainly confined
to British English, and even there only in informal interaction; and it can’t readily be
used in the future or past); program (more common worldwide, and why use a
longer spelling when a shorter will do?); elevator (understood worldwide, whereas

1
It is interesting that the suffix -ize in words like organize, recognize, though often thought of as a feature of
American English, has always been the default spelling in the Oxford English Dictionary.

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 1 | Teaching English today

lift is confined to British English, and possibly ambiguous). A useful and easy-to-use
online tool that will help you decide which of two or more items is most common
is the Google NGram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams), based on a
corpus of published books. If you enter items with a comma between them, you will
be shown the relative frequencies over time of the two items.

Different language modes, registers and domains

We need to be aware that even within EPIC, there are different kinds of language use. The
most obvious is the mode: speech or writing. In speech, students need to learn not only
the grammar and vocabulary of the language, but also how these are expressed through
pronunciation, stress, intonation and so on. In writing, they need to know how to form
the letters, spell, punctuate and more.
Then there are differences between formality levels, or registers, which only partially
overlap with the distinctions between speech and writing. Informal language is likely to
be used in conversations or texting; formal language in essay-writing or academic lectures.
A parallel distinction between the kind of language knowledge needed for each has been
defined by Cummins (2008) as BICS and CALP: Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills,
as contrasted with Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency.
Finally, there are the different kinds of language that are likely to be used depending on
the subject matter, or domain, that is the subject of the discourse. This, of course, can vary
from lesson to lesson, or even within lessons; but increasingly we find entire courses that
are dedicated to teaching a particular subject, academic field, or profession, as discussed in
the following section.

English for Specific Purposes

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of courses that teach English for Specific
Purposes (ESP). Perhaps the two types of ESP most in demand are Business English (BE),
and English for Academic Purposes (EAP).
More and more businesses are going international, opening branches in different countries
or performing transactions with companies abroad, and requiring easy and fluent
communication between branches and between individual employees. Some businesses run
their own English courses; others send employees to language schools that specialize in this
area. The number of coursebooks specifically targeting BE, or ‘English in the workplace’, is
huge and increasing daily.
EAP is at least equally in demand: a large number of students every year travel abroad
to study or register for international online courses. Even if the institutions of higher
education that they attend are not located in an English-speaking country, many teach
specific courses, or even complete programmes, in English, and therefore demand a
knowledge of that language to at least B2 level. EAP courses may be divided into two
types: those that teach general academic English; and those that teach specific discipline-
oriented English (mainly vocabulary). Some important work has been done in drawing
up lists of vocabulary items that could be the basis of a general academic lexical syllabus

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(Coxhead, 2000; Gardner and Davies, 2014; Deng et al., 2017). It can be argued that
the vocabulary and grammar necessary to understand or produce academic papers or
lectures in general academic English is very similar in practice to advanced general
English (B2–C1) needed for a variety of non-academic contexts. This, however, is not
true of specific discipline-oriented English; and it is in this area that we have seen a rapid
expansion in courses and publication of materials.
Other types of non-academic ESP courses include those oriented towards particular
professions or occupations: English for tourism, for example, or English for nursing. But in
all these areas, learners need first to raise their general proficiency in English to at least a
B1 level before starting to learn the domain-specific vocabulary.

1.2 EPIC: some implications for teaching

The teacher’s knowledge of English

The majority of English teachers today have as their L1 a language other than English.
They learned English, like their students, as an additional language. The English spoken
by such teachers, if they are (as they should be!) fully competent and fluent in the language,
is likely to be a better model of international English for their students than any variety of
English perceived as ‘native’. In addition, they have been through the same learning process
as their students, and therefore have insights into the kinds of problems that are likely to
come up and how to deal with them. Finally, they can function as role models: ‘If I can do
it, so can you!’
This is not to say that L1 English-speaker teachers cannot be effective teachers. Many
teach successfully in schools in non-English speaking countries of the world: this is,
indeed, my own professional background and that of many of my colleagues. L1 English
speakers are particularly in demand, obviously, in situations where the language is taught
as a preparation for study or work in an English-speaking country.
The bottom line is that in the majority of teaching situations, it doesn’t matter very much
what language the teachers originally spoke as their L1. What matters is that they have a
high-level mastery of English – usually EPIC – and know how to teach it.

Language and culture

In most English-teaching contexts, it is inappropriate to talk about a ‘target’ culture,
meaning one belonging to a nation of L1 English speakers. Learners of EPIC need to become
aware of a diverse, international set of cultural customs, social conventions, literature, art
forms and so on, rather than those of a single community. It is, therefore, important these
days to foster multicultural awareness on the part of our students. We cannot, obviously,
teach them all the cultures of the world. However, we can expose them to samples through
our materials, make them sensitive to the kinds of cultural differences that they may come
across, raise awareness of characteristics of their own home culture that other people
may find strange or difficult to cope with, and foster the ability to recognize and respond
appropriately to different cultural conventions: what is known as intercultural communicative
competence (Byram and Wagner, 2018).

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 1 | Teaching English today

Pause for thought

Can you think of an example of how your own culture differs from that of another
speech community? Has this difference ever produced difficulties or embarrassments
which, with hindsight, you could have avoided if you had known about it?

Comment
When I first came to my country, I used to go straight into the ‘business of the day’
when meeting someone or starting a phone call, like: ‘Hi, do you know …?’ I should
have started with ‘Good morning’ or similar courteous preliminaries, and was even
reprimanded on one occasion for my ‘rudeness’.

The place of the first language (L1)

For most learners today English is a tool, like basic arithmetic, literacy or computer skills:
an ability they need to master in order to function effectively in the modern world. They
do not need to be like L1 English speakers; they need to be bi- or multilingual: what Cook
(1999) has called multicompetent language users. The L1 remains the learner’s primary, and
usually dominant, language. What we as teachers are aiming for is to enable our students to
function in English side by side with their L1. If we discourage or even ban the L1 from the
classroom, we risk implying that it is in some way irrelevant, inferior, or to be marginalized.
In most instructional situations, moreover, the L1 is likely to play a valuable role in the
acquisition of English. Translation – at least at word or sentence level – is a useful ability in itself,
as well as a facilitator of learning, to be promoted rather than discouraged. Clearly if most of
the English lesson is in fact conducted in another language, then the students will not learn
very much English; but to ban the L1 completely from the classroom may result in negative
implications as to the value of the first language, and neglect of valuable learning opportunities.

Pause for thought

Thinking back to your own school lessons in English or another additional

language: do you think the teacher used the L1 enough? Not enough? Too much?

Comment
I was taught French in school by very traditional methods, with a lot of translation,
and most of the lesson was in English: definitely too much. It wasn’t until I went
to stay with a family in France for a while that I was exposed to an enormous
amount of comprehensible input in that language and learned to communicate
(relatively) fluently.

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1.3 Second language acquisition (SLA) and English-teaching approaches

and methods
An approach can be defined as a principled model of language teaching/learning, based
on theories of language and language acquisition. A method is a collection of teaching
procedures that accord with and apply a particular approach. A wide variety of approaches
and methods have been used for language teaching in the last century, often based on
research or thinking on second language acquisition.

Second language acquisition (SLA) research and theory

The importance of SLA research and theory lies in its contribution to an understanding
of how languages are best learned; such insights may in turn contribute to the design of
effective language-teaching approaches and methods.
Early SLA work focused mainly on the acquisition of grammar. Behaviourists believed
that language is a set of habits, and that grammatical patterns are therefore acquired by a
process of habit-formation. According to the linguist Noam Chomsky (1969), on the other
hand, humans have an inbuilt language acquisition device which enables them to acquire
basic awareness of the grammatical structures of a language, from which they can invent
an infinite number of actual sentences. Both behavourist and Chomskian theories were
assumed to apply both to first and second language learning.
With hindsight, neither of the above viewpoints have been very influential in SLA theory.
Behaviourism has been largely discredited as being too simplistic, and unable to account
for language creativity, and the Chomskian language acquisition device is too vague to
provide a useful model of acquisition.
The issue of how the language will best be learned within instructional settings – in a course
of lessons rather than through total immersion in a naturalistic immigrant situation – has in
recent years focused on a key controversy relating to implicit and explicit processes. Implicit
processes take place where the language is learned through exposure and use, as we acquired
our L1; explicit ones occur when the learner pays conscious attention to the learning of
the features and rules of the target language. On the whole, current research is in favour
of explicit teaching/learning in the context of instructional settings (e.g., Akakura, 2012),
while not, of course, denying the value of the inclusion of implicit processes as well. One
example of an explicit teaching/learning model is that based on skill theory, which claims
that language is learnt in the same way as other skills like playing a musical instrument or
driving a car: features are explained by the teacher (the ‘declarative’ stage), then practised
(the ‘proceduralization’ stage) until their use becomes automatized (DeKeyser, 2007).
While not necessarily accepting a linear skill-theory based process, other thinkers have
also included conscious cognitive processes in theories of SLA: Richard Schmidt (1990), for
example, claims that there is no such thing as ‘subliminal’ absorption of language features,
and that these must be consciously noticed in order for learning to take place. All this is not
to deny that implicit processes – learning incidentally through reading and listening – do
not have an important role in language learning within instructional settings, particularly
with younger learners. For an overview of these and other SLA issues, see Ellis (2021).

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Language-teaching approaches and methods in the twentieth century

The dominant approach for much of the twentieth century (and, indeed, before it) was
that language is composed of grammar, vocabulary, phonology and orthography, and
that effective language teaching should aim to enable learners to understand and produce
correct combinations of these components. The traditional grammar translation method,
for example, dominant until the mid-twentieth century, involved a lot of grammar
rules, reading and writing exercises, and translation. It is still used today in some places.
Audiolingualism, popular in the 1950s to the late 1960s, was based on an approach that
saw the language primarily as a set of grammatical patterns, and learning as primarily
behavioristic habit-forming: hence teaching should be based on drilling and getting
students to automatize grammatical patterns through mimicry and memorization. The
direct method, introduced in the late nineteenth century, prioritizes the oral skills, and
lessons are conducted entirely in the target language; it is in use in Berlitz schools to this
day. And there were various other minor ‘boutique’ methods briefly fashionable in the
second half of the twentieth century (for a more detailed summary, see Richards and
Rodgers under Further Reading below).

The communicative approach

The methods summarized above, however, have been largely superseded by those based
on, or fundamentally influenced by, the communicative approach, which has dominated the
scene from the 1980s. According to this approach, language is seen essentially as a means
of communication, and language learning should therefore be based on the gradual
acquisition of language forms and uses through meaningful, communicative activity, in
rather the same way as children acquire their first language. Classroom procedures should
thus prioritize the understanding and conveying of meanings over the production of
correct sentences (Widdowson, 1978). Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis (1981) posits that
comprehensible input (of either spoken or written language) at a level just beyond the
present level of the learner is a necessary and sufficient condition for language acquisition
to take place. This, however, has been controversial: Swain (2005), for example, claims
that there is an essential place for what she calls ‘pushed output’ in instructed language
learning; and as discussed above, there is today general acceptance of the value of explicit
language-teaching and -learning processes within instructional settings.
Task-based instruction, or task-based language teaching (TBLT), is perhaps the most well-
known (though not necessarily the most used in practice) of the methods based on the
communicative approach, and is widely promoted in the professional literature today
(Ellis et al., 2019). In TBLT, learners are required to perform tasks whose goals can only be
achieved through communicating or understanding content expressed in English. Such
tasks frequently involve interaction between students in pair and group work. Most models
of TBLT today include some explicit language teaching components through a procedure
called focus on form: attention is temporarily drawn to formal aspects of a language feature
which has come up in the course of a communicative task or text, or in which students
have made errors (Ellis, 2015).

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A noticeable trend in English teaching linked to the communicative approach is content-

based learning: the increasing use of English as a medium to teach other subjects. This
is usually called CLIL (content and language-based learning) where it refers to its use
in schools, or EMI (English as a medium of instruction), in the context of university
programmes. It is very demanding of the teacher, since it requires both knowledge of the
subject content and how to teach it, and a high level of English – as well as awareness of
effective language-teaching procedures.
My impression is that the choice of which method, or combination of methods, is used
in any particular classroom is likely to be primarily based on the culture of learning of any
particular student and teacher population (Cortazzi and Jin, 1999): their traditions and
expectations as to what effective language teaching should look like. Only secondarily
will it be influenced by methods currently promoted in the professional literature or in
teacher conferences. Sometimes current trends will fit the local culture of learning well;
sometimes not. In most places, the result is a compromise between the traditional and the
new: grammar explanations and practice, for example, side by side with communicative
discussion tasks and comprehensible input in the form of extensive reading.

Pause for thought

Think of a course in a foreign or second language – not necessarily English – that

you are familiar with, either as teacher or as student. Does it correspond with any
of the approaches and methods described above? Or is it a mixture? If you are
working in a group, compare the different courses described by participants. Can
you draw any general conclusions about a predominant trend (at least in the
experience of your group members)? Or are there very wide differences?

Comment
It helps a lot to understand the rather abstract models presented above if you can
identify how, or if, they are implemented in teaching/learning situations you have
experienced yourself. When I started teaching, for example, the textbooks I had to
use were largely composed of a series of drills, as well as dialogues students had
to learn by heart and recite. Only later did I realize that this was in fact a systematic
implementation of the audio-lingual approach, as presented in Wilga Rivers’ book
Teaching Foreign Language Skills (1980).

1.4 Standards of proficiency

In most places today in the world, target standards of language acquisition and the
definition of the different levels of proficiency in the learning of any language are defined
by the Common European Framework for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2020).
The CEFR defines levels not in terms of specific language exponents, but in terms of
what the learner ‘can do’ at any particular level, based mainly on reception (listening

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and reading) activities and strategies, production (speaking and writing) activities and
strategies, and interaction in all four skills. A fourth category, mediation, relates to the
ability of the learner to mediate messages between modalities, styles or languages for the
benefit of others.
CEFR levels are defined as Pre-A1, A1, A2 (beginner and elementary levels); B1 and B2
(intermediate and upper-intermediate); C1 and C2 (advanced and academic). Some of
these levels – particularly B1 and B2 – have been criticized as being rather too broad to
provide easily definable levels for purposes of assessment, selection or materials design.
A narrower set of codes for English has been suggested by Pearson: the Global Scale of
English (GSE), which provides a score range of 10 to 90, with a scale showing how this
corresponds to CEFR levels.
(www.pearson.com/english/about-us/global-scale-of-english.html)

1.5 Online English teaching

A discussion of ‘teaching English today’ would not be complete without a mention of the
trend towards the teaching of English through distance learning using videoconferencing
tools such as Zoom. This was already becoming popular, particularly in higher education,
during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, but its use increased dramatically
as a result of the COVID pandemic of 2020–2022. During this time, there were long
periods when the gathering of groups face-to-face was banned in most countries, and
therefore the only option for teaching-learning was through videoconferencing. Tools
and materials were developed, and teacher expertise in the use of online teaching
strategies increased. Even after the end of the pandemic, and the possibility of a return
to conventional face-to-face classrooms, it is clear that online teaching continues to be
used far more than it was before, and continues to develop. Models have developed more
recently of blended learning (where some lessons are online and some face-to-face) and
hybrid learning, where some of the students in a lesson are physically present and others
participate through computer links.

Review: Check yourself

1 Why should we teach EPIC (English for purposes of international

communication) rather than American or British English?
2 What are some advantages of the bi- or multilingual English teacher?
3 Why is L1 use more acceptable today as a component of instructed
English teaching?
4 How many different twentieth-century methods can you remember and describe?
5 What is the rationale underlying the communicative approach, and what
method is mainly associated with it?
6 What are the different levels of proficiency defined by the CEFR?

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Further reading
Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence.
Multilingual Matters.
(A clear presentation of what intercultural communicative competence involves and
how to teach it)
Ellis, R. (2021). A short history of SLA: Where have we come from and where are we
going? Language Teaching, 54(2), 190–205.
(A summary of some of the main issues in second language acquisition research
and thinking)
Howatt, A. P. R. and Widdowson, H. G. (2004). A History of ELT (2nd Edition). Oxford
University Press.
(A historical survey of trends in English language teaching approaches and
methods)
Littlewood, W. (2014). Communication-oriented language teaching: Where are we now?
Where do we go from here? Language Teaching, 47, 349–362.
(An interesting discussion of the development of the communicative approach(es)
in the early twenty-first century)
Richards, J. C. and Rodgers, T. S. (2001). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching.
Cambridge University Press.
(A comprehensive and critical guide to the different methodologies and their
underlying theory)
Rubdy, R. and Saraceni, M. (2006). English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles.
Continuum.
(A collection of articles on various aspects of the use of English as an international
language)

References
Akakura, M. (2012). Evaluating the effectiveness of explicit instruction on implicit and
explicit L2 knowledge. Language Teaching Research, 16(1), 9–7.
Byram, M. and Wagner, M. (2018). Making a difference: Language teaching for
intercultural and international dialogue. Foreign Language Annals, 51(1), 140–151.
Chomsky, N. (1969). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.
Cook, V. (1999). Going beyond the native speaker in language teaching. TESOL
Quarterly, 33(2), 185–209.
Cortazzi, M. and Jin, L. (1999). Cultural mirrors: Materials and methods in the EFL
Classroom, in Hinkel, E. (Ed.) Culture in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Cambridge
University Press, pp. 196–219.

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 1 | Teaching English today

Council of Europe (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages:

Learning, Teaching, Assessment, Companion Volume. COUNCIL OF EUROPE.
https://rm.coe.int/common-european-framework-of-reference-for-languages-learning-
teaching/16809ea0d4
Coxhead, A. (2000). A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213–228.
Cummins, J. (2008). BICS and CALP: Empirical and theoretical status of the
distinction. Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2(2), 71–83.
DeKeyser, R. (2007). Introduction: Situating the concept of practice. In DeKeyser, R.
(Ed.), Practice in a Second Language: Perspectives from Applied Linguistics and Cognitive
Psychology (pp. 1–18). Cambridge University Press.
Deng, T. N. Y., Coxhead, A. and Webb, S. (2017). The Academic Spoken Word
List. Language Learning, 67(4), 959–997.
Ellis, R. (2015). The importance of focus on form in communicative language teaching.
Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 1–12.
Ellis, R. (2021). A short history of SLA: Where have we come from and where are we
going? Language Teaching, 54(2), 190–205.
Ellis, R., Skehan, P., Li, S., Shintani, N. and Lambert, C. (2019). Task-Based Language
Teaching: Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press.
Gardner, D. and Davies, M. (2014). A New Academic Vocabulary List. Applied
Linguistics, 35(3), 305–327.
Kachru, B. (1985). Standards, codification, and sociolinguistic realism: The English
language in the outer circle. In Quirk, R. and Widdowson H. G. (Eds.): English in the World:
Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures (pp. 11–30). Cambridge University Press.
Krashen, S. D. (1981). Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Pergamon
Press Inc.
McArthur, T. (2006). World English and World Englishes. In Bolton, K., and Kachru, B. B.
(Eds.) World Englishes: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (pp. 89–124). Taylor and Francis.
Rivers, W. (1980). Teaching Foreign Language Skills. University of Chicago Press.
Schmidt, R. W. (1990). The Role of Consciousness in Second Language Learning. Applied
Linguistics, 11(2), 129–158.
Swain, M. (2005). The Output Hypothesis: Theory and Research. In Hinkel, E.
(Ed.) Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 495–508).
Routledge.
Widdowson, H. G. (1978). Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford University Press.

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 2 The lesson

Overview

2.1 The lesson: different perspectives. A general definition of ‘the lesson’

followed by a discussion of some different ways of looking at it.
2.2 Functions of the teacher in the English language lesson. The varied roles a
teacher may play during a lesson.
2.3 Classroom organization. Different patterns of classroom organization during
a lesson.
2.4 Lesson planning. Guidance on lesson components and their combination in
a varied and balanced lesson plan; some practical tips.
2.5 Written lesson plans. The importance of written lesson plans and
suggested format.

2.1 The lesson: different perspectives

The lesson is a type of organized goal-oriented social event that occurs in most, if not
all, cultures. And although lessons in different places may vary in topic, atmosphere,
methodology and materials, they all have several basic elements in common:
• Their main objective is learning;
• They are attended by a predetermined population of learner(s) and teacher(s);
• They are held at a preset time and place (except for asynchronous online lessons:
see 18 Digital technology and online teaching).
There are additional aspects of a lesson which may be less obvious. It is useful to consider
these through the medium of metaphor, as suggested in Pause for thought below.

Pause for thought

Which of the following metaphors captures the essence of a lesson, in your

opinion? You can choose more than one, or invent a new one of your own.
climbing a mountain consulting a doctor a conversation eating a meal
a football game a menu a television show a wedding
Optionally, discuss your choices with a partner, and your reasons for them. Then
read on.

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Comment
It is interesting that in any given group of people, there will be a wide variety
of different selections, because of the different ways individuals interpret reality
(see 20 Learner differences 2: diversity and inclusion). The main aspects of a
lesson which are foregrounded in the different interpretations are the following:
Cooperative interaction. This is most obvious in the metaphor of conversation, but
is also represented by the wedding, the television show and, in perhaps a rather
different way, the football game. The focus here is on the dynamic relationship among
students, or between students and teacher. A lesson essentially involves cooperative
social interaction, and should promote the participation of all members of the class.
Goal-oriented effort, involving hard work. Here, climbing a mountain might be
an appropriate metaphor, or perhaps a football game. This image suggests the
existence of a clear, worthwhile objective, the necessity of effort to attain it and
a resulting sense of satisfaction and triumph if it is achieved, or of failure and
disappointment if it is not.
An interesting or enjoyable experience. Enjoyment may be based on interest
and entertainment (television show), challenge and fun (football game), or the
satisfaction of a need or desire (eating a meal). The main point is that participants
should enjoy it and therefore be motivated to attend while it is going on – and to
come back for more!
Preset roles. The role of the teacher typically involves responsibility and activity,
and that of the students, responsiveness and receptivity (though of course in
specific procedures the roles may temporarily be reversed). The consultation
with a doctor, or the wedding, would represent a role-based culture of this kind.
Participants in such events know and accept in advance the demands that will
be made on them and their expected behaviours.
A social event with elements of ritual. Examples here would be a wedding or a
television show. Certain set behaviours occur every time: for example, there may
be a certain kind of introduction or ending, certain pre-determined exchanges
or sequences, and the components of the overall event may be selected from a
limited set of possibilities.
A series of free choices. Occasionally, it may happen that participants are free to
do their own thing within a set of choices (a menu) or a relatively loose structure
(a conversation). They construct the event as it progresses, by making their own
decisions. The teacher is less of an authority figure than a facilitator, participating
with the students in the teaching/learning process.
Each of the interpretations described above – and you may well have discovered
others – represents one aspect of the whole picture. It is helpful in your planning
and teaching of specific lessons if you are aware of these different possible
perspectives: a lesson is not just a type of interaction, for example, or a goal-oriented
process, or a ritual social event. It is all of these, and more.

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2.2 Functions of the teacher in the English language lesson

During the latter part of the twentieth century, there was a strong reaction against the
old-fashioned image of the teacher as ‘master/mistress’ and lecturer. As a result, teachers
have been encouraged to see themselves mainly as supporting learning rather than causing
it, as facilitators who help students acquire knowledge or skills, rather than ‘tellers’ who
teach facts. There is a general condemnation of the ‘mug and jug’ model (the student as
empty mug and the teacher as a jug pouring information into it) and of teacher talk in
general, with a preference for eliciting ideas from students, rather than instructing them.
In principle, of course, most teachers would like to see themselves as supportive rather
than dictatorial, and to encourage learner independence and autonomy. A strong
emphasis on student initiative and responsibility, however, can sometimes interfere
with learning, particularly in language courses. Language is composed of a collection of
arbitrary sounds, vocabulary and conventions of grammar and syntax: there is no way
the students can discover these without substantial exposure to information and/or an
instructor. If substantial exposure is not available – and sometimes even when it is – the
teacher needs to be proactive in order to enable students to learn. Effective language
teaching, therefore, needs to be based on a substantial amount of teacher-initiated
instruction, as well as student-centred activation.

Pause for thought

How many different kinds of functions does the English teacher have during a
lesson? Make a list, and then compare it with the list below. You’ve probably used
different terminology, but will have some similar items. Check to see what your list
has left out – or added.

Comment
The list you make, and the order in which you list the functions, will clearly be
based on your own learning experiences, as well as your beliefs about how a
teacher should function. In any case, the teacher fulfils a number of different roles
during any lesson: I’ve seen lists that run to 30 or 40 different possibilities! My own is
shorter, but still very varied.

Teacher functions
Instructor. The teacher, together with the teaching materials, provides information about
the language: its sounds, letters, words, grammar and communicative use. The most
essential teaching skills here are the ability to provide clear explanations and appropriate
samples of spoken and written language.
Activator. Getting the students to use English themselves is essential for acquisition to
take place. ‘Using English’ does not necessarily mean getting them to speak or write; it may
involve only listening or reading. So the teacher needs to provide tasks that activate the

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students and get them to do something that involves engaging with the forms, meanings
and uses of the language.
Model. The teacher represents the prototype of the English speaker for the students during
a lesson. It is the teacher’s accent, writing and language usages that the students will
use as their immediate model. So at least some of the lesson time needs to be devoted to
providing such a model.
Manager. The management of classroom process includes activities such as bringing the
class together at the beginning of a lesson and organizing group work, as well as making
sure that individual members of the class are attending and responding appropriately.
This may be more, or less, difficult to do, depending on the class population (see
17 Classroom discipline).
Provider of feedback. The teacher provides feedback on student oral or written
production. Exactly when and how much corrective feedback to supply is a tricky issue
(see 12 Feedback and error correction), but it is, along with the provision of approval
and confirmation, an essential function. In order to progress, students need to know what
they are doing right or well, what they are doing not so well, and how they can improve.
Supporter. The teacher encourages students, helps them understand and produce
appropriate language, suggests learning strategies or resources that may be useful, and
encourages initiative. This not only improves learning and raises motivation, but also
encourages the students to become independent learners who will continue to progress
after and outside the lesson.
Assessor. Teachers occasionally have to spend some lesson time assessing students. This
might be formally, through graded classroom tests, or informally, through quick quizzes or
dictations or ongoing assessment. This is because, in any process, we need to know where
we are now in order to know where to go next, and assessment provides vital information
on students’ present level of proficiency (see 13 Assessment and testing).
Motivator The level of initial student motivation when they come to study English may
vary, but whether the language-learning process in the course of the lesson is interesting
and motivating or boring and demotivating is largely up to the teacher (for more on
interesting activity design, see 4 Tasks). Even students who are at first unwilling to
participate can be motivated to do so if they are given appropriate and stimulating tasks,
together with the teacher encouragement and support mentioned above.

2.3 Classroom organization

The lesson may include various kinds of classroom organization: teacher-fronted, full
class, collaboration between students in group work, or individual work. The types of
interaction involved in each will be explored in more detail in 3 Classroom interaction.
Teacher-fronted. The most common type of classroom organization is teacher-fronted.
This may be based on elicitation of responses through questioning (see 3 Classroom
interaction for more on this), which involves student responses. Or it may be ‘teacher
talk’ where there is no overt student response, only attentive listening. This might be

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based on things like explanation of a grammar point, presentation of vocabulary, telling a

story, or a lecture on a topic connected to the language.
Teacher talk is often condemned as being overly teacher-centred, and not allowing
sufficient opportunities for students to be active learners. There are even YouTube videos
advising language teachers how to cut down on their ‘TTT’ (teacher talk time) in lessons.
However, for many students, teacher talk is their only opportunity to get much-needed
live comprehensible oral input, addressed to them and adapted to their level; and teacher
explanations of language points are likely to be clearer and more effective alternatives to
written or recorded versions of the same. The important point is to use teacher talk where
it clearly fulfils an important function in promoting student learning, and to complement
it with student activation.
Whether based on elicitation or teacher talk, a teacher-fronted process is often what
is called lockstep: all the students are expected to do the same thing at the same
time, according to the teacher’s instructions or cues. But variations are possible: see
3 Classroom interaction and 20 Learner differences 2: diversity and inclusion.
Full-class. Full-class interactions are mainly in the form of oral discussions. The teacher
here acts only as a facilitator or catalyst, encouraging student contributions, but keeping
their own speech to a minimum. Sometimes the discussion may be supplemented by
writing: students may make notes of what is said, or either the students or the teacher
may record key points on the board, or using the chat facility in an online lesson.
Group and pair work. When a class is organized into pairs or groups (in an online lesson
this would be through the use of breakout rooms), the responsibility for learning activity
falls on the students themselves. There are two main types of such collaboration. The
first is when two or more students work on a task that could in fact have been done by
an individual: for example, when students are asked to do a grammar exercise, or write a
paragraph, together. What often happens in fact is that one of the pair or group does most
of the work, as there is no real necessity for collaboration in order to achieve the goal.
Better are group tasks which do require collaboration: recalling or brainstorming tasks, for
example, where a number of students working together will always find more and better
results than a single individual; or discussions, where the group has to reach a consensus;
or information-gap, where students find out things from each other.
Individual work. Individual work is likely to be done on reading and writing tasks.
All the class may be working on a single task, but – unlike the lockstep process referred
to earlier – individual work enables students to work at their own pace and sometimes
actually to make other choices relating to content (see 3 Classroom interaction and
20 Learner differences 2: diversity and inclusion). In an online lesson, this would be
‘time out’ from the online interaction, usually with a preset time limit. An important type
of individual work is homework (see 4 Tasks).
It is important for a lesson to include different types of classroom organization, and not to
be limited to teacher-fronted.

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Pause for thought

Look at the following teaching objectives, as expressed by the teacher,

and suggest which patterns of classroom organization might facilitate their
achievement most successfully. Then read on.
1 Comprehension check: ‘We’ve just finished reading a story. I want to make sure
the class has understood it, using the comprehension questions in the book.’
2 Familiarization with text: ‘We’ve just finished reading a story. I’m fairly sure
they’ve understood the basic plot, but I want them to get really familiar with the
text through reading, as they’re going to have to pass an exam on it.’
3 Oral fluency: ‘I have a small [15] class of businesspeople, who need more
practice in talking. I want them to do a discussion task where they have to
decide which qualities are most important for a manager.’
4 Grammar check: ‘We’ve been working on the distinction between two similar
verb constructions. I want to find out how far they’ve grasped it, using an exercise
in the book where they have to choose the right construction for the context.’
5 Writing: ‘They need to improve their writing. I want to ask them to write for a few
minutes in class, but am worried they might just make a lot of mistakes and not
learn anything.’
6 Grammar practice: ‘They need to practise asking questions. I thought of using
an interview situation where they might interview me or each other.’
7 New vocabulary: ‘I want to draw their attention to some new vocabulary we’ve
met in a text.’

Comment
There may, of course, be more than one way of achieving any particular objective:
having made your own selections, compare them with my own suggestions below.
1 Comprehension check. Usually this is done through teacher-led question-
answer sessions based on the textbook questions, but individual work is
probably more effective. In full-class questioning, only a minority of the class
answers: more students participate if you let all of them try to answer the
question individually in writing, while you move around the class to help and
monitor. You can always check their answers later by a quick full-class review or
by taking in notebooks.
2 Familiarization with text. It is probably best to use individual work here, in the
form of silent reading. Or, if the students have already read the text on their
own, it can be helpful to read it aloud yourself (teacher-led) while they follow, in
order to recycle it in a slightly different way. Another possibility is to ask different
students to study different sections of the story in depth, and then get together
to teach each other what they have studied (individual and group work).

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3 Oral fluency. Group work is best in this case, certainly much better than full-
class interaction. A class of 15 may seem small, but even so, dividing it into
five groups of three gives each participant, on average, five times as much
speaking practice (see 3 Classroom interaction). Even if some of the time is
spent speaking the students’ L1, they are likely to spend more time speaking
English than they would have done in a full-class discussion.
4 Grammar check. The teacher’s clear objective is to assess (‘I want to find
out how well they understand it’), though they do not actually use the word.
Therefore, as with the comprehension check, it would be best to use individual
work to ensure that each student has the chance to answer the questions.
Later, a teacher-led process can be used to check answers.
5 Writing. Initially, most writing is done individually, so it makes sense to start with
individual work. A collaborative stage can follow, as students help each other
improve, correct and polish their texts. Teacher monitoring can take place
during the writing, if there are not too many students in the class, or later.
6 Grammar practice. In order to make the interview produce as much practice
of questions as possible, it is a good idea to let students prepare at least
some of these in advance: individually, in pairs, or through full-class interaction
(brainstorming suggestions). Students may then interview the teacher or
each other.
7 New vocabulary. In general, the most efficient way to deal with new vocabulary
is just to present and explain it (teacher talk). If, however, you think that some of
your class know some of the items, ask them, and give them the opportunity to
teach them for you (closed- or open-ended teacher questioning).

2.4 Lesson planning

Most English lessons in schools are about 45 minutes long, though sometimes,
particularly where the students are adults, they may be as much as 90 minutes. For the
purposes of this chapter, I am assuming that the lesson takes between 45 and 60 minutes.

Components
A typical English lesson is likely to include a selection of the following components:
• reading of a written text, with associated comprehension tasks
• a listening comprehension activity
• an oral communicative task, such as discussion of a topic
• a writing task
• presentation and explanation of a grammatical point
• presentation and explanation of vocabulary

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• presentation and explanation of other linguistic features (e.g., pronunciation, spelling,

punctuation, aspects of language use)
• exercises on linguistic usages, such as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling
or punctuation
• silent reading (e.g., using simplified readers)
• review of homework
• preparation for a test
• a test

Pause for thought

Have a look at a unit from an English coursebook you are familiar with. Which of
the components listed above can you identify?

Comment
The last four items above are not, of course, normally included in a coursebook
unit. You are, however, likely to have found most of the others. Typically, a unit
will include substantial work on grammar and vocabulary, and tasks activating
students in all four skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing). Which of them
is emphasized more and which less will depend on the type of course and the
target student population. In a book for a CLIL course, for example, the focus is
likely to be on content-based reading or listening material; in a course focusing
on conversational English, there are more likely to be oral tasks and a lot of
vocabulary rather than grammar.

Variation
In a lesson which is entirely taken up with one kind of activity, interest is likely to flag.
Students will find it more difficult to concentrate and learn, and boredom may, in some
classes, result in discipline problems. A varied lesson is likely to produce better learning,
to be more engaging and enjoyable for both teacher and students, and to cater for a wider
range of learning styles (see 20 Learner differences 2: diversity and inclusion). It may
also prolong energy levels by providing regular refreshing changes in the type of mental
or physical activity demanded.
Lessons may vary in a number of ways:
• Tempo. Activities may be brisk and fast-moving (such as guessing games) or slower and
reflective (such as reading literature or writing brief compositions).
• Organization. The students may work individually, in pairs, in groups, or as a full class
interacting with the teacher, as described in the previous section.

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• Material. A lot of your lesson may be based on the coursebook, but it is good to spend
at least some of the time working on teacher- or student-initiated tasks or digital
materials (see 15 Teaching/learning materials).
• Mode and skill. Activities may be based on the written or the spoken language; and
within these, they may vary as to whether the students are asked to produce (speak,
write) or receive (listen, read).
• Difficulty. Activities may be easy and non-demanding, or difficult, requiring
concentration and effort.
• Topic. Both the language-teaching point and the (non-linguistic) topic may change
from one activity to another.
• Mood. Activities vary also in mood: light and fun-based versus serious and profound,
tense versus relaxed and so on.
• Stir-settle. Some activities enliven and excite students (such as controversial
discussions, or activities that involve physical movement). Others, like dictations, have
the effect of calming them down (Maclennan, 1987).
• Active-passive. Students may be activated in a way that encourages their own
initiative, or they may only be required to do as they are told.
Obviously, when planning a lesson, you cannot go through each of the items above
and check out your plan to make sure you are covering them all! But hopefully reading
through them will raise your general awareness of the various possibilities. Note that
lessons with younger learners should, on the whole, be made up of shorter and more
varied components than those planned for older ones. But even adults, in my experience,
dislike spending a whole period on the same task and appreciate a shift of focus and
activity type during the lesson.
All of this applies also to a sequence of lessons. Make sure you don’t get into a dull routine
of doing the same sort of thing every lesson, and that you cover, over time, a variety of
tasks, texts and materials.

Some practical tips on lesson-planning

1 Put the harder tasks earlier. On the whole, students are fresher and more energetic
earlier in the lesson and get progressively less so as it goes on, particularly if the
lesson is a long one. So it makes sense to put the tasks that demand more effort and
concentration earlier on (learning new material, or tackling a difficult text, for example)
and the lighter ones later.
2 Do quieter activities before lively ones. It can be quite difficult to calm down a
class – particularly of children or adolescents – who have been participating in a lively,
exciting activity. So if one of your lesson components is quiet and reflective, it is
generally better to plan it before a lively one, not after. The exception to this is when
you have a rather lethargic or tired class of adults. In such cases, ‘stirring’ activities
towards the beginning of the class can be refreshing and help students get into the
right frame of mind for learning

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3 Pull the class together at the beginning and end of the lesson. We usually start with
a general activity like greetings, attendance-taking and so on; but remember that it’s a
good idea to have some kind of rounding-off procedure at the end of the lesson as well
(see the next tip). So activities which tend to fragment the class – group or pair work,
or individual work on digital materials, for example – are best done in the middle of
the lesson, framed by full-class interaction before and after. Teachers of younger classes
often find that set rituals are useful for this: routine greetings and information about
the date and weather at the beginning, for example, songs and farewells at the end.
4 End on a positive note. This does not necessarily mean ending with a joke or a fun
activity. For some classes, it could be something quite serious, like a summary of what
we have achieved today, or a positive evaluation of something the class has done.
Another possibility is to give a short task which the class is very likely to succeed in
and which will generate feelings of satisfaction. The point is to have students leave the
classroom feeling good.
5 Don’t leave homework-giving to the end. Give homework in the course of the
lesson, and simply remind the students what it was at the end. If you leave it to the
end, then you may find that you don’t have enough time to explain it properly (see
the section on Homework in 4 Tasks). In any case, it is better to round off the lesson
with some kind of planned ending, as noted in tip 3 above.
6 Prepare a reserve. Have an extra activity ready to include if you find you have time
on your hands (see Ur and Wright (1992), for some ideas for short activities). Similarly,
note down in advance which components of your lesson you will cancel or postpone
if you are running late, or if you’ve added something unplanned which took up a lot
of time.

2.5 Written lesson plans

It’s important to write down in advance what you plan to do in the lesson – not just to
think about it and put a bookmark at the relevant page of the textbook! This is particularly
true for inexperienced teachers, but even many experienced ones – myself included –
prepare written plans for every lesson, though they vary a lot in how they format them.
The function of such plans is not, or not mainly, as instructions to be referred to constantly
during the lesson itself. In practice, I usually look through my lesson plan just before the
lesson begins, and then rarely need to glance at it while teaching, except to check specific
information like page numbers or vocabulary I want to cover. A more important reason
is that writing makes you think concretely and practically. It ensures that you haven’t
forgotten anything and that you have planned and ordered all the components and
materials appropriately. Knowing what is planned also contributes to your confidence
when entering the classroom: a confidence which communicates itself to the students.
Having a lesson plan does not, of course, mean that you can’t diverge from it. You may
want to add extra, unplanned activities, initiated by you or the students in the course of
the lesson and that you feel are valuable and worth adding. Alternatively, you may find as
the lesson proceeds that something you planned is unnecessary or inappropriate (or you

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 2 | The lesson

simply don’t have time for it), and you need to skip it. It’s a good idea, therefore, to glance
through your original lesson plan after the lesson, and note anything you omitted and
still want to cover, perhaps in the next lesson.

The lesson plan format

Each teacher has their own preferred layout for a lesson plan. However you display it, I
suggest you include the following information:
• How you will open the lesson
• A brief description of each component, in the order in which you want to use them
(noting any you may omit if you run out of time)
• The classroom organization (e.g., ‘group work’) you plan to use for each
• Page numbers of any coursebook feature you want to use
• Lists of any vocabulary you want to teach or review
• Homework (if planned)
• How you will close the lesson
• A reserve activity for inclusion if you have time.
You will also need to prepare, of course, any supplementary materials you are using:
copies of texts or other material for distribution; links to websites you intend to use;
pictures, texts or graphics for display, either digitally or on paper.

Pause for thought

If you are already teaching, have a look at a recent lesson plan of your own.
Does it include the components above? Does it also include the desired learning
outcomes (goals) of each component?

Comment
It’s important for the teacher to be aware of the learning goals of each lesson
component: there’s a tendency for some teachers to include activities simply
because they keep the students busy, or because they seem nice. This is why
novice teachers are often encouraged to write explicitly what the learning goal is
for each lesson component. More experienced teachers usually skip the explicit
writing of such goals, but can easily, if challenged, identify them. Occasionally, of
course, you may include activities that have goals other than language learning
as such: improving classroom climate or group solidarity, for example, or simply as
motivating time-fillers for a difficult class in a lesson at the end of the day. But even
in such cases, it’s important to be aware why you are doing them, whether or not
you actually write the aims into the lesson plan.

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Other uses for the lesson plan

In addition to using the written lesson plan to guide your own lesson, there are two
further major uses for it.
Share with the class. At the beginning of a lesson, many teachers like to write up on
the board the main ‘agenda’ – a shortened version of their lesson plan – so that the
students are also aware of what the lesson is to include and have a sense of structure
and achievement. In general, sharing your plans and objectives with the students can
contribute to a pleasant and cooperative relationship with the class, and this is one simple
and practical way of doing so. You can then tick off the components as you cover them.
Reflection. It’s useful to use your lesson plan later as a basis for reflection. By each
component, note briefly how it went, and then think about what you can learn for future
action from successes or failures or interesting developments.

Review: Check yourself

1 What are the key characteristics of a lesson (in any subject)?

2 How many different ways of perceiving the English language lesson can you
recall (for example, ‘cooperative interaction’)?
3 Can you recall at least five different functions of the teacher in the lesson?
4 Why is group work appropriate for practising oral fluency?
5 Why should a lesson include a variety of different components?
6 In what ways may these components be varied? Can you recall at least three?
7 Can you recall at least three practical tips about lesson planning?
8 Why is it important to write down your lesson plan?

Further reading
Harmer, J. (2015). The Practice of English Language Teaching (5th Edition). (pp. 214–224), Pearson.
(Further useful guidance on various aspects of lesson planning)
Woodward, T. (2001). Planning Lessons and Courses. Cambridge University Press.
(An extended treatment of various aspects of advance planning, both at lesson-
and at full-course level, with practical suggestions)

References
Maclennan, S. (1987). Integrating lesson planning and class management. ELT Journal,
41(3). 193–197.
Ur, P. and Wright, A. (1992). Five-Minute Activities: A Resource Book of Short Activities.
Cambridge University Press.

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 3 Classroom interaction

Overview

3.1 Teacher-led interaction. Teacher elicitation through questioning; evaluating

teacher questions; different student responses to teacher elicitation.
3.2 Group and pair work. Advantages and disadvantages of group and pair
work; guidelines on optimal use.
3.3 Individual work. Ways of providing students with opportunities to work
individually.
3.4 Varied interactions. Different combinations of group, individual and teacher-
led interactions, with examples of tasks that use them.

3.1 Teacher-led interaction

Most classroom interaction is teacher-led (see 2 The lesson). And of all the types of
teacher-led interaction, the most common is questioning, which has the aim of eliciting
responses from students.

Questioning with individual oral responses

Questioning usually takes place within the IRF (Initiation–Response–Feedback) pattern:
the teacher initiates the interaction through a question; a nominated student responds; the
teacher gives feedback, in the form of confirmation and approval, correction, or rejection.
Teacher: What’s the past simple of give?
Student: Gave.
Teacher: Good.
Note that the question may not be a grammatical interrogative: it may, for example, be an
imperative (e.g., ‘Tell me …’) or just a declarative sentence (e.g., ‘You’re going to describe
…’). The point is that it has the goal of eliciting response(s) from the students.

Pause for thought

What purpose do teacher questions serve in the classroom? Try to think of as

many as you can, and then compare your list with the one on the next page. Was
there anything you had forgotten? Is there anything you can add?

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Comment
Purposes of teacher questions
• To provide a model for language or thinking
• To find out something from the students (e.g., facts, ideas, opinions)
• To check or test understanding, knowledge or skill
• To get students to be active in their learning
• To direct attention or provide a warm-up to the topic which is about
to be studied
• To inform the class through students’ answers rather than through the
teacher’s input
• To provide weaker students with an opportunity to participate
• To stimulate thinking (logical, critical or imaginative)
• To probe more deeply into issues
• To get students to relate personally to an issue
• To get students to review and practise previously taught material
• To encourage self-expression
• To communicate to students that the teacher is genuinely interested in what
they think
Any specific question is likely to involve more than one of these; for example, it
might review and practise while simultaneously encouraging self-expression.

Types of questions
We can classify teacher questions according to various criteria:
Communicative authenticity. Are they genuine or display questions? Does the teacher
really want to find out the answer, or are they simply checking if the student knows
it? An example of a genuine question might be: ‘What do you enjoy doing in your free
time?’ A display question is like the one shown at the beginning of this section: the
teacher knows the answer, but wants to check if the student knows it. Since we want to
give students experience of using English for communication, there should be a place
for genuine teacher questions in classroom interaction. Display questions are, however,
also important: indeed, they are essential, for the teaching of any subject. There are
many occasions where we need to get students to demonstrate what they know, practise
something, or speak or write in order to increase fluency, and display questions are often
the most effective way of achieving such aims.

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Nomination of student. How does the teacher choose who answers? Sometimes they may
nominate the student in advance:
‘Pedro, what is another word for far?’
Sometimes there is no advance nomination:
‘What is another word for far?’ (pause, followed by nomination of one of the
students who raised their hand).
In principle, the second type of nomination is better: the first puts a lot of pressure on the
nominated student, who has not volunteered to answer, and discourages other students
from participating.
Length of expected response. Do the questions elicit short responses (a word, phrase or
short sentence) or extended ones? In most cases, questions that require longer responses
(a sentence or more) are better, because they create more student activation and more
learning opportunities. However, there is also a place for short ones where, for example,
the aim is only to find out if a student has understood or not.
Number of expected responses. Are the questions closed-ended (with a single, right
answer) or open-ended (with many possible answers)? Closed-ended questions usually have
short responses and are useful for quick checks of knowledge or comprehension, or for
testing. Open-ended ones may have short or long answers, but there are lots of them: each
question leads to a number of responses. So they are good for situations where you want
to get plenty of practice of a particular language point, or to stimulate fluent speech or
writing. They also are more likely to elicit interesting responses (see 4 Tasks, Section 1).
Level of thinking required. Do the questions stimulate lower-order or higher-order
thinking? Lower-order thinking is simple recall or basic factual information; for example:
‘What is the opposite of white?’ Higher-order thinking involves deeper understanding,
application, analysis, criticism, evaluation or creativity; for example: ‘What do you think
about the way X behaved in this story?’
Note that you cannot really manage without questions based on lower-order thinking for
initial teaching and reviewing new material, whereas you can do without those based on
higher. As a result, sometimes the latter are neglected. They are important, at all levels, for
the cultivation of critical and creative thinking, and arguably lead to more challenging,
interesting and richer language-learning procedures.

Pause for thought

The next time you observe or participate in a lesson, choose one or two of the
criteria above, and note down how many questions of each kind you hear: for
example, how many display questions and how many genuine? Or how many
short-response and how many long-response? Which kinds were most common?
Do you have any comments or criticisms? If you are working in a group, each
observer/participant may focus on a different criterion, and then pool results later.

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Comment
Most questions in most English language lessons tend to be display, eliciting one short
response each, and based on lower-order thinking. In my experience, both teachers
and course materials tend to under-use genuine questions, those eliciting multiple
or longer responses, and those based on higher-order thinking. This is partly because
such questions are harder to formulate, and their responses are more difficult to
monitor and correct. I am not claiming that all, or even most, questions should be
from these under-used categories, but you should make sure that there are at least
some of them in every lesson: they lead to good learning, and are likely to be more
interesting for students. They can be adapted to different levels, so can be used from
the most elementary and youngest classes up to the most academic adult ones.

Effective questioning
An effective questioning technique is one that elicits prompt and appropriate responses. If
most of our questions result in long silences, are only answered by the strongest students,
obviously bore the class, or consistently elicit only very brief or unsuccessful answers,
then there is something wrong. In such cases, the following checklist can help.
1. Clarity. Do the students immediately understand not only what the question means,
but also what kind of an answer is required? Often it can help a lot if the teacher first
provides a sample acceptable answer or two as a model.
2. Interest. Do the students find the question interesting, challenging, stimulating?
3. Level of answer. Are the answers demanded appropriate to the students’ level, both
cognitively and linguistically?
4. Learning value. Is the question likely to lead to, or check, learning?
5. Teacher reaction. Are the students sure that the feedback to their responses will be
respectful, that they will not be put down or ridiculed if they say something inappropriate?

Pause for thought

Below are some samples of actual classroom exchanges between teacher and
students, showing different kinds of teacher questions. Think about them, or discuss
with others, and make any observations or criticisms you feel relevant. Then look at
my comment on pages 31–32.

Exchange 1: Discussing circuses

T: Now today we are going to discuss circuses. Have you ever been
to a circus?
Ss: (immediately) Yes, yes.
T: Yes. Where you see clowns and horses and elephants and acrobats.
Our reading today is about a circus …

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Exchange 2: The word relief

T: Yesterday we learned various words that express feelings. Let’s review
them. Can you tell me … What does ‘relief’ mean? (pause) Well, when
might you feel relief? (pause) Can you remember a time when you felt
relief? Yes, Maria?
S1: When my friend was late, I thought she wasn’t coming and in the end
she came.
T: Right, a nice example: When Maria’s friend was late, she thought she
wasn’t coming, but in the end she came. Good … (pause) Fran?
S2: I thought I will fail the exam, and then in the end I pass.
T: Good …

Exchange 3: What was the story about?

T: Now: what was the story about? Can anyone tell me? (pause) Claire?
S: Man.
T: Yes, a man. What did this man do? Can you tell me anything about him?
S: He … married.

Exchange 4: Describe a picture

T: Here’s a picture, with lots of things going on. Tell me some of them.
For example: the policeman is talking to the driver, perhaps he’s telling
him where to go. What else? (pause)
S1: The little girl is buying an ice cream.
S2: There’s a woman, old woman, in the middle, she’s crossing the road.
S3: A man … sitting … on chair …
T: OK, a man is sitting on a chair, there in the corner … What else?

Comment
Exchange 1: Discussing circuses. A basic problem here is that the declared
objective is contradicted by the questioning technique. The teacher says that
the intention is to discuss; but the introductory question, though clear, actually
discourages discussion. It is a Yes/No question inviting a single, brief answer.

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However, it is both interesting and accessible to students. The fact that the students
answer immediately and apparently enthusiastically indicates that they probably
have something to say. However, they are given no opportunity to do so. The
teacher gives information that could, and should, have been elicited from them
and then moves on to the reading passage. The teacher either did not really
intend to discuss at all and prefers to hold the stage, or was not aware of the
inappropriate form of their questions; perhaps a combination of the two.
Exchange 2: The word relief. The aim is to review vocabulary learnt the day
before, and it is clear from what they say later that the students do in fact know
the meaning of the word. The obvious question – What does X mean? – though
apparently clear, is unsuccessful in eliciting answers. This is probably because it is
too abstract and difficult. Even an advanced English speaker might find it hard to
give a definition. This teacher, however, quickly realizes their mistake and rephrases,
twice. The question that demands a concrete example from experience is much
better, and predictably receives immediate and full responses. Note that the
teacher does not, at this stage, correct the grammatical errors made by students,
as the focus is on the communication of ideas.
Exchange 3: What was the story about? There do not seem to be any pauses
after the questions, and the answers are basically correct in content; the questions
also seem fairly clear, interesting and available to most of the class. But their
learning value is lowered because of the difficulty the students have in expressing
their answers. The teacher might have been able to help by giving some hints or
modelling answers in their questions: Was it about a man, a woman, an animal …?
It was … Yes, Claire?
Exchange 4: Describe a picture. Here, the teacher makes it very clear what kinds
of responses are required by providing examples, and also indicates that a number
of different answers are expected. The combination of these two strategies makes
the question far more accessible and easier to answer than something like What
can you see in the picture? (Compare this exchange to the previous one.) The
number of student responses to the single cue looks as if it will be relatively large,
and S3, who is more hesitant and sounds as if they are not as good at English as the
others, attempts a response based on the examples (of the teacher and of previous
speakers) which they might not have done without these models.

You may have noticed a couple of useful strategies associated with teacher questioning in
these exchanges: wait-time (indicated by ‘(pause)’ in the samples), and echoing.
Wait-time. When asking questions in class, it’s good to wait a little before nominating a
student to answer. This increases the number of students who might be able to answer it.
Some teachers even say things like: ‘I’m waiting to see at least five students raise their
hands …’, and wait for five volunteers before nominating one. But don’t overdo it:
too much wait-time slows down the process, and might lead to boredom and lack
of attention.

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Echoing. In many cases, it’s a good idea to ‘echo’ student answers. This is a confirmation
of the response, and an indirect compliment to the student who made it. It also makes
sure that the rest of the class hears the response, as not all students speak clearly or loudly
enough to be heard by everyone. Echoing is also an opportunity to correct and extend the
student’s response for the benefit of the rest of the class, as provided by the teacher at the
end of Exchange 4. But it needs to be done meaningfully, where needed, not just as an
invariable automatic response.

Elicitation of other types of responses

Sometimes the goal of the teacher in questioning is not to get individual students to answer, but
to respond in other ways: by choral speech, by physical movement, by drawing, or by writing.
The advantage of any of these is that the entire class is activated simultaneously rather than just
one student at a time. Some useful elicitation techniques activating the full class follow.
Repeat all together. Particularly at the earlier stages of language learning, choral
repetition of sounds, words, phrases, sentences, chants or dialogues can be very helpful,
particularly for students who would not open their mouths to speak solo, but are happy to
do so under the shelter of choral speech (see 9 Teaching speaking).
Answer all together. This only works, clearly, for short, closed-ended questions, and is
appropriate mainly for younger beginners. Again, it helps shyer students to participate.
Do as I say. These activities are based on questions or instructions that lead to physical
movement: ‘Simon Says’ for example. They can also include mime: the teacher says
a sentence like, ‘You are drinking a glass of water’ and the students indicate their
understanding by miming drinking from a glass (see 8 Teaching listening).
True or false. The teacher says a sentence which is true or false, and students indicate
their answers either by physical movement (nodding or shaking of head, for example),
or by writing a tick or a cross (or a question mark if they don’t know) on paper or on a
digital device.
Picture dictation. The teacher describes a picture, map or other graphic display, and
students draw it. Alternatively, students already have a graphic display, the teacher
dictates alterations they are asked to make to it (e.g., additions or colours).
Dictation. The teacher dictates a letter, word, sentence or entire paragraph, and the
students write it down. A variation of this is translation dictation, where the teacher says
a word or phrase in the students’ L1, and they write it down in English (or vice versa). For
more varied ideas on dictations, see Davis and Rinvolucri (1988).

3.2 Group and pair work

Both group (three or more students working together) and pair work involve collaborative
activity, but may be used for slightly different purposes and in different situations. Group
work is more difficult to organize in a conventional classroom, because it usually involves
moving students, and sometimes their chairs and tables. Pair work is simpler, because
students are often sitting in pairs anyway, and simply turn towards each other. Also, group
work is often more difficult to control with an undisciplined class. In online teaching,

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on the other hand, group or pair work is easy to set up – you simply send the students to
breakout rooms. However, it is much more difficult to monitor, since you cannot scan all the
groups simultaneously, and cannot keep an eye on other groups when helping one of them.
Group work has some advantages over pair work. More students can contribute ideas to a
discussion task; there are more participants if the activity is a game; groups can often work
as teams in a competition; and the mere fact that students get up and move in order to
form, or re-form, groups can provide a welcome break from the routine of sitting in the
same place all the time. Pair work is useful for things like comparing answers to a written
exercise or peer-editing of written compositions.
Let us look first at some advantages and disadvantages of using group (including pair) work.

Advantages
Group work:
• is essential in order to provide opportunities for practising oral fluency. Students in a
class that is divided into five groups get five times as many opportunities to talk as in a
full-class discussion (see 9 Teaching speaking, Section 1).
• can provide opportunities for language learning, as students negotiate meanings and
help each other formulate and understand spoken messages.
• fosters learner autonomy. Students working in groups are not directly controlled by the
teacher, and they make their own choices about how they do the group task. If they
are collaborating on gapfill grammar exercises, then such choices will be limited to the
pace at which they work, the amount of work they do, and perhaps the order in which
they do different items. If they are discussing something, then the language they are
using will be determined by them, not by the teacher. If they are working together on a
project, then the content itself may depend on their own decisions.
• can be enjoyable and motivating for many students. It is easier and less scary to
interact with peers within a group sitting close to one another than to contribute
responses in the full-class forum to a larger group, many of whom are physically
distant. It can be pleasant to cooperate with others to produce a joint result, and
students enjoy the sense of group solidarity and warmth that often results.

Disadvantages
Group work:
• may lead to discipline problems. Some teachers fear that by moving out of the role of
manager and leader, and fragmenting the class, they will lose control, particularly with
young or adolescent groups in schools. Students might start using the L1 too much,
make a lot of noise, and may not in fact be engaged in the task at all. The problem of
going off-task and using L1 is even more acute if you are teaching online, since you
cannot monitor more than one group at a time. For these reasons, many teachers –
particularly novices, or ones who are coping with an unruly class – avoid group work
completely, in spite of its advantages.

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• may not lead to much learning. Interaction within a group, even if based on
exchanging information, may lead to minimum actual speech in English, limited to
words or phrases that convey essential information, and not giving much opportunity
for substantial language use (Seedhouse, 1999). And if the task is such that it could
have been done by an individual, many of the members of the group may not
participate at all.
• may not suit some learners. Some students do not like it because it simply does not fit
their individual learning style: they prefer a teacher-led classroom, or working on their
own. Some may simply not be used to it if it is not part of their ‘culture of learning’.
Others think that working with other students does not result in serious learning: they
feel they should be learning from the teacher, not from each other.

So what’s the answer?

The situation of students going off-task, over-using the L1, making a lot of noise, and so on
during group work is a very real one in some classes. There are two points to be made here.
First, some of these events may not be as negative as they seem. If the task involves
talking, then in a conventional classroom there will be a lot of noise – which is not
necessarily a bad thing! And using L1 is not necessarily counterproductive either. In many
cases, some L1 use can help students perform the task more effectively, while leaving
plenty of time for use of English. It is true that L1 use can get out of hand, so you need as
far as you can (very difficult, of course, particularly if you are teaching online) to keep an
eye on what is happening and limit it as you feel necessary. Student monitors within the
group whose job it is to make sure students are speaking English most of the time can be
useful here.
Second, you can often prevent clearly counterproductive developments, such as students
misinterpreting the task or failing to do it altogether, through the design of the task. For
example, if the groups have been set the goal of reaching a decision on a controversial
topic in order to get practice in talking, you need to make sure that both objectives are
achieved, and that they do not just all agree with the first person who suggests a decision!
You could, for example, make it a rule that everyone has to express an opinion, or give
each member of the group a role to play. Efficient management of process is also crucial:
how to present, manage and close group activities (this is discussed in detail in 4 Tasks).
Even with the best task design and organization, some classes may not like group work,
for any of the reasons listed earlier. In such cases, it might help to explain to the class why
it is important to do occasional group tasks, give them opportunities to express how they
feel about it, and agree together with them how much, or how little, you will do it.

Conclusion
Group work is only valuable when it enables good learning and/or helps motivation. In
some classes it may be really difficult to do successfully, so you don’t need to feel guilty
if you use it only rarely. A lot of good classroom learning is based on full-class work led
by the teacher; and individual work is also important, as discussed below. However, do
try to include some group work, even if only occasionally. It adds variation, it provides

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opportunities for students to talk in English, it suits the learning style of many students, it
helps to build relationships between students and promotes learner autonomy.

3.3 Individual work

In individual work, each student works on their own. All the students may be doing the
same task, in which case the fact that they are working alone means that they can do the
task at their own pace. In some cases, they may be able to decide how much of the task
they do, or even choose which to do of a set of different tasks.

Self-access centres
The concept of individualized learning in education is sometimes identified with the
provision of a self-access centre. In a self-access centre, different materials may be made
available: audio and video equipment, computers or other digital devices with language-
learning software and internet access, a library of books, worksheets, games and puzzles,
areas where people can simply sit and chat in English and so on. In principle, the students
themselves choose where to work and how to engage with the tasks they have selected.
Such centres still exist, but are less popular than they used to be, and mostly limited to
well-endowed institutions of higher education. A major issue is expense. Self-access centres
cost a lot to set up, in terms of both money and work; they also need constant maintenance
and replenishing. Another problem is the fact that most students need a structure to their
learning: without a clear programme, deadlines, goals and set tasks, many students feel
uncomfortable, lose motivation and find it difficult to concentrate and get things done.
To address this, the teacher can provide a preset plan which provides a clear structure for
student work. For example, each student has to work on a certain number of specific types of
tasks and keep a record of what they have done. The downside of this is, of course, that the
teacher needs to monitor who does what, make sure that not too many students are trying
to use the same resource at the same time, and check task completion. With a large class, this
can be very demanding.

Individualization within a conventional classroom

A measure of individualization can, however, be provided within a conventional
classroom. The teacher can provide a limited number of tasks and invite students to choose
what they want to do from the range provided, or leave each student the freedom to
choose how much of a set task they wish to do. Such strategies provide a useful alternative
to the conventional lockstep learning, where everyone in the class is expected to do the
same thing at the same time.
Below is a list of classroom procedures that allow for varying degrees of individual learner
choice within a regular classroom.
• Individualized teacher questioning. The teacher invites students to volunteer oral
answers to a conventional exercise. However, instead of initiating the question,
the teacher invites each student to choose any question from the exercise to which
they think they know the answer and raise their hands to volunteer a response. The

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questions are thus covered in an order determined by the students, and the teacher
mops up any that remain at the end.
• Written textbook exercises. The teacher tells the student which textbook exercise(s)
they are going to work on – grammar, vocabulary, comprehension or any other type –
and asks them to find all the questions they know they can answer and do them in
writing, skipping those they don’t know. Later, answers can be checked by the teacher,
or students can get together in pairs to check answers, calling the teacher over if there
are any uncertainties.
• Homework assignments. All the class are given the same assignment, but told to spend
half an hour (or however much time the teacher feels appropriate) to do as much of it
as they can. They work at their own speed and are not necessarily expected to complete
the task.
• Worksheets, workcards. The teacher distributes print worksheets, or directs students
to digital ones, that include a variety of language tasks at an appropriate level. Students
are invited to choose sections they want to do and to complete as much as they can in
the time given. In a conventional classroom, a pile of workcards each with a different
short task can be placed on the teacher’s desk: each student takes one, does the task,
returns it and takes another.
• Digital tasks. If each student has access to an individual digital device, the teacher
prepares links to a number of different websites with different tasks: reading texts with
comprehension work, grammar exercises, tasks based on online searches, vocabulary
work, dictionary work and so on, and displays these on the board. Students choose
which to do.
• Extensive reading. Students choose individual simplified readers, of varied level and
topic, from a school library, or download to a digital device, and read at their own pace
for a set time, either at home or in the lesson (see 10 Teaching reading, Section 6).
• Writing. Students are given five or ten minutes to write as much as they can on a
given topic.
These activities are individualized to different extents and in different ways, depending on
what aspect of the task can be varied. The main such aspects are the following, listed in
order of amount of individualization and personal choice available to the student.
Speed. Each student works at their own pace at a single assignment given to all the class
and does as much as they can in the time given.
Quantity. Each student may choose how much or how little of the given task to complete
and how much time they spend on it.
Level. A number of tasks, or questions within a single exercise, all on the same topic, or
targeting the same language point but at different levels of difficulty, are available, so each
student can choose the one(s) they can do.
Task. Students can choose what they do from a wide variety of tasks selected and made
available by the teacher, which focus on different aspects of fluency or accuracy in English.

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Pause for thought

Look at the list of individualized procedures shown on page 37. Have you
experienced any of them, as teacher or as student? Which can you imagine
yourself, as a teacher, using in class?

Comment
Note that the formats that afford most differentiation and individualization are those
which also demand most investment on the part of the teacher in preparation,
monitoring and post-task feedback. On the other hand, some simple alterations in
instructions as to how to approach a conventional exercise (as in ‘individualized
teacher questioning’, for example) can provide students with substantial individual
choice as to how much of a task they decide to do or how fast they feel they need
to work.

3.4 Varied interactions

Many useful tasks used in the classroom involve a combination of teacher-led, group and
individual work, or fluid groups.
First, there are those activities which involve different stages. A teacher may ask students to
do a task individually or in groups, and then come together to check results in a teacher-led
process. Alternatively, a teacher-led preparatory stage – for example, brainstorming ideas
or preparing vocabulary for a writing assignment – can precede individual work on written
composition.
Some classic language-learning procedures, such as ‘dictogloss’, are based on more
extended combinations.
Dictogloss. This begins with the teacher reading aloud a text while students take notes;
students then come together in small groups to try to reconstruct the original text as
nearly as they can based on their notes. Next, the teacher reads the text again, and
students return to groups to polish their versions. Finally, the teacher leads a full-class
final session comparing the original text with students’ versions.
Second, there is fluid interaction between groups, where individuals move between groups
or exchange partners.
Jigsaw. In jigsaw activities, each group works on understanding a part of a story. They
then break up, and new groups are formed, each composed of one member from each of
the parent groups. The new groups then pool the information each member has from the
parent group in order to reconstruct the full story. The same can be done based on other
kinds of text, or on discussion of topics or questions.

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Mingling. In a mingling process, students move around the classroom, meeting

classmates for brief conversations before breaking off and meeting others. ‘Find someone
who’ is one example of this. Each student has a worksheet with a list of kinds of people
to find (e.g., ‘Find someone who has a dog’, ‘Find someone who likes chewing gum’) and
walks around meeting classmates and asking and answering in order to fill in names for
each item. Another variation is the ‘getting to know you’ activity, where each student
meets one other student and they exchange names and some personal information for a
minute or two, before breaking off and talking to someone else.
Here are some other interactions, involving a combination of individual and collaborative
work.
Correspondence. Students interact with each other through writing notes. In a
conventional classroom, each student is allotted a partner, writes them a question on a
piece of paper and delivers it. Each partner then answers the question, writes another
question in response, and so on. The same activity can be done online using text
messaging, through WhatsApp or any other texting tool.
Pass it on. Each student gets a worksheet which requires a large number of responses:
filling in opposites to a given set of words, for example, or answering a set of questions,
or brainstorming written responses to an open-ended cue. Each student fills in as much
as they can in two minutes; they then pass the sheet on to a neighbour who fills in more
and so on. A similar process can also produce a collaborative story. Each student writes a
first sentence beginning ‘Once upon a time…’ and passes it on; the next student writes
a sentence to continue the story, and passes it on. The same can be done to produce a
poem. ‘Pass it on’ can be run in the full class, or in small groups.

Review: Check yourself

1 How many reasons can you think of for teacher questioning in the classroom?
2 What are some key characteristics of effective questioning in the classroom?
3 What kinds of responses might the teacher want to elicit, other than individual
student spoken answers?
4 What are some advantages of using group work?
5 Can you give examples of individualized classroom procedures during which
students can work at their own speed? Choose how much to do? Choose their
own language level? Choose their own task?
6 Can you give an example of an activity which combines group and
individual work?

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Further reading
Teacher questioning
Brualdi Timmins, A. C. (1998). Classroom questions. Practical Assessment, Research, and
Evaluation, 6(1), 6.
(A brief, useful summary of the main issues in teacher questioning)
Tsui, A. (2001). Classroom interaction. In Carter, R. and Nunan, D. (Eds.) The Cambridge
Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (pp. 120–125), Cambridge
University Press.
(A discussion of the various aspects of classroom interaction, focusing particularly
on teacher questioning processes)

Group and individual work

Jacobs, G. M. and Hall, S. (2002). Implementing cooperative learning. In Richards, J. C.
and Renandya, W. A. (Eds.) Methodology in Language Teaching (pp. 52–58). Cambridge
University Press.
(Practical tips on the organization of group work in English lessons)
McDonough, J. and Shaw, C. (2003). Materials and Methods in ELT: A Teacher’s Guide
(2nd Edition). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
(See Chapters 11 and 12 for some useful discussion of group and pair work, and of
individualization, focusing on self-access facilities)
Scrivener, J. (2012). Classroom Management Techniques. Cambridge University Press.
(Some useful guidance on the management of group work (see particularly
pp. 199–225)

References
Davis, P. and Rinvolucri, M. (1988). Dictation: New Methods, New Possibilities.
Cambridge University Press.
Seedhouse, P. (1999). Task-based interaction. ELT Journal 53(3), 149–156.

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 4 Tasks

Overview

4.1 The language-learning task. A definition and some features of good

classroom tasks.
4.2 Task evaluation. The features described in the previous section applied as
criteria for the evaluation of the effectiveness of different tasks.
4.3 Organizing tasks. Aspects of the presentation and practical classroom
management of tasks.
4.4 Interest. How to stimulate and maintain student interest in doing tasks.
4.5 Homework. Different homework tasks and ways of checking them.

4.1 The language-learning task

A task is defined here as a learner activity that a) aims to enhance learning of some aspect
of language, and b) has an outcome that can be discussed or evaluated. It could be a
grammar exercise, a problem-solving activity or a writing assignment. It thus excludes
tests, which are designed to assess rather than produce learning. Note also that this is a
wider definition of the word task than that used in the methodology called ‘task-based
language teaching’ (Ellis et al., 2019), which focuses on communicative tasks as a vehicle
for language acquisition.
The following are some underlying practical principles of good language-learning
task design.
• Validity. The task should activate students primarily in the language items or skills it
is intended to teach or practise. This is an obvious principle that is surprisingly often
violated. For example, oral fluency tasks based on full-class discussions actually allow
for very little oral fluency practice by most of the class, as relatively few students get a
chance to speak: it’s better to divide them into small groups or pairs for this purpose (see
9 Teaching speaking).
• Quantity. Roughly speaking, the more English the students actually understand and
engage with during performance of the task, the more they are likely to learn. If the
time available for the activity is seen as a container, then this should be filled with as
much volume of language and language activity as possible. So you need to make sure
that if, for example, you are practising a particular grammatical form, then students
repeatedly engage with it (receptively or productively) in different contexts; if you
are doing an activity aimed at improving listening, then you need to ensure that
the students actually do a lot of listening. And you should try to activate as many

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students as possible simultaneously rather than one by one, minimizing time spent on
classroom management or organization, or on fruitless puzzling out or not knowing.
Many word games and puzzles, for example, such as sorting out scrambled words or
wordsearches, involve the students spending most of their time looking for, rather than
finding, the answers, and waste a lot of potential learning time on not knowing, when
they could have been using it for engaging meaningfully with the target vocabulary.
• Success-orientation. On the whole, we learn by doing things right. Continued
inaccurate use of language items leads to stabilization of errors: in other words, learners
get used to saying or writing language forms that are wrong, in the sense of being less
acceptable by the standards of EPIC (see 1 Teaching English today), and will find it
increasingly difficult to correct them. This is not to say that there is no place for errors
and error correction; however, errors should be seen not as failures, but as steps on
the way to success: corrections and explanations by the teacher are a transitional stage
whose function is to make students aware of what they have done wrong (as defined
above) in order to raise their awareness of how to do it right, or more appropriately.
They then need plenty of opportunities to perform successfully in the use of target
forms and skills in order to consolidate learning. It is therefore important to select,
design and administer tasks in such a way that students are likely to succeed in doing
them most of the time. Repeated successful performance is also likely to reinforce the
students’ self-image as successful language learners and encourage them to take up
further challenges.
• Flexibility of level. A good task provides opportunities for students to engage with
it at all, or most, of the different levels of proficiency within a class. For example, if
you give a learning task which (like most grammar exercises in coursebooks) invites
single predetermined ‘right answers’, then it caters only to one level, and a substantial
proportion of your class will not benefit very much. A cue which invites a number of
responses at different levels is likely to cater to a wider range of levels. See 20 Learner
differences 2: diversity and inclusion for more on ways of adapting tasks to make
them doable by students at different levels.
• Interest. If the task is relatively easy because of its success-orientation, and if there
is a lot of repetition of target forms resulting from the principle of quantity, then
there is obviously a danger that the task might become boring. Boredom is not only
an unpleasant feeling in itself, it also leads to student inattention, low motivation and
ultimately less learning. However, if interest is not based on the challenge of getting
the answers right, it has to come from other aspects of the activity: an interesting
topic, the need to convey meaningful information, a game-like task, attention-catching
materials, appeal to students’ feelings or a challenge to their intellect or creativity. See
Section 4 for more discussion of this issue.

4.2 Task evaluation

The principles presented in the previous section can serve as a useful set of criteria for
evaluating the effectiveness of classroom tasks such as those illustrated in the Pause for
thought below.

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Pause for thought

Have a look at the scenarios described below. How effective do you think
the learning tasks are? How might you improve them? Then read the comments
on pages 44–46.
Scenario 1: Spelling: ‘Hangman’. The teacher writes seven dashes on the board to
represent letters in the word they are thinking of and invites the students to guess
what the letters are. They start guessing letters. For each letter they guess right, the
teacher writes it above the appropriate dash. For each one they guess wrong, the
teacher adds another line to a drawing (traditionally a ‘hangman’, but today I
prefer to use a beetle, as below). The students try to fill in all the letters of the word
before the teacher completes the drawing.

Scenario 2: Listening comprehension. The class listen to the following

recorded text:
Ozone is a gas composed of molecules possessing three oxygen atoms each
(as distinct from oxygen, which has two atoms per molecule). It exists in large
quantities in one of the upper layers of the atmosphere, known as the stratosphere,
between 20 and 50 kilometres above the surface of the Earth. The ozone layer
filters out a large proportion of the sun’s ultraviolet rays and thus protects us from
the harmful effects of excessive exposure to such radiation.
The teacher then tells the students to open their books and answer the
following questions.
1 The passage is discussing the topic of a) radiation, b) oxygen, c) ozone,
d) molecules.
2 Ozone molecules are different from oxygen molecules in that they a) have
three atoms of oxygen, b) exist in large quantities, c) may have one or two
atoms, d) have one atom of oxygen.
3 The stratosphere is a) above the atmosphere, b) below the atmosphere,
c) more than 20 kilometres above the surface of the Earth, d) more than
50 kilometres above the surface of the Earth.
4 The ozone layer a) prevents some harmful radiation from reaching the earth,
b) stops all ultraviolet rays from reaching the Earth, c) protects us from the light
of the sun, d) involves excessive exposure to ultraviolet rays.

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When the students have finished, the teacher asks volunteers for their answers,
accepting or correcting as appropriate.
Scenario 3: Grammar exercise: the present perfect. The students are studying the
following exercise that requires them to produce sentences in the present perfect.
1 Lina is looking in her bag, but she cannot find her keys. (lose)
2 The Browns live in that house on the corner, but they are not there now.
(go away)
3 Mark and Dan are delighted. (pass the test)
4 Becky won’t be playing today. (break her leg)
5 Sam will be late. (have an accident)
The teacher asks for answers. A student answers the first item: ‘Lina has lost her keys.’
The teacher approves this answer and asks for a volunteer to answer the second
item. This time the student answers wrongly. The teacher asks for another student to
provide a correct response. The process continues until the exercise is finished.
Scenario 4: Vocabulary. Teacher: Who knows the meaning of the word
disappointment? (Puzzled looks; a student hesitantly puts up his hand.) Yes?
Student 1: Write a point?
Teacher: No . . . anyone else? (silence) Come on, think everybody, try again!
Student 2: Lose a point?
Teacher: No, it has nothing to do with points. Try again. It has something to do
with feelings.
(After another few guesses, the last of which, after broad hints from the teacher,
comes fairly near, the teacher finally gives the correct definition.)

Comment
Scenario 1: Spelling: ‘Hangman’. The task as described here is apparently
intended to practise the spelling of a word. But out of the minute or so spent by
the students on the guessing process, they engage with the actual spelling of
the target word for only a few seconds at the end. The rest of the time is spent on
more or less random calling out of letters, or on mistaken guesses. In other words,
we have an activity about nine-tenths of which contributes little or nothing to
engagement with the target language feature: it lacks both validity and quantity.
This is an interesting example of a task which is superficially attractive – motivating
and fun for both students and teacher, as well as demanding little preparation –
but which, when carefully analysed, proves to have very little learning value. If we
wish to practise the spelling of a set of words, then it is better to display the words

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from the beginning and think of a procedure that will induce students to engage
with their spelling throughout the task time (see, for example, Recall and share in
11 Teaching writing).
Scenario 2: Listening comprehension. This is a listening activity which in fact
provides little opportunity to listen: it lacks validity. There is more reading than
listening: the written text (the questions) is longer than the listening, and more time
is spent dealing with it during the procedure as a whole. The task relies heavily
on memory rather than on ongoing comprehension: students need to recall
accurately a set of facts presented very densely and quickly. This may be extremely
difficult for those who do not have the underlying knowledge in advance, since it
is based on a subject which may be unfamiliar to them. If, on the other hand, they
did know the information, then they would probably be able to answer most of the
questions without listening at all! The task also scores low on quantity (the listening
text is very short) and on flexibility (there are no opportunities for giving responses
at different levels). The text would be improved if it were longer, with the information
given less densely. A better task might be to ask students to take notes on the text
as they hear it, and then compare with each other or with a replay of the original
text. Alternatively, brief questions might be given in advance, so that students can
listen out for the answers and note them down as they hear them (see 8 Teaching
listening).
Scenario 3: Grammar. A lot of the students’ time and energy is spent reading the
cue sentences, which do not include the target feature at all. This means that the
task is of dubious validity. Moreover, the whole exercise produces only six responses
using the target structure, so there is little quantity. And, since each response is
limited to one right answer, the task does not allow for flexibility of level. Finally,
it is not very interesting! The exercise could be improved by deleting the verb in
parenthesis at the end of the cue items, and inviting students to account for the
given situation each time by various statements using the present perfect. The first
sentence, for example, might elicit a number of sentences like: She has forgotten
to put them in her bag. She has left them on the bus. She has dropped them. Her
brother has taken them. Someone has stolen them. The dog has buried them.
Such a strategy is likely to solve most of the problems. It is a little more demanding
in terms of creative or critical thinking and effort, though not necessarily much
more difficult in terms of language knowledge. (For more on such adaptations see
20 Learner differences 2: diversity and inclusion, Section 3.)
Scenario 4: Vocabulary. This may look like a caricature of a vocabulary
teaching procedure; but I have seen it happen. The task is based on elicitation
of information from students; but it is information which they simply do not have,
so they cannot do the task. It is obviously failure-oriented, and most of the time is
spent ‘not knowing’: a waste of time – no validity, and very little quantity – as well
as increasing students’ feelings of frustration and inferiority. If the teacher wished
to base a task on elicitation of meanings of vocabulary, they should immediately
have provided contexts or hints that would help students to succeed, or allowed

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 4 | Tasks

them to refer to dictionaries. But it might be better in this case to abandon the
‘elicitation’ aspect altogether: simply provide an explanation or translation of the
target vocabulary, and then use the time saved for a task which gives opportunities
to use it purposefully and interestingly in context. For example, the teacher could
invite a number of students to describe situations when they or someone they
know experienced disappointment. (See 6 Teaching vocabulary.)

4.3 Organizing tasks

The success of a task in bringing about learning and engaging students depends not only on
good initial task design, but also on how you actually run it. Here are some guidelines about
what to do before, during and after a classroom task to make sure it works.

Before the task

Prepare a reserve activity. Sometimes individuals, groups or pairs finish early. If you want
other students to continue work, then you need to be ready with something for the faster
workers to do while the others are finishing: an extension or variation of the original
activity, reading, something from the coursebook or a short further task.

Giving instructions
Make sure students are attending. Everyone has to be listening when you are giving
instructions; otherwise they may do the task wrong, or spend time telling each other or
getting you to repeat yourself. It is worth waiting an extra minute or two before you start
giving instructions to make sure that everyone is attending. This is particularly true if the
task involves getting into small groups or pairs. Give the instruction before dividing them
into groups: once they are in groups, students’ attention may be directed to each other
rather than to you.
Repeat. A repetition or added paraphrase of the instructions may make all the difference.
Students’ attention may wander occasionally, and it is important to give them more than
one chance to understand what they have to do. Also, it helps to present the information
again in a different mode: if it’s not too long, both say it and write it up on the board,
and/or ask students themselves to recap the main points.
Keep it brief. Make your instruction as brief as you can to leave maximum time for the
task itself. This means thinking fairly carefully about what you can omit, as much as
about what you should include! In some situations, it may also mean using students’ L1,
as a more accessible and shorter alternative to a long or tricky English explanation, thus,
again, leaving more time for the doing of the task itself.
Give examples. Very often an instruction only comes together for an audience when
illustrated by an example, or preferably more than one. If it is a textbook exercise, do the
first one or two items with the students. If it is a communicative task, perform a rehearsal
with a volunteer student or two, to show how it is done.

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Get students to show they’ve understood. It’s not enough just to ask, ‘Do you
understand?’; students will sometimes say they did, even if they did not, out of politeness
or unwillingness to lose face, or because they think they know what they have to do when
in fact they have completely misunderstood! It is useful to ask them to do something that
will show their understanding: to paraphrase in their own words or, if you have given the
instruction in English, to translate into their L1. This also functions as an extra repetition
for those who missed something earlier.

Tell students how it will end. If the task is based on group or individual work, then give
information about how much time they have, how you intend to stop them, whether or
not you’ll give them advance notice a minute or two before stopping.

During the task

Provide ongoing support. Ongoing teacher support is likely to increase the chances of
students doing the task successfully and learning well. In a teacher-led interactive process,
this involves such things as allowing plenty of time to think, making the answers easier
through giving hints and guiding questions, or confirming beginnings of responses in
order to encourage continuations. In group or individual work, it means being there for
the students, available to answer questions or provide help where needed.

Give feedback. It is important to provide a feedback stage whose main function is to

round off the task: by evaluating results, commenting on the work done and signalling an
end to the activity as preparation for moving on to the next one. A task based on group
and individual work usually has a clear outcome which can be used as the basis for a full-
class feedback stage. If it is problem-solving, elicit and discuss the solutions that different
groups have come up with. If it is a brainstorming activity, pool their ideas on the board.
If it is discussion, comment on their suggestions and ideas … and so on.

Pause for thought

Think about a recent lesson you observed or participated in – not necessarily

a language lesson. How did the teacher run the tasks? Could the process have
been improved by using one or more of the suggestions above?

4.4 Interest
Probably the best way to explore the reasons why some tasks arouse and maintain student
interest, and others don’t, is to try to analyse the differences in interest between pairs of
tasks that have similar teaching aims.

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Pause for thought

Compare the pairs of tasks described below. Which, in your opinion, is the more
interesting of each pair, and why?
1 Spelling: the spelling and pronunciation rule of the suffix -tion
Task A. Students are asked to brainstorm in groups as many words as they can
that end in -tion The teacher pools all their ideas on the board and makes sure
that everyone knows what they mean.
Task B. The following words are dictated: prevention, intervention, instruction,
intention, conception, nation, reaction, eviction, distraction, direction. Students
write them down, the teacher checks and corrects.
2 Vocabulary: reviewing a set of words learnt from a text. The words are written
on the board.
Task A The teacher invites students to take any one word of their choice, and
compose any sentence that contextualizes it.
Task B The teacher invites students to take any two words of their choice and
compose a sentence with them that contextualizes them.
3 Vocabulary: learning and understanding a set of words describing emotions
and moods
Task A Students complete the following sentences on their own to describe
experiences they have had, and then share with partners. I was angry because
. . . I was sad although . . . I felt jealous when . . . I was tense although . . . I was
confident because . . .
Task B Students do the following matching exercise on their own, and then
check with partners.

1 angry a unhappy and angry because someone has something

you want
2 sad b having a strong feeling against someone or something
that makes you want to shout or hurt them
3 jealous c nervous, anxious, unable to relax
4 tense d sure or trusting
5 confident e unhappy or sorry

4 Grammar: there is / there are. The teacher displays a picture that shows a lot
of different people, things and activities.
Task A In small groups, the students suggest and write down sentences using
there is / there are that apply to the picture. Later, the teacher elicits from each
group the sentences they had thought of.

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Task B In small groups, the students suggest sentences using there is / there
are that apply to the picture. They are told they have one minute to think of and
say as many as they can. They do not write anything down: a secretary notes
a tick ( ) for each sentence anyone produces. The teacher stops them after
exactly one minute and asks the groups how many ticks they have.

Comment
1 Spelling: the spelling and pronunciation rule of the suffix -tion. Task A is more
interesting to do, mainly because words are chosen by the students; they are
therefore more likely to have some sense of ownership of the items. All things
being equal, an activity which calls on students to initiate ideas themselves
rather than repeat or be tested on a set of given items is likely to be more
interesting. Connected to this is the fact that the task is open-ended (there are
a number of right answers): it is almost always more interesting to produce or
hear a response that is not predetermined or predictable, as we shall see with
other examples below. Finally, there is the aspect of collaboration: the students
are working in a team, which means not only that they can enjoy working
together, but also that the result is likely to be more successful.
2 Vocabulary: reviewing a set of words learnt from a text. Both tasks here are
open-ended and allow for student creativity and initiative; but the second
is significantly more interesting to do. The difference in this case is produced
by the added challenge of connecting two items, which involves the use of
higher-order thinking skills: looking for a connections between two concepts
and contextualizing it in a statement. You can create a range of challenges
based on higher-order thinking challenges: asking students to make false
statements with given words, for example, or to work on classification, sorting
the words into different groups.
3 Vocabulary: learning and understanding a set of words describing emotions
and moods. In this case, it is Task A which is the more interesting to do. Like the
previous ones, it requires student initiative and is open-ended; here, however,
we have the added dimension of personalization and real interpersonal
communication. The students are relating the target items to their own
experiences and sharing these experiences with one another. Finally, there is
the less obvious aspect of the use of higher-order thinking skills: in this case,
temporal or logical relations, demanded by the conjunctions when, because,
although, etc., which make the students think a bit more deeply about the
meanings of their sentences.
4 Grammar: there is / there are. Task B is based on Task A, but it is far more
interesting and feels a bit like a game. Participants feel a slight rise in adrenalin,
produced by the challenge to produce as many sentences as they can before

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time runs out. The game-like effect is produced by the combination of a clear and
easily achievable objective (making simple sentences), along with a constraint,
or rule, which makes it more challenging: in this case, the time limit. Other interest-
producing factors here are the collaboration, and the use of the visual focus of
a picture.

Summary
The main practical principles contributing to interest in the design of classroom tasks can
be summarized as follows:
• Initiative: students initiate their own ideas in response to the task.
• Open-ending: students produce a number of different, equally acceptable, ideas.
• Collaboration: students work together to produce a better result than they could have
done on their own.
• Success: students succeed in achieving the task objective.
• Higher-order thinking: students are challenged to think about causes and effects,
categories, connections, priorities and so on, rather than just recalling or saying simple
sentences.
• Personalization: students express their own experiences, opinions, tastes or feelings.
• Game-like activity: students experience a feeling of playing a game, produced
by the combination of a clear and easily achieved objective, together with ‘rules’:
constraints that limit how they can achieve it (a time limit is one of the easiest
to implement).
• Visual focus: students use a picture or other visual stimulus which functions as a basis
for the task.

4.5 Homework
Research indicates that homework makes a substantial contribution to learning, and
becomes an increasingly important factor in learning as students get older and/or more
advanced (Cooper et al., 2006). Not only does it provide opportunities for more learning
or review than would be possible only in lesson time, it is also an investment in future
learning. Eventually, after students leave school, their continued progress will depend
largely or entirely on their own ability to study on their own initiative: reading books or
internet texts, for example, or conversing with other English speakers. So homework is
not only a way to provide extra opportunities for language study outside the lesson, but
also an investment in the future, in that it fosters students’ ability to work on their own as
autonomous learners and to progress independently of the teacher.

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Pause for thought

Recall from your own schooldays one homework assignment, or type of assignment,
that you remember as being a waste of time, and another that you feel was
worthwhile and learning-rich. What were the factors that made the difference?

Comment
When I have done the task above with teachers, a lot of them recall assignments
based on learning by heart of texts as a waste of time; however, some admit that
they hated this at the time, but later found that their ability to recall chunks of text
they were forced to learn – poems, for example – was rewarding and valuable.
When asked which assignments were felt to be more interesting and worthwhile,
many recalled those which required some kind of initiative on their part – doing
research for projects, for example. It also made a huge difference if the teacher
explained in advance why they were giving the assignment.

Types of homework tasks

Most homework tasks fall under one of the three types listed below.
Routine review. A lot of language learning depends on repetition for its success. Homework
is one way of ensuring that the necessary review takes place, and leaves more classroom
time available for learning new material, explanation and discussion. So use homework to
get students to re-read texts, to review vocabulary or to do grammar exercises. It’s worth
explaining to the students why this is important for their success in learning. There
are many routine language-practice tasks available online, with built-in checking and
correction facilities.
Previews and preparation. Homework is less commonly used to anticipate upcoming
lessons, but it can be usefully exploited to do so. For example, students can be asked to
find out all they can from the internet about the subject of a text you intend to work
on with them, or to read through a new text and look up words they did not know in a
dictionary, or to prepare presentations. The flipped classroom model is based on the idea
that students watch a video, or read or listen to material in advance, leaving more lesson
time with the teacher available for tasks based on information that they have already
studied (see more on this in 18 Digital technology and online teaching).
Creative assignments. It’s important to give occasional assignments that demand some
kind of open-ended response on the part of the students. Such assignments are more
interesting to do, and provide opportunities for personal initiative and creativity. They
can be as simple as multiple answers to a brainstorming cue (‘How many ... can you think
of that ... ?’); or suggesting alternative answers to questions given in the textbook.
They can also be longer and more demanding: creative writing assignments
(see 11 Teaching writing), recording presentations (see 9 Teaching speaking) or

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doing projects based on information from the internet. These, of course, demand more
work from the teacher in responding and giving feedback, but are ultimately probably the
most rewarding type of homework in terms of learning outcomes and motivation.

Giving feedback on homework tasks

Often teachers use the first part of the lesson to go through the homework students have
just done, eliciting answers from different members of the class, checking and correcting.
This can be very time-consuming: it substantially cuts down the amount of time available
for all the other things you want to get through in a lesson. Also, review of the homework
often does not contribute much to learning. It is much more learning-productive for
the students, and saving of lesson time, to take in notebooks and check homework
assignments at home, if you have time. If you have large classes and cannot find time
to check all assignments, some things that can help are using online tools like ‘check
changes’ to correct written work submitted in electronic form, and selective checking
(see Practical tips below). Alternative strategies are simply to provide the right answers
(if the exercise produces single answers to each item), either written up on the board or
dictated by you, so that students can self-check. Or give five minutes in the course of the
lesson for students to check each other’s homework in small groups, calling on you only if
they have any questions. If homework has involved the preparation of oral presentations,
then usually these will need to be presented in class; but the feedback can be given later,
through email or other types of digital messaging.

Practical tips
1 Don’t give homework at the end of the lesson. Take time during the lesson to
explain what it involves, how it will be checked, what options there are, and to answer
any questions, and write it up on the board. You can always come back to remind
the class what the homework is at the end of the lesson; but if you postpone giving
it to the end, you may find you don’t have time to explain fully or answer questions.
Also, giving homework at the end implies that it is less important than the rest of
the lesson.
2 Say why you are giving this assignment. An explanation of why you are giving this
homework assignment can raise student motivation to do it, and expresses respect for
the students as partners in the teaching-learning process.
3 Make homework a component of the grade. When allotting an end-of-term grade,
include the regular completion of homework assignments as a component: say,
10 percent. This encourages students to do their homework and enables less proficient,
but hardworking, students to raise their grade.
4 Limit homework by time rather than quantity. Tell students to spend 20 minutes
(or whatever you think appropriate) on Exercise X and do as much as they can, rather
than just to ‘do Exercise X’ (see 3 Classroom interaction, Section 3). This means that
slower-working students will not have to take hours doing something that other students
finished in a few minutes: each will work according to their own speed and ability.

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5 Don’t worry too much about students copying from one another. It is true that
copying homework may mean that one student is not learning anything; but there is
also the possibility that one is helping the other, which may well promote learning
and therefore should not be condemned. And the alternative may be that the weaker
student wouldn’t do it at all! Ask students to tell you if they worked together so that
you know about it, but don’t ban it completely.
6 Encourage students to do their homework online. Whether or not you are teaching
the course through videoconferencing, it is far easier to monitor who has submitted
and who has not, and to correct and give feedback on assignments if homework is
done online. This does not only apply to written assignments: it is easy for students to
record oral ones on digital recording tools.
7 Selective checking. If you have a large class and cannot possibly check all their
homework every week, take in, say, one-third of the class’s notebooks each week to
check, and then the others in later weeks. Use of an online Learning Management
System makes this much easier.

Review: Check yourself

1 Can you define a task in language teaching/learning?

2 What are the main characteristics of a good language-learning task?
3 What are some possible problems with a listening comprehension task based
on an informative spoken text followed by written multiple-choice questions?
4 What are some useful guidelines to remember when giving instructions for a task?
5 In what ways can a teacher provide ongoing support for students as they
perform tasks?
6 Can you remember at least three useful tips on giving and checking homework?

Further reading
Scrivener, J. (2012). Classroom Management Techniques. Cambridge University Press.
(A useful and practical book on all aspects of managing classroom tasks in
language teaching)

References
Cooper, H., Robinson, J. C. and Patall, E. A. (2006). Does homework improve academic
achievement? A synthesis of research, 1987–2003. Review of Educational Research, 76(1), 1–62.
Ellis, R., Skehan, P., Li, S., Shintani, N. and Lambert, C. (2019). Task-Based Language
Teaching: Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press.

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 5 Texts

Overview

5.1 What is a text? A definition of what we mean by text in the context of English
language teaching; intensive and extensive text study.
5.2 Teaching the text: the goals. What we want learners to get from text study:
comprehension, language learning, and more.
5.3 Comprehension of content. Teaching procedures before, during and
after reading of the text that can facilitate student comprehension; some
practical tips.
5.4 Language learning from a text. The selection and teaching of grammatical
and vocabulary items from a text.
5.5 The text as discourse. Features relating to the text as a whole: genre, style,
structure, coherence, cohesion.
5.5 Follow-up tasks. Some ideas for tasks for later enrichment based on texts.

5.1 What is a text?

A text in the present context is a piece of writing or speech which is used for language
learning. It can be studied as a complete and autonomous unit: the reader or listener can
therefore understand it without necessarily knowing the context, even if it was originally
an extract from a longer text such as a book, a website or a conversation. It is coherent,
so it has a beginning, a middle and an end which make a clear sequence of thoughts or
events, and belongs to a recognisable genre of speech or writing. The term as it is used
here does not therefore normally include things like lists of words to be learnt, sentences
that give samples of usage or a grammar exercise.
Usually, a coursebook text ranges in length from a paragraph to a page or two; or, if it is
spoken, lasts for a couple of minutes. It may, however, be shorter; it could consist only of
a brief poem, a proverb or a quotation (Maley, 1994, see Further reading). Texts outside
the coursebook may be a good deal longer: several pages of a website, for example; or an
entire book or audiobook. In any case, their function in a language course is to provide
input which is a basis for language learning.

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A distinction needs to be made between intensive and extensive text study. Intensive means
that the text is not only understood, but also studied in detail, or milked for the language
that can be learnt from it. It is also possibly analysed or used as a springboard for further
language work, as described later in this chapter. Extensive means that the text is read
or heard for pleasure and/or information, but not studied in detail: the main aim is to
improve reading or listening fluency, and any language learning is incidental.
Most texts in English courses are used for intensive study, involving language learning
in various ways: comprehension work; learning the language items which appear in
it, analysis of content, genre or structure, and as a basis for further work on content or
language.
In principle, it is possible to do intensive work on a listening text as well as a reading one,
but in practice this is less common. A reading text is much easier to study, review and scan
than a listening one, even with rewind and other digital facilities, and the availability of
transcripts.
The guidelines in this chapter relate therefore mainly to texts used for intensive reading,
though many of them can also be applied to spoken ones.

5.2 Teaching the text: the goals

The main goals of teaching the text in a language course are comprehension of content,
language learning, discourse analysis, and then, optionally, enrichment through further
tasks based on different aspects of the text.

Comprehension of content
1 General gist. First, we need to make sure that the students understand the general
content: the plot, for example, if it is a narrative, or the ideas presented if it is an
informational text.
2 Detailed understanding. The next stage is more detailed comprehension of the
different parts of the text. This often means sentence-by-sentence study, helping
students to understand new language as it comes up.
3 Reading between the lines. You may invite students to infer meanings that are
not stated explicitly. In a literary text that involves dialogue, for example, you may
find it interesting to discuss the way the speech of different characters shows their
personality or motives. Or in an article presenting an argument, learners may be able
to elicit the underlying approach or prejudice of the writer, as revealed by their choice
of words.
4 Critical analysis. The text may then be studied critically: students are invited to judge
how truthful, consistent, or logical a text is. This is particularly useful when reading

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texts that are designed to persuade: political speeches or commercial advertisements.

For example, you might want to draw your students’ attention to tautology
(unnecessary repetition) in phrases like a free gift, or internal contradictions in phrases
like an objective opinion.

Language learning
1 Vocabulary. The most important language-learning benefit of intensive study of a text
is arguably vocabulary expansion or review. By drawing attention to new vocabulary
and activating students in tasks that involve understanding it, you can help students
to notice and learn new items, and review ones they have met before but may need
reminding of (see 6 Teaching vocabulary).
2 Grammar. A secondary benefit is the learning of word- or sentence-grammar
(morphology and syntax): any text of more than a few lines will provide a number
of examples of grammatical features. You will probably ignore the simpler ones that
the students already know, but it is useful to draw attention to ones which they have
recently learnt. And you may sometimes pick out a grammatical feature new to the
class, and spend a few minutes explaining and teaching it, providing further examples
from outside the present text (see 7 Teaching grammar). See Section 4 on page 62 for
guidelines on how to select language items to teach as well as some practical tips.
3 Other language features. Occasionally, you may want to draw students’ attention to
other linguistic features, such as style, punctuation or text formatting.
4 Aspects of discourse. These include features that relate to the text as a whole: genre
and structure, for example (rather than particular linguistic features such as grammar
or vocabulary). Discussion of aspects of discourse can normally only take place after
students have thoroughly understood the content of the text, and is more common in
relatively advanced classes.
5 Follow-up tasks. Having finished comprehension, language and discourse-analysis
work, you may find that many texts provide rich stimuli for further language-learning
tasks which involve student production (speech or writing), such as discussions, or
creative writing or research projects. These may be based on the actual content of the
text or on aspects of the language, style or discourse genre.
All these are discussed in more detail in the following sections.

Pause for thought

Look at the coursebook extract shown on the next page (a reading text and its
associated Exercises 1–5 and Exercise 9). Which goals from the list above can you
identify? Do you have any comments on the way the text is used? Would you add
anything? Would you change anything?

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 5 | Texts

Vocabulary computers (2); articles:

VOCABULARY a, an, the, no article

7C AND SKILLS Social networking Skills Reading: a magazine article;

Listening: an informal conversation

QUICK REVIEW Second conditional 3 a Read the article again. Answer these questions.
Decide what you would do if you: won the
1 Why doesn’t Robin Dunbar think we can have 1,000 friends?
lottery, were the leader of your country, spoke
2 Why does the writer think some people collect friends?
English fluently, were ten years younger.
Work in groups and compare ideas. Which 3 How did people get a free burger from Burger King?
students have the same ideas as you? 4 What does the British children’s charity say about loneliness
and online bullying?
5 What do some young people find difficult to cope with?
6 Why do professional people use sites like Linkedin?
Vocabulary and Speaking
Computers (2) b Work in pairs. Compare answers. Do you agree with the
points discussed in the article? Why?/Why not?
1 a Look at these sentences. Which of the
words/phrases in bold do you know? Check
new words/phrases in VOCABULARY 7.3 p143.
1 I’m on a social networking site such as
The lonely
Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. generation?
2 I update my status every day.
3 I change my profile quite often.
4 I’ve downloaded one or two new apps
recently.
T hese days, millions of people
organise their lives on social
networking sites like Facebook,
5 I sometimes upload videos to websites like Google+ or Twitter, and many of
YouTube. them can’t go a day – or even
6 I sometimes post comments on news sites an hour – without checking for
and forums. status updates. But what effect Sorry – I’d love to come out, but I’m
is this having on society and how busy updating my Facebook status.
7 I’m on Twitter and I tweet quite often.
is it changing the way we see
8 I also follow some famous people on Twitter.
our friends?
9 I often share links to interesting websites, The scientist Robin Dunbar suggests that the largest number of active social
blogs or videos with my friends. relationships a person’s brain can deal with is 150. However, most people have
b Work on your own. Tick the sentences hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of Facebook friends, partly because making
that are true for you. friends online is so easy. When you receive a friend request, you just click ‘Confirm’
and you have a new person to add to your collection of online friends. But do you
c Work in pairs. Compare sentences. really want to be friends with the person, or are you just trying to appear more
Ask follow-up questions if possible. popular? To illustrate the point, the Burger King chain of restaurants in the USA
offered to give people a free burger if they deleted 10 friends from their Facebook
page. Amazingly, over 530,000 people did just that, which shows how little some
Speaking and Reading people value many of these online friendships.
2 a Work in groups. Discuss these questions. Experts are also concerned that spending so much time online is making
children feel lonelier than ever before. According to a children’s charity in the UK,
1 In what ways do social networking sites help
the number of calls they receive about loneliness from teenage boys has gone up
people’s social lives?
by 500% compared to five years ago. The charity also reports that online bullying is
2 What problems can social networking sites also increasing. In another report, a third of people at university said they spent too
cause? much time communicating online and not enough in person. So it’s not surprising
3 How is social networking affecting teenagers that young people who are addicted to social networking sites find it harder to form
and children, do you think? strong, long-lasting relationships. For them, to be offline is to be disconnected from
b Before you read, check these words/ their network of friends, which can be very hard to cope with.
phrases with your teacher or in a dictionary. Of course, you don’t have to be at school or university to use social networking
sites. Many professional people use networking sites like Linkedin to make work
a collection lonely loneliness contacts. And of course being part of a global professional network means that
bullying be addicted to people can make the most of opportunities anywhere in the world. So if you’re
a designer working in Dublin or an engineer who’s moving to Egypt, the online
c Read the article. Which of the ideas that community is one of the most effective ways to help your career.
you discussed in 2a are mentioned in the Social networking sites are one of the most amazing success stories of
article? the internet and Facebook now has over a billion users all over the world. However,
the effect these sites are having on our friendships is changing our society forever.

58

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 ● today’s office meeting relatives can watch them.
● Twitter and tweeting
d CD2 24 Listen and check.
● number of Facebook friends
5 | Texts e Look at Audio Script CD2 22 p165. Listen to the
● how often Simon goes on Facebook
conversation again. Follow the sentence stress and
b Listen again. Are these sentences true or false? notice the weak forms.
1 All three people went to the meeting.
HELP WITH VOCABULARY 9
2 Simon goes ona,Facebook fivearticle
times a day. a Work in groups. Write a survey about the internet
Articles: an, the, no and social networking. Write at least five questions.
3 Jenny doesn’t use Facebook
4 a Look at the words/phrases as much as she used to.
in blue in the article. Use words/phrases from 1a or your own ideas.
4 She Match
saw heronefriends more often
word/phrase because
to each of Facebook.
of these rules.
1 Which social networking sites are you on?
5 Simon● says
We usethata his sister has more Facebook friends
or an:
thanaJenny.
when we don’t know, or it isn’t important, which one. b Ask other students in the class. Write the answers.
6 Gary likes following famous people on Twitter.
a day c Work in your groups. Compare answers.
7 Simonb watches
with jobs. videos of baby animals on YouTube.
c to talk about a person or thing for the first time.
d Tell the class what you found out about other
c Work in pairs. Compare answers. If a sentence is students’ social networking and internet habits.
● We use
false, explain the:
why.
d to talk about the same person or thing for the second/
(from face2face IntermediateGary
Jenny Student’s Book Simon
third/fourth, etc. time. 2nd Edition by Redstone, C. and Cunningham, 59
e when there is only one (or only one in a particular place). G., 2013)
HELP WITH LISTENING Weak forms (2)
f with countries that are groups of islands or states.
● Remember: in sentences we say many small words
g with superlatives.
with a schwa /ə/ sound. These are called weak forms.
● We don’t use an article:
8 a Work in pairs. How do we say the strong and
h for most towns, cities, countries and continents.
weak forms of these words?
i to talk about people or things in general.
j for some public places (school, hospital, etc.) when we do you at for of and to can
talk about what they are used for in general.
b CD2 23 Listen and notice the difference
b Check in VOCABULARY 7.4 p143. between the strong and weak forms of these words.

5 a Look at the words/phrases in pink in the article. strong weak strong weak
Match them to rules a–j in 4a. There is one word/ are /ɑː/ /ə/ but /bʌt/ /bət/
phrase for each rule. /wɒz/ /wəz/
was as /æz/ /əz/
b Work in pairs. Compare answers. were /wɜː/ /wə/ from /frɒm/ /frəm/

6 Work in new pairs. Student A p104. Student B p109. your /jɔː/ /jə/ them /ðem/ /ðəm/
Comment c Look at these sentences from the conversation.
Listening and Speaking
There is work
Which words do we hear as weak forms?
on comprehension (Exercises 2c and 3), which relates to the main
1 Here are your drinks. We were lucky to get a table,
7 points
a CD2 made22 Lookby the
at the writer.
photo If Iwork
of three were teaching this text,
colleagues, I would
weren’t we? also want students
Jenny, Simon and Gary. Then listen to them talking
toabout
be how
aware of the overall gist, or bottom-line
they use social networking sites. Put these message,
2 But I wasthat the
spending writer
hours and is trying
hours to it
on it and
wasn’t as much fun as it used to be.
convey. Vocabulary
topics in the order they talkisabout
dealtthem.with in Exercise 1, and the students are invited to relate
3 No, but I like reading tweets from fi lm stars and
the items
● videos andto their own experience in a personalized
YouTube discussion
footballers and peopletasklike(Exercise
that. 1c).
● how Jenny uses Facebook Well, my wife posts videos of the children so our
I would probably want to add more vocabulary from the text, based on students’
4
● today’s office meeting relatives can watch them.
level and
● Twitter andneeds.
tweeting A grammatical point (rules relating to indefinite and definite
d CD2 24 Listen and check.
articles)
● number of is Facebook
discussed friendsin Exercises 4 and 5, somewhat misleadingly headed ‘Help
e Look at Audio Script CD2 22 p165. Listen to the
with vocabulary’. There is no discussion of discourse
● how often Simon goes on Facebook
aspects; I would probably want
conversation again. Follow the sentence stress and
to direct students’ attention to the main topics of
b Listen again. Are these sentences true or false? thethe
notice different paragraphs, and why
weak forms.
1 All are
they three ordered
people went to inthe meeting.
this way. An interesting follow-up task is provided in Exercise 9.
2Simon goes on Facebook five times a day. 9 a Work in groups. Write a survey about the internet
and social networking. Write at least five questions.
3Jenny doesn’t use Facebook as much as she used to.
Use words/phrases from 1a or your own ideas.
4 She saw her friends more often because of Facebook.
1 Which social networking sites are you on?
5.3 Comprehension of content
5 Simon says that his sister has more Facebook friends
than Jenny. b Ask other students in the class. Write the answers.
The6 priority in dealing
Gary likes following famouswith
peopleaontext is to get
Twitter. the students
c Workto
in understand it: first
your groups. Compare the gist,
answers.
7 Simon watches videos of baby animals on YouTube.
then in more detail. d Tell the class what you found out about other
c Work in pairs. Compare answers. If a sentence is students’ social networking and internet habits.
false, explain why.
Before reading the text 59

Preparatory work before students actually encounter the text can be extremely helpful
for comprehension. It can include discussing the topic, pre-teaching vocabulary, raising
expectations and asking preliminary questions to which the text will provide the answers.

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Presenting the topic. Previous knowledge of the topic is a major factor facilitating text
comprehension. So it is a good idea either to give students information about the content of
the text in advance, or to elicit it from them by asking questions. In some cases, it may even be
appropriate to provide a synopsis in the students’ L1 in advance. Students do not necessarily
have to discover for themselves what it is about, and they may get a pleasing sense of success as
they recognize and understand known content through reading the English version.
Pre-teaching vocabulary. A lot of books and teachers do this routinely, as in the
‘Vocabulary and Speaking’ section in the textbook extract shown on pages 57–58.
Research indicates it has some value for text comprehension (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2022),
but possibly not as much as one might expect. Teaching a lot of vocabulary in advance
overloads students’ short-term memory, and they often do not remember the meanings
when they encounter them in the text. Discussing the topic in advance may be more
conducive to eventual understanding of a text (Chang and Read, 2006). So perhaps it’s
best to pre-teach only a small number of vital items, which may come up anyway during
an introductory discussion of content, and to provide clarification of the rest as you
go, through a glossary or through your own input. An alternative, if the text is not very
difficult, is to do without pre-teaching altogether: to engage directly with the reading and
teach the vocabulary as it comes up in context, and/or in response to students’ questions.
Raising expectations and curiosity. In order to motivate students to engage with the
text, a useful strategy is to arouse their curiosity by giving them questions to discuss,
to which the text will provide the answers. Alternatively, let them glance at the title,
headings and any illustrations, and make guesses or ask questions about the content of
the text, or brainstorm what words or phrases they think are likely to come up in it. These
types of preliminary questions make comprehension easier when students encounter the
text, as well as raising their motivation to read (or listen to) it.
First reading for understanding
In the case of a reading text: sometimes students are asked to prepare it at home before
it is studied in class, but more often the text is encountered for the first time in a lesson.
There are three main ways this is done: the students read along while listening to the text,
either on a recording or being read by the teacher; students read it silently; students read
sections aloud, in turn.
In many cases, a difficult reading text encountered for the first time will be best understood
if the teacher reads it aloud at an appropriate speed (or plays a recording, if there is one)
while the students read along. There is some evidence that this can be an effective strategy
to support learner comprehension (see, for example, Amer, 1997). If you do this, keep
occasional eye contact with your students, and allow yourself to stop now and then to clarify
or check comprehension. A more challenging alternative is to allow silent reading – provided
that the text is not too difficult, there has been some preparation of content and there
are glosses of new words available, on the same page or through a hyperlink. If successful,
this will have the added bonus that the students can feel satisfied that they have read and
understood the text on their own. Asking students to take turns reading aloud a new text is
probably the least effective strategy, and does not usually help comprehension very much.
This is partly because a student reading aloud focuses on the decoding and pronunciation of

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 5 | Texts

words and does not have much attention to spare for thinking about the meaning of what
is read. Also, students often cannot sight-read well enough to communicate the meanings
to other members of the class who are listening: certainly not as well as the teacher can. In
some learning cultures, however, students are routinely asked to ‘sight-read’ a new text and
are disappointed if the teacher doesn’t let them. If you are teaching in a context where this is
the case, try to postpone student reading aloud to the second or third time you read the text,
when students already understand most of it and are likely to be able to read it more fluently
and meaningfully.

Pause for thought

How did you feel about being asked to read aloud a new text in the classroom in
your own learning of a new language?

Comment
Your answer here will very much depend on how well you read aloud as a learner,
and how often you and the other students were asked to do so.

Comprehension tasks
Comprehension questions. The most common type of text comprehension task is
comprehension questions after hearing or reading the text. But these may not always be
very effective, as illustrated in the following Pause for thought.

Pause for thought

Read the following passage and answer the following questions.

Yesterday I saw the palgish flester gollining begrunt the bruck. He seemed very
chanderbil, so I did not jorter him, just deapled to him quistly. Perhaps later he will
besand cander, and I will be able to rangel to him.
1 What was the flester doing, and where?
2 What sort of a flester was he?
3 Why did the writer decide not to jorter him?
4 How did she deaple?
5 What did she hope would happen later?

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Comment
If you did the task, you probably found it easy to answer the questions. However,
this obviously did not show that you had understood the passage. So we can
conclude that answering ‘comprehension’ questions may not always entail
comprehension! The reason in this case is that the questions virtually echo the text,
and you can answer them without thinking. If the questions are worded differently
from the text itself, or require interpretation and application of the reader’s
background knowledge, then they are likely to be more effective.
Have a look at the original text on which the nonsense one on page 60 was
based, and check out the following comprehension questions, which are
designed using the above criteria.
Yesterday I saw the new patient hurrying along the corridor. He seemed very
upset, so I did not follow him, just called to him gently. Perhaps later he will feel
better, and I will be able to talk to him.
1 What is the problem described here?
2 Is this event taking place indoors or outside?
3 Did the writer try to get near the patient?
4 What do you think she said when she called to him?
5 What might the job of the writer be?
6 Why do you think she wants to talk to the patient?
These questions demand real comprehension and encourage interpretation of
the text, as well as being more interesting to do.

Other comprehension tasks. There are other types of comprehension tasks which
encourage and monitor understanding. They are often more interesting than the standard
comprehension questions and can be just as effective. Working individually or in groups,
students might, for example:
• suggest alternative titles and justify them;
• compose their own comprehension questions, then exchange and answer;
• identify the most important sentence in the text (or two, or three) and justify
their choice;
• summarize the content (in L1 or L2, orally or in writing);
• re-present the content in a different form: as a picture, a list of points, a diagram,
a table.

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Practical tips
1 When doing preparatory work on the content of a reading text, tell students to close
their books (or digital devices), and not to look at the text itself. Otherwise they may
start reading, and be distracted from the preparation.
2 With a monolingual class whose language you know, feel free to pause briefly to slip
in quick translations of difficult bits if you are reading aloud a text at first encounter.
Translations can be really helpful and can be done very quickly, without disturbing the
flow of the text in the way that longer explanations in English might do.
3 If you can pre-edit a reading text, provide glosses for unknown words. It is probably
better to place these in the margin rather than immediately after the unknown word
itself (Schmitt, 2008), and better in L1 – if feasible – than in English (Yanagisawa et al.,
2020).
4 Make sure students actually read through, or hear, the text more than once; the
re-reading in itself substantially improves comprehension and learning from a text
(Gorsuch and Taguchi, 2010).
5 Adopt the ‘sandwich’ principle! Present the text for the first time, and then work on
comprehension tasks and other detailed work on different aspects or parts of the text.
Finally, re-read, or let students hear, the whole text again.

5.4 Language learning from a text

The text may contain a lot of language items that we want students to learn. So after we
have ensured comprehension, a following stage is to spend some time working on lexical
and other items we have selected for focused teaching.

Selection
We can’t normally teach every single word and all the grammatical features in the text:
how do we select which to focus on?
Vocabulary. Most coursebook writers are now aware of the importance of focusing on the
most useful and common vocabulary. However, some materials still either do not provide
enough vocabulary work on texts, or list every new item, as if these were all equally vital –
which, of course, they are probably not. At least for beginner or intermediate classes, we
need to make a distinction between those that are really important for students at this
level to know, and those which need to be understood in order to deal with this particular
text, but are less essential for students’ communicative needs at this level.
In most cases, you yourself will supplement or alter the lists provided by the coursebook –
or make your own list, if you are not using a coursebook at all. Make sure when doing so
that you include also multi-word items, or phrases, not just single words.
Useful online tools for selecting which vocabulary to teach are the ‘vocabulary profilers’:
websites which invite you to paste your text (or a transcript of a listening text) into a

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window. They then provide you with information about which items are more, or less,
appropriate for different levels: either by identifying the CEFR level or defining how
frequent the items are according to a corpus-based frequency list: so ‘K1’ and ‘K2’ (the top
2,000 words) would be appropriate for classes at an elementary level (A1/A2) and so on.
The ones I have found most useful are:
• Lextutor
www.lextutor.ca/vp/comp/
Rates by thousands according to a frequency list
• Text Inspector
http://englishprofile.org/wordlists/text-inspector
Rates by CEFR (A1, A2, etc.)
• Vocabkitchen
www.vocabkitchen.com/profile
Rates by CEFR (A1, A2, etc.), or the Academic Word List, or the New Academic
Word List
• Corpus of contemporary American English (COCA)
www.english-corpora.org/coca/
(Click on ‘input entire texts’ on the home page.)
Rates by low frequency, mid-frequency, high frequency
Below is a sample of the Text Inspector’s analysis, based on the final paragraph of the
coursebook text shown on page 57.

Statistics and details (Toggle all words)

On the main site you can process 10,000 words, and export your data. Go to www.textinspector.com
(Subscription required)

17 types / 22 tokens 6 types / 8 tokens 7 types / 7 tokens

A1 A2 B1
53.12% / 56.41% 18.75% / 20.51% 21.88% / 17.95%
(Show words) (Show words) (Show words)

1 types / 1 tokens 1 types / 1 tokens

B2 Unlisted
3.12% / 2.56% 3.12% / 2.56%
(Show words) (Show words)

Input
social networking B1 sites A2 are A1 one A1 of A1 the A1 most A2 amazing A2 success B1 stories A2 of A1
the internet A1 and A1 facebook now A1 has A1 over A2 a A1 billion B2 users B1 all A1 over A2 the A1
world A1 however A2 the A1 effect B1 these A1 sites A2 are A1 having A1 on A1 our A1 friendships B1 is A1
changing A1 our A1 society B1 forever B1

Text inspector shows the lowest value of each item by default. For mor accuracy, click on an item and choose the
correct use from the list. Then click on the UPDATE button below to update your statistics.

U P DAT E Back

Text Inspector sometimes draws your attention to multi-word items (see social networking
in this sample), but the other tools relate only to single words. So you may need to
supplement their lists with multi-word items you notice.

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Note that modern online dictionaries often note the level or frequency of headwords: the
Cambridge Dictionary (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/), for example,
provides the CEFR level immediately below the headword.
Having said all this about the importance of prioritizing frequent vocabulary – remember
to leave space also for individual student choice! Some students, for example, might wish
to learn all the new vocabulary in the text, others might find they like particular words or
phrases, and want to note down and remember them.

Pause for thought

Choose a text from a coursebook, a newspaper or a website and imagine you are
going to use it with an intermediate (B1) class. Identify:
• the items you think are very common and probably already known by students
(leave unmarked);
• the items which are not so common but would probably be useful to teach
(underline);
• the items which are much more advanced and do not need to be taught
in an intermediate class, but might be appropriate for an advanced one
(double underline).
Check how your intuitions compare with a corpus-based analysis, by using a
website such as one of those suggested on page 63, or an online dictionary that
gives frequencies, such as the Cambridge Dictionary.

Comment
You’ll probably find that your intuitions are usually – though not always – accurate
according to corpus-based frequency lists. For any particular student population,
the ratings suggested by the profilers may not be appropriate, so you’ll need to
decide in each case whether to adopt them, or go with your own intuitions.

Grammar, spelling, punctuation, pronunciation. Again, it’s useful to note for yourself
in advance which features you want to teach or review. As in the case of vocabulary,
prioritize features that are more important and frequent, and don’t worry too much about
ones that are much more advanced than your students’ current level. The items you focus
on might be ones you have recently taught, minor ones which students might not notice
on their own, or usages which are noticeably different from parallel ones in the students’
L1. There will always also be points which come up spontaneously during the lesson:
perhaps in response to a student question or error, or because you or a student notice
something interesting as you work through the text.

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Teaching selected items

Once you (and/or the students) have selected which language features from a text you
want to focus on in class, you need to decide how you are going to do so.
Inferring meanings from context. A popular strategy used by many teachers is asking
students to work out what a word means from its context. This, however, is not as useful
as it might appear. Research indicates that such inferencing is unreliable (Kaivanpanah
and Alavi, 2008); and, interestingly, students very often believe they have guessed rightly
when in fact they haven’t. This is a strategy, then, to be used with caution, as it might
result in mistaken guesses, frustration and time-wasting. If the meaning of a word is
clearly revealed by the surrounding context, then by all means invite students to guess it;
if not, then it is probably best just to tell them what it means and move on.
Allocation of time. Stopping for intensive study of particular features as you go through
the text may spoil the momentum of the text content itself. It’s better to draw students’
attention briefly to the words or grammatical forms as you go, and then return to the
reading of the text as a whole. Detailed attention to the teaching and review of new
language can be postponed to a separate session within the same lesson.
More detailed discussion of the focused teaching of vocabulary, grammar and features of
written text can be found in 6 Teaching vocabulary, 7 Teaching grammar, 11 Teaching
writing.

5.5 The text as discourse

The term discourse relates to macro aspects of the text as a whole, as distinct from the
micro aspects at word, phrase or sentence level which have been discussed up to now.

Genre
There is an enormous number of different genres of text, written and spoken, and
virtually all of them can be exploited for purposes of language learning.

Pause for thought

Look through the lists below of longer and shorter text genres. Then:
1 Cross out any which you feel would be less relevant or useful for a student
population you are familiar with, and add any more you feel are missing.
2 Look at a coursebook used with the student population you are thinking of
and check how many of the genres in your list you can find.
Longer texts: written (online or print)
academic paper advertisement advice or guidance current news
email informative text instructions narrative
online chat plays, written dialogue poetry questionnaire

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Longer texts: spoken

face-to-face conversation full-length film instructions
interview monologue, talk, lecture narrative
podcast radio or television news telephone conversation
video
Shorter texts
‘one-liner’ joke advice or tip book or movie title cartoon caption
diagram infographic map newspaper headline
notice or street sign saying or proverb short poem
short posting to a forum or blog tweet

Comment
The coursebooks I looked at contain a surprisingly limited range of text genres. The
vast majority of the written texts were informative articles, taken from websites – often
blogs – or print media; there were also a few providing guidance on social or health
issues. There was no text messaging (see the next section on informal written style).
Spoken texts were mostly interviews or chats; less frequent were talks or lectures. I also
found virtually no short texts, and surprisingly little narrative. You may find it advisable,
therefore, to supplement the texts provided in your coursebook with some other
genres from your list; or, if you are not using a coursebook, to make sure that your
students get a reasonably wide variety of genres in the texts you provide. A wide
variety of texts are easily accessible nowadays through the internet, though you
would need to check copyright (see 18 Digital technology and online teaching);
and it may be necessary in some cases to simplify in order to meet the needs of a
particular group of students.

Style
Style refers to the language choices a writer/speaker makes to clarify their message, attitude
or identity and to impress their reader. These choices can include features such as: choice
of grammatical structure(s) and vocabulary; punctuation; use of capitals, spacing, or
different fonts in written texts; use of voice quality, volume, intonation, pauses in spoken
texts; and use of literary devices such as repetition, alliteration, or figurative language.
Even with less advanced classes, it is worth drawing students’ attention to basic stylistic
features. For example, you might look at the way the use of contractions such as can’t
shows informality. With more advanced classes, work can be done on the link between
genre and style: what stylistic characteristics are shown, for example, in an email text
we are studying that do not appear in academic writing, and vice versa? What sorts of
language use are typical of newspaper headlines, but rare elsewhere?
An increasingly common style today is very informal writing, as used in texting and postings
inserted in blogs or forums. Such texts are rarely seen in course materials, perhaps because

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this type of writing is still seen as sub-standard by many teachers and materials writers, and
therefore to be avoided. But besides being on the increase, it is also today, in my view, a
legitimate written style, which students need to learn about. It is, therefore, worth exposing
students to the genres that use it, and raising their awareness of when and where it is
appropriate (see 11 Teaching writing).

Structure, coherence and cohesion

Drawing students’ attention to how a good text is structured with a beginning, middle
and end can help when they come to write their own compositions, or prepare oral
presentations. A diagram, table or list can be a way to represent the components clearly and
how they are ordered. For example, you might summarize the description of the process of
an experiment by a flowchart, or chart the main events in a story in a vertical list.
A related topic is coherence and cohesion: the way the text hangs together. Coherence is the
macro: the text as a whole unit of meaning whose parts combine to make sense. Cohesion
is the micro: the way individual paragraphs, sentences or phrases are linked to each other.
Cohesion is achieved by means of cohesive devices: grammar and lexis which indicate
relationships between one chunk of text (word, sentence or paragraph) and another.
Some cohesive devices are: conjunctions such as and, but, yet, because, although, if;
repetition or paraphrase; sentence adverbs or adverbial phrases such as however, on the one
hand, in addition; pronouns or possessives such as the one, she, their.
Students can be encouraged to identify cohesive devices within the text.

Pause for thought

Have a look at the short text below, or choose one of your own. What might you draw
students’ attention to with regard to genre, structure, style, coherence and cohesion?

“Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

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Comment
After making sure students have understood the text, you might check out some
formal aspects of the text as discourse. The genre is clearly poetry, mainly shown at
first glance by the structure: the text appears as short lines, each beginning with an
upper-case letter. The style is typical of poetry: it includes the use of metre, rhyme
and stylistic features such as extended metaphor, personalization and alliteration.
As regards coherence and cohesion: you might discuss the use of punctuation: the
fact that the whole poem is, a single sentence (only one full stop at the end); dashes
are used to divide sense units. For many texts, your discussion of the discourse may
be confined to discussion of such aspects; in this case, however, your class may
enjoy further discussion of features, expressions and meanings that contribute to its
impact as a poem. (See 16 Teaching content, Section 4 on teaching literature.)

5.6 Follow-up tasks

Once your class has finished studying a text, learning its language, and perhaps analysing
some aspects of its genre, structure and style, you might want to draw to a close there, and
move on. Or you might want to add additional tasks which use the text as a trigger for
further language enrichment work. If you do want to add enrichment tasks, here are some
you can give your students, adapted from Maley (2011).

Shorten the text.

• Delete words or phrases from the text, making sure that what remains still makes sense
and conveys the message of the original.
• Take out all the adjectives and/or adverbs. What difference does this make to the
overall meaning or feel of the text?

Extend the text

• Add adjectives and adverbs wherever you can.
• Add at least one extra sentence within each paragraph, without destroying its coherence.
• Add an introductory paragraph or an extra paragraph at the end.

Change the text

• Insert synonyms of words in the text wherever you can. What difference did this make
to the overall impression of the text?
• Change the style of the text: from formal to informal, for example. Or simplify to make
the text accessible to less proficient learners.
• Change the genre of the text. For example, if it is written as a poem, rewrite as a
newspaper report (try this on the poem shown on page 67!).
• (For a monolingual class) Translate (part of) the text into L1. Discuss any interesting
translation problems that came up.

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Compare
• Compare the content and style with another text you have studied previously, or with
a new one provided by the teacher.

Create your own text

• Write your own text based on the genre and structure of the text you have just studied,
but on a topic of your own choosing.
• Write a personal response to the text. This could be in the form of a letter to the writer,
responding to their ideas, or it could be in the form of an essay. In either case, you
should make clear your own opinion or interpretation of the ideas brought up in the
original text.

Expand knowledge
• Discuss the issues raised in the text: either through a class discussion, or online (a
forum, an exchange of emails, a blog).
• Conduct a survey on issues raised in the text.
• Find out more about the content of the text by searching for information from the
internet, books, or by asking people you know. Create a presentation displaying the results.

Evaluation and reflection

• Evaluate the text: did it achieve its objective? What was good or bad about it? How did
you personally respond to it? Did you enjoy studying it?
• Reflect on your own learning: what have you learnt, in terms of information, new ways
of thinking about things and language?

Review: Check yourself

1 What is meant by intensive study of a text?

2 What are some common problems with comprehension questions on texts?
How can they be overcome?
3 How might you decide which lexical items from a text to teach and which not?
4 Can you recall at least seven different genres of text that you might use
with a class?
5 What aspects of style might you want to draw your students’ attention to?
6 How many types of enrichment tasks on texts can you remember?

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 5 | Texts

Further reading
Driscoll, L. (2004). Reading Extra. Cambridge University Press.
(A variety of different reading texts of varying lengths, with some ideas of how to
teach them)
Maley, A. (1994). Short and Sweet. Penguin.
(A useful collection of short texts of varied genres, with some very imaginative but
practical ideas on how they may be treated in the classroom)
Thornbury, S. (2005). Beyond the Sentence: Introducing discourse analysis, Oxford:
Macmillan Education.
(A discussion of how written and spoken texts are structured, and how a
knowledge of this structure can help us teach a text)

References
Amer, A. A. (1997). The effect of the teacher’s reading aloud on the reading
comprehension of EFL students. ELT Journal, 51(4), 43–47.
Chang, A. C. and Read, J. (2006). The effects of listening support on the listening
performance of EFL learners. TESOL Quarterly, 40(2), 375–397.
Gorsuch, G. and Taguchi, E. (2010). Developing reading fluency and comprehension using
repeated reading: Evidence from longitudinal student reports. Language Teaching Research,
14(1), 27–60.
Kaivanpanah, S. and Alavi, M. (2008). Deriving unknown word meaning from context: Is
it reliable? RELC Journal, 39(1), 77–95.
Maley, A. (2011). Squaring the circle – reconciling materials as constraint with materials
as empowerment. In Tomlinson, B. (Ed.), Materials Development in Language Teaching
(pp. 379–402). Cambridge University Press.
. .
Pellicer-Sánchez, A., Conklin, K. and Vilkaite-Lozdiene, L. (2022). (Re) Examining the
benefits of pre-reading instruction for vocabulary learning. TESOL Quarterly, 56(1), 363–375.
Schmitt, N. (2008). Review article: Instructed second language vocabulary learning.
Language Teaching Research, 12(3), 329–363.
Yanagisawa, A., Webb, S. and Uchihara, T. (2020). How do different forms of glossing
contribute to l2 vocabulary learning from reading? A meta-regression analysis. Studies in
Second Language Acquisition, 42(2), 411–438.

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 6 Teaching vocabulary

Overview

6.1 What is vocabulary? A definition of the word vocabulary in the context of

English language teaching.
6.2 What students need to learn. Aspects of lexical items that learners need to
learn, associated with their form, meaning and use in context.
6.3 How best to teach vocabulary: some facts and figures. Research-based
information about how vocabulary is most effectively learnt and taught.
6.4 Presenting new vocabulary: selection and presentation. Choosing which
lexical items to teach, and how to present them.
6.5 Vocabulary review. Later practice and enrichment activities to enhance
vocabulary learning.

6.1 What is vocabulary?

Vocabulary can be defined, roughly, as the words in the language. However, it may include
items that are more than a single word: for example, post office and mother-in-law. There
are also longer multi-word expressions such as call it a day, in any case, which express a
single concept and are stored in the memory as a whole chunk. A useful convention is to
cover all such cases by talking about vocabulary items rather than words.
The term vocabulary is also sometimes taken to include grammatical items: pronouns such
as she, someone, or determiners such as the, that, any. These are contrasted with lexical items
(nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). Grammatical items do not have much meaning on
their own, but are used to show the relationships with other words within meaningful
utterances. They are closed sets (it is unlikely that the language will acquire a new
pronoun, or another demonstrative to add to this/that), whereas lexical items are an open
set: items are constantly being added, lost or changed.

6.2 What students need to learn

The most important things the students need to know about a lexical item are its written
and spoken form and its meaning, or meanings. However, there are additional aspects
which also need to be learnt at some point: its grammar, collocational links, connotations,
and appropriate contexts for use.

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Form: pronunciation and spelling

The learner has to know what a word sounds like (its pronunciation) and what it looks
like (its spelling). Many people assume that meaning is more important than form: but
remember that knowing a meaning is pretty useless without knowing the form it is attached
to. In most cases, the learners will encounter a form before they know its meaning, not vice
versa – which is why it is put first here.
You may stress either pronunciation or spelling when teaching a particular item:
ultimately, students will need to know both. Most English words are pronounced and
spelt according to a set of reliable rules (see 11 Teaching writing, Section 5), but where
they are not, you will need to teach the irregular form.

Meaning: denotation
The meaning of a word or expression is what it refers to, or denotes, in the real world.
This is given in dictionaries as its definition. Sometimes a word may have various
meanings: most often these are metaphorical extensions of the meaning of the original
word (for example, the foot of a mountain, deriving from foot as part of the body). But
sometimes a word such as bear has multiple meanings (bear the animal and bear meaning
‘tolerate’) because they are derived from two different words which happen to have
developed into the same form (homonyms).

Grammar
The grammar of a new item will need to be taught if this is not obviously covered by
general grammatical rules. An item may have an unpredictable change of form in certain
grammatical contexts (for example, the past simple of irregular verbs), or may have
some particular way of connecting with other words in sentences (for example, the verbs
which take -ing forms after them (like enjoy) rather than the to infinitive (like need). It is
important to provide students with this information when, or soon after, introducing the
item itself.

Collocation
Collocation refers to the way words tend to co-occur with other words or expressions.
For example, we normally say tell + the truth but not *say + the truth. As in this case, a specific
phrase may be grammatically correct and yet sound wrong simply because of inappropriate
collocation. More examples: you can do your homework, but you cannot make it. Similarly,
you throw a ball but toss a coin; you may talk about a high mountain, but not * a high person.
Collocations are often, but not always, shown in dictionaries under the headword of one of
the collocating items.

Connotation
The connotations of a word are the emotional or positive–negative associations that it implies.
The words moist and damp, for example, have the same basic meaning (slightly wet),

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but moist has favourable connotations while damp has slightly unfavourable ones. So you
could talk about a moist chocolate cake, which sounds appetising, but a damp cake would
be somewhat distasteful. Many words have only weak connotations or do not have them
at all; however, where the connotation is marked, as in the above example, it needs to
be taught. The dictionary does not always specify connotations in its definitions, though
where these exist, they may often be understood from the examples or collocations
provided.

Appropriateness
In order to know how to use an item, the student needs to know in what contexts it
is appropriate to use it. Thus, it is useful for a student to know, for a particular item, if
it is usually used in writing or in speech, in formal or informal discourse, whether it is
commonly used or rare. Some items may be taboo in most social interactions; others may
belong to certain varieties of English. For example, learners need to know that the word
weep is virtually synonymous with cry, but it is more formal, tends to be used in writing
more than in speech, and is in general much less common.

Pause for thought

How would you present the meanings (denotations) of the words swim, fame,
childish, political, impertinence, kid?
For which would you mention their connotations? Collocations? Appropriate
contexts?

Comment
Swim means to move oneself through the water by moving parts of the body:
you might clarify by using pictures or mime (it could also be a noun, as in go
for a swim). It has no particular connotations and collocations, and is neutral as
regards context of use. Fame means the state of being well known. It has a positive
connotation; you would not use the word about someone who is well known
because they have done something bad. It has no particular collocations and is
neutral as regards context of use. Childish means like a child, but it has a strong
negative connotation: it would be used to insult, or criticize behaviour. It often
collocates with words like games, silly, stupid. It is neutral as regards context of
use. Political means associated with politics. It can have a negative connotation in
some contexts: where, for example, political motives are contrasted with motives of
justice or morality. It commonly collocates with party, prisoner, decision. It is neutral
as regards context of use. Impertinence means being rude or cheeky, particularly

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relating to the behaviour of someone to a superior who is normally respected. It

has no particular connotation or collocation but is used mainly in formal speech
or writing. Kid means a child, of either gender. It has slight connotations of affection
(though it can also be used with negative adjectives) and commonly collocates
with sister, brother. It is normally used only in informal conversation or writing.

Meaning relationships
It can also be useful to look at how the meaning of one item relates to the meaning of
others, though this is perhaps less essential for initial learning than the aspects discussed
above. There are various such relationships: here are some of the main ones.
• Synonyms: items that mean the same, or nearly the same. Example: bright, clever or
smart may serve as synonyms of intelligent.
• Antonyms: items that mean the opposite. Example: rich is an antonym of poor.
• Hyponyms: items that serve as specific examples of a general concept. Example: dog,
lion, mouse are hyponyms of animal.
• Co-hyponyms/coordinates: other items that are the same kind of thing. Example: red,
blue, green and brown are co-hyponyms, or coordinates.
• Superordinates: general concepts that cover specific items. Example: furniture is the
superordinate of chair, table, sofa.
Besides these, there are other, perhaps looser, ways of associating meaning that are
useful in teaching. You can, for instance, relate parts to a whole (e.g., the relationship
between arm and body); or associate items that are part of the same real-world context
(e.g., tractor, farmer, milking and irrigate are all associated with agriculture). All these
can be exploited in teaching to clarify the meaning of a new item, or for practice or
test materials.

Word formation
Words can be broken down into morphemes: for example, unkindly is composed of the
prefix un-, the root word kind and the suffix -ly. You may wish to teach the common
prefixes and suffixes: for example, if students know the meaning of the prefixes un- and
sub- and the suffixes -able, -ful, this will help them understand the meanings of words like
substandard, ungrateful and untranslatable. They should, however, be warned that in many
common words, the meaning of the prefix or suffix has got lost and knowing it may not
help them understand the meaning (examples are subject, refine). In general, the teaching
of prefixes and suffixes is more useful for high-intermediate or advanced learners (B2
upwards), less so for lower levels (Ur, 2022).

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New words are constantly entering the language. Often, these are based on prefixes or
suffixes added to known words (as in ultra-modern, watchable). Another way vocabulary
items are built is by combining two (occasionally more) words to make one item,
sometimes hyphenated (copypaste, crossdressing, state-of-the-art).

6.3 How best to teach vocabulary: some facts and figures

How many of its words do you need to know in order to understand a text?
Many people think that if you understand 80–85 percent of the words of a text, then
you can probably guess the rest and, when reading, feel confident that you understand
what the text as a whole is saying. This is now known to be an underestimate (try the
Pause for thought experiment below if you don’t believe me, before reading on to the
Comment). It is generally agreed by researchers today that in order to understand a
text, you need to be able to understand between 95 percent and 98 percent of its words
(Laufer, 2020).

Pause for thought

Have a look at the following passage. I have deleted about 20 percent of the
words. Can you understand roughly what it is about?
Since the beginning of Western civilization, there has been a particular interest
in the _______ _______ that _______ have in their _______ of _______ . The body of
_______ associated with the _______ of _______ in which a person is _______ is a
particularly important difference between _______ and _______ _______ . Much
of this knowledge can be _______ and _______ with _______ to benefit _______
in the domain and can help _______ _______ and _______ their progress toward
_______ . The special status of the knowledge of _______ in their _______ of _______ is
acknowledged even as far back as the Greek civilization.

Comment
It is quite difficult to understand what the topic is. Knowledge? Talent? Character?
And it is almost impossible to guess what the missing words are. It is, in fact, about
expertise (the first missing word), and is taken from a book on the topic by Ericsson
et al. (the full reference is given in the References list at the end of the chapter).
Now move on to the next Pause for thought, shown on the next page.

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Pause for thought

Below is shown the same text as used in the previous Pause for thought, but now
with only 3 percent of the words deleted. The general meaning is now clear, assuming
that all the other words are understood. But it is very difficult to guess the meanings of
the missing words. Try it. And then check with the full text, shown on page 84.
Since the beginning of Western civilization, there has been a particular interest in
the superior knowledge that experts have in their domain of expertise. The body of
knowledge associated with the domain of expertise in which a person is expert is a
particularly important difference between experts and other individuals. Much of
this knowledge can be __________ described and shared with others to __________
__________ -making in the domain and can help educate students and facilitate
their progress toward expertise. The special _________ of the knowledge of experts in
their domain of expertise is acknowledged even as far back as the Greek civilization.

Comment
Of course, in a real learner situation, the gaps would be filled with the unknown
words, and in some cases the learner would be helped by knowing meanings
of component morphemes: basewords, prefixes or suffixes. In the present text, for
example, the meaning of the baseword decide might have helped the learner
work out the meaning of the word decision. The other items are very difficult to
guess, and you will probably have found that you could correctly identify the
meanings of only one or two of them: maybe none. This obviously does not mean
that you don’t know English, or don’t have good inferencing strategies. The reason
is that in many, if not most, natural contexts the meaning of an unknown word is
simply not clearly revealed by the content of the surrounding text. You need to
think twice, therefore, before asking a student to guess meanings from context:
do so only when you are fairly sure that these are in fact guessable.

Knowing about 98 percent of an unsimplified text means knowing a lot of vocabulary,

and a substantial amount of research has been done in order to try to identify the number
of words needed at different levels. The research is complicated by different definitions of
what a ‘word’ is. The two most common definitions are
a) a lemma: a word similar to the headword in a dictionary (for example, send, assumed to
include regular grammatical variants like sends, sent, sending);
b) a word family: a set of words from a common root with commonly used prefixes or
suffixes (for example, nation, nations, nationalize, national, international).
A word list based on word families, will therefore imply a much longer list of lemmas; and it
will be longer still if we include multi-word items, such as of course or on the other hand, whose
meaning cannot necessarily be worked out from the component words. Most research on

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quantity of vocabulary needed for the different levels has been based on word families; so, for
example, Schmitt and Schmitt (2014) estimate that 3,000 word families are needed in order to
reach a high-intermediate level (end of B1), and up to 9,000 in order to cope with advanced
texts (C1).
The challenge facing the teacher and materials writer, particularly those working in, or
writing for, schools in a country where English is not commonly spoken outside the
classroom, is how to reach these levels in the time available. A typical school curriculum
in such a country may allow for the teaching of English during the 30 to 40 weeks of
the school year for three or four hours a week for eight years or so. If you add it up, that
means that about 20–30 word families need to be taught a week. There will be fewer, of
course, in the younger classes and more in the older; but however you divide it, it is a lot
of words!
In addition, it is not enough for learners just to read or hear and understand a new item
once. They need also to review it. Researchers have claimed that we need at least six,
maybe as many as 16, re-encounters with an item in order for it to be properly learnt
(Webb, 2007).

Incidental and deliberate teaching and learning

An important question is whether you can acquire a large vocabulary incidentally, only
through listening, reading and conversation. This is certainly the main way we learn
vocabulary in our L1. However, in second language learning in the context of a formal
school course, this does not work so well. It is simply inefficient (Zahar et al., 2001):
very slow and rather unreliable. Most researchers agree that we need to include some
deliberate, focused vocabulary-teaching procedures as a supplement to – though not a
substitute for – incidental acquisition through extensive reading and listening.
Deliberate vocabulary-teaching procedures can be divided into two groups: those that are
aimed to teach new items for the first time in order to expand the students’ vocabulary;
and those that are designed to provide opportunities for review in order to consolidate and
deepen students’ knowledge of the new items. The next two sections will deal with these.

6.4 Presenting new vocabulary: selection and presentation

Selection and sources of new vocabulary

The most important criterion for the selection of which vocabulary items to teach has to
be their usefulness for the students’ own needs. One helpful measure of the usefulness
of an item is frequency, i.e. how often a word, or expression, is used in conversation or
writing, as revealed by a corpus survey (see the websites referred to in 5 Texts, Section 4).
Frequency, however, is not the only criterion. We might want to teach new items for any
of the following further reasons:
• They are important for the students’ own present situation or culture;
• Students have asked to learn them;

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• They are easy to learn (short, easily pronounced and spelt);

• They are cognates (similar to equivalents in the students’ L1);
• They occur frequently in classroom interaction or coursebook instructions;
• They are fun or interesting items in themselves.
In any case, when we come across large number of new vocabulary items in a text, we
do need to differentiate between which items we feel are important enough to teach
and review so that the students remember and can use them, and which only need to be
explained so that they can understand the current text being studied (see 5 Texts).
Texts may not supply all the vocabulary students need. They can be supplemented by
activities whose focus is simply vocabulary expansion. For example, you might have a
spot in the lesson, perhaps at the beginning, called ‘word of the day’ or ‘expression of the
day’ where you teach a new item. Or you might have students themselves ‘show and tell’:
find out about new items and teach the rest of the class. For more vocabulary expansion
activities see Ur (2012).

Presenting new vocabulary

Once we have selected the items to teach, we then need to get students to perceive
their form and understand their meaning(s). We want to do this as emphatically and
interestingly as we can, so that the students pay attention and take the items into short-
term memory. Some key practical principles are:
• Include both written and spoken forms, both receptive and productive. Usually,
the new items have to be both said and written up on the board. Students ultimately
need to know both forms, and displaying both is likely to make the item more clearly
perceptible and memorable. Similarly, if students both say and write down the item,
they will be more likely to remember it than if they only hear or see it.
• Ensure understanding of meanings. As we have seen above, guessing meanings of
words from context can be quite difficult, and students often guess wrongly. Even
looking words up in the dictionary is not reliable: the student may choose the wrong
meaning. Both these strategies can be used to access meanings, but they will need to
be checked and supplemented by you. If you yourself are presenting the meaning of a
new item, there are various ways you can do this.
Pictures, realia (actual objects or toy models). These help a lot with making sure the
presentation is memorable (see Optimize impact on the next page), but pictures can
sometimes be misinterpreted, so it’s good to back them up with a translation or other
clarification strategy. Incidentally, pictures can be used effectively not only with words
with concrete referents and younger classes, but also with abstract meanings and older
classes (Farley et al., 2012).
Gesture and mime. These are useful for conveying meanings of action verbs and
moods.

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Examples. Examples can be used to explain superordinates: for example, ‘Mars,

Venus and Neptune are all planets.’
Sample uses of the item in context. As we have seen above, use of an item in
context may not always convey its meaning unambiguously; so contextualizations
are best backed up by one of the other methods.
Translation. If you have a monolingual class whose language you know, translation
is a very useful way of clarification of meaning: at least as accurate as any of the
other methods, quick, and easily understood by students. It can also be used
effectively as a back-up, either before or after any of the other ways of explaining
meanings, to make quite sure the students have understood.
• Optimize impact. The more impact your presentation of new items makes, the more
likely students are to remember it. A memorable first presentation does not make
review unnecessary, but it does make learning easier and faster. This is one good reason
for using pictures, mime and gesture (particularly if you are a good artist and/or actor!)
instead of, or to back up, translation and explanation. The use of realia, where possible,
is also effective: I have found that real objects are more attention-catching than
pictures, particularly (but not only) in younger classes.
• Mnemonics. Another useful strategy is to use mnemonic devices, in particular the
technique called keywords: students link the target word with an image involving a
similar word in their own language. For example, suppose you were teaching the word
shelf to a group of German speakers: tell them to imagine a cat (or any animal they
like) sleeping (schläft) on a shelf. The next time they come across the word, or need to
use it, the image of a cat asleep on a shelf will help them remember it.

What helps students remember individual items?

Some interesting insights on how memory works are gained through an experiment where
subjects are asked to memorize contrasting lists of vocabulary: all with three letters, but of
varying difficulty and meaningfulness, as in the following Pause for thought.

Pause for thought

Here are two lists of words to learn.

A. who dot com lar sex oct pad awe ion nub own dig obi sot the
B. arm leg fat pig peg fox dog cat man boy son mum dad bad sad
Give yourself a minute to learn List A. Then close the book and see how many you can
remember and write down. Do the same with List B. If you are working in a group, then
compute the average scores of the group. Then think about or discuss the results.
Which list was remembered better? Which individual words? Can you explain why?
And what particular strategies did you, or others, use to help you remember?

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Comment
List B often produces near-perfect scores; List A noticeably less. There are two main
reasons for this: the uniform (fairly low) level of difficulty of the items in List B in
contrast to the rather more advanced and varied level of List A; and the fact that the
words in List B are grouped according to meaning- or sound-association, whereas
in List A there is no such grouping. The results would indicate not only that we learn
words better when they are easier (i.e., we can easily assign meaning to them, and/
or their spelling and pronunciation are transparent), but also that it is helpful to learn
words in pairs or small groups, where one word can be associated with another:
because they are naturally associated in our minds (dog + cat ) or because they
would go together in a natural phrase (fat + pig) (but see second bullet point
below). Words with emotional associations (mum, dad, sex) are remembered better.
Words at the beginning of a list also tend to be remembered better.

The implications for the teaching of new vocabulary can be summarized as follows:
• The easier a word is to say and spell, the more quickly it will be remembered; so we will
find it easier to get students to remember, for example, sky than earth.
• It is useful to link words together when teaching and reviewing them. Several studies
have shown, however, that teaching a larger set of isolated items for the first time
which are co-hyponyms, or the same sort of thing (e.g. red, yellow, green, blue, purple)
can be confusing and lead to less effective memorizing (Wilcox and Medina, 2013).
Better results can be obtained if you select and present them as they would combine
naturally in a phrase or sentence, e.g., blue + sky.
• Learners remember words better if they have some personal significance or emotional
connection. So when presenting them, try to link them to students’ own lives, feelings
and experiences, or to your own.
• Words taught earlier are on the whole learnt better: if you are teaching a whole set of
words in a lesson, put the more important ones first (see also tip 2 below).

Practical tips
1 Don’t teach more than ten or so new items together in lower-level or young classes.
Highly motivated classes of adult learners can, however, cope with a lot more.
2 Teach new items early in the lesson. Students are fresher and better at learning new
material at the beginning of lessons than they are later.
3 Get students to write down the new vocabulary they have learnt: in a vocabulary
notebook, on cards, on their phones or other digital devices. They might also use
online tools such as Quizlet or Memrise which incorporate digital flashcards.
4 Don’t insist on students making detailed entries for each item they write down. It is
sometimes suggested that students add to each item an English definition as well as

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 6 | Teaching vocabulary

an L1 one, a sample sentence, the part of speech, a phonemic transcription. But in

my view, all this takes up more time than it is worth in terms of benefit to learning.
Probably the word or phrase itself, possibly with a synonym or L1 equivalent,
is enough.
5 Use flashcards, which display the word on one side, and, optionally, the meaning
on the other. These can be digital or paper: either format can be used for review. For
example, a card is displayed and students are asked to define or translate; or a card is
selected but hidden and students are given hints to help them guess what is on it. The
online tools mentioned above include more tasks which use the flashcards for practice
and tests.

6.5 Vocabulary review

It has already been noted that a learner needs to re-encounter a new item a number of
times in order to remember it permanently. Very common words like go, put, people, day
are likely to be encountered again anyway in the course of listening to or reading texts, or
in interpersonal communication. But as soon as you start expanding taught vocabulary
to include rarer items like kitchen or rise, this becomes less and less likely, and we need
to create opportunities for review. This means using effective learning tasks (see 4 Tasks)
whose focus is multiple, meaningful encounters with the target items. Ideally, every lesson
should include some vocabulary review work.

The importance of retrieval

There is substantial evidence that review is more effective when it involves retrieval – the
learner makes an effort to retrieve from memory either form or meaning of the target item –
than if it just involves being exposed to the item or studying it again. So don’t just show
student the items they’ve learnt and remind them of what they mean: challenge them to do
something that involves retrieval: matching, translating, grouping, completing sentences
and so on. Retrieval tasks need to be carefully designed, so that they are success-oriented:
the students can, with a bit of effort and perhaps help from the teacher or classmates,
succeed in performing them. Inevitably, however, there will be some items which have been
forgotten: re-teach them, and then review again later.

Expanding rehearsal
The most effective review takes place when students still remember the item but need
a slight effort to recall it. So do the first review very soon after students have learnt the
item – in the next lesson, for example. The next review can be after a longer gap – perhaps
a week. Then two weeks, then a month and so on: what is called expanding rehearsal
(Nakata, 2015). As students learn the item better and better, the length of time they can
remember it without a reminder grows, as does the speed at which they can retrieve it
when needed, until they get to the point at which the item is part of their permanent
vocabulary.

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 6 | Teaching vocabulary

Types of review tasks

Single-item. Review of single words or expressions does not always have to be done
through encountering them in full sentences. Work on individual items is also very useful,
and a lot quicker than working on sentence-contexts. Very quick reviews can be based on
procedures such as the following.
• Display and check. Items are displayed on the board: students identify meanings or ask
to be reminded of those they don’t remember.
• Recall. Students are challenged to recall items recently learnt.
• Dictations. The teacher dictates single words or brief phrases.
• Translation dictations. The teacher says the word in L1, students write the English, or
vice versa.
• Collocations. Students suggest what other words a target word might go with.
• Yes/No. Students are shown a list of items and asked to say whether they know their
meanings or not.
• Quick bingo. Each student writes down their choice of five of a set of 15 items
displayed on the board. The teacher calls out one, and students cross it off if they have
it. The first and last students to finish are the winners. (The last condition ensures
that you get through all the words, not just the ones listed by the first finisher, and
that every student is motivated to continue until they complete their list – as well as
increasing the number of winners.)
• Guessing. Tell the students you are thinking of an item they have learnt this year, and
give a hint in the form, for example, of a picture, mime, synonym or quick definition.
Students guess it. The successful guesser then thinks of another item and gives a hint
for the rest of the class to guess.
Items in context. Asking students to engage with (understand or produce) items within a
sentence or longer text takes longer than recalling single words. However, it provides for
review and deeper learning of ways the word is used in context which cannot be provided
in single-item work.
• Sentence completion 1. Students are asked to insert a target word in a gapped sentence.
This may be based on a bank of words, or students challenged to retrieve from memory.
• Sentence completion 2: A beginning of a sentence is provided that includes a target
vocabulary item: students complete it any way they like that makes sense.
• Sentence composition. Students compose sentences (spoken or written) that
contextualize one of the items from a set shown on the board. There are some
interesting variations on this one:
Compose a sentence that contextualizes two of the items.
Compose a sentence (including one of the items) that expresses a false statement.
Compose a sentence (including one of the items) that is true for you.
Compose a question that includes one of the items.

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 6 | Teaching vocabulary

Review: Check yourself

1 What does the term lexical item include?

2 What aspects of the meaning, form and use of a word does a learner need
to know?
3 What is the meaning of collocation? Can you give some examples?
4 How much (percentage) of the vocabulary of a text does the reader need to
know in order to be reasonably sure of understanding it?
5 How many times (approximately) does a learner need to review a new item
in order to be sure of remembering it?
6 What are two important criteria for selection of the vocabulary to teach a class?
7 What are some ways of making sure that the initial presentation of new items
has impact?
8 Can you recall at least four different activities that can be used to review or
deepen vocabulary knowledge at word level? Contextualized in sentences?

Further reading
Hinkel, E. (2004). Teaching Academic ESL Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and
Grammar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
(Some excellent practical techniques for getting advanced classes to extend and
consolidate their vocabulary)
Nation, I. S. P. (2022). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge University Press.
(A classic, comprehensive book on various aspects of vocabulary teaching and
learning)
Ur, P. (2012). Vocabulary Activities. Cambridge University Press.
(A range of practical activities for vocabulary expansion, enrichment, review
and assessment)
Ur, P. (2022). Penny Ur’s 77 Tips for Teaching Vocabulary. Cambridge University Press &
Assessment.
(Some useful practical tips, briefly summarized)
Webb, S. and Nation, P. (2017). How Vocabulary is Learned. Oxford University Press.
(Further, more detailed research-based information about the teaching and
learning of vocabulary)

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 6 | Teaching vocabulary

References
Ericsson, K. A., Hoffman, R. R. and Kozbelt, A. (Eds.) (2018). The Cambridge Handbook of
Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge University Press.
Farley, A. P., Ramonda, K. and Liu, X. (2012). The concreteness effect and the bilingual
lexicon: The impact of visual stimuli attachment on meaning recall of abstract L2
words. Language Teaching Research, 16(4), 449–466.
Laufer, B. (2020). Lexical coverages, inferencing unknown words and reading
comprehension: How are they related? TESOL Quarterly, 54(4), 1076–1085.
Nakata, T. (2015). Effects of expanding and equal spacing on second language vocabulary
learning: Does gradually increasing spacing increase vocabulary learning? Studies in Second
Language Acquisition, 37(4), 677–711.
Schmitt, N. and Schmitt, D. (2014). A reassessment of frequency and vocabulary size in L2
vocabulary teaching. Language Teaching, 47(4), 484–503.
Ur, P. (2022). How useful is it to teach affixes in intermediate classes? ELT Journal, 76(3),
330–337.
Webb, S. (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 28(1),
46–65.
Wilcox, A. and Medina, A. (2013). Effects of semantic and phonological clustering on L2
vocabulary acquisition among novice learners. System, 41(4), 1056–1069.
Zahar, R., Cobb, T. and Spada, N. (2001). Acquiring vocabulary through reading: Effects of
frequency and contextual richness. Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue Canadienne
Des Langues Vivantes, 57(4), 541–572.

Full version of paragraph from pages 75 and 76

Since the beginning of Western civilization, there has been a particular interest in the
superior knowledge that experts have in their domain of expertise. The body of knowledge
associated with the domain of expertise in which a person is expert is a particularly
important difference between experts and other individuals. Much of this knowledge can
be verbally described and shared with others to benefit decision making in the domain
and can help educate students and facilitate their progress toward expertise. The special
status of the knowledge of experts in their domain of expertise is acknowledged even as
far back as the Greek civilization.
Ericsson, K. A., Hoffman, R. R. and Kozbelt, A. (Eds.) (2018)

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 7 Teaching grammar

Overview

7.1 What is grammar? A brief definition.

7.2 What students need to learn: standards of grammatical acceptability.
7.3 How best to teach grammar. Explicit and implicit processes; grammar
practice; timing of explicit grammar teaching.
7.4 Presenting grammar: explanations. Some practical guidelines on the
provision of grammatical explanations in the classroom.
7.5 Grammar practice exercises. Different types of grammar practice activities,
and the importance of meaningful, communicative practice of grammar
in context.

7.1 What is grammar?

The term grammar includes syntax and morphology. Syntax is the way words are chosen
and combined to make correct sentences: so in English I am a teacher is grammatically
acceptable, *I a teacher, and *I are a teacher are not. Morphology is the grammar of single
words: it includes features like the plural -s of nouns, or the past tense of verbs. English
morphology is fairly simple, compared to many other languages: grammatical affixes are
all suffixes, and there is a limited number of them. It is the syntax, on the whole, which is
more difficult for learners and needs more careful teaching.
Grammar is not just a matter of correct forms; it also carries meaning. The meaning
of a particular message in a communicative situation is created by a combination of
vocabulary and grammar. We use grammatical items and constructions to express, for
example, time (using tenses) or place (using prepositions) or possibility (using modals or
conditional clauses). It is often the meanings that create problems for students rather than
the forms (for example, when contrasting present perfect simple I have done my homework
with present perfect progressive I have been doing my homework).

7.2 What students need to learn: standards of grammatical acceptability

There is some debate these days as to what standards of grammatical accuracy should
be applied to English as it is taught and learned in the classroom. How much should we
worry about grammatical accuracy if mistakes do not interfere with meaning? Surely, it is
argued by some, the main purpose of language is communication, so it shouldn’t matter if
you make a minor slip in morphology or syntax, so long as the communicative message is

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 7 | Teaching grammar

clear. For example, should we correct a student who drops the third person -s suffix in the
present simple (saying she like instead of she likes)? And should we correct which instead of
who in relative clauses relating to a person (the man which instead of the man who)? Should we
only correct such variants when they actually make the meaning unclear or misleading – for
example, when a student uses a present tense verb where a past tense is needed to convey
an appropriate message?

Pause for thought

What is your own opinion on this issue? Would you, as a teacher, always insist on
the standard forms? Or would you relate to the non-standard ones – where they
do not affect meaning – as legitimate learner variants rather than as errors, and
accept them?

Comment
We need to make a distinction between usages that are acceptable in general
communicative situations, and those that we teach in the classroom. If in a
conversation with a speaker of English I hear variants like those mentioned
above, it doesn’t bother me particularly, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to
correct them. In the classroom, however, I would try to teach my students to use
the conventional forms, and would relate to such variants as errors. This is not
because the conventional forms are those used by L1 English speakers – who
are today a minority of users of English – but because they are, as far as we
can judge, the forms used by the majority of speakers of English worldwide
(whatever their first language is). Our students surely have the right to be taught
the standard grammar – as well as vocabulary – that is used by English users
with whom they will be – or are already – communicating. There are some
additional factors that support this general conclusion: substantial evidence
that most students express a wish to be corrected when they make grammatical
errors (Roothooft and Breeze, 2016); some high-stakes exams, which may
penalize departure from standard grammatical forms; the policy of the Ministry
of Education of the country where we are teaching or of the institution that
employs us, which are likely to support the teaching of conventional grammar.

It is true that there are situations where grammatical accuracy may matter less. First, an
error may not matter so much if it does not affect the basic meaning of what is being
communicated. Second, accuracy is a lot less important in informal conversation or text
messaging than it is in formal writing. The kind of course we are teaching also makes a
difference: if we are teaching a course in conversational English with the aim of improving
oral fluency, we may well ignore grammatical errors which do not change a message, and
not let them affect our assessment of students’ performance. Accurate grammar is more
important if our course is, for example, aiming for improvement of academic English for
participants who are planning to apply to a university and need to be able to write papers
and make academic presentations.

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 7 | Teaching grammar

The bottom line is that, as suggested in the Comment on the previous page, all things being
equal, we shall continue in most situations to teach our students to observe the conventional
grammatical rules, while remaining sensitive to the need for flexibility in certain contexts.

7.3 How best to teach grammar

Explicit and implicit teaching

Having decided which grammatical features we are going to teach, how should we do
this? Should we allow students plenty of opportunities to hear, read and use the correct
forms through comprehensible input and communicative interaction, but not explain
them (implicit teaching)? Or should we provide explanations, focused practice and error
correction (explicit teaching)? Or should we use a combination of the two?
Stephen Krashen (1999) claims that grammar is best acquired implicitly, through plenty
of comprehensible input (listening and reading), and that explanations, focused grammar
exercises and corrective feedback have only a marginal effect. Others would add that there
is value also to student communicative output: Michael Long (1996), for example, in his
interaction hypothesis, says that learners learn through interacting with others (both learners
and more proficient speakers); Merrill Swain (1995) says it is important for learners also
to speak and write in what she calls pushed output in order to become more proficient (the
output hypothesis). In favour of explicit grammar teaching, others have produced evidence
that grammar acquisition is facilitated by explanations (Akakura, 2012; Boers, 2021),
practice exercises (DeKeyser, 2010) and error correction (Sheen and Ellis, 2011).
A sensible conclusion, supported by the evidence, is that for good learning of grammar in
an English course, you need both: communicative input and output, together with some
explicit teaching.

Pause for thought

If you learnt English, or another foreign language, in school, how was grammar
taught? What kinds of things were helpful/unhelpful in getting you to use the
grammar of the language correctly?

Comment
I was taught French in school through the grammar-translation method, so there
was a lot of emphasis on getting the rules right and applying them in largely
translation-based exercises. These were helpful in getting me to understand and
produce grammatical sentences, when I had time to think about it and apply
the rules. So I could not speak French fluently as a result of my school studies,
but I could read and write it fairly well; and when I eventually spent some time in
France, the underlying knowledge of grammatical rules was certainly helpful as I
gradually became more fluent.

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 7 | Teaching grammar

The timing of grammar teaching

A rather confusing distinction has been made in the literature between focus on formS
and focus on form (Long and Robinson, 1998). Focus on formS is the traditional process
of teaching grammar according to a grammatical syllabus: the teacher or textbook
introduces a rule, students do exercises to practise it, and then move on to the next rule.
Focus on form, in contrast, takes place when a grammatical feature comes up in the course
of a communicative task or text, and the teacher takes time out to focus on it, drawing
students’ attention to it and explaining as necessary (some writers would include brief
practice exercises within this process), before returning to the original task or text.
Approaching the same issue from the point of view of timing, some research has been
carried out to try to establish when it is best to teach a grammatical feature: on its own, in
a teacher- or materials-initiated process (isolated), or in context, in response to a need in
the course of communicative activity (integrated). In a questionnaire-based survey on this
point, Valeo and Spada (2016) asked teachers and learners which they prefer. The majority
were in favour of integrated, while also acknowledging the value of isolated.
The conclusion seems to be that there is value to both: I do not see that there is any
contradiction between the two models. Many teachers and learners are in favour of the
conventional process of a grammar explanation followed by practice exercises; indeed,
most coursebooks include them. On the other hand, it is true that a one-off teaching
of a grammatical feature, however much practice follows it, will not necessarily lead
to effective learning. It is important, therefore, to include also regular incidental focus
on form – reactive focus on a grammatical point that comes up in the course of a
communicative task. This may be the first time learners have noticed the particular point
in question, or may function as a review of something that has been deliberately taught or
incidentally encountered earlier.
The guidelines in the following sections are based on the assumption that there is value
to explicit explanation and practice of grammar in English courses, whether isolated in a
conventional grammar lesson or integrated within a communicative task.

7.4 Presenting grammar: explanations

Grammar explanations may be initiated by the teacher because they are required in your
syllabus or come up in course materials. Or they may take place in response to a learning
need; you may have noticed that students are making mistakes with a particular feature
and might benefit from some focused explanation.

Pedagogical grammar rules

The grammar rules we give students are not necessarily the same as those provided in a
formal grammar reference book, such as the Cambridge Grammar of English (Carter and
McCarthy, 2006). We will need to simplify; and we need to take into consideration the
learners’ L1, if we know it. In some cases – where the rule is very easily understood, or
similar to the learners’ L1 – we may not need to spend much time on it; in others, we may
need to work harder at clarifying, perhaps emphasizing the differences between it and the
L1, where there are liable to be errors based on L1 interference.

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 7 | Teaching grammar

Some guidelines on explaining grammar follow below.

• Provide students with examples of the target feature in meaningful contexts
before explaining it. This sounds obvious, but I have seen teachers start by writing up
an isolated phrase on the board and then analysing it immediately, when the students
had little or no idea what it might mean in context.
• Both say and write examples of the target form. This is important, not only because
students might need to use the grammar in both speech and writing, but also because,
as mentioned earlier in reference to vocabulary, a new item is more memorable if it is
both seen and heard.
• Teach both form and meaning. Which of these you emphasize depends on what the
target feature is. Some grammatical constructions have fairly easy forms, but rather
complex meanings that may have no parallel in the students’ L1 and need careful
explanation and lots of examples (the present progressive, for example). Others
may have very simple meanings, and you need to focus on teaching the forms (the
comparative of adjectives, for example).
• You may or may not use grammatical terminology. This will depend on your
situation and students. On the whole, older or more analytically minded students
may find the terminology helpful. Others may not, or may even find it confusing.
Remember that terms such as adjective, imperative are not particularly common in
communication in general: so unless you are sure they will help students understand,
try to manage without them. With many classes, particularly younger ones, I would try
to explain by using actual exponents rather than the abstract definitions: for example,
saying a or an rather than the indefinite article.
• Explain the grammar in the students’ L1, if you know it, unless they are
proficient enough to cope with English explanations. The level of English needed
to understand a grammatical explanation in that language is quite high – often
higher than than the grammatical feature itself! – so it may be difficult to understand
for many classes. Using L1 can save time which can then be used for practice or
communicative use of the target grammar. Use English for explanations with relatively
advanced classes who can readily understand them.
• Compare the English structure with an L1 parallel if you can. Where there are
differences – whether substantial or only subtle – between English and the L1, it
can be very helpful to compare and contrast the two. Awareness of such differences
can help to prevent mistakes. For example, you might point out that the use of the
present perfect in a sentence with for or since (I have worked here for six years) is likely to
correspond to the use of the present tense in the students’ L1.
• Keep it short. With a potentially complex rule, it’s best just to give a simple statement
of the main, most common, form and meaning – a rule of thumb, as it were – and then
move on to using the grammar in context. A long and complex rule is unlikely to be
remembered. You can always add further explanations or exceptions in a later lesson.

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 7 | Teaching grammar

• Ask students to work out rules for themselves, based on a set of examples
(inductive process), or give the rules yourself, and they later work on examples
(deductive). The deductive process is more common in both textbooks and classroom
teaching. However, if the students can work out the rule for themselves, then they
are more likely to remember it. The problem with inductive teaching is that if the
rule is really difficult, students may waste a lot of time on frustrating guessing or on
misleading suggestions. In such cases, it is better simply to provide the information
yourself. It really depends on how easily a rule can in fact be correctly induced from
examples, and also on students’ own preferences.

Unit Present
Pause for continuous
thought and present simple 1
3 (I am
Have adoing
look at theand I do)
grammar explanations below. Are they clear and helpful? Do
you have any criticisms? What might you add at a later stage?
A Compare:

present continuous (I am doing) present simple (I do)

We use the continuous for things happening at We use the simple for things in general or things
or around the time of speaking. that happen repeatedly.
The action is not complete.

I am doing I do
past now future past now future

The water is boiling. Be(from careful.

English Grammar in WaterUse, 5boils
th at 100by
Edition degrees Celsius.
Murphy, R., 2011)
Listen to those people. What language Excuse me, do you speak English?
are they speaking?
Let’s go out. It isn’t raining now.
Comment It doesn’t rain very much in summer.
‘I’m busy.’ ‘What are you doing?’ What do you usually do at weekends?
The I’m getting hungry.
explanations given Let’s go and
here are eat.
mostly simple, short andget
I always hungrythey
helpful: in thedon’t
afternoon.
go
into Kate wants to work
unnecessary in Italy,
detail, are so she’s accessible to a
clearly Most peopleatlearn
learner to swim
a fairly basicwhen they
level
learning Italian. are children.
of proficiency, and the diagram is easily understood. I’m not sure, however, if the
The population
additional fact about of the
theworld is continuous ‘TheEvery
present action dayisthe
notpopulation
complete’ of the world
is very
increasing very fast. increases by about 200,000 people.
helpful to a learner or adds anything essential: surely anything that is going on
Weatusea the
point of time for
continuous is by definition
temporary in process, We
situations and therefore
use the simplenot for completed. In the
permanent situations
(things that continue
definition of the for a shortsimple,
present time): the phrase ‘things
(things that continue is
in general’ foraabit
long time): I’d
vague:
prefer living with some
I’msomething friends until
like ‘general I find
facts orasituations’. IMy parents
also livestudents
tell my in London.that,Theyinhave
place of my own. lived there
general, the present simple is far more common than the present continuous, so all their lives.
a: You’re
if they’re workingwhich
wondering hard today.
to use they should usually Joe isn’t
opt lazy. He works
for the simple!hard most
Later of
on,
b: Yes, I have a lot to do. the time.
I would add the use of both forms to express a future action which has already
Seebeen
Unit 1planned. It may be worth telling students
for more information. about
See Unit 2 forthe
moreslight difference
information.
between the form we are leaving tomorrow, as a planned, intended action, and
we leave tomorrow as a more definite and scheduled one.
B I always do and I’m always doing
I always do something = I do it every time:
I always go to work by car. (not I’m always going)
I’m always doing something = I do it too often or more often than normal.
For| example:
90 A Course in English Language Teaching

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009417594.008 Published myby
online keys again.University
Cambridge I’m alwaysPress losing them.
 7 | Teaching grammar

Practical tips
• Use pictures. If you can, use pictures to help your explanation or, if appropriate, mime
and facial expression. They help make the explanation memorable.
• When you’ve finished, check understanding. It’s not enough to ask, ‘Do you
understand?’ Get students to demonstrate their understanding by giving examples or
explaining in their own words. Or try using the next tip.
• Get feedback. When you have finished explaining, delete everything from the board,
tell students to close their textbooks, and to write down in their own words what the
rule was, in English or L1. Then ask them to read out what they have written, or share
with one another. This will give you a good idea of how well they have understood the
explanation and is in itself a review of the rule.
• Teach new rules early in the lesson. As with the teaching of new vocabulary, it’s a
good idea to plan grammatical explanations to take place towards the beginning of the
lesson when students are fresher and more willing to engage with new material.

7.5 Grammar practice exercises

There is some debate about the place of explicit grammar practice in the form of drills
or exercises. Again, this is something that most teachers and coursebooks provide, that
students expect and that does seem to contribute to learning (see the discussion of explicit
grammar teaching above). But all experienced teachers are familiar with the phenomenon
that students continue to make mistakes in the target grammar even after extensive
practice. Practice does not necessarily make perfect.
One of the explanations for the phenomenon that learners sometimes just do not seem
to take on board a grammatical structure they have successfully practised is given in
Pienemann’s (1984) teachability hypothesis. Pienemann observed that learners of German
acquire German grammatical structures in a fixed order, regardless of the order in which
they were taught; and there is some evidence that this is true for the acquisition of other
languages as well. From this, it is hypothesized that the teaching of a grammatical item or
construction for which the learner is not developmentally ready will not result in learning.
One possible practical implication is the idea of teaching grammar through consciousness-
raising (Ellis, 2001). Consciousness-raising means that learners’ attention is drawn to a
particular grammatical rule, without demanding immediate implementation in practice
exercises. Then, when they are developmentally ready, it is suggested, they will notice the
occurrence of the same grammatical features in input and start using them themselves.
According to this model, practice exercises have little value. If the learner is ready to acquire
the grammar, they will do so anyway, without practice; if they are not, then practice won’t
help. On the other hand, other writers, as mentioned earlier (DeKeyser, 2010), have claimed
that focused practice does contribute to grammatical accuracy.

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 7 | Teaching grammar

The most likely conclusion seems to be that most learners do, indeed, go through a fairly
stable order of acquisition of grammatical features, and that some acquisition does occur
through exposure to comprehensible input, but that explanation combined with practice
may contribute to and speed up such learning. We do, however, need to abandon the
exaggerated hope that practice makes perfect and content ourselves with the expectation
that practice, like explanations of rules, can make a substantial contribution to good
learning and is therefore worth including in our teaching.

Implications for the design and ordering of practice exercises

There remains the phenomenon of students who do all the grammar exercises on a
given item perfectly, but then make mistakes in the same item when they are composing
their own free speech or writing. The problem here is that the structures have not
been thoroughly mastered. The student still depends on a certain amount of conscious
monitoring in order to produce them correctly. And when students are concentrating
mainly on communicating, they do not have enough attention to spare for such
monitoring.
In other words, if students have not mastered the grammatical point to the degree that
they can produce it without thinking, then in communicative situations they will make
mistakes, often based on L1 interference. Is there anything we can do about this? I would
claim that there is: we can encourage students in our grammar practice activities to try
using the target structure to make meanings, rather than just to focus on getting it right:
to provide practice tasks that encourage them to combine the two.
Grammar drills, whose focus is only on getting it right, are in general disapproved of in
the professional literature as meaningless and unproductive of learning (see, for example,
an article entitled ‘The evidence is in: Drills are OUT’, Wong and Patten, 2003), though
more recently they may be making a comeback (see, for example, Scheffler and Butzkamm,
2019). It is probable that at the early stages, it may be useful to give traditional exercises
like gapfills, transformation, and matching, with definite right and wrong answers.
However, if this is all the grammar practice the students get, they are unlikely to be able to
transfer their knowledge to their own output. Such conventional exercises, therefore, need
to be supplemented by activities that prompt students to use the target features to produce
their own sentences, while keeping an eye, as it were, on grammatical accuracy.
On the next page is a description of a number of grammar tasks that provide practice in a
range of grammatical features. They move from the less productive, very controlled and
very accuracy-oriented exercise at the beginning to a fluency activity giving opportunities
for the free use of the grammar in context at the end. The aim of the later tasks is to get
students to use the grammar in order to say their own thing, paying attention to both
communicative purpose and grammatical form. It is not suggested that this sequence
should be strictly followed in classroom teaching, though on the whole, the more
controlled exercises tend to come earlier. But it is important that our lessons should
overall include a combination of grammar-based tasks that provide both form-focused and
meaning-focused practice.

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 7 | Teaching grammar

Types of grammar practice:

Type 1: Awareness. After the students have been introduced to the grammatical point,
they are given opportunities to encounter it within some kind of discourse, and then do a
task that focuses their attention on its form and/or meaning.
Example: Past simple. Look at a text extract, and underline all the examples of the past
simple.
Type 2: Controlled drills. Students produce examples of the structure. These examples
are predetermined by the teacher or materials and have to conform to very clear, closed-
ended cues. They can often be done without understanding.
Example: Past simple. Complete the sentence in the past simple, using the correct form of
the verb in brackets.
a) I ________ to school yesterday. (go) I went to school yesterday.
b) Judy ________ the cake. (eat)
c) They ________ the lesson early. (leave)
Type 3: Controlled responses through sentence completion or rewriting. Students
produce examples of the structure that are predetermined by the teacher or materials by
being required to rewrite according to a set cue, or to complete a sentence. However, in
either case they will need to understand in order to respond correctly.
Example: Comparative adjectives. Use the adjectives in brackets. Write two sentences for
each item.
a) A computer / a book (cheap / expensive). A computer is more expensive than a book.
A book is cheaper than a computer.
b) A train / a car (short / long)
c) Walking / skating (easier / more difficult)
Type 4: Meaningful drills. The actual grammar is fairly controlled, but the student can
insert some words of their own choice in order to make meaningful statements.
Example: Present simple. Choose someone you know very well, and write down their
name. Now compose true statements about them according to the following model: He/
She likes ice cream. He/She doesn’t like ice cream.
a) play She plays tennis. She doesn’t play football.
b) enjoy
c) live
Type 5: Guided, meaningful practice. The students form sentences of their own
according to a set pattern, but exactly what vocabulary they use is up to them.
Example: Conditional clauses. Look at the following cue: If I had a million dollars. Write
down at least five things you would do if you had a million dollars.

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 7 | Teaching grammar

Type 6: (Structure-based) free sentence composition. Students are provided with a written
or visual cue (for example, a picture showing various people engaged in different activities)
and invited to compose their own responses. They are directed to use a certain structure.
Example: Present continuous/progressive. Look at the picture below and say what you see
is happening, or that is not happening.

Type 7: (Structure-based) discussion and/or composition. Students hold a discussion or

write a passage according to a given task. They are directed to use at least some examples
of the structure within the discourse.
Example: Modals. You see a good friend of yours cheating in an exam. What might you
do? Your recommendations should include modals like might, should, must, can, could, etc.
Type 8: Free discussion or composition. As in Type 7, but the students are given no specific
direction as to what language to use. However, clearly the task invites use of the target structure.
Example: Modals. As for Type 7, but without the last sentence.

Pause for thought

Have a look at the grammar exercises on the next page. What types are they,
according to the list above? Can you think of ways you might adapt them in
order to make them more meaningful?

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 7 | Teaching grammar
Exercises Unit
7
7.1 Read the situations and complete the sentences using the present perfect. Choose from these
verbs:
break disappear go up grow improve lose shrink stop

1 Tom is looking for his key. He can’t find it. Tom has lost his key.
2 Maria’s English wasn’t very good. Now it is better. Her English
3 My bag was here, but it isn’t here any more. My bag
4 Lisa can’t walk and her leg is in plaster. Lisa
5 Last week the bus fare was £1.80. Now it is £2. The bus fare
6 Dan didn’t have a beard before. Now he has a beard. Dan
7 It was raining ten minutes ago. It isn’t raining now. It
8 I washed my sweater, and now it’s too small for me. My sweater

7.2 Put in been or gone.

1 My parents are on holiday. They’ve gone to Italy.
2 Hello! I’ve just to the shops. I’ve bought lots of things.
3 Tom has just out. He’ll be back in about an hour.
4 Alice isn’t here at the moment. I don’t know where she’s .
5 You’re very late. Where have you ?

7.3 Complete the sentences using the present perfect.

1 Sally is still here. She hasn’t gone (she / not / go) out.
2 I can’t find my bag. (you / see / it) anywhere?
3 I can’t log on to the website. (I / forget) my password.
4 I sent Joe an email this morning, but (he / not / reply).
5 Is the meeting still going on, or (it / finish)?
6 (the weather / change). It’s colder now.
7 (you / not / sign) the form. Could you sign it now, please?
8 Are your friends still here, or (they / go) home?
9 Paul doesn’t know what he’s going to do.
(he / not / decide / yet).
10 ‘Do you know where Julia is?’ ‘Yes, (I / just / see / her).’
11 ‘When is David going away?’ ‘ (he / already / go).’
12 a: (your course / start / yet)?
b: Not yet. It starts next week.

7.4 Read the situations and write sentences with just, already or yet.
1 After lunch you go to see a friend at her house. She says, ‘Would you like something to eat?’
You say: No thank you. I’ve just had lunch . (have lunch)
2 Joe goes out. Five minutes later, the phone rings and the caller says, ‘Can I speak to Joe?’
You say: I’m afraid . (go out)
3 You are eating in a restaurant. The waiter thinks you have finished and starts to take your plate away.
You say: Wait a minute! . (not / finish)
4 You plan to eat at a restaurant tonight. You phone to reserve a table. Later your friend says,
‘Shall I phone to reserve a table?’ You say: No, . (do it)
5 You know that Lisa is looking for a place to live. Perhaps she has been successful.
You ask her: ? (find)
6 You are still thinking about where to go for your holiday. A friend asks, ‘Where are you going
for your holiday?’ You say: . (not / decide)
7 Laura went out, but a few minutes ago she returned. Somebody asks, ‘Is Laura still out?’
You say: No, . (come back)

(from English Grammar in Use, 5th Edition by Murphy, R., 2011)

15

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 7 | Teaching grammar

Comment
These are all exercises that have been planned so that they have one right answer
each and can easily be checked using the key available at the end of the book.
In order to facilitate such checking, they are all either Type 2 (Exercise 7.2) or Type
3 (7.1, 7.3, 7.4). There is no preparatory awareness exercise (Type 1), and there are
no exercises that give the learners opportunities to say their own thing using the
target structure (Types 4–8). It would be unfair to blame the writer for the lack of
more meaningful or personalized practice, given the aim of the book, which is to
enable self-study and self-checking. If I were using it in the classroom, however, I
would try to adapt the exercises in order to provide more practice, more interest,
and more personalized responses. For example, in 7.1, I might tell students to
ignore the verbs in the box, and tell me what they think has happened in reference
to selected items in order to produce the situation described. For example, I might
ask them what they think has happened to produce the situation where Tom
can’t find his key (item 1). Or what has happened in order for Maria’s English to be
better (item 2).

Review: Check yourself

1 What is the difference between syntax and morphology?

2 What are some reasons for teaching standard grammatical forms, even if
­non-standard variants would not affect meaning?
3 What does explicit grammar teaching include?
4 Can you recall at least four useful guidelines or tips to help explain a new
grammar point to the class?
5 What is the difference between deductive and inductive teaching of a rule?
6 What kind of practice can help students transfer knowledge of a grammatical
rule so that they can use it fluently in their own production?
7 Can you give two or three examples of exercises that get students to use the
grammar to express meanings, rather than just to get the form right?

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 7 | Teaching grammar

Further reading
Swan, M. (1994). Design criteria for pedagogic language rules. In Swan, M. (2011).
Thinking about language teaching (pp. 45–56). Oxford University Press.
(A useful set of guidelines for the explanation of grammatical rules to a class)
Swan, M. (2017). Practical English Usage (4th Edition). Oxford University Press.
(A very accessible and user-friendly guide to English grammatical usage, with
plenty of examples, including common learner errors)
Ur, P. (2009). Grammar Practice Activities (2nd Edition). Cambridge University Press.
(A collection of game-like or communicative activities that provide meaningful
practice in grammatical features of English)

References
Akakura, M. (2012). Evaluating the effectiveness of explicit instruction on implicit and
explicit L2 knowledge. Language Teaching Research, 16(1), 9–37.
Boers, F. (2021). Evaluating Second Language Vocabulary and Grammar Instruction: A Synthesis
of the Research on Teaching Words, Phrases, and Patterns. Routledge.
Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (2006). Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide.
Cambridge University Press.
DeKeyser, R. (2010). Practice for second language learning: Don’t throw out the baby with
the bathwater. International Journal of English Studies, 10(1), 155–165.
Ellis, R. (2001). Grammar teaching – Practice or consciousness-raising? In Richards, J. C.
and Renandya, W. A. (Eds.) Methodology in Language Teaching (pp.167–174). Cambridge
University Press.
Krashen, S. D. (1999). Seeking a role for grammar. A review of some recent studies. Foreign
Language Annals, 32(2), 245–254.
Long, M. H. (1996). The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition.
In Ritchie, W. and Bhatia, T. (Eds.). Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 413–468).
Academic Press.
Long, M. H. and Robinson, P. (1998). Focus on form: Theory, research and practice. In
Doughty, C. and Williams, F. (Eds.) Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition
(pp.15–41). Cambridge University Press.
Murphy, R. (2011). English Grammar in Use (5th Edition). Cambridge University Press.
Pienemann, M. (1984). Psychological Constraints on the Teachability of Languages. Studies
in Second Language Acquisition, 6, 186–214.

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 7 | Teaching grammar

Sheen, Y. and Ellis, R. (2011). Corrective feedback in language teaching. In Hinkel,

E. (Ed.). Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning
(pp. 593–610). Routledge.
Swain, M. (1995). Three functions of output in second language learning. In Cook, G.
and Seidhofer, G. (Eds.) Principles and Practices in Applied Linguistics: Studies in Honour of
H. G. Widdowson (pp. 125–144). Oxford University Press.
Roothooft, H. and Breeze, R. (2016). A comparison of EFL teachers’ and students’ attitudes
to oral corrective feedback. Language Awareness, 25(4), 318–335.
Scheffler, P. and Butzkamm, W. (2019). Pattern practice revisited: From syntax to sense and
positive emotions. Neofilolog, 52(1), 89–101.
Valeo, A. and Spada, N. (2016). Is there a better time to focus on form? Teacher and
learner views. TESOL Quarterly, 50(2), 314–339.
Wong, W. and Patten, B. (2003). The evidence is IN: Drills are OUT. Foreign Language
Annals, 36(3), 403–423.

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 8 Teaching listening

Overview

8.1 Some basic features of listening comprehension. Level of language;

bottom-up versus top-down processes; the importance of successful listening
experience.
8.2 Listening activity design 1: the text. Characteristics of spontaneous speech
in English that listeners need to be able to cope with.
8.3 Listening activity design 2: the task. Guidelines on the design of listening
tasks for effective listening comprehension practice.
8.4 Types of activities. A list of listening comprehension activities, from those
requiring little or no response to those requiring extended interaction.

8.1 Some basic features of listening comprehension

Learners need to be able to listen to and understand spoken English, as a preliminary
to speaking it and, in most situations, to reading and writing it as well. This is not
only because in the natural order of things we hear a new language before we speak it
and because reading and writing are secondary to speech. It is also because listening is
normally the main channel through which learners are exposed to new items, lexical or
grammatical, in English, and increase their knowledge.
Listening is not just the mirror image of speaking. Learners can understand spoken English
that is at a higher level, and a lot more in quantity, than that which they are capable of
producing themselves. Texts used for listening comprehension activities should therefore
be longer and more advanced than the kinds of spoken output we would expect from the
learners who are expected to cope with them: what Stephen Krashen (1981) calls ‘i+1’. If
students talk to one another in spoken fluency activities, it is true that they are also listening;
but the amount of useful listening comprehension practice that they are getting is limited.
The speech they are hearing is only at the level they can produce themselves: it is not ‘i+1’.
An additional point to be noted is that comprehension of both spoken and written
discourse involves knowledge which derives from at least two different sources. On the
one hand, there are the bottom-up processes which are based on the decoding of the
text itself: perception of sounds and combinations of sounds, the identification and
comprehension of individual words, phrases and patterns. On the other, there are top-down
processes deriving from listeners’ real-world knowledge of the subject matter, genre or
context, which enable easier perception of meanings or underlying implications. In some
cases, top-down processes may precede the bottom-up, as when we come to a text with
strong preliminary assumptions as to its content or style.

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 8 | Teaching listening

There is some debate in the literature about which is more important (top-down or
bottom-up), and this would clearly depend in any specific case on what the text is and which
learner population is using it. However, in general it would seem that top-down knowledge
(of content, genre and context) is more important for listening than it is for reading, due to the
relative difficulty of perceiving and understanding natural speech through bottom-up processes
only. In reading, the learner can read at their own rate and go back to re-read anything that
was not initially understood, whereas in listening, the speed at which the discourse moves on
is out of the control of the listener, who cannot immediately re-hear indistinct bits at will.
The bottom line is that both top-down and bottom-up processes are essential: both can
cause problems in listening (and reading) comprehension; and both need to be taken into
account when we are designing, administering or giving feedback on activities.
We need, therefore, to find ways of providing learners with plenty of experience of
understanding spoken text produced by speakers who are well above the present level of
the students themselves, and which activate both top-down and bottom-up processes.
And this experience needs to be successful. ‘Success’ in this case does not mean that the
learners have understood every word they hear; it means that they can get the message
conveyed by the speaker(s) – which may involve not only explicit information, but also
sometimes underlying implications, including those of mood or emotion – and that
they can map this message onto what they already know or think in order to respond
appropriately. Unsuccessful listening comprehension experience is discouraging and will
not help students improve their listening skills very much. The task should be designed,
therefore, to support, not to test, comprehension (see Section 3). Some ideas on assessing
listening comprehension can be found in 13 Assessment and testing.

8.2 Listening activity design 1: the text

After studying French for seven years in school, I went to France and found that I could
not understand what French people were saying to me. I needed them to slow down,
pause and pronounce things the same way I had been taught they should be pronounced.
This was in spite of having had listening comprehension exercises in school. What
had gone wrong? The answer is that my schoolteachers and textbooks had simply not
prepared me for real-life listening: the kinds of listening texts I heard were not the kind I
was likely to encounter in authentic communicative situations, and the way I was asked
to respond to them (answering comprehension questions) was quite different from the
way I needed to respond to real-life communicative speech.
Simply providing students with authentic listening comprehension texts and tasks,
however, is not easy: there are pedagogical constraints. The most common authentic
listening situation requiring listener response, for example, is conversation: I hear what
my interlocutor says to me and respond appropriately; they speak again, I respond again,
and so on. But this is near-impossible to replicate in the classroom outside one-to-one
teaching. Conversation between learners will not provide very much useful listening
practice, for the reasons given in the previous section. So we need to find a sensible and
practicable combination of a) the provision of authentic, as far as possible, listening
experience and b) pedagogical validity and practicability.
In the next section, I’ll be discussing listening tasks in the classroom; but first let’s look at
the spoken text itself.

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 8 | Teaching listening

Spoken discourse in real life

The most common real-life situations where listening comprehension is required
are different kinds of interpersonal interactions, such as face-to-face or telephone or
computer-mediated chats, interviews, lessons, buying and selling, or getting instructions.
These are normally characterized by the following:
• The speech is real-time, not recorded.
• The discourse is typically in informal, colloquial style (see below for more on this).
• The speech is improvised, not written beforehand to be read aloud.
• The speaker is visible.
• The listener responds in real time to what they hear.
• The listener has expectations: some idea of the kind of content or information they are
going to hear.
• The listener has a purpose in listening, beyond just comprehension (e.g., getting
information, developing a personal relationship, enjoyment, etc.).
• The listener does not need to understand every word.

Pause for thought

Think of a recent situation where you have been listening to someone outside the
classroom, and needed to understand them, either in your own L1 or in another
language. How many of the above features apply to it?

Comment
Probably your answer is ‘most of them’. But, of course, there will be exceptions:
in a telephone conversation we may not see the speaker (although of course,
when using a smartphone, we very often do). If we are listening to a lecture or
watching a movie, we don’t need to respond in real time. If we are listening to a
news broadcast, whether on television or through a website or on the radio, the
discourse may well be based on written text, read by the speaker off a script. But
for most of us, these are only the minority of communicative situations requiring
listening: most of our listening takes place within the context of interpersonal
interaction, characterized by most or all of the features listed above.

Informal language
A key characteristic of most listening situations is the use of informal language.

Pause for thought

Have a look at the two texts on the next page. Text A is a transcript of authentic
conversation; Text B is a transcript of a listening comprehension text from a
textbook. What are the differences in the use of language?

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 <S 02> male (40s)
Two old friends who haven't seen each other for a few years are 'catching up' with
8 | Teaching listening
each other. They are in a village pub garden on an exceptionally hot summer's
evening, talking about <S 0 1 > 's children.
Text A
Transcript
I <S 01> Are you still playing er
2 <S 02> lGui-tar
3 <S 01 > Irish music, yeah
4 <S 02> No I don't play very much now, no, not at all
5 <S 01> l1 thought you were touring the

42 Unit 4 Two old friends meet up again

(from Exploring Spoken English by Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. 1997)

K No, it’sText
a typeBof machine. It’s … er you L Well, why don’t you do an intensive
put food and water in, then er you turn it
CD2 5 course before you go? I’m sure the
on and it cuts up the food. ADAM Hello? company would pay for it.
L Do you mean a blender? LILY Hi, Adam. A Yes, that’s not a bad idea.
K Oh yes, that’s right. A blender. A Hi, Lily. How are things? L Have you talked to Mum and Dad about
L OK, the blenders are over there, on the L Oh, um not too bad, I suppose. But this?
top shelf. now the kids are at school, I’ve been A Er, no, not yet.
K Oh, OK, OK, thanks a lot. wondering what to do with my time. I get L Well, don’t worry. I won’t say anything
L Is there anything else you need? bored being at home all day on my own. until you decide what to do. I know
K Um, yes, er I don’t know what it’s called A So, er what choices do you have? they’ll want you to go, though.
in English. Um, it’s stuff for getting L Well, I could go back to teaching, but I’m A Yes, probably. Anyway, I’ll call you when
marks off your clothes. thinking of doing another degree instead. I know what I’m doing. So, how’s Billy
L Do you mean washing powder? A Really? Wow! getting on at his new school?
K No, it’s a type of liquid. Um, you use it L Well, if I start teaching again, I’ll be
when you get coffee or wine on your shirt. exhausted after a year. And I don’t know CD2 6
L Oh, you mean stain remover. That’s on if I want to work in a school all day and I’ll be exhausted after a year. ➞ If I start
the second floor, in the Home Laundry then look after three children when I get teaching again, I’ll be exhausted after a year.
department. home. | if you do another degree ➞ What will you
K Thanks very much. What’s it called again? A What will you study if you do another study if you do another degree? | if you don’t
L Stain remover. degree? apply soon ➞ You might not get in this year
K Thank you for your help. Goodbye. L I’d like to do fashion design. You know if you don’t apply soon. | I’ll be too old ➞
L Goodbye. I’ve always been interested in that kind of But unless I do it soon, I’ll be too old. | I’ll
LISA Hello again. Did you find what you
thing. I’ve talked to a few colleges and I let you know ➞ As soon as I make up my
were looking for? don’t think it’ll be a problem getting in. mind, I’ll let you know. | until you decide
A Well, that’s good. But you might not get what to do ➞ I won’t say anything until you
KATHARINA Oh, yes, thanks. But I’m still
looking for one or two other things. in this year if you don’t apply soon. It’s decide what to do.
L Well, can I help at all? What is it that you
already June.
L Yes, I know. CD2 7
need?
A What does Jack think? you want them to be happyC.and successful ➞
K I … I can’t remember what they’re (from
called,face2face Intermediate Student’s Book 2nd
L Well, he’s worried about the money side
Edition by Redstone, and
but you use them to mend your clothes. If you have children, you want them to be
Um, they’re made of metal and they’ve of things. You know how expensive Cunningham,
happy and successful. |G.,
they2013)
don’t develop in
got a102
hole|in university fees are nowadays. But unless I other ways ➞ If children study all the time,
A the end. in English Language Teaching
Course do it soon, I’ll be too old.
L Oh, you mean needles. they don’t develop in other ways. | they
A Well, have you asked Mum and Dad?
K Yes, that’s right, needles. shouldn’t put too much pressure on them ➞
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009417594.009
L They’re over there, near the Published online by CambridgeThey
escalator. might
University lend you some money.
Press If parents want their children to be happy,
 8 | Teaching listening

Comment
Text B is intended to represent natural informal conversation, but is clearly
carefully prepared, as an analysis of the differences between it and the authentic
conversation Text A reveal. Some of these differences are:
• Text A includes very few actual sentences. It uses short phrases, ‘false starts’
(‘I … er … we go’) or long run-on utterances that are not really grammatical
sentences (at least by generally accepted norms of written English). Text B, on
the other hand, is mostly composed of grammatical sentences.
• Text A has quite a lot of fillers: ‘yeah’, ‘you know’, ‘erm’; Text B has relatively few.
• Text A often repeats the information, through paraphrase or reiteration
(redundancy), e.g., ‘I don’t … not, not at all’, ‘we listen … do quite a lot of
listening’. In Text B, informational content is provided only once.
• Text A uses more informal vocabulary, vague expressions like ‘putting stuff on’
and shortened forms like ‘cos’.
• In Text A, the listener uses backchannelling: this indicates they are listening and
attending with brief verbal interjections – in this case ‘Mmm’.

The transcripts on the previous page cannot represent all aspects of the pronunciation;
but note that the pronunciation of words in improvised speech may often be indistinct
and noticeably different from the phonological representation presented in a dictionary
and taught to students. Examples include the use of the neutral vowel sound ‘schwa’ in
the pronunciation of weak forms (such as /əv/ for of ); assimilation, such as the change of
/n/ to /m/ in the pronunciation of phrases like ten percent (/tempəsent/); and elision, i.e.,
the disappearance of one or more of the sounds (/oraɪt/ for ‘all right’ or /∫wi:/ for ‘Shall we
…?’). There is some evidence (Jenkins, 2002) that many English speakers with a different
first language tend to pronounce words fairly closely to the way they are written and
formally pronounced, which of course makes them more clearly comprehensible. Even so,
the pronunciation features described above are still very widespread, and learners need to
have opportunities to encounter and understand them.
Other characteristics of authentic conversation include overlaps (two people speaking
together), indistinct or incomprehensible words or phrases, pauses, implicit knowledge
(information the speakers share and which therefore does not need to be expressed in
words), background noise, and the use of gesture, body language or facial expression to
express things not put into words, or to add underlying meanings. All these would make
such discourse difficult to understand for a non-participant hearing a recording of it later.
Clearly, in order to prepare students for real-life listening, we do not want to limit
listening comprehension only to listening texts which eliminate such problematic
features: non-interactional formal speech used in events such as rehearsed speeches, talks,
and recorded news bulletins. We also need to provide students with experience of natural,
conversational input, while making sure that such input is in fact comprehensible and
usable in the classroom. In other words, we are looking for a combination of authentic (as
far as possible) listening experience with pedagogical validity and practicability.

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 8 | Teaching listening

We will need to compromise on some aspects of authenticity: totally authentic

conversation, whether recorded or improvised live, is not usually suitable for classroom
use, for reasons discussed above: unfamiliar vocabulary, indistinctness, overlaps,
information that is not made explicit. It is also out of context: the listeners do not know
the speakers or the surrounding situation. If it is an audio recording, then we lose also the
input provided by body language, facial expression and the surroundings.
There are two main ways we can nevertheless provide students with authentic or
semi-authentic improvised speech.
The first is teacher talk: you, the teacher, provide spoken input, through mini-talks,
stories, jokes, explanations. You know your students, can adapt your speech to fit their
level, and can check comprehension as you go, either simply through perception of
their body language and facial expressions, or through occasional question-and-answer
checking. Teacher talk can be supplemented by occasionally inviting guests – other
teachers, friends, parents of students – to come to the classroom to talk to the class or
respond to their questions.
The second is recordings of a simulation of natural conversation, as many coursebooks
already provide, making sure that the actors who perform it keep to a level of language
that is accessible to the target student population. Some thought, however, needs to
be invested in making such recordings both authentic-sounding and accessible. First,
as we have seen, the speaker is visible in most listening situations, and it makes sense
therefore to use video rather than audio recordings. Second, the discourse should display
at least some of the characteristics of natural improvised speech that do not impede
understanding: these include things like repetition and paraphrase; vague, colloquial and
abbreviated vocabulary; fillers (‘you know’, ‘I mean’, etc.); hesitations (‘erm’, ‘um’). Two
useful internet resources when you are searching for such recordings, whether video or
audio, are the Open Educational Resources at www.oercommons.org/ and the English
Listening Lesson Library Online (elllo.org).
Another point to be taken into account when choosing or using recordings, or when
inviting speakers to the classroom is the provision of a variety of accents. Students are
likely to encounter a wide range of different accents when using English for purposes
of international communication. It makes sense, therefore, to vary the accents in our
listening comprehension texts and to include a variety of speakers of English from
different speech communities.

8.3 Listening activity design 2: the task

In the design of the listening task, we need again to aim at providing authentic,
or simulation-authentic, listening activity, but taking into account pedagogical
considerations. So we need to ask ourselves:
1 Does the task provide listening experience that prepares students for real-life listening
situations? In other words, does it provide opportunities for students to cope with and
respond to different kinds of natural English speech in ways similar to those they are
likely to encounter in the future outside the classroom?

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 8 | Teaching listening

2 How practical is the task to do in the classroom? Is it easy to present and manage? Can
we monitor how well the students are understanding?
Sometimes these two considerations clash. For example, we often want to replay a recorded
(audio or video) conversation in order to give students more quantity of listening, to
help them understand it by providing extra exposure, and in general to increase the
learning value of the exercise as a whole. In real life, in contrast, we almost never have
the opportunity to hear exactly the same text twice: people do not rewind their speech.
Another example has to do with responses: in real life, listener responses to what they hear
are normally spoken and ongoing: the listener acknowledges, answers, provides comments
or reactions. In class, because we are usually working with large groups of students, it is
simply not feasible to elicit spontaneous spoken individual responses as the speech is
going on. In both these cases, we will probably prioritize the practical over the authentic:
give students the possibility of hearing a text more than once, and ask them to respond in
writing or action rather than speech (see the next section).
In brief, I return to the point made in the previous section relating to text: a sensible
compromise means trying to maintain as much as we can of the naturalness of a listening
task, while making sure that it has maximum teaching/learning value and is easily
administered in the classroom or made available to students to do for homework.

Design features which can contribute to a successful listening task

Expectations. Students should have in advance some idea about the kind of text they are
going to hear. This both replicates the reality of most listening situations and facilitates
understanding. The instruction Listen to the passage, on its own, is not very helpful. It
is better to give the students some idea of what they are going to hear. For example:
You are going to hear a husband and wife discussing their plans for the summer … This type
of instruction activates students’ relevant schemata (their own previous knowledge
and concepts of facts, scenes, events, etc.) and enables them to use this knowledge to
build expectations that will help them understand (top-down processes). You may even
discuss the topic with students in advance. It is previous knowledge of the topic which is
probably the major factor in facilitating understanding of a listening passage (Chang and
Read, 2006).
Purpose. Students should be provided with a preset task which leads to some kind of clear
and visible or audible response. Instead of saying simply: Listen and understand, then answer
the questions, it is better to give an instruction like: Listen and find out where the family are
going for their summer holidays. Mark the places on your map. Giving them a purpose means
that the students can listen selectively for significant information, as we do in real life.
This is easier, as well as more natural, than trying to understand everything … which leads
to the next point.
Selective listening. The task should encourage students to listen out for what they need
to know. This implies that they also need to learn how to ignore irrelevant bits. In the
traditional type of listening comprehension task, students are expected to understand
almost everything and are often asked questions about trivial points. Trying to understand
every word is an ineffective listening strategy and one that is often doomed to failure.

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 8 | Teaching listening

Students should be reassured that they do not need to understand every word, just listen
out for meanings that accord with their purpose and expectations.
Ongoing listener response. The task should, as far as possible, allow for responses during,
rather than after, the listening: in other words, students should be encouraged to respond
to the information they are looking for as they hear it, not to wait to the end. It is not
practical in most situations, as we have seen above, to ask them to respond orally as the
speech is going on. We therefore have to use less authentic but more practical alternatives,
such as asking students to write brief answers to questions, make notes on the content, or
raise their hands. A visual focus can often provide a basis for such responses. For example,
the task could involve inserting items in a picture or diagram, or marking or annotating a
written text.
Interest. The task should be one that is interesting to do: see the discussion of arousing
and maintaining interest in classroom tasks in 4 Tasks.
Replay. As noted above, it’s a good idea to let students hear the listening text, if it’s a
recording, at least twice, for the sake of the added listening experience, and to make it
more likely that they will be able to complete the task successfully.

Exceptions
The above are useful guidelines in the design of most listening tasks: but in some cases, we
might want to make exceptions.
No task. You might provide no preset task if the listening text is so interesting and easy to
understand that you can be sure students will benefit from listening without the need for a
focused goal. The classic example of this is a story: anecdote, joke, folk tale and so on. You
do not have to be a brilliant storyteller: any teacher can tell stories they know, and students
of all ages react well to them. Reading stories aloud is also useful thing – and not only for
younger learners. Other examples of such ‘taskless tasks’ are watching a good movie or
video clip, or an interesting or funny TV show, or listening to a poem. In such cases, preset,
information-based tasks can actually be counterproductive: may spoil the fun, excitement or
aesthetic value of the text.
No expectations or preparation. You might occasionally want to challenge students to
understand something with no preparation whatsoever, for the sake of the challenge: as
when we turn on the television or radio with no idea of what kind of programme we are
going to encounter. The task here is to pick up clues to understand what type of text it is, and
what it is about.

Pause for thought

Have a look at the listening comprehension task shown on the next page. What
do you think works well? Would you make any criticisms? How might you use it
yourself in the classroom?

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 connected to you, or people you know.
for /fɔː/ /fə/
b Work in groups. Take turns to talk about the
words/phrases you chose. Ask follow-up questions b Look at these sentence
8 | Teaching listening
if possible. interview. Which words do
How many people do you k
at night? For many of us in
Listening being able to get to sleep is
3 Work in pairs. Look at these sentences about very dangerous.
sleep. Try to choose the correct words or numbers. c CD1 13 Listen and ch
d Look at Audio Script C
interview again. Notice the
Which other words do we o

Reading, Vocabulary
6 a Work in pairs. Think of
to help them get to sleep.
1 Tiredness causes more/less than half of all road b Read the article. Why d
accidents in the USA. has he tried to do to get a
2 10%/30% of people in the UK have problems c Read the article again.
getting to sleep or staying asleep.
1 How much sleep did Kev
3 Nowadays people are sleeping 30/90 minutes less
than they did 100 years ago. Vocabulary sleep; gradable and 2 What happens on a typic

RY 4 Teenagers need more/less sleep than

strongadults.
adjectives; adverbs 3 When does he sleep well
4 What does he find stress
S Sleepless nights 5
than adults.
Skills Listening:
Teenagers naturally wake up two/three hours later
a TV interview;
Reading: a newspaper article 5 Which cure for insomnia h
6 We use less/the same amount of energy when d Work in pairs. Compare
we’re asleep compared to when we’re resting. you give Kevin?
ys of cooking
oil, etc.) and 4 a CD1 13 Listen to a TV interview with a sleep scientist.
18
Check your answers to 3.
ok for each verb
k in pairs. Take b Listen again. Answer these questions.
. Your partner 1 How many British people have serious insomnia?
and noodles. 2 How were sleeping habits different 100 years ago?
at’s right. 3 Who needs the least amount of sleep?
4 What happened when a British school started lessons
an hour later?
aking Sleep 5 What do our brains do when we’re asleep?
se words/phrases do (from face2face 2nd(1)
Edition by Redstone, C. and
HELP WITH Intermediate
LISTENING Student’s
WeakBook
forms
w words/phrases in Cunningham, G., 2013)
● In sentences we say many small words with a schwa /ə/
sound. These are called weak forms.
(back) to sleep
5 a CD1 14 Listen to the strong and weak forms of these
leep snore
words. Do we usually say these words in their strong or
e insomnia weak forms?
dream
ht/heavy sleeper strong weak strong weak
do /duː/ /də/ of /ɒv/ /əv/
you /juː/ /jə/ and /ænd/ /ən/
ses from 1 that are at /æt/ /ət/ to A Course /tə/Language Teaching | 107
/tuː/ in English
e you know.
for /fɔː/ /fə/
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can /kæn/ /kən/
ns to talk about the
 a week.
hat’s a good idea? I’m sitting in one of Mexico City’s busy
y, a lot of people are parks. | Now I’m writing a book about street
ays, as we know, so | food. | We’re working in Mexico for a few
8 Teaching listening
days. | My blog is becoming more popular
fewer hours, it might
every year. | More people are visiting
noré, people are Thailand on holiday these days.
s in some countries. Audioscript (The circles represent pronunciation stress.)
CD1 13
ans spend 15% less
han in 1980. [words in pink = weak forms]
A Yes, and another interesting thing about R Yes, but w
s that we ought to MAN How many people do you know who teenagers is their body clock is different, argument
th our families. have trouble sleeping at night? For many so they naturally want to go to bed and too much
appening in some of us insomnia’s part of life, and not wake up about two hours later than angry at m
? It says in the book being able to get to sleep isn’t just adults. L Oh, how a
ployees are allowed annoying, it can also be very dangerous. W So that’s why our children aren’t very R But I only
nd at 3 p.m. on WOMAN Yes, and with us today is sleep bright in the morning. house – an
scientist, Doctor Angela Moore. Welcome A And because they have to get up early for L Perhaps yo
o says people can to the programme. school, this means they can feel exhausted together –
when they’re doing ANGELA Thank you. when they get there. Recently a school I think yo
stein was famous for W Doctor Moore, how much of a problem in the north of England decided to start a week.
ce at his office at is this, do you think? lessons at ten rather than nine. With a R Yes, you c
y. And you can’t say A Well, we know tiredness can cause later starting time, fewer students missed when he g
good ideas! accidents. More than fifty per cent of school and the exam results in English L I’d be hap
hat else interested you road accidents in the USA are because and maths were much better than the R Oh, that’s
of people driving when they’re tired. previous year. a lot. Uh o
d to read that M That’s amazing! M So do you think all schools should start woken up
0 hours a year more A Yes, it is, isn’t it? And when you think later?
t in some American thirty per cent of people in the UK can Conversation
A Well, that’s certainly what a lot of sleep
es can sleep whenever have problems getting to sleep or staying ANDY Charl
experts think nowadays.
tly they have special asleep, and ten per cent have serious Bradley ac
M So why do we need sleep?
can go and relax if insomnia – that’s a lot of accidents CHARLIE Oh
A We don’t really know. Scientists used to
waiting to happen. A Thanks. A
think sleep was the only time you had
ne here, I’d be in there W So how much sleep do you think people C Yeah, I’m
complete rest, but in fact we use about the
are getting these days? sleeping th
same amount of energy when we’re asleep
ople in the UK are A Well, a hundred years ago, before A I’m sorry
as when we’re sitting on the sofa relaxing.
break every four electricity, people went to sleep when it problem?
M Really? That’s very surprising.
t, of course. I was got dark and woke up when it got light. C Well, Har
A Yes, and our brains are very active for
d that 20% of British But now in our twenty-four-hour wakes us
some of the time we’re asleep. Apparently
han 60 hours a week. society we sleep about an hour and a then we ca
that’s when our brains can organise
ours in Europe and half less than we did a century ago. A Maybe yo
information they’ve collected during the
king us happier. W Well, I’ve got two teenagers and no one rooms. Yo
day.
ple have to take work can say they’re sleeping less! sleeping b
W Well, it’s been absolutely fascinating
e under a lot of A I’m sure a lot of parents would say that. so often.
talking to you. Thank you for coming
adlines. Apparently Actually, scientists now believe teenagers C Well, it’s w
in today.
le who were need about an hour more sleep than just that. R
A My pleasure.
y didn’t take all their adults. money. N
hat’s just crazy! W Really? VIDEO 2 CD1 15 of things f
ourse we’re able to A Yes, it’s because their bodies are still we just do
Conversation 1
hen we’re travelling. growing. Of course, teenagers don’t A Well, why
REBECCA Here you are, Lisa. One sugar.
ain or on a plane or need as much sleep as babies and small C I’ve tried t
LISA Thanks, Rebecca. Where’s Harry?
children – they need the most sleep. It’s again, and
R Oh, he’s having his afternoon nap.
en have a word for actually older people who generally need too hard,
L Right. You look a bit stressed. Is
means ‘death from the least amount of sleep. heard tha
everything OK?
W That’s very interesting. their jobs
R Well, Charlie and I are having a difficult
we’ll leave it there. one of the
time at the moment.
A Yes, I see
L Oh, dear. What’s the matter?
(from face2face Intermediate Student’sR Book 2nd Edition don’t thin
Harry isn’t sleepingby Redstone,
very C. and
well. He wakes
The comp
157 up four or fiveCunningham, G., 2013)
times every night, which
C Thanks, A
means Charlie and I wake up too, of
what do y
course. The trouble is, Charlie finds
A Well, I’d t
it difficult to get back to sleep, so he’s
meal, you
always absolutely shattered the next day.
That’s wh
L Hmm, I can see why you’re upset. That
having pro
must be really difficult.
helpful.
R Yes, it is. And when Charlie gets home
108 | A Course in English Language Teaching C Yes, that’s
from work he’s really exhausted and fed
Thanks, A
up. So we’re arguing a lot more than we
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A No proble
usually do.
C Cheers. A
 8 | Teaching listening

Comment
It’s good that the book provides a preliminary exercise that invites students to
think about the topic of the listening text. This will certainly help them understand
the information when they hear it, by activating top-down processes, as well as
being interesting in itself. It also provides a preset task: at the first encounter with
the text, they will be listening out for the answers to the first exercise. As to the later
comprehension questions (4b): it’s not altogether clear whether the students can
read the questions before they listen again, or listen again and then look at and
try to answer the questions. If I were doing this in the classroom, I would invite them
to look at the questions first and even discuss what the answers are: they might
remember these from the first listening. (Note that at least one of the questions
has already been answered at first listening (1), and another partially (3).) The
second listening will therefore function as an opportunity to check and review,
as well as provide added listening experience. A problem is that each question
requires information that is given only once in the course of the recording. If I
were designing the text, I’d try to make sure that key information is provided more
than once. Finally, all the comprehension questions relate to isolated items of
information. So I would at some point provide opportunities for students to discuss
some underlying meanings or conclusions, such as: ‘What’s the context of the
conversation?’, Who are the speakers?’, ‘How do you think one or more of the main
findings here might be applied in your own lives?’

A possible follow-up to any listening comprehension activity is to allow the students to

see the written transcript, and read it as they hear the recording once more. This will
enable them to mop up any bits they still didn’t understand – and also contributes to
reading comprehension.

8.4 Types of activities

If you are using a coursebook, then you will probably use the listening tasks and texts it
provides. If you are not, or if you wish to supplement the materials with more listening
practice, this section lists a number of different types of listening tasks you might design
yourself. They are classified according to the amount and complexity of response required.
1 No overt response. Students do not have to do anything in response to the listening.
However, facial expression and body language often show if they are following or not.
2 Short responses. Students respond by writing a word or a symbol, or by physical
movement.
3 Longer responses. Students write longer answers, which may be phrases or full
sentences.
4 Mixed-skills responses. The listening provides only the first stage in an extended
activity involving also reading, writing or speaking.

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 8 | Teaching listening

Some examples follow.

1 No overt response
Stories. Tell a joke or real-life anecdote, retell a well-known story, read a story from a
book. If the story is well chosen, students are likely to be motivated to pay attention and
understand in order to enjoy it.
Songs. Sing a song yourself, or play a recording of one. Make sure that you focus students
on the words of the song as well as the music. Otherwise, they may just enjoy the tune
without listening to the words, when your aim is for them to do both!
Entertainment: short videos, films, theatre. As with stories, if the content is really
entertaining, students will be motivated to make the effort to understand without
the need for any further task. You can search for suitable material on the websites
recommended earlier (www.oercommons.org and elllo.org); or you might prefer to use
clips from video-sharing platforms or full-length movies from (paid membership) sources.
2 Short responses
Obeying instructions. Students perform actions or draw something in response to
instructions.
Ticking off items. A list, text or picture is provided. The students listen to spoken
description, information or narrative and mark the relevant items as they hear them
mentioned.
True/False. The listening passage consists of a number of statements, some of which are
true and some false (possibly based on material the class has just learnt). Students write
ticks or crosses to indicate whether the statements are right or wrong; or use gesture; or
make brief choral responses (‘True!’ or ‘False!’ for example); or repeat if the statements are
right and stay silent if they are not.
Detecting mistakes. The teacher tells a story or describes something the class knows, but
with a number of deliberate mistakes. Listeners raise their hands or call out when they
hear something wrong.
Cloze. Like the more conventional written cloze passage, the text has occasional gaps;
however, in a listening passage, these gaps are represented by silence or some kind of
buzz. Students write down what they think might be the missing word. The gaps have to
be much more widely spaced than in a written text, otherwise there is not enough time
to listen, understand, think of the answer and write. If you are speaking the text yourself,
then you can adapt the pace of your speech to the speed of student responses.
Guessing definitions. The teacher provides brief oral definitions of a person, place, thing,
action or whatever; students write down what they think it is.
Skimming and scanning. Students are asked to identify some general topic or
information (skimming), or certain limited items of information (scanning) and note the
answer(s). Written questions inviting brief answers may be provided in advance; or a grid,
with certain entries missing; or a picture or diagram to be altered or completed.

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 8 | Teaching listening

3 Longer responses
Answering questions. Questions which require responses of several words are given in
advance. The listening text provides the answer(s). Students write down the answers as
they listen.
Note-taking. Students take brief notes from a short lecture or talk.
Summarizing. Students write a summary of the content of the listening passage after they
have heard it, either in English or in their L1.
Long gapfilling. A long gap is left, at the beginning, middle or end of a listening text.
After listening, students guess and write down, or discuss, what they think might
be missing.
4 Mixed-skill
Problem-solving. A problem is described orally. Students discuss how to deal with it and/
or write down a suggested solution.
Interpretation. An extract from a piece of dialogue or monologue is provided, with no
previous information. The listeners try to guess from the words, kinds of voices, tone and
any other evidence what is going on. At a more sophisticated level, a piece of literature
that is suitable for reading aloud (some poetry, for example) can be discussed and analysed
using both written and spoken versions.
Dicto-gloss. Students take notes from a text they hear, and then, in small groups,
combine their information and attempt to reconstruct the original text. They may
hear the text again during this process. Later, the teacher displays the original text for
comparison, and teacher and students discuss together any problems (Wajnryb, 1990).

Review: Check yourself

1 How useful is it to have students listen to each other for listening

comprehension practice?
2 Can you define top-down and bottom-up listening processes?
3 Can you recall at least four characteristics of natural listening situations?
4 What are some characteristics of natural conversation that may be difficult for
learners to cope with?
5 What aspects of authentic listening tasks or texts can be simulated in the
classroom? What aspects are more difficult to imitate?
6 Can you give at least two examples of listening activities that elicit very brief
responses from students?
7 Can you give an example of an extended activity based on listening that
eventually activates students in speaking, reading or writing as well?

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 8 | Teaching listening

Further reading
Field, J. (2008). Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press.
(Practical guidelines on the design of listening comprehension activities in the
classroom, suggesting alternatives to the traditional comprehension question-
based tasks)
Jannuzi, C. and Zanini, G. (2021). Extensive listening through film (1). English Teaching
Professional, 134, 49–51.
Jannuzi, C. and Zanini, G. (2021). Extensive listening through film (2). English Teaching
Professional, 135, 44–46.
(Ideas on how to use films for listening practice)
Lynch, T. (2009). Teaching Second Language Listening. Oxford University Press.
(Research and theory, together with practical suggestions for classroom
listening tasks)
Rost, M. (1991). Listening in Action: Activities for Developing Listening in Language Education.
Prentice Hall International.
(A series of suggested activities, classified according to the type of listening, with
guiding notes and suggestions)
Ur, P. (1984). Teaching Listening Comprehension. Cambridge University Press.
(Theoretical topics similar to those treated here, with a range of ideas for listening
activities at different levels)
Wilson, J. J. (2008). How to Teach Listening. Pearson Longman.
(A practical handbook on teaching listening, providing a range of sample activities
as well as principled guidance on task design)

References
Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (1997). Exploring Spoken English. Cambridge University Press.
Chang, A. C. and Read, J. (2006). The effects of listening support on the listening
performance of EFL learners. TESOL Quarterly, 40(2), 375–397.
Jenkins, J. (2002). A sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation
syllabus for English as an International Language. Applied Linguistics, 23(1), 83–103.
Krashen, S. D. (1981). Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Pergamon.
Redston, C. and Cunningham, G. (2012). face2face Intermediate Student’s Book,
(2nd Edition). Cambridge University Press.
Wajnryb, R. (1990). Grammar Dictation. Oxford University Press.

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 9 Teaching speaking

Overview

9.1 Goals and problems in teaching speaking. The main objectives in teaching
oral fluency, some problems and how we might address them.
9.2 Speaking activity design: some basic features. The roles of topic and task in
stimulating lively conversational English in the lesson.
9.3 Getting them to speak: from beginner to advanced. A range of useful
speaking activities at different levels.
9.4 Presentations. Teaching more formal speaking in the form of classroom
presentations at various levels.
9.5 Pronunciation. Aspects of English pronunciation which you may find useful to
teach, and some ideas for how to do so.

9.1 Goals and problems in teaching speaking

Of all the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), speaking seems intuitively the
most important. People who know a language are referred to as ‘speakers’ of that language,
as if speaking included all other kinds of knowing. And many, if not most, language learners
are mainly interested in learning to communicate orally. Classroom activities that develop
students’ ability to express themselves through speech – mainly informal conversation –
would therefore seem an important component of a language course.
It is very difficult to design and administer procedures that actually get students to talk:
more so, in many ways, than to get them to listen, read or write. So let’s start by defining
the main goals of classroom activities that are designed to promote oral interaction, and
the accompanying problems.

Goals
The students should actually talk a lot. As much time as possible during the activity
should be taken up with talk by the students themselves. This may seem obvious, but
in many activities, a lot of the time is actually filled with teacher explanations, pauses,
reading texts or instructions, or classroom management issues.
The language used should be of an acceptable level. Students should express themselves
in language that is relevant, easily understandable and reasonably accurate. This does not
mean that everything has to be absolutely correct, only that it is free from pronunciation,

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lexical and grammatical errors that interfere with the fluent communication of meanings.
(For a discussion of the teaching of pronunciation, see the last section of this chapter.)

Pause for thought

What, in your experience as either student or teacher, are some of the problems in
getting students to talk in the classroom?

Comment
Some of the main problems I have come across are the following:
• Reluctance to speak in English in the classroom. A very basic problem is
students’ lack of willingness to communicate (WTC) in English (Yashima,
2012). This can be rooted in a number of factors, including shyness, lack of
confidence, aversion to speaking in front of an audience, fear of making
mistakes or of losing face.
• Finding things to say. Even if they are not inhibited, you often hear students
complain that they cannot think of anything to say. Just providing an interesting
topic, as we shall see in the next section, is not enough. Students need to feel
that they have something relevant and original to contribute so that it is worth
making the effort to speak.
• Low participation. Only one participant can talk at a time if they are to be
heard; and in a large group, this means that each student will have only very
little talking time. An added problem here is the tendency of some students to
dominate, while others speak very little or not at all.
• L1 use. In classes where some or all of the students share the same L1, they
may fall back on it when they could, with a bit more effort, use English. They do
so because it is easier and feels more natural to talk to each other in their own
language. Occasional L1 use is inevitable – and, indeed, can be very helpful
in solving specific vocabulary problems, for example – but if students spend
most of their time speaking their own language, they will obviously have little
opportunity to improve their speaking skills in English.

Two features which will help a lot to address these problems are the use of group or pair
work and a relatively low level of language.
Group work. The use of group work, whether through face-to-face division into groups
within the classroom or the use of breakout rooms in videoconferencing, increases the
amount of learner talk during the activity, and also helps to lower the inhibitions of
students who are unwilling to speak in front of the whole class. It is true that group work
means the teacher cannot supervise all speech produced by students, that errors may go
uncorrected and that students may sometimes slip into their L1. Nevertheless, even taking

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into consideration occasional mistakes and L1 use, the amount of time when individual
members of the class are actually speaking in English is still likely to be far more than it
would be in a whole-class discussion.
Easy language. In general, the level of language needed for participation in the
interaction should be lower than that used in other language-learning activities in the
same class. The vocabulary and grammar items needed should be ones which can easily be
recalled and produced, so that students can speak fluently without too much hesitation. It
is a good idea to review essential vocabulary before the activity starts, and maybe even to
display some useful items on the board for students to refer to.
Below are some further useful practical tips.
1 Use pair work. Where feasible, use pair work rather than small-group work. That
way, the amount of talk overall in the class is maximized (at any one time, half the
members of the class are likely to be speaking). Also, pair work is far easier to organize
than group work: it just involves turning to face a partner, rather than actually moving
tables and chairs to get into groups.
2 Discussion leaders. Appoint one member of the group as discussion leader, whose job
it is to make sure that everyone gets a chance to participate and that nobody over-
dominates the process.
3 L1 monitors. With classes who have a strong tendency to overuse L1, invite one
student (not the discussion leader) to act as monitor for each group. The monitor’s
job is to note instances of L1 use. Even if there is no actual penalty attached, the
awareness that someone is monitoring their language helps participants to keep to
English. The monitor’s notes could be used later for the group to explore how the L1
words or sentences could have been expressed in English, perhaps with the help of the
teacher or by referring to a dictionary.
4 Avoid correcting errors. In general, give corrective feedback on errors only rarely
during oral fluency work. Stopping students to correct them may distract them,
and focusing too much on accuracy will discourage them from trying to express
themselves freely. On the other hand, there are places where correction can actually
help: if the student is obviously hesitant and needs a confirmation of the correct form,
for example. An alternative is for you to note errors and discuss them with the class
later. For more on this topic, see 12 Feedback and error correction.

9.2 Speaking activity design: some basic features

Pause for thought

On the next page are two samples of speaking activities designed to have
students engage in exchanges of opinion. What are some differences between
them? How well do you think each would work in a classroom of students of an
appropriate level?

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Activity 1
Discuss the following conflicting opinions:

Opinion 1: Children should be taught in heterogeneous classes: setting them into

ability groupings puts a ‘failure’ label onto members of the lower groups, whereas
putting differently abled students together allows opportunities for peer teaching and
overall better learning.
Opinion 2: Children should be divided into ability groupings for most subjects:
this enables students to get instruction appropriate to their differing needs, makes
teaching easier, and improves individual achievements.

Activity 2
A good schoolteacher of English should have the following qualities. Can your group
agree together in what order of priority you would put them?

ability to activate students flexibility

ability to create interest honesty
ability to explain clearly intelligence
ability to keep order knowledge of English
clear speaking voice love of children
enthusiasm for teaching pleasant appearance
fairness sense of humour

Comment
The main difference between the two activities shown above is that the first
simply asks participants to talk about a topic, the main objective being clearly
the discussion process itself. The second asks them to perform a task, where
the objective is the production of some kind of clear result (in this case, a joint
decision about priorities). The first includes the explicit command ‘discuss’; the
second does not, but asks students to complete a task (in this case, agree on
an order of priority), which cannot be done without talking. In all groups in which
I’ve tried these out, the second type produced more talk and more interest. When
asked why this might be so, participants say things like: ‘I knew what needed to be
said’; ‘It was a challenge – we were aware that time was running out and we had
to get a result’; ‘It was more like a game, we enjoyed it.’ However, there is a minority
of students who do prefer discussing a topic: ‘I found discussing a topic more
interesting: you can go into things more deeply without the pressure of having to
reach a decision.’

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The distinction between topic and task in the design of discussion activities is a key one.
Topic. A good topic is one to which students can relate, using ideas from their own
experience and knowledge. The ‘ability-grouping’ topic under Pause for thought on the
previous page is therefore appropriate for most schoolteachers or people whose school
memories are fresh. It helps if it represents a genuine controversy, in which participants
are likely to be fairly evenly divided. Some questions or suggested lines of thought can
help to stimulate discussion, but not too many arguments for and against should be fed to
the class in advance: leave room for their own initiative and originality.
Task. A task is goal-oriented: it requires the group, or pair, to achieve an objective in the
form of an observable result, such as brief notes or lists, a rearrangement of jumbled items,
a drawing, a spoken or written summary or conclusion. This result should be achievable
only by interaction between participants: so in the instructions for the task, you often
find directions such as ‘reach a consensus’, or ‘find out everyone’s opinion’. A task is often
enhanced if there is some kind of visual focus to base the talking on: a picture, for example,
or a text or list of some kind, as in the example shown in Activity 2 on the previous page.
You will find more examples of task-based speaking activities in Section 3 below.
One reason for the success of task-based activities is that they are based on an important
characteristic of real-life talking: the purpose. It is true that sometimes we speak just to
make contact or be polite (e.g., ‘Hello!’ ‘Nice talking to you!’ etc.) or to entertain (e.g.,
telling jokes), or to get something off our chest (e.g., exclamations or cursing) – but in the
majority of situations, we have some goal that we want to achieve by talking: to take a
decision, to solve a problem, to clarify an issue, to find out the answer to a question and
so on. A well-designed task provides students with a purpose of this kind, giving them a
reason to speak.
A task can be used more than once: there is some evidence that task repetition results in
increased fluency and more successful performance (Bygate, 2009). There is, of course, the
possibility of such repetition being seen as tedious and redundant: we need to find ways
to vary: by repeating only part of the task process, or by doing it slightly differently (using
different student groupings, for example).
On the whole, then, it is recommended that most oral fluency activities should be
designed round tasks, while including also, mainly for more advanced classes, some open
topic-based ones.
Besides these two main categories, there are other types of oral fluency activities that
are useful at more elementary or more advanced levels. For lower-level learners, there
are those based on learning by heart, or introducing variations into given mini-texts, or
reading aloud (see the first part of the next section for some examples). And then for the
more advanced, there are those based on role play, or on individual presentations.

9.3 Getting them to speak: from beginner to advanced

This section presents a selection of interactive oral fluency activities, starting with very
simple ones for beginners and progressing to more advanced ones.

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Beginner–elementary (Pre-A1 to A2 level)

As noted earlier, some of the problems with getting students to participate in speaking
activities are their inhibitions based on lack of knowledge of English and fear of making
mistakes. But learners even at the earliest stages can be provided with safe ways to
express themselves in spoken English, building their confidence in preparation for more
challenging tasks later.
Using conventional language exercises. Conventional grammar or vocabulary exercises
can be used as a basis for individual speech, by making them open-ended and inviting
multiple responses to a question. For example, let’s take simple past exercise items like
the following:
Write the past simple of the verbs.
1 She ________ early. (leave)
2 He _______ a film. (see)
If this has been done once conventionally, so the past simple is known, you can then
tell students to ignore the end of the sentence and say other possible (full) sentences,
for example: ‘She left the room’, ‘She left late’, ‘She left her husband’ or ‘He saw me’,
‘He saw a picture’, ‘He saw the house’. The utterances are short and make use of known
vocabulary, and give the students the opportunity to say their own thing within a given
frame. The same can be done with matching exercises (delete one column of matches and
invite students to invent their own completions to each item), or some multiple-choice
(delete the options).

Pause for thought

Have a look at a coursebook or book of grammar exercises. Can you find items
that could be used as above as cues for open-ended oral responses by students?

Comment
You’ll probably have found a few, though not all exercise items lend themselves
to such adaptation; some allow few possibilities other than the one the item
is targeting. Another possibility is to suggest to students that if the subject of a
sentence is a person, they substitute ‘I’and make sentences that are true for them.

Learning by heart. The procedure of reciting text learnt by heart is associated with the
audiolingual method, which was popular in the 1960s, but is now rarely used, and some
people mistakenly assume that it is therefore an outdated and ineffective technique. It is
actually very useful for the development of oral fluency at elementary levels: it provides
beginners with ready-made, meaningful utterances that they can perform fluently,
giving them the confidence early on that they can communicate successfully in spoken
English without the fear of making mistakes. There are various kinds of text that can be
memorized, but perhaps the most useful are chants and dialogues.

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Jazz chants have been popularized by the numerous books and videos of Carolyn Graham
(see Further Reading): sequences of utterances that replicate the rhythm of speech but
with a strong ‘beat’. Later writers have adopted the basic idea, but without the ‘jazz’
aspect, and have designed simple chants for choral repetition that retain a natural
rhythmic ‘beat’, while teaching useful interactive chunks of text that learners can later
integrate into their own output.
Here is one of my own (the upper-case letters indicate the stress, and three dots a
brief rest):
HI … LOU … HOW are YOU? …
HI … LOU … HOW are YOU?
Hi, KATE, I’m FEELing GREAT and
HOW … ARE … YOU?
I find that younger learners particularly enjoy the rhythm and the experience of chanting
in chorus, with appropriate gestures; see more on this in 19 Learner differences 1: age.
Dialogues can also be learned and recited: whether very simple exchanges like:
Do you like apples?
Yes, I do
Or more dramatic exchanges like:
Come here at once!
Who, me?
Yes, you! Come here at once!
What’s the matter?2
The dialogues once learnt, are repeated, either in chorus or by individuals, and can be
varied in speed, mood, volume and so on, as well as added to or changed.
Reading aloud: reader’s theatre. In the procedure called reader’s theatre, students rehearse
and perform a scene, or scenes, from a story. They do not learn their parts by heart, but
read aloud from a script; the rehearsals ensure that they read fluently and meaningfully.
If you check out the phrase “reader’s theater” (American spelling) on the internet, you’ll
find a number of examples. Again, this is a procedure which helps learners to speak
without the stress associated with having to create their own utterances. Note that the
text doesn’t necessarily have to be based on scripted dialogue: I have used the same
technique with poems and even paragraphs from a reading passage from the coursebook.
Students are given ten or fifteen minutes to decide who says what, how, whether they will
use movement or gesture, pause or repetition … and then perform before the class.
Scaffolded activities. Scaffolded activities are those where students compose their own
utterances based on a given pattern or grammatical structure. A classic example is guessing

2
Adapted from Raz, H. (1968). Dramatic Dialogues. Publishing House of the Teacher’s Union in Israel, now out of print.

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games, which are based on Yes/No questions: ‘Guess what I have in my bag,’ for example,
or ‘Guess what I’m doing’ (a mime), or ‘Twenty questions’ (you have twenty questions to
guess the thing, animal or person I’m thinking of). Other examples are brainstorms based
on sentence beginnings: ‘If it rains tomorrow …’; ‘Last week, I ...’; ‘Next year, I hope …’
Simple utterances. The next stage is activities that elicit sentences that, though not
scaffolded in the sense of being built around a given pattern, are simple enough to be
easily composed by students at an A2–B1 level. Examples are guessing what an abstract
doodle scrawled on the board or screen might represent; or answering simple personal
questions in an interview; or saying as many sentences as they can about a picture (like
the one shown below) within a given time-limit.

Longer utterances. Slightly more demanding are those activities which might require
longer sentences with more advanced vocabulary. ‘Find things in common’, for example,
is a pair-work task in which partners have to find as many things as possible that they
have in common. These must be things that can be discovered only through talking – not
obvious or visible characteristics like ‘We are in the same class’, or ‘We both have blue
eyes.’ At the end, they share their findings with the full class.
Role play. In this, students have to compose entire conversations based on role cards. For
example, one student gets Role Card A shown on the next page, and the other gets Role
Card B; they are invited to improvise a conversation based on these.

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ROLE CARD A: Last time your friend borrowed your bike, it came back very dirty and
scratched, but you didn’t like to complain. Now the same friend has said they want
to ask a favour, and you have the feeling they want to borrow the bike again. You
really don’t want to lend it, but you don’t want to lose the friendship.
ROLE CARD B: You don’t have a bike of your own, but you need one for a group
bike ride tomorrow. So you’re going to ask your friend if you can borrow their
bike (you know your friend isn’t planning to go on the bike ride). You are good
friends, and you’ve borrowed this bicycle before, so you don’t think there will be
any problem.

More inhibited or anxious students may find role play difficult and sometimes even
embarrassing. Factors that can contribute to a role play’s success are: making sure that
learners can easily produce the necessary language; your own enthusiasm; careful and
clear presentation and instructions. A preliminary demonstration or rehearsal by you
together with a student volunteer can also be very helpful.
An extension of the role play is the simulation, where participants are in an imaginary
situation with some task to perform, but they do not have specific individual roles, as in
the following Extended discussion.
Extended discussion. Activities involving extended discussion are often based on tasks
that require a group to reach a consensus on some issue requiring a decision, for example,
‘Educational Advisory Committee’. Students in the class are invited to recall authentic
problems they remember encountering in school with regard to particular classes, or
individual ‘problematic’ students or teachers. Each group chooses one of the problems and
has the responsibility, as an educational advisory committee, of working out a detailed
suggestion as to some possible solutions, or actions that might improve the situation.
They should discuss their recommendations and write them out in the form of a letter
to the school principal. At the feedback stage, the resulting letters can be read aloud: this
often produces further debate.
Debate. Write a debate motion on the board in the form of the expression of an opinion:
for example, Summer is better than winter. The class is divided into two teams: one is to
support the motion, the other is to oppose it. The teams discuss what their arguments
might be in presenting their position. These arguments are presented by a representative
for each side, after which the discussion is thrown open to anyone who wishes to express
an opinion. The session may culminate in a vote where students are free to vote according
to their real opinions rather than the ones they were assigned as members of a team.
There are, of course, a number of variations of this process: try searching “debate” on the
internet. See www.weareteachers.com/high-school-debate-topics for some debating topics.
And if students can’t think of arguments, they might resort to AI tools like Opinionate to
help them.

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9.4 Presentations
Presentations involve longer stretches of speech and may be accompanied by written
or graphic material displayed on a screen or in the form of handouts. They are often
followed by a question-and-answer session or discussion.
Teaching students how to give presentations is particularly appropriate for those students
studying English for Academic Purposes (EAP) or Business English.

Live or recorded?
Traditionally, students make their presentations live in the classroom, followed by a question-
and-answer session or discussion. Today, however, making video recordings of both short and
long presentations is very easy using any digital device with a camera and microphone, with
the help of tools like Loom, ScreenPal, Capture or Flip; and there are considerable advantages
to allowing students to do so. The presenter does not have the stressful experience of speaking
in front of the whole group; they can delete and re-record if the first version does not work
well; the teacher can give private and personal feedback through digitally recorded or written
comments; and if the presentations are long, there is considerable saving of lesson time.

Types of presentation
Short. At the early stages, classroom presentations may be very short: for example, students
may be asked to introduce themselves in 30 seconds (Lindstromberg, 2004). Later, they can
be asked to speak for up to about five minutes. Short presentations may be based on:
• ‘Show and tell’. The student shows an object they have brought from home, and tells
the class what it is and why it is significant for them.
• ‘Describe’. The student shows a photograph of a person or scene or event, and
comments on it.
• ‘About me’. The student tells the class something about themself: personal details,
family, occupation, interests, tastes, hobbies.
• A joke. The student tells a brief joke.
Medium-length. Longer presentations of 5–15 minutes may include:
• Narrative. The student tells a story: a joke, an anecdote, a fable, an urban legend.
• Instructions. The student explains to the class how to do something that they are
an expert in.
• Recommendations. The student recommends a book, film, television programme or
play to the class. This will involve some narrative but should focus on reasons why the
speaker enjoyed the work and thinks the audience will also like it.
Any of these can be accompanied by illustrations or text using PowerPoint or Canva or
other digital presentation tools.
Long. Full-length presentations simulate ones that are given in real life: promotions
of a product in business, for example, or lectures on academic topics. These need to be

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structured: an introduction telling the audience what the presentation is to be about;

the main body, with clearly ordered sections that include explanations and examples;
and an ending, summarizing and, where appropriate, drawing conclusions and making
recommendations. The main types of long presentations are:
• Information. The presentation conveys information about a topic, sometimes in the
form of a report, very often based on research. It is often accompanied by written
materials and/or illustrations or headings on slides.
• Argument. A case is presented for or against a claim, which may relate to any area:
political, social, scientific, etc. It should include arguments in favour of and against the
main thesis, with the speaker’s own position made clear.

Pause for thought

Based on your own experience as a student learning how to give presentations,

what are some useful tips you have been given (or wish, in retrospect, that you
had been given!)?

Comment
Some useful tips I have been given myself, and try to observe in my own
presentations, are the following:
• Prepare! Make notes about what you’re going to say; perhaps learn by heart
your final sentence, or a few good phrases that can make an impression! But
don’t learn the whole presentation by heart – see the next point.
• Don’t read your text aloud or try to learn all of it by heart! A text that has been
learnt by heart and recited, or read aloud, tends to be boring. It’s much more
interesting for the audience if you explain things in your own words, even if you
occasionally hesitate or repeat yourself. But you can, of course, refer to notes to
keep you on track.
• If using slides (e.g., on PowerPoint  ), don’t just read them aloud. Your
audience can probably read English, so you don’t need to tell them what’s
written! Use the text on your slides as cues and reminders, not as your entire text.
• Keep eye contact with your audience (or with the camera if you are
recording). It’s much more interesting listening to a speaker who is looking at
you. And address the entire class, not just the teacher!
• Speak clearly. This sounds obvious, but it’s easy to drop your voice, or speak
monotonously, without realizing that you are doing so. Speak louder than you
normally do, and try to vary the pitch and speed at which you speak.
• Use movement and gesture. Body language also communicates! A speaker who
moves and uses occasional gesture to add emphasis or meaning is likely to be
more interesting and successful in conveying their ideas than one who is static.

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9.5 Pronunciation
The term pronunciation as it is used here includes not only the sounds of the language, but
also rhythm, intonation, and stress patterns. Students do not need necessarily to model
their accents on L1 English speakers – indeed, the speech of such speakers is often difficult
to understand! – but their pronunciation does need to be clear enough to be readily
comprehensible by other English speakers. Where learners’ pronunciation is very difficult
to understand, you may want to spend some lesson time working on improving it.

Sounds
Some mispronunciation of sounds in international English conversations can actually bring
about a breakdown in communication, as described by Jenkins (2002); for example, the
substitution of a long /i:/ sound for the short /ɪ/ in a word like the verb live, which then
sounds like leave. We do therefore need to make sure that students are differentiating between
these two sounds and using them correctly. Other common variants, according to Jenkins, in
fact make very little difference: for example, the pronunciation of the ‘th’ sounds /ð/ and /θ/
as /d/ and /t/, or as /z/ and /s/, does not, apparently, cause problems for most listeners.
In general, the nearer the pronunciation is to the actual spelling of a word, the more
likely it is to be easily understood by the majority of speakers worldwide. It therefore does
not matter so much if students fail, for example, to use the schwa sound in weak forms
like /fə/ for for.

Rhythm
The speech rhythm of many (probably most) fluent speakers of English is stress-timed.
This means that in each phrase or sentence, certain words are stressed (usually the
lexical words which carry the main content) and the other words are shortened to fit
the rhythm. How long each phrase or sentence takes to say, therefore, depends on how
many stresses there are in it. For example: My old GRANDfather used to go SWIMming
in the middle of DeCEMber (three stresses) does not take much longer to say than My
GRANDpa went SWIMming in DeCEMber (three stresses). Many other languages are syllable-
timed: the time it takes to say a sentence depends only on how many syllables there are.
However, so many people now speak English with syllable- rather than stress-timing –
or a mixture – that both are becoming acceptable worldwide, and it may not be worth
investing very much effort in training students to produce stress-timed speech themselves.
They do, however, need to be able to hear and understand both types: this is one of the
reasons why it is so important to give them a varied diet of different accents in listening
comprehension, as mentioned in the previous chapter.

Intonation
The rules of intonation in English within L1-speaker speech communities are fairly
complex and difficult to teach: very few English textbooks, or teachers, attempt to provide
explanations or practice in them. The issue is complicated further by the fact that, as with
rhythm and stress, the increase in the use of English as an international language has
resulted in a proliferation of intonation patterns that are used, accepted and understood in
spoken English worldwide. So it is probably not worth trying to teach rules of intonation,

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and what we need to do, again, is provide students with plenty of exposure to different
accents and their accompanying intonations, within comprehensible listening texts.

Stress
English speakers indicate which word they are stressing in a sentence not by increased
volume but normally by a higher pitch. Thus, the message conveyed by a sentence like
Eli came by train this morning will vary according to which word is pronounced at a higher
pitch than the others. For example:
1 Eli came by train in the morning. = It was Eli, not someone else, who came.

2 Eli came by train in the morning. = It was by train that Eli came, not by car.
3 Eli came by train in the morning. = It was the morning that Eli came, not the afternoon.
Misuse of intonation for stress can produce misunderstandings. Where the students’ L1
indicates stress differently, it may be useful to make them aware of how this works in
English. For example, students might work in pairs on sentences like:
I don’t want to walk into town tomorrow.
One student reads out the sentence with a particular stress: for example:
I don’t want to walk into town tomorrow.
The other student has to identify what it is, exactly, that the speaker objects to (in
this case, the walking).

Pause for thought

Make a list of the aspects of pronunciation that you think need to be explicitly
taught to learners coming from another language that you know.

Comment
According to Jenkins (2002), the most important aspects of pronunciation that
need to be taught to most learners of English are the following:
• vowels: contrast between long and short vowels, particularly /i/ – /i:/;
• consonants: all the consonants, with the exception, as mentioned earlier,
of the /ð/ and /θ/ sounds, which do not seem to be essential for accurate
communication. Particularly important are the contrast between unvoiced
plosives (/p/, /t/, /k/) and voiced plosives (/b/, /d/, /g/) and initial consonant
clusters e.g., the /pr/ in a word like proper;
• intonation: the use of intonation to signal stress of a particular word in a sentence.
You may find, however, that you may need to add to, or shorten, this list, in response
to the particular needs of students in your own classes. See Swan (2001) for a list
of English pronunciation problems experienced by speakers of specific languages.

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How do we teach pronunciation?

As with grammar, most students can benefit from focused teaching of pronunciation as
well as incidental acquisition through listening. This is because very often they simply do
not hear an English sound when listening but perceive it as an approximation to a similar,
but not identical, sound in their own language. Many Arabic speakers, for example, have
problems perceiving and producing the voiceless /p/, which they hear and pronounce
as a sound similar to the Arabic /b/. It is therefore useful to start by awareness-raising:
letting students hear and compare two easily confused sounds either in isolation or
within minimal pairs such as bin/pin, and making sure that they can actually recognize
the difference. Or use exercises on phonemic awareness which are a useful preliminary
to teaching reading (see 10 Teaching reading). Systematic explanation can help here:
you can explain, for example, about the puff of air that accompanies an initial plosive
consonant like /p/, or in what part of the mouth a particular sound is formed.
The next step is to ask students to produce the sounds in single syllables or pairs of
contrasted syllables, imitating your pronunciation, or that of a recording. Learning by
heart the correct performance of entire phrases or sentences can help a lot, particularly
within the context of dialogues or jazz chants.
Finally, it is important to practise pronunciation within a meaningful task: challenging
students to identify or produce messages based on sentences whose exact meaning
depends on correct pronunciation. A variety of activities which do this can be found in
Hewings (2004).

Review: Check yourself

1 What are some factors that prevent, or discourage, students from talking in
English in the lesson?
2 What practical aspects of speaking activity design can help address these
problems?
3 What is the difference between task-based and topic-based speaking
activities?
4 Why is it useful to get students to learn dialogues by heart?
5 What are some advantages of having students record their presentations
rather than giving them live in class?
6 What are some important features of pronunciation to teach?

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 9 | Teaching speaking

Further reading
Bilbrough, N. (2007). Dialogue Activities. Cambridge University Press.
(Varied and interesting activities based on the idea of learning and performing
dialogues)
Gammidge, M. (2004). Speaking Extra: A resource book of multi-level skills activities.
Cambridge University Press.
(Mainly for adults, but can also be used with adolescents: a variety of speaking
activities involving discussion, role play, storytelling)
Graham, C. (2006). Creating Chants and Songs. Oxford University Press.
(Useful guidance on how to design rhythmic chants to teach oral skills, grammar
and vocabulary)
Klippel, F. (1985). Keep Talking: Communicative fluency activities for language teaching.
Cambridge University Press.
(Original and stimulating ideas for getting students to talk, mainly for more
advanced students)
Seligson. P. (2007). Helping Students to Speak. Richmond Publishing.
(Basic problems with getting students to speak and how to overcome them;
practical ideas for activities)
Ur, P. (2014). Discussions and More. Cambridge University Press.
(Oral fluency activities, suitable for a variety of levels)

References
Bygate, M. (2009). Effects of task repetition of the structure and control of oral language.
In Van den Branden, K., Bygate, M. and Norris, J. (Eds.). Task-Based Language Teaching: A
reader (pp. 33–58). John Benjamins.
Hewings, M. (2004). Pronunciation Practice Activities. Cambridge University Press.
Jenkins, J. (2002). A sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation
syllabus for English as an International Language. Applied Linguistics, 23(1), 83–103.
Lindstromberg, S. (2004). Language Activities for Teenagers. Cambridge University Press.
Swan, M. (2001). Learner English: A teacher’s guide to interference and other problems.
Cambridge University Press.
Yashima, T. (2012). Willingness to communicate: Momentary volition that results in L2
behaviour. In Mercer, S., Ryan, S. and Williams, M. (Eds.) Psychology for Language Learning
(pp. 119–135). Palgrave Macmillan.

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 10 Teaching reading

Overview

10.1 How do we read? A summary of some of the basic facts about successful
reading and factors that contribute to it.
10.2 Beginning reading 1: phonemic awareness. Some activities that prepare
younger learners for reading by raising their awareness of the separate
sounds of English represented by letters or letter combinations.
10.3 Beginning reading 2: learning the letters. Some general guidelines about
the early teaching of letters and the reading of simple texts.
10.4 Beginning reading 3: reading tasks. A variety of practice tasks for young
learners aimed at improving and consolidating basic reading skills.
10.5 Fluent reading. The factors contributing to fluent reading, including both
basic skills and more conscious reading strategies, and how our teaching
can promote these.
10.6 Extensive reading. The nature and importance of extensive reading, some
associated problems and practical tips.

10.1 How do we read?

In this chapter, I am taking the word reading to mean ‘reading and understanding’. A
learner who says, ‘I can read the words on the page, but I don’t know what they mean’
is, therefore, not reading, in this sense, but only decoding: translating the written symbols
into their corresponding sounds.
In this section, I aim to clarify some aspects of the nature of reading by critically
examining some generally accepted assumptions expressed in the following statements.
1 We need to decode individual letters in order to read words; and we need to read and
understand all the words accurately in order to understand a text.
2 If we understand all the words in a text, we will understand the text.
3 The more words there are in a text, the longer it will take to read it.
We’ll examine these assumptions in the three Pause for thought tasks on the next
two pages.

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 10 | Teaching reading

Pause for thought

Read the following text as quickly as you can:

The handsome knight mounted his horse and galloped off to save the
beautiful princess. On and on, over mountains and valleys, until his galloping
house was exhausted. At last he dismounted … Where was the dragon?
Did you understand it?

Comment
Did you notice that the second time the word horse appeared, it was spelt
‘house’? If you did not, this does not mean that you are a bad reader, but rather
the reverse: you are a good reader, in the sense that you are looking for meanings,
and aiming to understand the overall sense of the text. We have a natural
tendency to try to make anything we read meaningful to us. If a particular word is
irrelevant or misspelt, we tend to overlook any aberrations: to interpret it, as here, in
a way which accords with the overall message of the text. So we don’t just decode
all the letters, or read every word accurately.

Pause for thought

Read the following passage.

In the proposed method, the dynamic model of induction motor is updated
based on prediction (receding horizon principle) for the inner control loop
(current control) while the brain emotional learning-based intelligent controller
(BELIC) is used for the outer control loop (speed control).
(Affan and Uddin, 2021)
Do you understand each individual word? Did you understand the information
given in the passage?

Comment
Probably the words are known to you, but the meaning of the text as a whole
is incomprehensible (as it is to me!), unless you are an expert in the relevant
technology. Knowing the meanings of the words in a text ensures understanding
only if you have some knowledge of the subject matter. The use of this knowledge
to help us understand what we read is known as top-down reading strategy and
is used together with bottom-up reading strategy (decoding and understanding
the words) in order to arrive at overall comprehension (see a discussion of these
terms in 8 Teaching listening). While reading the text in the previous Pause for
thought, you probably had some knowledge of traditional stories with knights

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 10 | Teaching reading

on horseback which helped you make sense of it. It is true (as mentioned in
6 Teaching vocabulary) that a learner needs to know about 95–98 percent of
the words of a text in order to understand it easily. This is necessary, but may not,
in some cases, be enough: some background knowledge may also be needed
in order to activate top-down strategies; conversely, a wealth of background
knowledge may compensate for not knowing some of the vocabulary. So it may
be very helpful as a preparation for reading to activate, share or add to students’
previous knowledge of the content (and sometimes genre or context) of the text.

Pause for thought

Read carefully the two lines of text below. Which takes you more time to read and
which less?
1 jam hot pin call did tap son tick
2 How quickly can you read and understand this?

Comment
You probably found that the second line was much quicker and easier to read
than the first, although it is longer. This indicates that there is not a simple one-to-one
relationship between the number of words in a text and the time it takes to read.
What appears to be more significant is the number of sense units: words combined
into meaningful phrases or sentences. So if you have a text made up of one sense
unit (in this case, the full sentence shown in the second line), it will be easier and
quicker to read than a text made up of isolated, disconnected words (the first line),
even if the total number of words is the same. The difference is one of coherence:
the words in the first line are difficult and time-consuming to read because there is
no connection between them. In contrast, in the second line, the same number of
words connect with each other coherently to make a meaningful sentence.

To recap:
1 We do not necessarily need to read every letter of every word accurately in order to
understand a text. We need to read enough words to understand the main meanings
of the text, and can then skip or pay less attention to ones that repeat previous
information, are misspelt, or are redundant.
2 If we understand all the words in a text, we are likely to understand it – but not
always! Some previous knowledge of the subject matter (and sometimes genre and
context) may be helpful and even, as in the example above, essential. Application of
this knowledge is known as top-down reading strategy, as distinct from bottom-up which
is based on decoding the actual text.

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3 The more clearly the words are linked together to make coherent sense-units (phrases,
sentences), and the more clearly sentences are linked together to make coherent
paragraphs, the easier the text will be to read.

Implications
The main implication for teaching all of this is the importance of encouraging students
to concentrate on understanding the meaning of a text, using previous knowledge of the
content, genre and context of the text as well as the meanings of the actual words, and
not to feel obliged to decode every word. Decoding single letters and words is, of course,
an important first stage in learning to read, particularly for those students whose L1 does
not use the Latin alphabet. But you need to be aware that it is only the first stage, and
a means to an end. You need to encourage students to read and understand meaningful
texts – even very short ones – as soon as you can.

10.2 Beginning reading 1: phonemic awareness

Many beginner learners of English need to learn a totally new writing system. For
some learners, even the concept of an alphabet is new, as their L1 written symbols may
represent syllables or even words. Even those who have already learnt the Latin alphabet
for their L1 may find that some letters may be pronounced differently in English.
In either case, it is very helpful to do some preliminary work on phonemic awareness. This
involves making sure the students can hear and differentiate between the different sounds, or
phonemes, of English which they will need to match with the letters or letter combinations
that represent them. They need, for example, to be able to identify the difference between /p/
and /b/, or between /ɪ/ and /i:/ (see 9 Teaching speaking, Section 5). Various kinds of oral
exercises can be used, usually based on getting students to listen to sounds and do various
identification tasks, such as the following:
1 Tell students to put their hands up when they hear a particular phoneme. Say a series
of phonemes, including the target one and others that may be confused with it. For
example, ask them to look out for /θ/ and then dictate: /θ/ /ð/ /d/ /t/ /ð/ //θ/ /s/ /ð/ /ð/.
2 Ask students which is the odd one out of a series of phonemes. Let them hear the
series twice. For example, /t/ /t/ /t/ /d/ /t/.
3 Ask students to identify which words rhyme. Give two options. For example: ‘Which
word rhymes with patch? Say one or two. One: cash; Two: catch.’
4 Challenge students to identify whether a sound is at the beginning, middle or end of a
word. For example: say if the /i:/ sound is at the beginning, middle or end of the word.
Then dictate: 1. even 2. three 3. steep.
5 Add an extra sound to a word, and ask students if they can say what sound was added.
For example, ‘Here’s a word: sand. Now I’m going to say the word with another sound
added – can you tell me what the new sound is? The word I said before was sand. The
new word is stand.‘

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6 Ask students to count the sounds in a simple word, where these correspond with
letters in the written form. For example: ‘How many sounds can you hear in the word
cats? What are they?’
7 Provide students with the component sounds of a word, and challenge them to put
them together to make a word they know. For example: ‘Here are some sounds. If you
put them together, what word do they make? /m/, /æ/, /n/.’

10.3 Beginning reading 2: learning the letters

Some students at the early stages of learning a new language are having to deal with
an entirely new writing system in English. Others are only having to learn different
pronunciations for some of the letters of an alphabet that is already familiar to them.
For those learning a new alphabet, there are a number of questions we need to consider
when beginning to teach reading.
1 Should we teach our students only orally for a while, so that they have basic spoken
proficiency in English before starting reading? Or start reading and writing from
the beginning?
2 Should we teach them single letters, and gradually build these up into words (the
phonic method)? Or should we teach the written form of meaningful words first and
analyse the different component letters later (the global reading method)?
3 If we decide to teach single letters, should we teach their names first, or their (usual) sound?
4 Should we teach them in the same order as they appear in the alphabet?
5 Should we teach upper- and lower-case letters together, or first the lower case of all the
letters, because they are more common?
6 At what stage should we teach the conventional order of the alphabet?
My answers to these are in the Comment following the next Pause for thought.

Pause for thought

Imagine you have to teach a group of beginners whose mother tongue is

Chinese or Arabic, and they need to learn a new alphabet and even a different
direction of writing. What would your answers be to the questions above?

Comment
1 In such cases, it is usually preferable to begin reading only after acquiring some
basic knowledge of the spoken language including familiarity with a core
vocabulary of high frequency words. Then reading can more quickly become
a matter of recognizing meanings, rather than just decoding symbols. This also
means you can give much more interesting tasks for reading practice. Teaching
letters before the learners know much spoken English would mean that you would
have to provide exercises based on nonsense-words, which can be boring.

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2 In most cases, it is probably most practical to begin with single letters (the
conventional phonic method), starting with the most common and useful. As
soon as students have a few of the most common letters (for example, a, e,
i, o, s, n, t, r), they can read and write a large number of common words. The
most common digraphs (two-letter combinations that make a single sound, like
th, sh, ee) are worth teaching even before you teach the less common letters
like q or z. Having said this, I would add the reservation that it is useful to teach
early on a few very common words whose spelling and pronunciation are not
transparent (for example: the, he, she, what, are).
3 It is possible, of course, to teach both name and sound of the letters – ‘This
letter is called ‘aitch’ and is pronounced /h/’ – if the class can cope. This would
be appropriate for older beginners, but with younger ones, it is arguably more
helpful to teach them first how to pronounce the letter as it is read in a word,
and leave the names until later. Letter names are used only if you need to spell
out a word or pronounce initials (UN, for example), and are not very useful for
fluent reading at the early stages. Note that even students who already know
the Latin alphabet are going to have to learn new letter names, as well as
some corresponding sounds.
4 It is more useful to start with the most common letters, as suggested under 1
above, than to stick to the order of the alphabet. Some letters that happen
to occur earlier in the alphabet (b, c, for example) are relatively rare and less
useful for beginner readers.
5 My own preference is to teach the upper- and lower-case forms of the letters
together. This slows down the process a little, but means that the letters the
students do know can immediately be recognized in authentic texts outside
the classroom (even in countries where the local writing system is different,
English names regularly appear on signs in public spaces). Another reason is
that proper nouns, which regularly begin with upper-case letters, are very useful
for reading practice with classes of beginners who do not yet have a very wide
vocabulary: names of people, commercial products or places provide a lot of
extra words that the students can read and recognize.
6 Conventionally, the order of the alphabet is taught very early, particularly in
younger classes who learn to sing the ‘alphabet song’. However, there is not
much justification for this. Knowing the names of letters is only marginally useful,
as mentioned above, and the order is only needed when students start looking
up words in print dictionaries or other reference books. This is likely to happen at
a much later stage – and anyway we mostly look things up online these days,
with no need for a knowledge of alphabetical order. I am not suggesting that
you don’t teach the order of the alphabet at all, only that it is not essential at
the early stages of learning to read.

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Learners whose mother tongue also uses the Latin alphabet – Spanish or German
speakers, for example – need only to be taught those letters whose pronunciation is very
different from their pronunciation in the L1: j for Spanish speakers, for example, or w for
German speakers. And again, it makes sense to do a lot of preliminary work listening to
and producing oral English before you start requiring reading or writing; it will then be
relatively easy to draw students’ attention to such letters and their pronunciation, as well
as to the common digraphs.

10.4 Beginning reading 3: reading tasks

In order for students to start developing reading fluency, they need a lot of practice at the
early stages in reading and understanding very short, simple texts, at word and sentence
level. Your course materials will supply a number of these. If, however, you feel there are
not enough, or that they are not very varied or interesting, you may want to supplement
them with your own tasks, presented as online assignments, or in class using worksheets
or work cards (see 3 Classroom interaction).
Below is a variety of tasks for beginning reading, ordered from the easiest to the most
difficult. I have given only sample items for each, which can be expanded into longer
exercises. Note that at this level, instructions may be provided in the L1.

Letters in words
These exercises focus on single letters, but students have to identify the letters in words
which they already know in their spoken form. These exercises are particularly useful
for classes which are learning a new writing system. They can easily be designed to
use only a limited set of letters, and so can be used even before the class has learnt the
entire alphabet.

Task 1

Which letter begins which word? Match the letters to the pictures.

h E D H C e d p T t c P

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Task 2

Under each picture is a set of letters. Cross out the letters that you can’t hear when
you say the word.

D, F, G, T, E, P o, s, t, f, r, l s, b, m, n, i, d P, F, B, N, M, A, E

Single words 1: cognates

Here, students are asked to identify words that are likely to be the same, or roughly similar,
in their own language. The purpose is simply to provide a wider range of vocabulary for
them to practise reading.

Task 3

Can you translate these words into your own language?

pasta television dragon video

Task 4

Write out the names of the countries in your own language. (And perhaps find them
on a map.)
England  Brazil  Canada  Japan  India  Poland

Task 5

Are these names for boys or girls?

Maria  Peter  David  Sarah  Anna

Single words 2: English words

Students identify the words and do something with them to demonstrate comprehension.

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Task 6

Copy these words in the order of size of the object, the biggest first.
a bag   a tree   a mouse

Task 7

Which words go together? Draw a line between words that are connected.
table woman up hand

man chair foot down

Task 8

Circle the words that are the names of animals.

head  dog  table  pencil  cow  horse

Task 9

Which is the odd one out?

run  walk  sit  jump

Phrases and short sentences

Here, students need to understand whole sense-units and demonstrate understanding: the
last stage before beginning full texts.

Task 10

Draw the following items:

a red bottle a blue clock a white door a black cat

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Task 11

Copy out only the sentences that are relevant to the picture.

1. There is a table here. 4. They are not eating.

2. They are under the tree. 5. They are drinking.
3. They are not happy.

Task 12

Write what this is (in your language if you don’t know the word in English):
It is in Australia. It is big. It can jump.

10.5 Fluent reading

Once the students have mastered basic reading comprehension of words, phrases and
sentences, we need to help them deal with longer and more advanced reading texts and
tasks. Note that the focus here is not on reading texts intensively for the sake of the
language learning (dealt with in 5 Texts), but on the improvement of the skill of reading
in English in itself. The aim is for the students to become fluent readers in the same way
that we want them to be fluent listeners and speakers: to access the meaning of a written
text successfully and rapidly. A large sight vocabulary (lexical items the student identifies
and understands at a glance) is the first requirement for this (see 6 Teaching vocabulary).
But in order to foster fluent reading, we also need to make sure that students have plenty
of successful reading experience through encounter with a wide range of texts read for a
variety of purposes.
Today, much of students’ reading is done online. This does not mean, however, that
reading from paper is necessarily on the decline; it appears to be a matter of personal
preference whether you prefer to read from a screen or from paper.

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Pause for thought

Given the choice, which do you prefer – screen or paper – when reading
professional or informational texts? When reading for pleasure (e.g., novels)?

Comment
I myself prefer reading from a screen, whether it is research articles I’m studying
while writing this book, or light novels I read from my Kindle. But I have the feeling
I’m in the minority: most people I’ve asked say that given the choice, they use the
screen for brief reading activity (texting, for example, or checking the news on
the internet), but prefer paper if the reading text is a book or a long article. And
there is some evidence that reading from paper is associated with better reading
performance (Clinton, 2019). For reading skills specific to online reading, see
18 Digital technology and online teaching. In any case, the skills needed to be
a fluent reader, whether from a screen or from a printed page, are very similar.

Characteristics of fluent readers

1 Speed. Fluent readers read fairly fast, focusing on groups of words that make
meaningful units, rather than word by word.
2 Selective attention. Fluent readers concentrate on the significant bits and skim the
rest. They may even skip parts they know to be less significant.
3 Unknown vocabulary. Fluent readers are not worried by unknown vocabulary. They
guess its meaning from context, or ignore it and make do with the general meaning of
the surrounding text. They use a dictionary only when these strategies don’t work.
4 Prediction. Fluent readers think ahead, hypothesize and predict.
5 Motivation. Fluent readers are likely to be interested in what they are reading, to
enjoy it, and to be motivated to read more.
6 Purpose. Fluent readers are reading for a purpose. This may be just pleasure or
entertainment, as when they read a good poem or novel. Or it may be to find out or
confirm something.

Implications for teaching

If we are trying to help our students read fluently, we can get them to read books (often
simplified readers) in what is called extensive reading, discussed in the final section of this
chapter. Here, I would like to look at the reading of shorter texts provided in coursebooks.
5 Texts dealt with how such texts can be exploited for comprehension and language-
learning in general; here, the focus is on their use to foster the development of fluent
reading skills.

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Some guidelines as to the selection and use of such texts are the following.
Keep the language accessible. The texts chosen for reading should be of a level that is
easily comprehensible to the students. As noted earlier, a knowledge of between 95 percent
and 98 percent of the words is necessary for fluent reading and understanding of a text.
If students cannot understand vital information without looking up words, then work
on the text may improve their vocabulary knowledge (as discussed in 5 Texts), but it will
be less useful for improving their reading skills as such. If you’re using a text that has a
lot of unknown vocabulary, then pre-teach essential items, or use glosses or your own
explanations to help students understand.
Ensure the topic is familiar. The content of the text should be based on information or
world knowledge that the students already know something about. If they don’t know
much about it, then you can use various pre-reading strategies to prepare them: elicit what
they already know, and then add further input yourself; provide an easy introductory text
which provides the information; or send students to the internet to find it out themselves.
Choose interesting texts. Texts should be selected with reader interest in mind:
topics that are likely to be at least partially familiar to students, but with enough extra
information to invite curiosity and increase knowledge; or good stories. The task is even
more important: a boring text can be made interesting through a stimulating task, but a
boring task can kill a potentially interesting text (see 4 Tasks).
Encourage skimming. Skimming is looking very quickly through a text in order to gather
the main gist or message, without actually reading everything in it. It is a very useful skill
to cultivate on first encounter with a short text (paragraph or article) – particularly if you
are not sure if you want to read it more thoroughly or not. For students, a brief skim is
likely to provide them with information that will help them understand when they come
to read in detail.
(Usually) provide a preset task. When reading a story or a very interesting or
entertaining text (see Section 6), no actual task may be necessary: students will be
motivated to read anyway, and a task may actually spoil their enjoyment. But in most
cases, you will need to provide a task, given in advance, so that the student has a purpose
in reading. Some examples of this are: to find out a specific piece of information; to
summarize the main points; to respond to the writer’s point of view.
Stimulate expectations. Give the students some idea in advance of what the text is going
to talk about, its genre or, where appropriate, context. All this may well be provided
through the task; if not, then perhaps discuss the title, or say something about the issue
under discussion, or something about the plot or characters of the story (without giving
away how it ends!).
Encourage selective reading and scanning. Paying more attention to key information
and less to redundancies or repetition is a reading strategy which fluent readers apply
intuitively. You can help students by providing scanning tasks: ask them to find out a
specific item of information in the text and to raise their hands when they have done

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so. In order to do this, they will need to search for content which is relevant to their
task, and identify and ignore those parts of the text which are not. It is also helpful to
do some explicit strategy instruction here, by making students aware that it is not only
legitimate but actually desirable to ignore redundant or repetitive items or chunks of text
while reading.
Tell students not to worry too much about words they don’t know. Pausing reading
in order to look up the meaning of a new word in a dictionary is a useful strategy for
vocabulary expansion, but it can be counterproductive if the aim is reading fluency. Of
course, students should know how to use the dictionary, but they should also be aware
when it is necessary and when a quick guess based on context (inferencing) is preferable,
even when the guess results in only an approximation of the meaning. Constant use of
the dictionary leads to slower, less fluent reading, as well as frequent misunderstanding
when students choose the wrong definition. Finally, tell students that it is legitimate to
ignore a new word completely if the general meaning is clear and the unknown word
not necessary for comprehension. Skipping redundant words in this way means missing
an opportunity to learn a new item, but if our main priority is fluent reading, then it is a
useful strategy to encourage.
Encourage prediction. This is, again, something which fluent readers do naturally. At
the conscious level, just to tell students, ‘Remember to predict as you read,’ is not very
helpful. But there are tasks which specifically encourage prediction, such as, ‘Read up to
the end of the first paragraph of the story: what do you think will happen next?’ or ‘Read
to the end of the page. What do you think the next word/few words is/are likely to be?’
Encourage re-reading. When you’ve finished doing any comprehension tasks you
want to use, give the students an opportunity to re-read the passage on their own. By
this time, they will be familiar with it, and are likely to be able to read it more fluently.
Similarly, later in the course you can ask them to go back and re-read any earlier texts they
have studied.

Pause for thought

Look at the coursebook page with a reading text and tasks shown on the next
page, designed for A2 learners. How well will this section encourage fluent
reading? What might you add, take out or change?

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 10 | Teaching reading

12 READING
A Skim the article. Match paragraphs A, B, and C to the photos.

ADVENTURE VACATIONS
Home About Vacations Hot spots Discounts

A good vacation, for many people, means comfortable 1

accommodations, a great atmosphere, and tasty food. It’s a
pleasant, relaxing experience. But for some, this type of vacation
just isn’t enough!
In today’s world, many of us have safe, sometimes boring lives.
We work, sleep, eat, and watch TV. So more and more people are
looking for adventure. They want excitement and danger. They
might even want to feel a little afraid!
A How about staying on a desert island in the middle of the Indian
Ocean? If you want, you can spend your whole vacation completely alone. 2
You’ll sleep in a tent and go fishing for your food. Your only company will
be the monkeys and lizards. But don’t worry. If you get bored, just call the
travel company and they’ll send a boat to pick you up!
B Or how about spending a week in the sub-zero temperatures of
the North? You will fly to the Arctic, and the local Sami people will teach
you to survive in this very difficult environment. You’ll learn how to keep
yourself warm and make special snowshoes. You can also go ice-fishing
and look after reindeer. You’ll even learn how to tell when it is going
3
to snow.
C But if the Arctic’s too cold, you could try the heat of the jungle
instead. Deep in the Amazon rain forest, you’ll sleep in the open air. At
first, you’ll spend a week with local guides. They will train you to do many
things, like find food and water or light fires with stones. They will even
teach you to pick the tastiest insects for dinner! Then you’ll spend a week
by yourself with no tent, no extra clothes, and no cell phone. You’ll be
completely alone – except for the crocodiles and snakes, of course!

B Read the article. Then complete the summary using words from the article.
Nowadays, life can sometimes be a little boring. So, many people are searching for an exciting or
dangerous 1) during their vacations. Some people like the idea of visiting a desert
island. There, they spend nights in a 2) and look for fruit and other plants to eat. If
they decide to go to the Arctic instead, they will walk around with unusual 3) on their
feet, and they’ll have the experience of taking care of 4) . If they decide to choose a
trip to the rain forest, they’ll learn many things from 5) , and afterward, they’ll live for
a whole 6) completely alone.

C Read the comments of people who are on one of these three trips.
Which vacation are they on? Write the letter.
1. “I know what the weather will be like tomorrow.”
2. “I haven’t seen anybody since the moment I arrived.”
3. “My whole body is absolutely freezing!”
4. “I’ve learned so much these first seven days.”
5. “I’ve had enough now! I’m going to call for help.”
6. “I haven’t eaten anything like this before!”

D GROUP WORK Which of these three vacations would you be

prepared to try? Which would you refuse to go on? Why?
Hit the road! 35

(from Interchange Level 2 Student’s Book 5 Edition by Richards, J. C. with Hull, J.

th

and Proctor, S., 2021)

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Comment
It’s an interesting text, and a lot of teenage and young adult students would
relate to it. The first task is not really stimulating pre-reading expectations, as it
requires learners to go straight into reading the text; and not really skimming
either, as it only requires reading the first sentence of each paragraph. So I would
add a preliminary activity that stimulates expectations as to the content of the
text: perhaps discuss the title, or ask students what kinds of vacations they have
experienced or heard about that involved challenging rather than relaxing
activities. Then I’d invite the students to read, and find out which, if any, of the
kinds of vacations they mentioned come up in the text. If I think they might find
the reading difficult on their own, I’d accompany their silent reading with my own
simultaneous reading aloud (see Amer, 1997), or use the recording provided by
the textbook, explaining difficult words as needed. Tasks B and C both require
re-reading of the text and scanning for specific information. I’d end by inviting
students just to read the text again as fast as they (comfortably) can.

Reading strategies
More systematic models of strategies to be used when using a reading text are KWL and
SQ3R (more can be found in Grabe (2009), pp. 231–2).
1 KWL stands for ‘Know – Want to know – Learnt’. The reader looks at the title or topic
of an informative text, notes what they already know and what they want or expect to
learn further from reading the text. After reading, they note what new information has
been learnt.
2 SQ3R stands for ‘Survey, Question, Read, Recall, Review’. Survey means skimming
through the title, main headings, illustrations, and maybe taking a quick glance at
the main points of the text. The Survey is followed by, or accompanied by Question:
what questions occur to the reader about the text or its topic or writer? Then there is
Read: the reader goes through the text more thoroughly, while bearing in mind the
questions asked previously. Recall means checking that the reader can remember the
main points made. Finally, at the Review stage, the reader re-reads and reviews the
content of the text.

10.6 Extensive reading

Extensive reading is the silent reading by individual students of long, interesting texts
(such as novels) that are in language that is simple enough to be easily understood. It is
sometimes known as reading for pleasure or sustained silent reading (SSR). It necessitates a
class or school library from which students can borrow books to read at their own speed
and exchange as needed; or, if they have digital devices, online books of an appropriate
level which they can access. The main benefit from extensive reading is an increase in
reading fluency and confidence, though it may also incidentally lead to the learning of
new language items.

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An extensive reading programme has the following features (Day and Bamford, 1998):
1 Students have access to a large variety of reading material to choose from.
2 Each student chooses their own reading material. The teacher may advise, but does
not choose for them.
3 Students can stop reading material that they find boring or too difficult and swap it for
something else.
4 The purpose of reading is enjoyment and interest, not a task from the teacher or
textbook. In principle, the reading is its own reward, just as when we read a novel in
our L1.
5 The role of the teacher is to encourage students to read and swap books, to help them
choose, and to be a role model as a reader.

Problems
Given their potential benefits, extensive reading programmes are implemented far less
than you might expect, mainly because of the practical problems involved.
Time. Teachers are worried about getting through the coursebook or preparing for an
exam and are unwilling to devote parts of classroom sessions to extensive reading. They
see it as a possible waste of valuable class time which could be spent on more intensive
language learning.
Money. Many institutions do not have the necessary financial resources to set up and –
just as important – to maintain and keep adding to a library. One solution is for students
to read stories online, assuming that there is one computer or other digital reading device
available for each student. Books, however, it seems remain to this day many people’s
preferred medium for reading. As Baron (2017) remarks: ‘If cost is removed from the
equation, digital millennials commonly prefer print.’
Monitoring. It is sometimes difficult to know whether students are actually reading their
books, and you may need to check. Many teachers insist on a book report for each book.
This provides the necessary feedback, but, of course, spoils the pleasure and motivation
associated with extensive reading and takes time away from the reading itself. There are
other, easier options, such as oral presentations recommending the book, drawings to
illustrate it, or posters to advertise it. But again, this leaves less time for reading. It’s a
tricky dilemma: personally, I prefer not to have follow-up assignments and to rely on my
own perceptions of students’ body language in the classroom to check that they are in fact
reading and understanding; but many of my colleagues do not agree.

Practical tips
1 Set aside a regular scheduled time for extensive reading: at the beginning of lessons,
or half a lesson a week. Don’t leave it just for homework: devoting lesson time to
extensive reading conveys a message about its importance and provides opportunities
for exchanging books.

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 10 | Teaching reading

2 Read yourself. If you can, use the extensive reading lesson to get on with whatever
book you are reading; example is a powerful instructor.
3 Bring books to the class. If your library is not in the classroom, bring a box of books at
the appropriate level to the classroom for students to exchange. Sending them to the
library in class time is time-wasting and does not allow you to help them choose.
4 Have reserve reading materials ready. Students sometimes forget to bring their
books. Have some short stories or booklets at an appropriate level ready to give these
students. Alternatively, if computers are available, prepare website addresses where
they can read interesting material at an appropriate level.

Review: Check yourself

1 What is the difference between decoding and reading?

2 Why do we not necessarily have to pay attention to all the words in a text?
3 What is phonemic awareness? Can you recall at least two activities that
support it?
4 Which is more important to teach: the names of the letters or their sounds?
Why?
5 Can you suggest at least three ideas for simple reading activities based on the
comprehension of single words or phrases?
6 Can you recall at least six features which are likely to facilitate students’
fluent reading?
7 Can you list at least three of the main principles to bear in mind when
encouraging students to engage in extensive reading?
8 What are the advantages and disadvantages of requiring a book report
after reading?

Further reading
Day, R. and Bamford, J. (2004). Extensive Reading Activities for Teaching Language.
Cambridge University Press.
(A collection of practical procedures and classroom activities to support and enrich
extensive reading)
Nuttall, C. (2005). Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (3rd Edition). Macmillan.
(A classic book on teaching reading, now in its third edition, covering a wide range
of reading-related issues)
Watkins, P. (2017). Teaching and Developing Reading Skills. Cambridge University Press.
(An excellent resource with both background guidelines and a wealth of practical
ideas for reading activities)

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 10 | Teaching reading

References
Affan, M. and Uddin, R. (2021). Brain emotional learning and adaptive model predictive
controller for induction motor drive: A new cascaded vector control topology. International
Journal of Control, Automation and Systems, 19(9), 3122–3135.
Amer, A. A. (1997). The effect of the teacher’s reading aloud on the reading
comprehension of EFL students. ELT Journal, 51(4), 43–47.
Baron, N. S. (2017). Reading in a digital age. Phi Delta Kappan, 99(2), 15–20.
https://kappanonline.org/reading-digital-age
Clinton, V. (2019). Reading from paper compared to screens: A systematic review and
meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Reading, 42(2), 288–325.
Day, R. and Bamford, J. (1998). Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom.
Cambridge University Press.
Grabe, W. (2009). Reading in a Second Language. Cambridge University Press.
Richards, J. C., Hull, J. and Proctor, S. (2021). Interchange Level 2 Student’s Book 5th Edition.
Cambridge University Press.

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 11 Teaching writing

Overview

11.1 What is writing? Characteristics of writing, as compared with speaking,

reading and listening; conventional formal writing contrasted with informal
writing through texting.
11.2 Beginning writing: the letters. Some practical guidelines and tasks for
teaching beginners (mainly for students who are not familiar with the Latin
alphabet).
11.3 Tasks that promote fluent writing. Some intermediate and advanced writing
tasks, with critical discussion.
11.4 Process writing. Enabling improvement through rewriting in response to
feedback.
11.5 Spelling and punctuation. Guidance on the teaching of spelling and
punctuation, with some ideas for tasks.

11.1 What is writing?

The teaching of writing has assumed much greater importance in recent years, since the
use of the internet requires written input for search engines and works of reference, as
well as rapid online written communication through text messaging, blogs and other
social media.

Some characteristics of writing

Writing is fundamentally different from the other four skills. Most obviously it is
associated with sight and (usually) movement, as contrasted with the auditory and oral
characteristics of listening and speaking; and it is productive, as contrasted with the
receptive skills of listening and reading. Other, less immediately obvious, characteristics
are the following:
• It is permanent. A text, once written, normally remains there, on paper or on the
screen, to be easily re-read or rewritten, either very soon after it was written or later.
Speech, on the other hand, is normally fleeting, with no possibility of changing
and editing.
• It is dense. The content of a written passage is presented relatively densely, with little
redundancy (pauses, repetition, fillers, paraphrases), as is typical of informal speech.
• It takes time. Writing takes longer than speaking, reading or listening, and also
requires more deliberate effort.

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• It is asynchronous, or time-independent. We usually read text some time after it has

been written. Even with synchronous chat, there is a time-lapse between production and
reception. Spoken discourse is, in most cases, produced and received simultaneously.
• The person or people being addressed are not physically present. The target
audience for a written text – whether a single addressee, closed group or the public at
large – is rarely physically present, whereas spoken interaction is mostly face-to-face.
• It is a learnt form. Most people acquire the spoken language (at least of their own
first language) intuitively, and may even learn to read on their own; whereas writing is
normally taught and learned in school.
• It uses more standard forms. English speech typically varies widely, in accent, lexis
and grammar, according to the cultural or linguistic background of the speaker; writing,
in contrast, is more uniform and tends to observe more carefully the conventional
grammatical rules of international English (see 1 Teaching English today).
In spite of the increase in informal writing (see below), most writing is formal. Stories, reports,
most webpages (wiki entries, for example), newspaper articles, fiction, the book you are
reading at this moment … all these are formal texts. In the past, informal writing was only
used for quick notes or reminders; but these days it is used much more: mainly in online
texting. For example:
A: hi
B: hi
A: how’s things?
B: I’m good
A: were RU?
A: Where
B: train
A: ETA?
B: Dunno, 12?
A: Wow, late
(pause)
A: Want me to meet you?
B: No, CU 2morow
A:

Pause for thought

What are the features of informal writing that appear in texting and that are
different from formal writing? What about ones that are the same? You can use
examples that appear in the text above, or others you know about. Then compare
your list to the table on the next page.

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 11 | Teaching writing

Comment
The differences derive mainly from the different context of communication. In formal
text composition, the writer is detached from the (usually personally unknown)
reader in time and space, and can write carefully and redraft if necessary. In
texting, the writer is communicating with the reader in real time, and wants to get
the message down quickly; it is not so important to use precise language.

Differences

Formal writing Informal writing (texting)

Usually long (paragraph or more) Usually short (words, short phrases or sentences)
Typically drafted and redrafted, corrected Not redrafted, not normally corrected
Precise language Vague language
Full grammatical sentences Not usually full grammatical sentences;
frequent ellipsis (missing words that are taken
for granted)
Correct language Frequent slips
Words written fully Shortened words, or use of emojis or symbols

Similarities
But note that there are also some similarities. More than 75 percent of the words in
texting are spelt the same way they are in a regular dictionary (see Lyddy et al., 2014), and
most of the punctuation is as it would be in a formal text, even if the sense would have
been clear without it (upper-case letters, full stops and commas, for example).
Although there are, of course, a lot of written texts which use an intermediate style, midway
between formal and texting (many emails and blogs, for example), most writing is arguably
formal. It is important to make learners aware of the difference in principle between formal
and informal writing, and in what contexts and circumstances the different styles may
be more, or less, appropriate. Most writing that students will need to do in their future
professions is likely to be formal. If they know how to create formal written texts, they will not
have much difficulty learning how to write informally – but the converse is not necessarily
true. So in classrooms, it is probably best to focus mainly on teaching formal writing.

11.2 Beginning writing: the letters

Note. This section relates to the teaching of monolingual classes whose L1 uses a non-Latin
alphabet or another writing system. Such classes are very often composed of young learners.
Some basic aspects of the teaching of writing to beginners who don’t yet know the
alphabet apply equally to the teaching of reading, and have already been dealt with

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in 10 Teaching reading. For example, there is the importance of knowing simple

conversational English and a basic vocabulary of the most frequent words before
beginning to learn the letters. As with reading, it is recommended to teach the most
common and useful letters before the less common and useful ones, and to present the
lower- and upper-case forms at the same time.
But there are other skills students need to master that are specific to handwriting and,
later, typing. Here are some of them, with practical teaching implications.

Letter-writing skills
Direction. Other writing systems may go in a different direction from English: from right
to left, for example, instead of from left to right (Arabic, Hebrew) or vertically (Chinese).
This involves not only getting used to moving one’s hand in a different direction along
the line, but also often learning to form the letters in a different direction. For example,
speakers of Arabic or Hebrew are used to drawing circular letters in a clockwise direction
and will now have to learn to form them anti-clockwise. If they are not deliberately taught
otherwise, they will continue to write these letters clockwise, which will slow down the
flow of handwriting and make it difficult to join up letters, should they wish to do so later
(see Cursive writing on the next page).
Practical implications. You need to provide students with models of correct-direction
writing: by modelling the letter writing on the board, and perhaps also by providing the
alphabet written out with little arrows showing in what direction it should be written.

It can help as a preliminary exercise to get the students to write rows of waves or loops,
running from left to right, as below. Then they need to practise writing out rows of similar
letters, and later combinations of different ones in words, while the teacher makes sure
they are forming them correctly.

Height, depth and level. One thing that students learning the Latin alphabet often find
tricky is getting the height and depth of letters right: making sure that letters like d, l, b
in fact have ‘arms’ that are of a similar height to capital letters, and that letters like p, y, g

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have ‘tails’ that are sufficiently long beneath the line. Some students also have problems
with maintaining level horizontal writing. In both cases, they need the guidance of ruled
lines at the early stages of writing.
Practical implications. Early writing should be done within horizontal lines, which limit
the height of letters and make sure they are level. These have two parallel lines in the
middle which limit the height of the smaller letters such as c, m, o, and two added lines
above and below to show how far the taller and deeper letters should reach.

Cursive writing. Should we teach learners to write cursive (joined-up) script? If their
L1 uses the Latin alphabet, then this will depend how they have already been taught to
write it. If, however, the Latin alphabet is a new writing system for them, you will need
to decide whether or not to teach cursive. Sometimes the decision will be taken for you:
there may be a clear general policy in your school, and perhaps in the country in general.
Practical implications. The overriding criterion here has to be comprehensibility; and
letters written separately are more likely to be legible than joined-up letters. A possible
compromise I used in my own primary classes was to insist that everyone used non-
cursive for the first year. In the second year, I taught them cursive, and anyone who
wished was told that they could continue to use it, provided it was clearly legible. Most
of my students in fact reverted to the non-cursive form and later, as adults, used a
combination, joining up some letters and not others.
Typing. For the foreseeable future, it will still be necessary for students to know how to
handwrite in English: for personal greetings, paper form-filling, quick notes, shopping
lists, etc. And there is some evidence that handwriting actually supports language learning
better than typing (Mangen et al., 2015). But it is becoming more and more important for
them to learn to type as well, as most writing today is done on a computer.
Practical implications. You should give students plenty of opportunities to use the keyboard,
as well as a pencil or pen and to do writing exercises, in order to increase their typing speed.
It is also useful to teach them how to use word processing tools to format their compositions:
different fonts, sizes and spacings, different colours and positions. Basic writing exercises
can be made more motivating by allowing students to use these tools to improve the
presentation of a text.
Speed and legibility. When teaching writing, the two main aims are to enable students to
write reasonably fast, and to write legibly. However, there’s a payoff: if you write very fast,

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your writing may be difficult to understand (true of typing as well as handwriting!). If you
write very carefully, so as to be legible, you may sacrifice speed.
Practical implications. Having taught the letters, you need to give students plenty of
practice in using them to write words and sentences so that they get to do so faster, but
not at the cost of legibility. See Beginner writing tasks below for some ideas. Later,
any grammar or vocabulary written exercises will obviously give practice in speed and
accuracy of handwriting or typing as a useful added benefit.

Beginner writing tasks

Apart from the first two ideas, which clearly relate to handwriting, all the following task-
types can be done either on paper or on the computer.
Copying. Copying is a useful way for students to practise letter formation. It can be done by
tracing (using tracing paper or following dotted lines) or copying lines of letters or words.
Colour copying. Since early letter-writing practice can be boring, invite students to use
different-coloured pens, or decorate their exercises with coloured frames or underlining.
Meaningful copying. Another way of making early writing practice interesting is to ask
students to copy according to particular criteria: to copy, for example, only words that
are names of animals (or any other lexical set you choose); or in a different order; or into
different categories; or in order to label pictures.
Transliteration. Students transliterate single letters, where possible, or words (cognates or
names of people or places are particularly useful) from their L1.
Dictation. Students write down single letters or simple words from dictation.
Completion. Students fill in the missing letter(s) from a known word, perhaps illustrated
by a picture.
Labelling. Students label pictures with simple phonetically spelt words.

11.3 Tasks that promote fluent writing

Most learner writing in an English course is not done primarily in order to develop writing
skills, but because writing is a convenient means of practising other features of language.
For example, students write down new vocabulary, copy out grammar rules, write out
answers to comprehension questions, or do written tests. Fluent writing tasks, in contrast,
aim to improve students’ ability to compose written text for communicative purposes.
Aspects of accuracy (grammar, vocabulary, spelling) are, of course, important in formal
writing, but the main focus is on meaningful writing, following the conventions of a
particular genre.
Some criteria for the planning or selection of fluent writing tasks are:
Interest. The task should require expression of interesting content: facts, opinions, ideas, stories.
Level. The language required should be at the students’ level or slightly below it.
Relevance. The topic of the task should be one that the students can easily relate to.

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Authenticity. At least some of the tasks should be similar to the kinds of things students
may need to write themselves, now or in the future.
Simplicity. The task should be easy to explain. Often the provision of a model text can
help to clarify.
Below are some categories of writing tasks, with examples. There is, of course, some
overlap in the kinds of content required; but in general, it is usually possible to identify
the main focus of a task as one of the following.
1 Responding to text
• Extended answers to questions about a text
• A summary of the content of a text
• Discussion of the content of a text
Responding to text means not just showing that the learner has understood a text,
but writing longer responses showing comprehension or personal critical response. It
is probably the easiest task to set up, but is relatively limited: it engages the students’
initiative and creativity less than the other tasks listed here.
2 Creative writing
• A story based on some kind of given stimulus: for example, a title, a picture or series
of pictures, or a first or last sentence; or a personal anecdote
• A poem based on a given stimulus: for example, a topic, a particular structure, first
or last lines
Some students respond well to tasks that demand creativity: others really don’t like them!
Poems are surprisingly easy and pleasurable to write if based on an appropriate stimulus: see
some excellent practical ideas in Writing Simple Poems (Holmes and Moulton, 2001). The results
of creative writing tasks are often enjoyable for other students to read: post them on the class
website, or on a noticeboard in the classroom, or ask the author to read them out to the class.
3 Instructions
• An instruction sheet for something you know how to do (for example, prepare
some kind of food)
• Directions for how to get somewhere
• Advice for someone entering the school you teach or study at; or for someone
entering a workplace you are familiar with
These tasks may be interesting for students if they relate to processes or places they know
a lot about. They may require some preliminary teaching or review of vocabulary; and you
may wish to give some advice on the layout of instructions: numbered steps, for example,
or illustrations where necessary. They are particularly useful for classes in English for
Specific Purposes, such as engineering or nursing.

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4 Interpersonal communication
• An application for a job, by email
• A letter of complaint
• A reply to a given letter
• A comment on a blog: either one that already exists, or one set up for the class
• A posting on social media, updating your friends on your news
Assignments like a letter or an email applying for a job or a letter of complaint are
probably most suitable for adults or older teenagers. Students also need to be aware that
such texts would demand far more formal English than the blog comment or informal
email. The blog task is often highly motivating, and can continue later, with other
students adding further comments.
5 Description
• A description of a view, a place or a person
• A description of a situation
• A description of a process, such as a scientific experiment, the life cycle of an
animal, a sequence of developments as represented by a flowchart
• A comparison of two subjects: people, places, etc.
Some descriptions can be done at a fairly basic level of proficiency. To make it even easier,
you might ask for phrases or single words, rather than full sentences in a coherent paragraph.
For the personal description, it is helpful to provide in advance some topics that the writer
might relate to: appearance; occupation; personality; interests; life story. Apart from the
flowchart, descriptions of processes can often be laid out in other ways, such as tables,
graphs, or infographics.
6 Opinion and persuasion
• A review: critical evaluation not only of books, films and other creative works,
but also of any kind of product, course, or service, as in websites like Tripadvisor,
or Which
• An argument for or against something
• A recommendation for a suggested development or advertisement for a product
• Advice on a problem or tips for any kind of activity
Most of these tasks are suitable for rather more advanced classes, as they demand fairly
careful planning of content and organization. The advertisement may be easier and can be
decorated with coloured fonts and designs, and illustrated by pictures. A development of
the advertisement is the leaflet promoting a place or course or holiday, which can be done
collaboratively in a team, each student contributing a section.

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7 Information
• A newspaper report on an item of news, genuine or imaginary
• A short article providing information on a particular topic or issue. It could be
based on internet research, and could include tables, diagrams or infographics.
The newspaper report can be based on a model: an authentic news report which has been
read in class. The short paper is a first step on the way to academic writing, though it may
be done at intermediate level. It can be highly motivating if the students are researching
something that interests them personally. Note that you may need to do some preliminary
instruction, not only on the need for formal language, but also on the need for structure:
introduction, headed sections, conclusion. An alternative is to require such assignments
to be formatted as presentations with slides. In this case, there is less actual writing, but
students will need to be careful with the choice of headings and notes to be shown on the
slides, and with the formatting: size of font, line spacing, use of punctuation and so on.

Pause for thought

Have a look at an ELT textbook you are familiar with that targets general English
– not academic English or a particular profession or subject area (ESP) – at an
intermediate or advanced level (B1 upwards), and check out how many of the
components explicitly labelled as writing tasks belong to the different categories
above. On the whole, do you feel its writing tasks cover a fair range of types? Are
there any missing that you feel you would like to add?

Comment
There is, of course, as noted earlier, some overlap: any interpersonal communication
is likely to include some of the other elements; and opinion and persuasion
obviously include information. But in general, what I found in my survey of six
textbooks was that the overwhelming majority of writing tasks were based on either
opinion and argument or information, with some descriptions. There were a few
which were based on responding to a text and some interpersonal ones: emails or
blog responses. I found no instructions, and no creative writing; though there was
one task requiring students to write a story about a personal experience. I would try
to add more creative writing, particularly narrative, and tasks based on instructions.

Students’ use of GPT

The question arises today: for any of the assignments listed above – won’t a student just
give a prompt to GPT and let the AI tool do the writing for them? This is certainly an
option which previous generations of teachers did not need to worry about. You can
probably tell, in most cases, whether a written assignment was in fact written by your
student; but not always. If the assignment is done out of class, then there is no alternative
to relying on the students’ integrity and willingness to abide by the rules.

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Some added possibilities using, rather than prohibiting, GPT are:

1 Tell the students to get GPT to write the essay: then tell them they have to insert
ten changes, which in their opinion improves the GPT version, and submit both the
original and their improved version.
2 Tell the students to write the essay themselves and then get GPT to correct it, noting
the changes.
3 Tell the students to write the essay themselves and then get GPT to improve it, noting
the changes.
4 Tell the students to write the end of the essay themselves and get GPT to write the
beginning; or vice versa.
Again, these will depend for their success on students playing by the rules!
If all else fails, you can require students to do writing in class, where you can monitor the
process.

Writing in class
Writing in class is a rather negative experience for those students who like to write
quietly and privately in their own space; but others like the feeling of support and
companionship. In-class writing can use the following procedures:
• Collaborative planning. Students plan their texts in pairs or small groups in class,
before retiring to their desks to do the actual writing alone. They later come together to
compare results.
• Five-minute writing. Students have exactly five minutes – no more, no less – to write
something in class. The time limitation usually increases concentration and is a useful
quick way of providing extra writing experience.
• Multiple contributions. Students write a sentence on the top of a sheet of paper: for
example, the beginning of a story starting ‘Once upon a time’. They then pass the
paper to their neighbour, who adds another sentence, continuing the story. And so
on, until there are between five and fifteen contributions. An alternative is a poem on
a given topic: each student adds another line. Note that the paper remains open, not
folded, so that every new writer can see all the previous contributions. The results are
then read out to the class.

11.4 Process writing

When they have mastered the basics, students need to progress and improve their writing.
This can be helped to some extent by focused instruction on spelling and punctuation
(see Section 5 on page 159); however, this is no substitute for actual writing experience.
Such experience is probably best when based on the process-writing cycle: students write a
first draft, get feedback, and rewrite. Sometimes this cycle can be repeated several times.

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First draft
Support. Having given the assignment, you need to provide support in order to ensure
that students write their first draft as well as possible. This support can include
• providing key vocabulary that you think students might need or that they ask for;
• providing a model text similar to the one required by the task;
• some discussion of possible content;
• guidance on the organization of texts of the relevant genre;
• allowing the beginning of the writing in class so that students have the opportunity to
consult you as they write. They can then continue at home.
No assessment. Students need to be aware that the first draft is not graded, nor are any other
preliminary drafts if the process-writing cycle is repeated more than once. The assessment
is given only on the final draft. Not giving a grade for preliminary drafts has two important
results. First, it lowers stress: students feel freer to experiment and to use language they are
not quite sure of but want to try out: they know that they will not be penalized if they get it
wrong. Second, they are motivated to implement feedback and improve in order to achieve a
better final grade.

Feedback

Pause for thought

What are your own feelings when getting feedback on your writing? For example,
from a teacher if you are in a language class? Or from an editor who is editing
something you wrote? Or from a reviewer if you have submitted an article to
a journal?

Comment
I think inevitably the writer in such situations is vulnerable: negative criticisms
can sometimes be depressing, or even hurtful. I’ve noticed, however, a frequent
interesting sequence in my own response to a negative criticism: my first response
is to reject it, and try to argue my way out of it; but as I argue, I very often realize
that the criticism was largely, or completely, justified, and more often than not end
up accepting it and making the relevant changes. Another point I’ve noticed is
that I am much more disposed to accept negative criticisms of one aspect of my
writing when there is also positive feedback and even praise of others.

1 What should feedback be mainly on: language? Content? Organization?

The problem. When a student submits a piece of original writing, the most important
thing about it is, arguably, its message: does it succeed in conveying the content required
in the task? Then there is the organization and presentation: are the ideas arranged

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in a way that is easy to follow and interesting to read? Finally, there is the question of
language forms: is the grammar, vocabulary, spelling and punctuation of an acceptable
standard of accuracy? Many teachers are aware that content and organization are
important, but find themselves focusing mainly on language forms in their feedback,
conveying the implicit message that these are what matter, sometimes to the exclusion of
the other aspects. There are various reasons for this: for one thing, mistakes in spelling or
grammar catch the eye and seem to demand to be corrected; for another, it appears that
students normally want their language mistakes to be corrected (see 12 Feedback and
error correction); finally, language mistakes are far more easily and quickly diagnosed and
corrected than are problems of content and organization.
Advice. You should correct language mistakes. The problem is how to do so without
suggesting that this is your only (or main) basis for evaluation, and the only aspect which
needs to be improved in a second draft. So corrections to language or style should be
noted, but you should also take care to include comments on content and organization.
2 Should all mistakes be corrected?
The problem. If we accept that language (including punctuation) should be corrected,
another problem arises: should all language mistakes be noted, even if there are so many
that the page will be covered with corrections? If not, how do we judge which to correct
and which not?
Advice. The problem is one of potential conflict between two of our functions as teachers:
language instruction versus support and encouragement of learning. Correcting mistakes is
part of the language instruction, but too much of it can be discouraging. Also, over-emphasis
on language mistakes can distract both students’ and teachers’ attention from the equally
important aspects of content and organization, as noted above. The answer is obviously some
kind of compromise, which will vary according to the course objectives, class and student.
You might correct only mistakes that could actually lead to misunderstanding, and/or those
which are very basic. Or, of course, you can vary your response according to individual need.
In any case, it is important to ask the students themselves (even younger ones!) how, and
how much, they want to be corrected. Finally, it’s important to draw attention also in your
feedback to the positive aspects of the writing: for example, things they got right, ideas well-
expressed, good organization.
3 Should we let students correct or give feedback on each other’s written work?
The problem. Correcting written work is very time-consuming, particularly with large
classes. It helps to let students correct and edit each other’s writing. They may not be
able to identify all its good or bad qualities, but they will detect at least some of them.
The problem is: will students feel uncomfortable correcting, or being corrected by, their
classmates? Will they accept criticism (positive or negative) from each other?
Advice. Students on the whole, it appears, prefer to be corrected by the teacher rather
than by their peers (see 12 Feedback and error correction). On the other hand, peer
editing can be a time-saving and useful technique: it helps to present it as ‘helping each
other to express things as well as possible’ rather than ‘correcting each other’. Also,
from the point of view of the peer-editor, critical reading for style, content and language
accuracy is a valuable exercise in itself.

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4 Is it a good idea to use digital tools that give feedback on writing?

The problem. There are a number of automated writing evaluation (AWE) tools available
online that claim to do comprehensive correction and assessment of student writing.
These include, at the time of writing: Criterion® Online Writing Evaluation service,
developed by ETS, Write and Improve (free) from Cambridge English; MY Access!™ from
Vantage Learning, WriteToLearn from Pearson … and there will be many others by the
time you read this. There are also the easily accessible spelling and grammar checks
included in Microsoft Word and also offered by programs such as Grammarly. Artificial
intelligence (AI) tools like GPT can also correct language errors in a text. All these can help
the students correct their language, but even here, they are not infallible; and certainly
with regard to other aspects (content, organization, coherence), the teacher is needed to
give additional feedback, and will be so for the foreseeable future. See Hockly (2019) for a
summary of these issues.
Advice. Encourage students to use such tools to help them check their English; but also
provide your own feedback during the drafting/redrafting process.

Practical tips
1 Give feedback quickly. Students get much greater benefit from your corrective
feedback if it is given immediately, or very soon, after they have submitted their work.
They should also be required to rewrite and re-submit within a fairly short time limit.
2 Use track changes. Word processing on a computer means you can make changes
or corrections and add comments to a document, while the original text can still be
clearly seen. This is a very useful and time-saving way of correcting. Similar editing
tools are available on PDF document readers.
3 Use ‘share documents’. If you want your students to do multiple rewrites, then
instead of sending documents by email attachment, you may prefer to use a file-
hosting service that allows you to share documents online, such as Google Docs. Your
student uploads a document and names you as a ‘sharer’: you can then annotate or
correct it, and the student can immediately see what you have done and implement
the corrections in a second version, which again you can see immediately.
4 Use screencasting apps. Tools like Loom, ScreenPal, Capture, Flip enable you to
provide your feedback orally, talking the student through the written text and your
comments. The student thus sees you and hears your feedback while simultaneously
scrolling through the text.
5 Give positive as well as negative feedback. Remember to draw students’ attention
to things they have done well: an appropriate use of language, interesting content,
a well-organized sequence. As I noted in my response to the Pause for thought on
page 156, corrections are far more likely to be appreciated and responded to when
they are accompanied also by praise for other aspects of the written assignment.

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11.5 Spelling and punctuation

Spelling
Contrary to general belief, the majority of words in English are actually spelt
either phonetically or according to regular rules which can be taught and memorized.
This means that teaching students to spell correctly is not as difficult as you might have
thought. And most of the words that have genuinely irregular spellings are the very
common ones which students learn anyway early on: to, what, one, would, for example.
Other irregular spellings can be taught as the individual words come up.
It is, therefore, important to teach the rules to your students. There is also some evidence
that the teaching of spelling contributes to students’ general proficiency in the language
(Graham and Santangelo, 2014).
Some basic spelling rules that are worth teaching are:
• the digraphs th, ch, sh, wh and the less common ph;
• the final e which causes a previous vowel to be pronounced like its name, as in late,
these, time, hope, tune;
• the letter c, usually representing the sound /k/, regularly pronounced /s/ before i,
e, y; and similarly g, usually representing the sound /g/, but usually (not always)
pronounced /ʤ/ before i, and e.
• the suffixes - tion, -sion, -ssion;
• the prefix al- spelt with one l in words like always;
• the suffixes -al and -ful spelt with one l;
• the u that regularly follows q;
• ck instead of c or k at the end of one-syllable words;
• the combinations -ight, -ought;
• that a double consonant usually causes the previous vowel to be pronounced short, not
like its name, in words like apple, filling (compare paper, filing). Hence the rule about
doubling the consonant when adding the -ed, -ing suffixes to short verbs, or making
the comparative of short adjectives.
(For more useful rules and ideas on how to practise using them, see Shemesh and Waller,
2000.)

Practice tasks for spelling

Dictations. Dictate a set of words that you have taught which follow a rule the students
have learnt. Other variations are as follows:
• Dictate a set of words that the students don’t know yet, but whose spelling follows a
rule they know, and challenge them to spell them correctly.
• Provide the students with the target words, but with some key letters missing. You read
out the full words, and they fill in the missing letters.

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• Dictate only the definition of a word; students write down the word.
• Provide the L1 translation; students write down the English word (if this is a
monolingual class whose L1 you know).
For more variations on dictation, see Davis and Rinvolucri (1989).
Recall and share. Write the target items on the board, give students a minute to look at
them, and then delete them. The students try to remember all of them, first individually
and then sharing. Finally, you display all the items again. This is particularly useful
for words spelt irregularly. (It is also an appropriate exercise for vocabulary review: see
6 Teaching vocabulary.)
Think of examples. Give the students one of the spelling rules listed above (including
the Further spelling tips), and challenge them to think of words they know that accord
with the rule. They can use a dictionary or the internet to help them search. Pool their
suggestions on the board.

Pause for thought

Can you add more ideas to the suggestions above: either from your own
experience as teacher or learner, or from a textbook, or your own invention?

Comment
To my surprise, there were very few spelling activities in the textbooks I looked
at, except where these actually focus on pronunciation and teach the spelling
incidentally. One of the few I found requires learners to correct the spelling of
misspelt words in sentences. This is more of a test than a teaching procedure, and
exposes students to misspelt words – a strategy that may backfire: the students
may remember the misspelling. I’d rather do things that go straight into reading or
writing the correct versions, as in the examples above.

Punctuation and capital letters

The most common punctuation signs are likely to be used in the students’ L1 in a very
similar way; for example, the full stop or period (.), the comma (,), the question mark
(?) and the exclamation mark (!). There may, however, be marked differences in the
way quotation marks are used. There are also specific punctuation usages in some other
languages which are different from English. Spanish adds an upside-down question mark
at the beginning of questions, for example, and German inserts a comma before the
equivalent of ‘that’ in relative or noun clauses. If you are teaching a monolingual class
whose language you know, you will probably be aware of such differences and will teach
them as they occur in reading texts, or responding to errors in students’ compositions.

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Students whose L1 does not use the Latin script may have problems mastering the use of
capital letters to mark the beginning of sentences and proper nouns, as well as in initials
and acronyms: these will need some focused teaching at the early stages. See the Practice
tasks below for some ideas.

Practice tasks for punctuation and capital letters

Inserting punctuation. Give students a text with missing punctuation and invite them
to insert it. It is, perhaps, best with most classes to provide texts from which only specific
items have been excluded. For example, there are no full stops, or no quotation marks
in a conversation. Students are told which type of item is missing and to insert it where
appropriate.
Capitals. Dictate a mixed list of common and proper nouns. Students write them down,
inserting the initial capital where appropriate.
Dictation. Dictate a short and fairly simple text, where the spelling is not difficult, but
which needs quite a lot of punctuation and capital letters.
Recall and share. As in the ‘recall and share’ activity suggested for spelling on the
previous page, give the students two minutes to look at a text similar to the one described
in the preceding dictation task. Then they try to reproduce it without looking back at it,
with the punctuation and capitals accurately inserted. They can share their results before
checking with the original.

Review: Check yourself

1 Can you recall at least four aspects of writing that distinguish it from the
other four skills (other than the fact that it is based on written symbols and is
productive rather than receptive)?
2 Can you identify at least three important differences between formal and
informal writing?
3 What are some problems in learning to write English for students whose L1 uses
a different writing system?
4 Can you suggest two writing tasks that might be appropriate for elementary or
intermediate classes, and two that are appropriate for more advanced ones?
5 What is process writing?
6 Suggest two problems associated with the giving of feedback on a preliminary
draft, and then some solutions.
7 How irregular is English spelling?
8 Can you suggest two activities that might help students practise punctuation?

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Further reading
Hyland, K. (2003). Second Language Writing. Cambridge University Press.
(A particularly clearly written and accessible guide to the teaching of second-
language writing)
Kroll, B. (2003). Exploring the Dynamics of Second Language Writing. Cambridge University
Press.
(An interesting collection of articles covering both research-based theory and
practical topics such as providing feedback)
Thaine, C. (2023). Teaching and Developing Writing Skills. Cambridge University Press
& Assessment.
(A collection of useful and practical ideas for getting students to write a variety of
different kinds of texts at different levels)
Truss, L. (2003). Eats, Shoots and Leaves. London: Profile Books Ltd.
(A must-read for the English teacher: the basic rules of punctuation,
entertainingly presented)

References
Davis, P. and Rinvolucri, M. (1989). Dictation: New methods, new possibilities. Cambridge
University Press.
Graham, S. and Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better
spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing, 27(9),
1703–1743.
Hockly, N. (2019). Automated writing evaluation. ELT Journal, 73(1), 82–88.
Holmes V. L. and Moulton, M. R. (2001). Writing Simple Poems. Cambridge University
Press.
Lyddy, F., Farina, F., Hanney, J., Farrell, L. and Kelly O’Neill, N. K. (2014). An analysis
of language in university students’ text messages. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 19(3), 546–561.
Mangen, A., Anda, L. G., Oxborough, G. H. and Brønnick, K. (2015). Handwriting versus
keyboard writing: effect on word recall. Journal of Writing Research, 7(2), 227–247.
Shemesh, R. and Waller, S. (2000). Teaching English Spelling. Cambridge University Press.

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 12 Feedback and error correction

Overview

12.1 Error correction. Some basic issues.

12.2 Learner preferences. Whether and how students like to be corrected.
12.3 Oral correction. Various techniques used for correction of oral work in class,
and some indication of which are more, or less, effective.
12.4 Written correction. Suggestions for how samples of student writing may
be corrected.

12.1 Error correction: some basic issues

The term error correction
I am using the term error correction here in its conventional sense to refer to what a
teacher does when indicating to the learner when they have said or written a form that
is considered an error by the standards of acceptability of international English (see
1 Teaching English today) and helping them to correct it. Researchers mostly prefer to
use the more precise term corrective feedback, since the word correction assumes that the
error has in fact been corrected, whereas this is not necessarily the case: the learner may
continue to make the error. In this book, I’ll use mostly the more common, conventional
term error correction, while bearing in mind that such correction, from the learner’s point
of view, may be only temporary, or may not be perceived at all: the term refers primarily
to the written or spoken input of the teacher.

Is error correction effective?

Most teachers assume that error correction is a natural and necessary component of the
language teaching/learning process, as do students. However, there are some who cast
doubts on its effectiveness (e.g., Truscott, 1999), based on the fact that learners often
continue to make the same mistakes after being corrected (more on this below). Krashen
(2002) says that error correction only helps conscious learning and does not have much
lasting effect on permanent language acquisition. The general consensus today, however,
is that error correction does contribute to proficiency (see, for example, the introduction
to the collection of papers on the topic edited by Nassaji and Kartchava, 2021).

Do learner errors derive from L1 interference?

In learning their first language, learners have no competing language, and their mistakes
therefore will be a result of what they know, or don’t know, of the language so far. For

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example, they may over-generalize rules (e.g., *goed instead of went). As they hear the
correct forms more and more, these will naturally take over, and conscious correction
is not necessary (although it is sometimes supplied by, for example, parents talking to
their children). However, second-language learners are already fluent in one language.
So unless they are aware of the differences, they may sometimes unconsciously apply an
L1 usage which is not appropriate for the second language (interference). For example, a
French speaker may say something like, We drink always coffee. This word order is perfectly
acceptable in French, but not in English; and some learners may never notice that English
orders the words differently unless their attention is drawn to it. Many learner errors are
indeed rooted in L1 interference, but not all; others are derived from issues within the target
language itself, such as the example of over-generalization mentioned above. Yet others
result from the natural tendency to simplify, especially in real-time speech production: for
example, the omission of auxiliary verbs (*I playing) even when the learner’s first language
has an equivalent which uses the corresponding auxiliary (e.g., Spanish, estoy jugando).

Is there a difference between an error and a mistake?

A theoretical distinction is sometimes made between an error – an unacceptable form
which the learner regularly makes because they do not know a rule, or have internalized
it wrongly – and a mistake – a slip, which the learner could in fact have avoided with a
little more thought. So in principle, a learner should be able to self-correct a mistake, but
needs input in order to correct an error. But the two are difficult to distinguish when they
actually occur, and the distinction, therefore, does not help us very much in practice.
Are errors an indication of a failure in learning or teaching?
No. It’s true that the word error has a negative connotation, which leads us to assume it
is somehow bad. But in fact errors are an inevitable and essential component of good
learning (of anything), and their detection and correction can contribute to the learning
process. There is even a suggested procedure for grammar teaching (the so-called garden-
path technique), based on inciting learners to make errors in order to help them learn by
drawing their attention to the correction. Errors, therefore, should not be condemned, but
accepted as a natural and positive aspect of the development of the new language, and the
correction offered as a basis for further progress.
What is the goal of error correction?
The main goal of error correction is to prevent mistakes from becoming entrenched, whether
they are rooted in interference from the first language or in some tricky feature within
English itself. So when we correct a student’s error, our goal is to make them aware of
what was wrong and what the correct form should have been so that the same error can
be avoided in future. The process is a very conscious one: it involves explicit thinking
about the language rather than just using it for communication. Sometimes the goal may
be wider: to use one student’s mistake as a basis for teaching the whole class a language
point, and thus to anticipate and possibly prevent similar mistakes by others.

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Why do learners often continue to make errors after being corrected?

Error correction does not necessarily produce either immediate or consistent results. Many
teachers are familiar with the situation that they correct a student in one lesson – and
then see them making precisely the same mistake in the next! Were they not listening?
Did they not understand? Why don’t they remember? One reason may be that they have
understood the correct form consciously, and can get it right if they think about it – but
in hasty writing or in speech they may not have enough time to work it out. Or it may
be because the influence from the learner’s L1 is too strong, or they may have got into
the habit of using the less acceptable feature and find it difficult to change. There is also
the factor of the developmental order of acquisition of grammatical structures, which
was discussed in 7 Teaching grammar: it seems likely that there is a certain order of
acquisition which cannot be changed, and therefore if we correct a structure for which
the learner is not developmentally ready, the correction will not, at that point, result in
uptake. Whatever the reason, it is clear that we cannot expect every correction of every
error to produce clear and immediate improvement in students’ performance; the effect
is likely to be marginal, delayed and cumulative. We need to be patient and willing to
continue to re-correct the same errors as necessary.

Pause for thought

Have a look at the statements below: where would you place yourself, in each
case, on the continuum indicated by the dotted line between the two extremes?

1 The fact that the teacher assesses and corrects students’ language implies a power
hierarchy: the teacher above, the student below.
Very much agree -------------------------------------------------------------- Totally disagree
2 Receiving corrective feedback from the teacher is potentially humiliating to
the student.
Very much agree -------------------------------------------------------------- Totally disagree
3 Teachers should try not to correct very much, in order not to discourage
students.
Very much agree -------------------------------------------------------------- Totally disagree
4 It is important to draw attention to when students get things right, not just
when they get them wrong.
Very much agree -------------------------------------------------------------- Totally disagree
5 Teachers should not let students correct each other’s work, as this is harmful to
their relationships.
Very much agree -------------------------------------------------------------- Totally disagree

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 12 | Feedback and error correction

Comment
Most of these have fairly flexible answers, and depend on the respondent’s
experience, personality, teaching context and professional judgement. My own
responses are presented below.
1 Power hierarchy. My answer here would tend towards the ‘Agree’ end of the line,
which may surprise you. In order to understand, you need to free yourself from
the negative connotations often associated with the phrase power hierarchy.
Power hierarchies may in some circumstances be necessary, productive and fully
compatible with good human relationships: parents and children, for example.
In the classroom, the fact that the teacher is an authority on the subject being
taught, with the power to assess and correct student errors, undeniably gives
them a position of power. It is important to be aware of this in order to be careful
not to exploit such a position ... which leads us to the next item.
2 Potentially humiliating. Again, I would tend towards ‘Agree’. Note the crucial
word potentially. The issue here is not whether correction humiliates, but
whether there is or is not such a potential. As with the previous item, this is
a question of awareness: we need to be aware that we have the power to
humiliate a student in order to take care not to do so.
3 Correction may discourage. I’m about in the middle here. It is true that a lot
of corrective feedback with no compensating praise (see next item) may
result in discouragement and even antagonism; however, too little may lead
to frustration or even irritation on the part of the students. It’s a question of
balance, and of being aware of students’ preferences (see Section 2).
4 Notice things that are right. Very much agree. Many teachers simply do not
think of drawing attention to students getting things right. It is seen as a
sort of default situation, not needing to be noticed. But surely getting it right
should not be taken for granted: a student who produces an accurate bit of
language (particularly if they are avoiding a very common mistake) deserves
to be noticed and praised. Moreover, other students are likely to learn from the
acceptable language item to which their attention has been drawn.
5 Correcting each other. It is true that students don’t really like being
corrected by one another (see Section 2). This is not so much because of
embarrassment or distress, but rather because they do not rely on one another
to provide the appropriate correction, and prefer to get it from the teacher.
In some situations, however, helping each other to get things right can be a
positive experience for all (see 11 Teaching writing).

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12.2 Learner preferences: whether and how students like to be corrected

There has been quite a lot of research on the subject of learner preferences in the area of
error correction, the majority based on input from adult respondents. In this section, I’ll
present some of the major findings, and also refer to an unpublished survey of my own,
based on questionnaires administered to primary and secondary schoolchildren in Israel.
Clearly, it is useful to learn about learner preferences with regard to error correction,
though we are not necessarily obliged to do exactly as they want: other research may
indicate that the students may want things that are not necessarily best for their learning;
and our own professional judgement also counts for something! But we can certainly gain
insights and awareness that can inform classroom decisions. Each finding is followed by
my own suggestions as to possible implications for classroom practice.

Pause for thought

As a learner of an additional language yourself, how much do you like to be

corrected? In speech? In writing? Do you find it helpful? What kinds of corrections
help you most?

Comment
Personally, I really want to be corrected if I get something wrong, whether spelling,
pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary. I’m fairly advanced in my second language,
so corrections don’t happen very often: when they do, I’m likely to remember and
learn from them. It’s probably the corrections in writing that I find most helpful,
because it’s more important to me to produce correct language in writing than it
is in speech. You probably also agree that you want to be corrected; and there is
substantial evidence that this is true of most learners, as we shall see below.

Learners want to be corrected

A synthesis of research on teachers’ and learners’ preferences with regard to oral corrective
feedback (Li, 2017) indicates a firm and consistent desire by most learners for teachers
to correct their errors. This was confirmed by my own survey: school pupils wanted the
teacher to correct them in both oral and written work, though the preference was slightly
more pronounced for written. Interestingly, Li also notes that learners on the whole want
to be corrected more than teachers want to correct them; and the same appears to be true
when the feedback relates to written work (Amrhein and Nassaji, 2010).
Implications for practice. The desire of learners to be corrected fits the generally accepted
research-based assumption that error correction helps learning. So in general, yes, you
should correct errors. This does not, however, necessarily mean correcting every single
mistake all the time: see the next page for further discussion of selective correction.

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Learners want teachers to tell them the correct form

Both in my own survey and in the two papers cited on the previous page, the majority
of respondents wanted the teacher to tell them explicitly both what was wrong and
what the correct form should have been. This is an interesting finding, given the general
assumption that learners are likely to learn something better if we get them to work it
out for themselves – see, for example, the research on retrieval in vocabulary practice,
as discussed in 6 Teaching vocabulary. Amrhein and Nassaji (2010) conclude rather
disapprovingly that many learners like to shift the responsibility for identifying the
correct form on to the teacher. I am not so sure: the reason may rather be that students
are not confident they can provide the right form themselves, and want to be sure they
get it right.
Implications for practice. I have the feeling that, in general, learners are right to require
their teachers to tell them what’s right, not just what’s wrong. That is one of the functions
of a teacher: to teach acceptable forms. On the other hand, if a learner is capable of self-
correction, then the process of doing so is likely to produce better learning than just being
fed with the target form. So where you are sure the student could, with a bit of effort,
self-correct, try to get them to do so. Where you think they can’t, or where you are not
sure, it’s probably better to just provide the correct form. It’s not always easy, however, to
distinguish between the two!

Learners do not, on the whole, want to be corrected by their peers

This is a finding reported in Li (2017), and I got the same result in my study. When the
teachers of the students in my survey were discussing later why this is so, most of them
thought that the reason was students’ unwillingness to embarrass or distress each other by
correcting. But when, later, they went back and asked their classes about this, it turned out
that the main reason was that the learners felt that teacher feedback was simply more reliable.
Implications for practice. I think this is fair enough: if a student makes a mistake during
a lesson, it’s probably better to correct them yourself, rather than asking one of the other
students to do so. (A problem is that very often, in my experience, if one student answers
a question wrongly, someone else in the classroom calls out the correction without being
asked! And then it is up to me to confirm (or not).) As regards correction of written work,
peer editing – where students work together on both their compositions – can be very useful
and save work for the teacher (see Section 4 on page 171): but it is a supplement to teacher
feedback, not a substitute.

Learners want most (sometimes all) of their mistakes to be corrected

One of the consistent differences between teachers’ and learners’ attitudes to error
correction that emerges from the research is that learners, on the whole, say they want to
get a lot more correction than the teachers wish to give. Teachers’ reluctance to correct
everything, particularly in written work, is partly because of the sheer load of work that
this would mean, partly because they don’t want to discourage learners by covering the
page with corrections, and partly because, where there are a lot of corrections, the learner
cannot possibly attend to and deal with every one.

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Implications for practice. Some (e.g., Lee, 2019) suggest that ‘less is more’ and that it is better
to focus on specific aspects of the written language in feedback and ignore errors relating to
anything else; but not everyone agrees. In any case, it’s often almost impossible to provide
all the corrective feedback that learners often say they want, for the reasons given above: we
have to compromise. Quite how much you decide to correct will depend largely on your own
teaching context and constraints. In any case, it’s probably worth discussing with students
in advance how their oral and written work will be corrected: listening to what they want,
clarifying your own approach (and constraints) and coordinating expectations.

Learners want error correction to be given immediately rather than delayed

This clearly relates to correction of speech rather than writing; though even for writing,
the implication is that the feedback should be given sooner rather than later. On the
whole, the research backs up learners’ preferences here: see, for example, Fu and Li (2022).
It appears that a correction that is given immediately in response to an error is more likely
to have positive learning outcomes than one that is given later. On the other hand, we
often do not want to interrupt a student who is speaking, since such interruption may
disturb the flow, and negatively affect the communicative nature of the speech.
Implications for practice. The above issue is discussed in more detail in the next section.

12.3 Oral correction

The main methods of oral correction used in most classes (following a much-quoted study
by Lyster and Ranta, 1997) are:
1 Recast. The teacher simply says the correct version of the student’s erroneous
utterance, without any further comment. For example:
Student: I reading a book.
Teacher: I am reading a book.
2 Elicitation. The teacher elicits the correct form from the student. For example:
Student: I reading a book.
Teacher: Can you correct that?
Student: I am reading a book.
3 Clarification request. The teacher asks for a clarification of the meaning. For example:
Student: I reading a book.
Teacher: I didn’t understand, can you say that more clearly?
Student: I am reading a book.
4 Metalinguistic feedback. The teacher explains using grammatical or other linguistic
terminology. For example:
Student: I reading a book.
Teacher: In the present continuous, you need the verb be before the -ing form of
the verb.

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5 Explicit correction. The teacher says explicitly that there has been a mistake, and
what the right form is. For example:
Student: I reading a book.
Teacher: No, that is incorrect. You should have said ‘I am reading.’
6 Repetition. The teacher repeats the incorrect utterance, with a rising intonation and a
doubting expression, implying that there’s something wrong with it. For example:
Student: I reading a book.
Teacher: I reading a book?

Effectiveness of the different techniques

According to the Lyster and Ranta study, and confirmed by later research, the recast is by
far the most common of all the techniques listed above. Teachers use it because it is quick
and easy and causes minimum disruption of a student’s speech. However, it is also the least
effective in bringing about uptake (i.e, in getting the student to understand and produce
the correct form in response to the correction), and probably the least likely to result in
lasting learning. This may be partly because the student sometimes does not realize it is a
correction at all; they may not notice that the teacher’s utterance was different from their
own and understand it merely as an echo or confirmation. But it is partly also because the
recast does not require any kind of confirmation or processing by the learner, and therefore
gets less attention.
It seems that the most effective oral correction involves some kind of negotiation and
active contribution by the student, to ensure that they have paid attention to it. So
elicitations and repetitions, for example, which get the student to rethink what they have
said and (hopefully!) self-correct, have significantly better results than do recasts.

Should we correct during fluent speech?

The above conclusion produces a dilemma. On the one hand, we do not want to interrupt
students as they are speaking, which might disrupt the flow of speech, discourage and
harm communication. On the other hand, no correction at all might lead to the mistakes
being further entrenched, and contradicts the general desire of most students to be
corrected in real time (see the previous section). So if a teacher decides to correct, they
may choose to do so using a quick recast, hoping to disrupt the speech as little as possible.
But then, as noted above, the correction might be ineffective. If you are going to correct
effectively, you need to stop the student, and correct in a way that ensures that they have
noticed and accepted the correction – which will inevitably involve some disruption of
communication. There is always the possibility of noting the mistake and coming back
to it later, but as we have seen in the previous section, this appears to be less effective,
and students prefer to be corrected immediately. There is also research evidence that
immediate correction does not discourage but actually contributes to WTC (willingness to
communicate) (Zare et al., 2022). See the Comment below for my own conclusions.

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Pause for thought

How would you address the issue described on the previous page? How do you
feel about interrupting a student who is speaking in order to correct errors?

Comment
There is no one easy answer to this. In any specific instance, we will need to
make a decision based on our own professional judgement, taking into account
a number of factors: the level and confidence of the student, the goals of the
course, the frequency or gravity of the error, the willingness of the student to
tolerate interruption and so on. The main point to be remembered here is that even
if in general you prefer not to interrupt communicative interaction, there may be
times where such interruption for the purposes of error correction may be helpful,
learner-friendly, and productive of learning. In any case, consulting the students in
advance about how they wish to be corrected during speech may help you make
the right decisions.

12.4 Written correction

This section relates to the correction of language errors in short writing assignments,
such as language exercises, answers to comprehension questions, or brief compositions.
(For guidance on giving feedback on longer written assignments, including
corrections, aimed at the rewriting and improvement of the composition as a whole,
see 11 Teaching writing.)
Below are some samples of uncorrected student work, followed by some Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQs) which relate to the correction of such assignments with suggested
answers.
The first sample is a grammar exercise on the present perfect, which the students did for
homework. The second is a test on vocabulary, which is also intended to check students’
mastery of the use of relative clauses in definitions. The third is a short piece of writing
done in class as an individual summary of a group discussion, and given in to the teacher
at the end of the lesson.

Pause for thought

How would you correct the student writing shown on the next page? Which errors
would you correct, and how? Which might you ignore, and why?

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1. Grammar exercises on the present perfect, given as homework

8.1 You are asking people questions about things they have done. Make questions with ever using
the words in brackets.
1. (ride / horse?) Have you ever ridden a horse?
2. (be / California?) Have
3. (run / marathon?)
4. (speak / famous person?)
5. (most beautiful place / visit?) What’s .

14.2 Complete the answers to these questions. Use the verb in brackets.
Example: Is it a beautiful painting? (see) Yes, it’s the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen.
1. Is it a good film? (see) Yes, it’s the best
2. Is it a long book? (read) Yes, it’s the
3. Is she an interesting person? (meet) Yes, she’s the most

2. Test on vocabulary and relative clauses

Define the following words, using who/which/that/whose/when/where.
For example: a deserted house = a house where nobody lives

1. a temple:
2. a motionless tree:
3. an illusion:
4. courage:
5. sweat:
6. a PR man:
7. a virus:
8. an antibody:
9. a host:
10. a paw:

3. Writing following a discussion

Dear Helpful Harriet,
I have a problem with this teacher at school. He is always shouting at me, though I don’t disturb
more than lots of other pupils in the class. It’s true that I sometimes don’t do my homework, but
I know his subject very well, always get high marks on the tests, so there is no point doing silly
homework. He gave me a much lower mark than I deserve at the end of the term. It’s not fair.
And it’s no good saying go to the class teacher, she always backs him up. What can I do?
Yours,
FRUSTRATED STUDENT

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Comment
How, and how much, you correct will depend on various factors: how important
accuracy is for your students in this course; what the conventions are for
error-correction in your institution; how proficient a particular student is. After
inserting your own corrections, read on to the section headed Frequently
asked questions below.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

1 Should I use a red pen (or red insertions, if the responses are in digital form) for my
comments? Or another colour?
It’s probably best to use a bright colour for corrections, simply in order to make them
clearly visible to the student. Some teachers feel that red is too aggressive and prefer
to use another colour. If the assignment was submitted digitally, you have the option
of using track changes, or notes using Google Docs, and you can choose which colour
to use.
2 Is it necessary to give an evaluative comment at the end such as ‘Well done’?
Students really like to know what your overall assessment was of the assignment: so let
them know what it was in an evaluative comment or assessment. Even more helpful
are specific comments aimed at helping the student in future similar assignments:
‘Remember next time to start sentences with capital letters!’
3 Should I correct all the mistakes? If not, how do I decide what to correct and what not?
As we have seen in Section 2, students on the whole want to be corrected more than
teachers want to provide corrections! A general guideline might be that if there are not
many mistakes, correct them all, but if there are a lot, allow yourself to ignore some of
them. You certainly need to correct mistakes that are associated with the goal of the
exercise (for example, in an exercise on the simple past you will correct mistaken past
forms). Of the others, you need to decide for yourself which are the most important
ones to correct and which can be ignored for the moment.
4 Should I write in the correct forms? Give a hint what these should be using codes, (‘sp’,
for example, for ‘spelling’)? Or simply underline something to indicate it was wrong,
without any hint?
Students on the whole like you to tell them exactly what the mistake was and to write
in the correct version (see Section 2, page 168). On the other hand, we simply don’t
have the time to write in all the correct forms in all our students’ compositions if we
have a lot of assignments to correct and a heavy work schedule. Probably the answer is
a compromise: write in the corrections if you think the student would find it difficult
to work them out on their own, and otherwise just underline, cross out or put in
an insertion mark ^. Whether you use a code such as ‘sp’ for ‘spelling’ is a matter of
personal preference; there is some evidence that students prefer simple underlining
(Chandler, 2003).

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5 Should I only correct, or also note things that were good, e.g., particularly effective use
of language by a student?
It is important to remind yourself to note positive things, where appropriate: ticks,
double ticks, complimentary comments in the margin. These responses can draw
students’ attention to their successes, boosting morale and reinforcing learning.
6 How far can I rely on AWE (Automated Writing Evaluation) tools to correct students’
written work?
AWE tools such as Grammarly can be very helpful and time-saving when the written
assignment is submitted digitally, in that they pick up the more obvious mistakes
and/or inappropriate expressions and suggest corrections. They are becoming more
and more accurate and comprehensive. However, they still cannot completely replace
the teacher: there are aspects of coherence, appropriate vocabulary and relevance
which only a human teacher can assess and give feedback on; and it still occasionally
happens that AWE tools will neglect to correct a mistake, or correct unnecessarily.
7 When or why should I require the student to redo some or all of the assignment?
If the work is in digital text, then students can very easily implement your corrections
and rewrite. On paper, however, rewriting of the items of a grammar exercise can be
mechanical and rather tedious and does not benefit students so much. You might,
instead, give the class the same, or similar, exercises a few days later to see if there has
been progress in eliminating errors. Full written compositions, in contrast, should
usually be redrafted, whether on paper or digital, correcting mistakes of language, style,
content and organization. For more discussion of this topic, see 11 Teaching writing.

Review: Check yourself

1 Can you define the primary function of error correction in the classroom?
A secondary one?
2 What are some problems with error correction as a means of helping students
improve accuracy?
3 Do most students want to have their mistakes corrected?
4 Why, probably, do students prefer on the whole to be corrected by the teacher
rather than by peers?
5 Which is the most common oral correction procedure? Why is it probably
not very effective?
6 What can a teacher do to make sure that an oral correction is noticed and
learnt from?
7 List some of the considerations you might take into account when deciding
which mistakes, and how many of them, to correct in a piece of written work.

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Further reading
Edge, J. (1990). Mistakes and Correction. London: Longman.
(A simple, practical handbook: suggests various techniques for correcting in
different situations)
Ferris, D. R. (2011). Treatment of Error in Second Language Student Writing (2nd Edition).
The University of Michigan Press.
(A research-based but practically-oriented discussion of written error correction)
Nassaji, H. and Kartchava, E. (Eds.) (2021). The Cambridge Handbook of Corrective Feedback
in Second Language Learning and Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
(A collection of papers summarizing research on different aspects of
corrective feedback)

References
Amrhein, H. R. and Nassaji, H. (2010). Written corrective feedback: What do students and
teachers think is right and why? Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 13(2), 95–127.
Chandler, J. (2003) The efficacy of various kinds of error feedback for improvement in the
accuracy and fluency of L2 student writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12(3), 267–296.
Fu, M. and Li, S. (2022). The effects of immediate and delayed corrective feedback on L2
development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 44(1), 2–34.
Krashen, S. D. (2002). The comprehension hypothesis and its rivals. In Selected papers from
the eleventh international symposium on English teaching/fourth Pan-Asian conference
(pp. 395–404).
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1andtype=pdfanddoi=
60ca321aeb8f970308c4102f2f1e411eb9ed4ca2
Lee, I. (2019). Teacher written corrective feedback: Less is more. Language Teaching, 52(4), 1–13.
Li, S. (2017). Student and teacher beliefs and attitudes about oral corrective feedback.
In Nassaji, H. and Kartchava, E. (Eds.) Corrective Feedback in Second Language Teaching and
Learning (pp. 143–157). Routledge.
Lyster, R. and Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of
form in communicative classrooms. Studies in second language acquisition, 19(1), 37–66.
Nassaji, H. and Kartchava, E. (2021). Introduction. In Nassaji, H. and Kartchava, E. (Eds.)
The Cambridge Handbook of Corrective Feedback in Second Language Learning and Teaching
(pp. 1–20). Cambridge University Press.
Truscott, J. (1999). What’s wrong with oral grammar correction? The Canadian Modern
Language Review, 55(4), 437–456.
Zare, M., Shooshtari, Z. G. and Jalilifar, A. (2022). The interplay of oral corrective
feedback and L2 willingness to communicate across proficiency levels. Language Teaching
Research, 26(6), 1158–1178.

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 13 Assessment and testing

Overview

13.1 Functions and types of assessment. A general introduction to the topic of

assessment; why and how we assess.
13.2 Assessment tools. Tests and alternative assessment tools as a basis for grades.
13.3 Giving a grade. Issues to do with giving a final grade at the end of a course.
13.4 Test design 1: testing accuracy. A list of test items, with critical discussion;
paper versus computer-based tests.
13.5 Test design 2: testing comprehension and fluency. How listening, reading,
speaking and writing can be tested.
13.6 Administering tests in class. Practical tips on the presentation and
management of classroom tests.

13.1 Functions and types of assessment

The main reasons for trying to assess English proficiency are as follows:
1 In order to determine learners’ overall level: for example, we may want to specify
their level according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages
(CEFR), or let them or their parents or employers know how good their English is, or
assign them to an appropriate course.
2 In order to assess learners’ progress: we may want to give feedback showing how
much a learner has improved since the last assessment.
3 In order to find out how well learners have learnt specific material during a
course: we may wish to know how well they know a set of vocabulary items, a text or
a grammatical feature.
4 In order to evaluate learners’ strengths and weaknesses (diagnostic assessment):
so that the learners themselves can be aware of what they need to learn, and so that
we can plan our teaching appropriately.
5 In order to evaluate our own teaching: often the results of learner assessment can
provide useful feedback on how well we as teachers have been enabling students
to learn.

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Summative and formative assessment

The most formal and prestigious types of assessment, such as state school-leaving exams,
or international exams such as IELTS or TOEFL, are summative in nature: they provide
only a numerical grade, may offer no specific feedback on aspects of performance, and
summarize or conclude a period of learning. Summative assessment may be used as a basis
for selection, or for acceptance into further education or employment. It may contribute
little or nothing to ongoing teaching and learning; however, it is a part of the teacher’s
job and we need to know how to do it effectively. Items 1 and 2 of the list of reasons for
assessment on the previous page are used mainly for summative purposes.
In contrast, most of the assessment that we carry out during a course (tests at the end of
units in a coursebook, for example) is formative: it may, like summative assessment, provide
a numerical grade, but it happens in the midst of a period of learning rather than at the end,
provides clear feedback in the form of error correction and suggestions for improvement,
and has the primary aim of enhancing future learning. For example, we might respond to
a dictation with a grade like 6 /10 and the comment, ‘You need to work on the spelling of
the words I have underlined.’ The types of assessment described in items 3 and 4 on the
previous page are essentially formative.
Summative assessment is usually carried out either by the class teacher or by an external
authority: a ministry of education, for example, or an internationally recognized body
such as Cambridge Assessment. In contrast, formative assessment is normally done by the
class teacher as part of the teaching process, though it may be supplemented occasionally
by the student’s own self-assessment (see the next page).

13.2 Assessment tools

Various tools are used to assess students’ language ability: tests, teacher assessment,
continuous assessment, self-assessment, portfolio assessment.

Tests
Tests are by far the most common assessment tool. The criterion for success is a fixed
level which the student is expected to reach (pass); and the result is usually expressed
as a percentage or other numerical value. Tests are relatively easy to design and check,
take place at preset times and places, give clear-cut results, and are in general (rightly or
wrongly) accepted as reliable bases for grades.
A side effect of tests is the backwash – the influence which the test has on the teaching
and learning leading up to it, which may be positive or negative. On the positive side,
an awareness that there is going to be a speaking component, for example, in a test, will
encourage teachers and learners to do a lot of oral work in the classroom; on the other
hand, there is the phenomenon of ‘teaching to the test’: teaching only those aspects of
language and types of task that are going to be tested, and neglecting others.

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Tests also have useful functions in the course other than assessment:
• They act as stations in the course programme, marking off the ends of units.
• They encourage students to review material in preparation.
• They are motivating, in the sense that students will work hard to do them well.
• They can give a sense of achievement and progress.
• In classes with discipline problems, they often provide a welcome oasis of quiet,
concentrated work during the lesson.
However, there are problems with tests as a basis for assessment:
• They are not always valid (i.e., actually test what they are meant to). For example, a
listening test based on long multiple-choice written questions may actually test reading
as much as, or even more, than listening comprehension.
• They may not be reliable. For example, similar classes may get quite different results on
the same tests because their teachers mark them differently.
• They are a one-off event which might not give a fair representation of the student’s
overall ability.
• They discriminate against students with test anxiety who perform badly under
test conditions.
• If they are the basis for crucial summative assessment in the student’s career, they can
be extremely stressful.
However, other tools are available, which can be used as an alternative, or supplement,
to tests.
Teacher assessment. The teacher gives their own estimate of the student’s level. This is
based on the performance of the student over time in a wide range of tasks, and it takes
into account aspects such as the student’s effort and progress, or particular learning
disabilities. On the other hand, it is inevitably subjective to some extent and may be seen
by stakeholders as unreliable.
Continuous assessment. The final grade is some kind of combination of the grades the
student received for various assignments during the course. Again, there may be a problem
of subjectivity, as the grades are given by the teacher. Also, the assignments and criteria
for the different grades may vary from class to class, which makes it difficult to achieve
standardization between classes.
Self-assessment. The students evaluate their own performance, using clear criteria and
grading systems. This is not very popular for summative assessment, even with students
themselves. And again there is the problem of subjectivity. However, for formative
purposes, self-assessment can be very valuable, since it encourages students to reflect on
and take responsibility for the evaluation of their own learning. It is particularly helpful
when it is combined with teacher assessment and discussed in a tutorial.

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Portfolio assessment. The student collects examples of their own work over a long
period to create a portfolio, which provides the basis for evaluation. This is a more
student-oriented method of assessment, as although the teacher decides on the overall
composition of the portfolio (for example, one essay, one test, one text comprehension
assignment, etc.), the exact assignments that will go into it are chosen by the student.
Portfolio assessment avoids the stress and one-off problems of testing. It also provides a
much broader basis for evaluation, though there is likely to be a disproportionate focus on
writing. Its main disadvantage in practice is the amount of work for the teacher, who has
to keep track of students’ work on the portfolios during the year to ensure they collect all
the required components, as well as read and assess the portfolios of entire classes.

Pause for thought

What experience do you yourself have of any of these assessment tools, as

teacher or student? What comments would you add to the definitions and
criticisms shown above?

Comment
My main experience, both as teacher and student, has been with tests, as I
imagine yours has, too. As a teacher, I experimented with both portfolio assessment
and self-assessment. The former, I found simply created too much work for me, as
noted above, and I did not continue with it. Self-assessment, however, I have found
useful: not as the overall basis for the final grade, as the students themselves do
not consider their own assessment as reliable enough, and they wanted a more
objective judgement. However, I found it really helpful to sit with each student and
elicit self-assessments: sometimes their views provided very useful insights into how
they were learning and affected the way I assessed them as a teacher.

13.3 Giving a grade

The most common practical problem relating to assessment that we face as teachers is
how to decide the final grade of a student, whether it is at the end of a course, at the end
of a term or at the end of a year.

Criteria
The first decision to be made is what standard(s) you will use to judge your students’ level:
whether you are going to use criterion-, norm- or individual-referenced assessment.
Criterion-referenced assessment means that you judge the student according to some
fixed criterion. This can be based on an estimation of what it is reasonable or desirable
to demand from students according to their age, career, level, stage of a course, etc. The
criteria might also be based on the levels of the CEFR.

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Norm-referenced assessment means that you evaluate the student’s performance

relative to what you would expect from the particular group. In this case, a group of
less advanced, or learning-disabled, students would be assessed according to different
standards from those applied to a group of advanced students within the same school.
Individual-referenced assessment means that you relate the assessment of an individual
student to their own previous performance, or to an estimate of their individual ability.
You might, for example, give a student a high grade if they have worked hard and made
impressive progress, even if by norm- or criterion-referenced standards the student might
have received a fairly low one.

Components of the grade

Having decided what your criterion (or combination of criteria) will be, you then need
to decide what information you will use as a basis for the grade. You may not have much
choice: some schools have rules for their teachers about what the final grade must be
based on. But if you have a choice, then it is probably best to take into account ongoing
work as well as tests: whether a student has made an effort and progressed, whether they
have consistently submitted homework assignments, for example, or displayed personal
initiative in improving their learning. In some classes, particularly the younger ones,
you may also want to include behaviour as a component: whether or not the student has
been punctual, attentive and cooperative.
The use of such components in a grade is fairer than assessing students only on the basis
of a one-off test, which may not, for reasons given earlier, provide a fair sample of what
they can do. It also helps student motivation. This may not be very educational, but it is a
fact of life: if we know that something is going to affect how we are assessed, then we are
more likely to make an effort than if we know it is not. For example, if students know that
completing homework assignments throughout the term accounts for 10 percent of their
grade, they are more likely to do them.
It is then necessary to determine what weighting (percentage of the final grade) we will
give to the different components: which means, of course, rather more work for us than
just copying out the results of a test.

Pause for thought

In a teaching situation you are familiar with, and assuming that the teacher is
responsible for determining every student’s grade at the end of the course rather
than an external examiner: what components would you take into account, and
what weighting would you give them?

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Comment
In my own teaching situation – a state high school in a country where English
is not spoken very much outside the classroom – my criteria were: final exam
50 percent; periodic class tests 20 percent; ongoing class work and attentiveness
10 percent; homework assignments 10 percent; overall progress since last
assessment – 10 percent. In different situations, it might be appropriate to remove
or change some of these criteria, or add others, or change the weighting. Your
own pedagogical approach and student expectations will also make a difference.

How do you express the grade you give the student at the end of the course? There are
various possibilities:
Percentages are probably the most common, though in different places the actual value
assigned to the different percentages may vary. For example, in some places 40 percent
is a pass, in others it is 60 percent; some student populations consider 75 percent a high
grade, others would think anything below 85 percent unsatisfactory.
Letters, words or phrases, such as ‘A’ or ‘B’; ‘Good’, ‘Very good’, ‘Excellent’, look a
little less impersonal, less definitive than percentages; however, the students and other
stakeholders (e.g., parents, employers) often read them as definitive number-type grades,
exactly as they read percentages.
Profiles are a totally different kind of expression of assessment, comprising a number of
separate grades on different skills or sections of knowledge, so that there is a possibility of
describing the performance of an individual student in more detail, showing their various
strengths and weaknesses. You might, for example, provide a rubric with categories such
as reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, vocabulary, and give a grade, or remark,
for each. This provides a more rounded view of the student’s level, but obviously involves
a lot more work for you.
Evaluative comments, such as, ‘Well done! You have worked hard,’ without any
expression of level of achievement, avoids the difficult and sometimes unpleasant job of
actually having to give a grade; however, the institution will normally demand a grade,
as will other stakeholders, such as parents. Students also, in my experience, want to see
a grade: they need some kind of clear-cut evaluation of how well they are doing. So it is
probably best in most contexts to give an indication of achievement through a grade, but
accompany it with encouraging and constructive comments.
In any case, if you as the teacher are responsible for giving the final grade at the end of
the course, you might find the following tips helpful.

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Practical tips
1 Tell students early on what your criteria are. Right at the beginning of the term
or course, make sure you explain on what basis the grades are given: whether you
are taking into account aspects of ongoing work, or only results of a final test. Don’t
leave it to the last minute: students should know from the start how they are going to
be assessed.
2 Discuss the grade with individual students. If your class is not too big, and if time
allows, try to set up individual meetings with students. Give them general feedback
on their performance, tell them what grade you intend to give them, ask them
what grade they consider they deserve; clarify and discuss any differences. You may
sometimes change the grade after this consultation. This will remove the stress of not
knowing what the final grade is until they get it in writing; and in some cases, it may
help you decide on a fair grade. If you are short of time, the meetings can be done in
class time while the rest of the class is doing individual work.
3 Make sure grades are kept private. Don’t make the grades public (unless your
institution insists on it). Most students prefer to find out privately what their grade
is, usually through a password-protected section of the course LMS, and then choose
themselves whether, and with whom, to share it.

13.4 Test design 1: testing accuracy

In this section you will find a list of the most common types of test items for testing
vocabulary and grammar, with some notes on their advantages and disadvantages. For
testing techniques for the assessment of listening or reading comprehension, or of spoken
or written ability in general, see the next section on page 188.
The test items on the next page are normally used in conventional class tests given at the
end of a teaching unit, term or year. Occasionally, some of them may be used in an oral
test, such as an interview, which provides the tester with information about how well the
student can understand and produce the spoken forms. Interviews are, however, rather
time-consuming as well as expensive, so most tests are written.
We need to take into account various considerations when selecting items to use for a
particular test.
• What will it tell me about the student’s knowledge? For example, will it reveal the
student’s ability to produce the item, or just show that they understand it? Will it
provide evidence that the student can use the item in appropriate contexts or not?
• How easy is it to compose? Will it take me a long time to think up and write out the
item? Is there a source (the coursebook, a website) which will provide me with ready-
made items I can use?
• How easy is it to check? Does it require only a quick, objective check based on a
single possible right answer, or will I need to use my own judgement in assessing
the answer?

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• Can it be administered and checked digitally? Are all the questions closed-ended
(one right answer) so that a computer could check and grade it?
The test items that are listed below are divided into two groups: those which are used
quite a lot and which you are likely to be familiar with; and those which are used less but
have various useful functions that are worth considering.

Common test items

1 True/False, or dual choice. This may be in the form of a statement (‘true’ or ‘false’), a
question (‘yes’ or ‘no’), or with two options to choose from.
a) London is the capital of France. True/False
b) Write ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Is London the capital of France? _________
c) Circle the correct answer. Those people live/lives in Argentina.
2 Multiple-choice. There is one correct option out of (usually) four.
Circle the correct answer. A person who writes books is called a) an engineer. b) an
accountant. c) an author. d) a baker.
3 Gapfill. The word, or its base form that is needed to fill the gap may or may not be
provided.
a) Complete the sentence. They ___________ (go) to Australia in 2007.
b) Complete the sentence. The money was _____________from the bank. (steal)
c) Complete the sentence. _______ you like action movies?
d) Insert the adverb. I’ve seen that film. (never)
e) Complete the sentence. Your mother’s sister is your _______.
4 Matching. Each item is to be matched with one other. Alternatively, the learner is
asked to insert a given type of matched word.
Match words that have similar meanings.

1. large a. high
2. sad b. big
3. tall c. many
4. a lot d. unhappy

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Write the noun.

1. happy a.__________
2. long b.__________
3. angry c.__________
4. difficult d.__________

5 Dictation. The tester dictates a passage or set of words; the student writes them down.
6 Focused cloze. The target lexical or grammatical items are omitted from a passage.
was
Insert verbs in the past tense. Beowulf 1. ____________ (be) a great warrior 1,000 years
ago. He 2. ____________(win) many battles against monsters and dragons. Grendel
____________ (be) a terrible monster from Denmark. He 3. ____________ (have) big teeth
and he was very strong. Grendel 4. ______________ (not sleep) and 5. ______________
(not eat). He 6. ____________(drink) blood …
7 Transformation. This usually involves alterations such as changing the tense or voice
(active/passive), or number (singular/plural), or positive to negative.
Put into the past simple: I go to school by bus.
8 Rewrite/Compose. A new sentence is to be composed based on a given sentence. It
could be a paraphrase, for example, or a question relating to an answer.
Complete the second sentence so that it means the same as the first. He came to the
meeting in spite of his illness. Although __________________________________________
Write a question to which the sentence is the answer. Yes, I came here yesterday. __________

Less frequently used test items

9 Sentence completion. The student may complete the sentence any way they like,
provided the language is acceptable. Complete the sentence. She will come to the party if …
10 Translation. This may be either from the L1 into English, or from English into the L1.
11 Mistake correction Correct the mistake. *We talked to the man which is in charge of
the project.
12 Sentence repetition. The student repeats a sentence they hear.

Pause for thought

Have a look at the test from a coursebook shown on the next page, or at any test
of correct language (grammar, vocabulary, spelling, pronunciation, punctuation)
which you have come across. Which types of test item are used? Any comments?

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5 Progress Test 40 minutes Name Score 100

9 It’s got more space our last house.

1 Fill in the gaps with the correct word/phrase
connected to homes. 10 This is smallest place we’ve seen.

1 I love sitting on the balcony . 9

2 We keep our car in the g . 4 Rewrite these sentences with the words in
3 Ben’s sitting at his desk in the st . brackets.
4 I’d like to buy a nice little co in the
1 I’m not as sensitive as him. (more)
country.
He’s more sensitive than me.
5 Look! The cat’s on the r ! How can
2 John is more adventurous than me. (less)
we get him down?
I
6 We’ve got some old suitcases in the l .
7 My sister lives in a de house in a very
3 Julia and I are both 1.65 m tall. (as … as)
friendly ne .
I
8 Barry’s parents live in a quiet re area
in the su .
4 I don’t know anyone who’s nicer than Jo. (nicest)
9 We live on the fourth f of an
Jo
a block in the city c .
12 5 My mobile isn’t the same as yours. (different)
Your
2 Complete these phrasal verbs.
1 Do you want me to c o m e b a c k later?
6 His laptop is almost the same as mine. (similar)
2 Could you e o the rubbish, please?
My
3 I need to t o my desk. I can’t find
anything.
7 Your handwriting is better than mine. (worse)
4 I’m going to o t these boxes
My
and w a anything I don’t want.
5 Rebecca, please y u your room and
8 Leeds Castle is very beautiful. There isn’t a more
t a all those clothes on the floor.
beautiful castle in England. (most)
6 If you don’t want it, why don’t you e it
Leeds Castle
a to someone who wants it?
7 I’m going to r o the spare room.
It’s full of things we don’t need. 14

8 5 Choose the correct verb forms.

sam When you start working from home next week,
3 Fill in the gaps with one word only.
which room 1 are you going to work /are you
1 This room’s more attractive than the other one.
working in?
2 I think he’s the same age me. kim This bedroom, I think. It’s nice and bright.
3 He’s the patient man I know. He never sam Do you think 2 it’ll be/it’s being big enough?
gets angry. kim Oh yes, I think so. My new desk 3 won’t take/
pROGRESS TESTS:

4 This house is nicer than the one we saw isn’t taking up much space.
photocopiable

yesterday. I really love it, don’t you? sam That’s good.

5 It’s a heavier, but not much. kim In fact, the shop has just phoned. 4They’ll
6 That was expensive than I expected. bring/They’re bringing it round tomorrow.
I thought I’d have to pay more. sam Where are you thinking of putting it?
7 It’s the spacious flat we’ve seen. All the kim I’m not sure. 5I’ll probably put/I’m probably
others were a lot bigger. putting it by the window.
8 The garden’s not big as I’d hoped. sam I don’t think 6 it’s going to fit/it’s fitting there.

(from face2face Intermediate Teacher’s Book 2nd Edition by Redstone, C., Clemenstone, T. and
248 face2face Second edition Intermediate Photocopiable © Cambridge University Press 2013 Instructions p236
p000
Cunningham, G., 2013)

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 13 | Assessment and testing

Comment
As is fairly typical of grammar and vocabulary tests, the most frequent type of test
item used in the above example is gapfill, with or without a hint as to what the
learner is expected to write. It is also noticeable that there is only one possible
answer to all the questions, so the teacher – or even a computer – can quickly
check and give a grade. If you looked at another test: do these two statements
apply also to them?

Discussion
A characteristic of all the more frequently used test items is that they are easy to check.
Most are also fairly easy to write, with one notable exception: multiple choice (see below).
A lot of them today can be composed by an AI tool, provided you give a precise prompt;
this is particularly useful when you need to compose a more complex and potentially
time-consuming type of item (see, for example, the note under Multiple-choice below).
1 True/false/dual-choice items check only receptive knowledge: the fact that students
got the answer right does not necessarily indicate that they would be able to produce
the target item themselves correctly or appropriately. And note that they have a 50:50
chance of getting it right, even if they are guessing.
2 Multiple-choice may be used for the same testing purposes as true/false items and
checks knowledge more reliably, since it offers more options (there is only a 25 percent
chance of getting it right by chance). Good multiple-choice questions, however, are
surprisingly difficult to design. They often come out with more than one possible
right answer, or no clear right answer at all, or one over-obvious right answer. Also,
the punctuation and aligning of the stem and options can be tricky. Finally, less
experienced test-writers tend to make the right answers the longest ones, which may
give them away to students who are aware of this tendency. Such problems can be
solved by using AI tools to design the item; then all you need to do is make sure your
prompt is comprehensive and accurate, and then to check through the suggestion
made by the tool to ensure that it is appropriate.
3 Gapfills, again, test mainly receptive knowledge. You need to be careful to design a
gapfill item so that there is only one right answer, or a very limited number of right
answers, otherwise it becomes difficult to check. For this reason, choices are usually
limited through the inclusion of a root word in brackets or a word bank.
4 Matching can be used not only to elicit knowledge of various lexical or grammatical
relationships: synonyms or parts of speech, as shown in the examples, but also
opposites, collocations and grammatical cohesion (appropriate sequence of tenses, for
example) and more. Design is not too difficult, but as with multiple-choice questions,
you do need to take care that there is only one right match for each item.
5 Dictation mainly tests spelling, sometimes punctuation and, perhaps surprisingly,
comprehension: people can normally write things down accurately from dictation
only if they understand them. For this reason, dictations appear also in the section

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on listening comprehension on the next page. If the dictated test is of a whole phrase
or sentence, responses may supply some information on students’ receptive knowledge
of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, or even general proficiency (MacNamara,
2000). If you are teaching a monolingual class whose language you know, you might
use translation dictation: dictate a word or short text in the L1; the students write
down the translation into English.
6 Focused cloze can be used to test grammar, vocabulary, spelling or punctuation,
depending on which items you choose to delete. Marking can be slightly less
straightforward than for previous items: you may find it difficult sometimes to decide
if a specific item is acceptable or not. If you insert multiple-choice options at each gap,
composition is more time-consuming, but the marking becomes easier.
7 Transformation items require changing the grammatical form of a particular word or
phrase. They are fairly easy to design and check, but often can be done mechanically:
the student does not necessarily need to understand the whole sentence.
8 Rewrite items are also based on transformation, but they relate to an entire
sentence: the learner will therefore need to understand in order to answer correctly.
Occasionally, there may be more than one acceptable answer.
Then there are the less frequently used test items: less frequently used for a variety
of reasons.
9 Sentence completion is difficult to check, since there is often a very large number
of possible right answers. Its big advantage is that it tests production: it shows whether
the student can produce correct sentences and use the target items in appropriate
(though limited) contexts.
10 Translation is still frowned on by some teachers and methodologists, though far less
than it used to be. It is actually a very useful technique in a monolingual class whose
teacher also speaks the students’ L1. The translation of a language item to or from
English can give very quick and reliable information about what the student does
or does not know, particularly when it involves entire units of meaning (phrases,
sentences) within a known context. Items are fairly easy to design and may be more,
or less, easy to check, depending on how close and obvious the translations are.
11 Mistake correction is, again, something which many teachers feel uncomfortable
with. There is always the worry that exposing students to a mistake in print might
reinforce that mistake rather than correcting it. If used, it has to be very clear what
the mistake is. One possibility is to cross out the wrong words (for example, *We talked
to the man which is in charge of the project) so the students only have to decide what
words should replace them. Another is to write an insert symbol ^ where something is
missing. But both design and checking are fairly straightforward.
12 Sentence repetition, or elicited imitation, sounds like a mechanical imitation task.
In fact, it produces surprisingly reliable results, because normally we can only repeat
accurately an utterance of more than a couple of syllables if we understand it (see the
note on Dictation on the previous page). Successful responses, therefore, are evidence
of comprehension. Sentence repetition has been shown to correlate well with results
of other types of test (Van Moere, 2012).
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Practical tips for test design

1 Clarity. Make sure the instructions for each item are clear. They should usually include
an example with its solution. For low-level, monolingual classes, it may be appropriate
to have the instructions in the students’ L1, as well as in English.
2 ‘Doability’. The test should be quite doable: not too difficult, with no trick questions.
It’s sometimes difficult to judge the doability of your own tests, so it’s worth asking a
colleague to read through and check they can answer the questions before you give the
test to students.
3 Marking. Decide exactly how you will assess each section of the test, and how many
points you will give each one out of the total. Make the marking system as simple as
you can, and inform the students what it is: write in the number of points assigned to
each section on the test sheet itself.
4 Suitability for administering and checking online. Make sure that most or all of
the test is based on single-right-answer items, which can be completed and checked
through a computer, thus saving you time and ensuring accurate results. If the
students are working online, however, you do need to make sure that they are not
using online facilities to find out answers by checking a dictionary or using an AI tool.
5 Varied level. Lower-level students should feel that they are able to do a substantial
part of the test, while the higher-level ones should have a chance to show what they
know. So make the earlier items fairly easy, and perhaps define one or more of the
more difficult ones as optional.
6 Tests designed by students. Occasionally, let students compose their own tests.
Students can be told exactly what you intend to test, and then write their own
test items, individually or in groups. You then collect these items, correct them
if necessary, and use some or all of them as a basis for the test. This is in itself an
excellent review of the test material and also reduces test anxiety.

13.5 Test design 2: testing comprehension and fluency

Tests that assess comprehension through listening and reading, and fluency and accuracy
in speaking and writing, rather than knowledge of specific language items, need a
different set of testing techniques.

Listening comprehension
This is usually tested as a skill on its own, although in real life it more often than not
occurs in conjunction with speaking (for discussion of the teaching, rather than testing,
of listening skills, see 8 Teaching listening). A test which involves both speaking and
listening is the interview, described under Speaking on the next page. Other types of
listening tasks are the following.
Dictation and repetition. As mentioned previously, a student can only normally write
down more than a word or two accurately from dictation if they have understood it.
Both dictation and sentence repetition therefore are valid and reliable tests of listening
comprehension.

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 13 | Assessment and testing

Text + comprehension questions is probably the most common form of listening

comprehension test. The student hears a text, usually more than once, and is asked to answer
questions on it. The questions may relate to gist or details of content. For convenience of
checking, they are very often multiple choice. This kind of test can be administered and checked
online, using audio texts followed by questions with a limited possible set of right answers.
Taking notes is a useful test of listening comprehension, but one that demands, of course,
the ability to write quickly and clearly, as well as understand what is heard. It obviously
needs to be checked by a human assessor.

Reading comprehension
Reading aloud single words can normally show only that the student can decode
the letters accurately; however, reading aloud a text with appropriate prosody (pause,
intonation, stress) can be done well only if the text is understood. So reading a text aloud
is a very easily designed and administered test of reading comprehension, in very much
the same way as dictation and repetition are tests of listening comprehension. It is, on the
other hand, time-consuming because it has to be done through one-to-one interaction
with the tester. The student should usually have time to read, re-read and prepare before
such a test: only at very advanced levels can we expect students to sight-read competently.
Text + comprehension questions is, as with listening, the most common format of the
reading comprehension test. The students study a text and answer questions, which are
commonly gapfills and multiple choice in order to enable easy, possibly digital, checking.
Cloze is another way of checking general reading comprehension. Words are deleted
that can be guessed from the surrounding context, and the testee required to fill them in
correctly. Sometimes each gap is linked to a bank of two or more possible answers.
Jumbled paragraphs. Students are given a text with the paragraphs in the wrong order,
and they have to sort them out. Their success depends not only on their comprehension
of the content, but also on their awareness of the typical discourse structure of the genre
and of cohesive devices (use of pronouns, connectors such as however, moreover, discourse
markers such as first, on the one hand, finally).

Speaking
The assessment of a student’s ability to speak fluently, accurately and appropriately is
particularly problematic for two reasons. One is practical: unlike the other three skills,
speaking can only normally be tested in individual (or, occasionally, pair- or small-group)
interaction. Even if the student’s speech is recorded while interacting with a computer, or
avatar, the assessment will need to be done by an individual human assessor. This means
that it takes a long time to test an entire class, and it is expensive to pay the testers. The
other problem is reliable assessment: there cannot possibly be one right answer, so there
is no possibility of objective or computer-based grading. Moreover speech is fleeting; it
cannot usually be re-read and reconsidered for assessment. It is also difficult to retain
speech in the memory long enough to assess its level. It can help to record the student’s
speech and then listen to it again later, but this increases the time and expense even more.

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 13 | Assessment and testing

Paper 4
The use of scales of standards, or rubrics can help to solve the problem of reliability by
making sure that there are clear criteria for the different possible grades, as shown in the
B2 First Speaking Examiners use a more detailed version of the following assessment scales, extracted from the overall
rubrics for the Cambridge B2 First exam below.
Speaking scales on page 80:

GRAMMAR AND DISCOURSE INTERACTIVE

B2 PRONUNCIATION
VOCABULARY MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION

Produces extended
Shows a good degree stretches of language Initiates and responds
of control of a range of with very little hesitation. Is intelligible.
appropriately, linking
simple and some complex
Contributions are Intonation is appropriate. contributions to those of
grammatical forms.
relevant and there is a other speakers.
5 Sentence and word stress
Uses a range of clear organisation of is accurately placed. Maintains and develops
appropriate vocabulary ideas. the interaction and
to give and exchange Individual sounds are
Uses a range of cohesive negotiates towards an
views on a wide range of articulated clearly.
devices and discourse outcome.
familiar topics.
markers.

4 Performance shares features of Bands 3 and 5.

Shows a good degree Is intelligible.
of control of simple Produces extended
stretches of language Intonation is generally Initiates and responds
grammatical forms, and
despite some hesitation. appropriate. appropriately.
attempts some complex
grammatical forms. Contributions are relevant Sentence and word stress Maintains and develops
3 is generally accurately the interaction and
Uses a range of and there is very little
placed. negotiates towards an
appropriate vocabulary to repetition.
outcome with very little
give and exchange views Uses a range of cohesive Individual sounds are
support.
on a range of familiar devices. generally articulated
topics. clearly.
2 Performance shares features of Bands 1 and 3.
Produces responses which
Shows a good degree are extended beyond
of control of simple short phrases, despite Initiates and responds
Is mostly intelligible, and
grammatical forms. hesitation. appropriately.
has some control of
1 Uses a range of Contributions are mostly phonological features at Keeps the interaction
appropriate vocabulary relevant, despite some both utterance and word going with very little
when talking about repetition. levels. prompting and support.
everyday situations. Uses basic cohesive
devices.
0 Performance below Band 1.

(from B2 First Handbook for teachers for exams by Cambridge English, 2023)

The following are some common formats used in oral testing.

Interview consists of a conversation between two people. It is the most common context
for speech in daily life and therefore should provide useful and reliable evidence of the
ability of the student to converse in English. Note that, as mentioned above, it tests listening
comprehension as well as speaking. Its main disadvantage is the problem of attention for the
interviewer who has to initiate and maintain a conversation as well as assess it; this can be
solved if the assessor is not the interviewer but an independent listener – but of course, this
raises the cost still further.

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 13 | Assessment and testing

Picture description is particularly suitable for younger learners or beginners. The student
describes a picture or a series of pictures. It is easier for the tester, who does not have to
initiate conversation and can devote their attention to assessing the student’s performance.
Presentation is a longer, more advanced procedure. The student is asked to present an
extended description, explanation or other oral account, while the tester simply listens
and assesses. The problem here is that students may memorize their presentations in
advance, which gives no idea of their ability to compose and deliver spontaneous speech.
An alternative is to give the student a topic, two minutes to prepare, and then ask them to
speak about it for a minute or two.
Group or pair discussions can be used in order to assess the speaking ability of two
or more students at the same time, while the tester simply sits at the side and listens.
This possibly saves time, but there is always the chance that the less assertive students,
however good their spoken English, may not get sufficient opportunities to speak.
Computer-based oral testing. Eliciting speech from a student by recording their responses
to questions or cues from an avatar can save expense; the student output is then assessed
by a human. (At the time of writing, I do not know of a digital tool that provides valid and
reliable feedback and assessment of informal speech.) The problem is that many students
find it difficult to respond to an interviewer they know is an avatar, and will provide more
reliable evidence of their abilities in face-to-face interaction with a human interlocutor.

Writing
A written assignment used for assessment purposes can of course be done on a computer,
in which case, students can use computer tools to check their spelling and grammar.
Some teachers prefer not to let students use computers when doing writing tests for this
reason. However, the use of such tools cannot disguise poor writing ability; and in any
case, since much, if not most, English writing is now done with these tools available, it
does not make sense to exclude them from tests. A trickier problem with using computers
is the possibility that students will copy-paste passages – or, indeed, full essays – from
the internet, or use GPT to compose texts (see a discussion of this point in 11 Teaching
writing). We can usually find out if a whole text is plagiarized from an online source by
using a search engine. AI use is more difficult to detect, though there are some websites
which claim to be able to identify AI-derived text in the majority of cases: for example,
https://www.turnitin.com/solutions/ai-writing. In general, it is therefore advisable to deny
testees internet access while doing a test. And if they are your own students, you can
usually tell if the writing is not at the same level as written assignments you have received
from them previously.
Assessing free writing is difficult. We need to check various aspects: accuracy, coherent
organization, content and so on. How much weight should be given to each? Again,
rubrics (parallel to those shown above for speaking) can help There are also some online
tools which can assess the overall level of a text by CEFR levels (for example, Cambridge’s
Write and Improve, at https://writeandimprove.com).

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 13 | Assessment and testing

Compositions are probably the most common form of tests of writing skills at intermediate
or advanced level. The student is given a topic, or sometimes a genre, communicative
purpose and target audience and asked to write a composition of a set length.
Brief descriptions and dialogues can be used to test writing at elementary level. The student
is given a picture to describe, or the beginning of a dialogue to continue with a set number
of exchanges. Care has to be taken when selecting the picture or writing the beginning of the
dialogue to limit the lexical and grammatical knowledge required to do the test.

13.6 Administering tests in class

In practice, most tests are actually run by the teacher in their own class. The test
experience can be a stressful one for students; even those not badly affected by test
anxiety may perform less well under test conditions, thus not providing a fair sample of
their knowledge and abilities. It is important for students to feel that, although we have to
assess their performance and will be as fair as we can in doing so, we are on their side and
want them to do as well as possible.

Practical tips
1 Inform your students about the test well in advance. Don’t suddenly announce the
test a day or two before it, and don’t do surprise tests. Tell learners exactly when it will
be and how long it will take. Let them have enough time to prepare themselves, and
review any material they need to.
2 Allot some class time for preparation. If the test is based on particular material,
don’t leave all the review for homework. Lead some focused review in lessons, and
give some class time for individual preparation.
3 Provide, or review, essential information about the test as you present it. You may
need to remind students about the test content, format and marking system before
giving out the papers, and sometimes run through the instructions with them after
doing so in order to make sure that everything is clear – as well as wishing them good
luck!
4 Check and return tests as soon as you can. This is so that you can discuss specific
points while the test is still fresh in the students’ minds.
5 Plan how to deal with those who finish early, or late. The institution may have a
policy as regards this point: to let early finishers leave, for example, or allow extra time
for slower ones. If not, and it’s up to you, you will need to plan your own management
of this issue: by preparing extra work to keep the faster workers busy, for example.

Pause for thought

Regarding tip 5 above: in a situation you are familiar with, how do you think the
issue of students who complete a test earlier or later than the others can, or
should, be dealt with?

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 13 | Assessment and testing

Comment
Whatever strategy you use – a prepared task for the faster finishers, for example, or
extra time for slower – it’s important to let students know in advance what this will
be. In my own classes, I add an extra optional section at the end of my tests for the
more advanced students who tend to finish early, which they can do as much of
as they can in the time, and which earns them extra bonus points. This enables me
to make the main test shorter, so that the slower workers are more likely to finish.

Review: Check yourself

1 What is the difference between formative and summative assessment?

2 What are some disadvantages of the test as an assessment tool?
3 What other assessment tools might be used in English courses?
4 What are some important criteria for the design or selection of test items?
5 What are the advantages and disadvantages of multiple-choice test items?
6 In what different ways might reading comprehension be assessed?
7 Suggest two problems with assessing speaking. What can help?
8 Suggest some ways we can mitigate test anxiety.

Further reading
Chapelle, C. A. and Douglas, D. (2006). Assessing Language through Computer Technology.
Cambridge University Press.
(Discusses practical issues associated with computer testing, and provides guidance
for teachers wishing to use it)
Cohen, A. D. (1994). Assessing Language Ability in the Classroom (2nd Edition). Boston:
Heinle and Heinle.
(Discusses the various methods of assessing language, with particular attention
paid to alternative methods such as self-assessment and portfolio assessment)
Hughes, A. and Hughes, J. (2020). Testing for Language Teachers (3rd Edition). Cambridge
University Press.
(Criteria for good test design, an overview of test items and guidance on the testing
of younger learners)
McKay, P. (2006). Assessing Young Language Learners. Cambridge University Press.
(Practical ideas for assessing the language of young learners)
Underhill, N. (1987). Testing Spoken English. Cambridge University Press.
(Practical issues and different techniques for testing speaking)

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 13 | Assessment and testing

References
Cambridge English. (2023). B2 First Handbook for teachers for exams. Cambridge University
Press & Assessment.
Erlam, R. (2006). Elicited imitation as a measure of L2 implicit knowledge: An empirical
validation study. Applied Linguistics, 27(3), 464–491.
MacNamara, T. (2000). Language Testing. Oxford University Press.
Redstone, C., Clemenstone, T. and Cunningham, G. (2013). face2face Intermediate Teacher’s
Book 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press.
Van Moere, A. (2012). A psycholinguistic approach to oral language assessment. Language
Testing, 29(3), 325–344.

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 14 The syllabus

Overview

14.1 What is a syllabus? Components of the language syllabus, core and optional.
14.2 Types of language syllabus. Some main types of syllabuses used in English
teaching, with examples.
14.3 The CEFR and language syllabuses. The influence of the Common European
Framework of Reference for Languages on modern syllabus design.
14.4 Using the syllabus. Different ways teachers use the syllabus in their teaching.

14.1 What is a syllabus?

Preliminary note: what I have here called a syllabus is sometimes called a curriculum,
particularly when referring to one which has been adopted as the approved syllabus for a
national education system.
A syllabus is basically a list: a document which presents information on what topics or
content are to be covered, and in what order, usually in a specified course of study. With
regard to English language syllabuses, it may present information on what is to be taught:
• in order to reach levels specified internationally (e.g., by the CEFR);
• in a national school system;
• in order to pass a particular examination (e.g., IELTS);
• in a specific course (no matter what materials are used);
• in a specific coursebook.
Syllabuses may be synthetic or analytic. Synthetic syllabuses provide a set of isolated
language items (grammatical structures or lexical items, for example), which are
then combined in the teaching process to create meaningful units that can be used
in communication. Analytic syllabuses work the other way round: they describe
communicative abilities, tasks or functions (how to convey simple information, for
example); the particular language features are then taught as contributors to the effective
performance of such components. It is common today for syllabuses to do both: see the
multi-strand syllabus described on page 197. This is particularly noticeable in modern
coursebooks, but also seen in those with a wider application. The syllabus for English in
schools published by the Ministry of Education in Israel, for example, is laid out as a series
of ‘can-dos’ relating to communicative abilities and aligned with the CEFR (see Section 3),
but includes also a grammatical syllabus and a list of lexical items divided into bands for
the different levels.

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 14 | The syllabus

Basic features of a syllabus

It has clear objectives, usually explained in an introduction. These objectives are then
used as the basis for selecting and ordering the components.
It is comprehensive. The actual components of the list may be, in a synthetic syllabus,
content items (words, grammatical features, topics), or in an analytic one, process ones
(tasks) or communicative ‘can-dos’ (standards). In any case, the syllabus attempts to be
comprehensive and cover as wide a range of the target items as possible.
It is laid out in a pre-specified order. The items are usually organized according to level:
components that are considered easier or more essential earlier, and more difficult and less
important ones later. But there are other possibilities: for example, the items in a lexical
syllabus may be listed, for convenience, alphabetically within each level (although this
does not, of course, imply that the items should be taught in alphabetical order!).
It is a public document. It can be read not only by teachers and materials writers who are
expected to implement it, but also by the consumers (learners, their parents or employers),
by the relevant authorities (inspectors, school principals), by other interested members of the
public (researchers, teacher trainers). There is therefore the aspect of accountability: the writers
of the syllabus are answerable to their target audiences for the quality of their document.
Further components are displayed by some syllabuses and not others. Some define the
time frame: that the syllabus should be completed within a certain number of hours, for
example, or requiring that certain items should be dealt with in the first year, others in
the second, etc. A particular approach or methodology may also be specified. Some may
list recommended materials (coursebooks, visual materials or supplementary materials) for
all or some of a course.

14.2 Types of language syllabus

A number of different kinds of syllabuses are, or have been, used in English language
teaching: the main types are listed below. The last is perhaps the most common today: the
others have been influential in the development of language syllabus design in general,
and you may still occasionally come across them.
1 The structural syllabus. This is based on a list of grammatical structures and items,
such as the present simple, definite and indefinite articles, comparison of adjectives.
It is the most traditional syllabus type, still in use in many places. Coursebooks, when
defining the syllabus on which they are based, almost always include a structural
syllabus in a prominent position. The structural syllabus has been criticized on the
assumption that it is likely to lead to an over-emphasis on accuracy at the expense of
meaningful communication.
2 The lexical syllabus. This comprises a list of lexical items (e.g., girl, happily), sometimes
including multi-word expressions (e.g., in any case, call it a day) and collocational links
(for example, take + a decision, hard + work). It also includes grammatical items such
as that or the suffix -ing, but relates to them in very much the same way as a lexical
item. There is some debate over what the ‘words’ listed in a lexical syllabus should
be, the two main types being lemmas or word families (see 6 Teaching vocabulary).

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 14 | The syllabus

A compromise suggestion is to list lemmas for elementary or intermediate syllabuses

and word families for the more advanced (Brown et al., 2021).
3 The functional-notional syllabus Notions are concepts that language can describe.
General notions may include things like number, time, place and colour. Specific notions look
more like vocabulary items: man, woman, afternoon. Functions, in contrast, are things you
can do with language: purposes or outcomes of a specific language use; examples include
identifying, denying, promising. The functional-notional syllabus was an early attempt to
create an appropriate syllabus for the communicative approach. The idea was to get away
from a focus on correct forms and move towards the use of language to express meanings.
Today, it is mainly used as part of multi-strand or task-based syllabuses (see below).
4 The situational and topic-based syllabus. The situational syllabus takes real-life contexts
of language use as its basis: sections are headed by names of situations or locations, such
as ‘Eating a meal’ or ‘In school’. A variation of this, the topic-based syllabus, lists particular
topics such as ‘Animals’ or ‘The family’. In either case, a fairly clear set of vocabulary
items, and sometimes grammatical features, is indicated, which may be specified. Both
situational and topic-based syllabuses are particularly suitable for courses in English for
Specific Purposes: those targeting areas such as tourism, business, etc.
5 The content-based syllabus. This is a syllabus largely associated with CLIL – content
and language integrated learning – which will be discussed further in 16: Teaching
content. The list of what is to be taught and learned is defined in terms of the subjects
or skills which are being taught through English rather than English itself; and the
language – whether grammar, lexis, pronunciation, functions, notions, or any other
language forms and meanings – will be that which emerges as necessary in order
to engage with the content. The teacher may in practice take time out to focus on
language forms, but these will not be included as such in the syllabus.
6 The task-based syllabus. This consists of a series of communicative tasks, where task
is defined as an activity with a clear communicative outcome, rather than a linguistic
one. For example, ‘Get your partner to draw a picture similar to the one you have in
front of you,’ would be a communicative task; ‘Write five sentences using the present
perfect describing things you have done,’ would not. The tasks may be ordered and
classified in various ways (Robinson, 2007), but the main two types are pedagogical
(not necessarily similar to real-life, but leading to communicative interaction, like the
picture-drawing one above) and real life (aiming to replicate authentic interactions),
such as one that involves role-playing buyers and sellers in a market.
7 The mixed or multi-strand syllabus. Increasingly, modern syllabuses are combining
different aspects in order to be as comprehensive and helpful as possible to teachers
and learners. Many people have come to feel that one kind of syllabus is unlikely
to answer the needs of all those involved in using it: the researchers, the education
authorities or heads of institutions, the teachers, the materials writers, the assessors
and, of course, the students themselves. On the one hand, syllabuses based on lists of
language items did not answer the needs of those looking for more communicative
and meaning-based components. On the other hand, practitioners and materials
writers feel they do need also to know what actual language (grammar, vocabulary
and so on) needs to be taught, and find it difficult to translate general definitions of
communicative goals into practice in terms of the design of texts and tasks.

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 14 | The syllabus

Published format
The syllabus may be published in various forms: as an online document or website, or
as a book or booklet. If it is the syllabus of particular course with a coursebook (print or
online), then it appears on the preliminary contents pages of the book.

Pause for thought

With regard to a syllabus you are familiar with: which of the types above does it
accord with? If multi-strand, which aspects does it include and which not? If you

Plan of Book 1
don’t have ready access to a syllabus, then have a look at the following, which is
the syllabus for the first four units of a beginners’ course.

Titles/Topics Speaking Grammar Pron

UNIT 1 PAGES 2–7
Where are you from? Introducing oneself; introducing Wh-questions and statements with Linked
Introductions and greetings; names, someone; checking information; be; questions with what, where, who, Listen
countries, and nationalities exchanging personal information; and how; yes/no questions and short schoo
answers with be; subject pronouns;
saying hello and good-bye; talking
possessive adjectives
about school subjects
UNIT 2 PAGES 8–13
What do you do? Describing work and school; asking Simple present Wh-questions and Syllab
Jobs, workplaces, and school; daily for and giving opinions; describing statements; question: when; time Listen
schedules; clock time daily schedules expressions: at, in, on, around, early, daily r
late, until, before, and after
PROGRESS CHECK PAGES 14–15

UNIT 3 PAGES 16–21

How much are these? Talking about prices; giving opinions; Demonstratives: this, that, these, Sente
Shopping and prices; clothing and discussing preferences; making those; one and ones; questions: how Listen
personal items; colors and materials comparisons; buying and selling much and which; comparisons with listeni
things adjectives
UNIT 4 PAGES 22–27
Do you play the guitar? Talking about likes and dislikes; giving Yes/no and Wh-questions with do; Intona
Music, movies, and TV shows; opinions; making invitations and question: what kind; object pronouns; Listen
entertainers; invitations and excuses; excuses modal verb would; verb + to + verb
dates and times
PROGRESS CHECK PAGES 28–29

Pronunciation/Listening
UNIT 5 PAGES 30–35
Writing/Reading Interchange Activity
What an interesting family! Talking about families and family Present continuous yes/no and Intona
ements with Family
Linked members;
sounds typical families members; exchanging
Writing questions requesting personal Wh-questions,
information “Getting to statements, and short
know you”: Collecting Listen
at, where, who, about the present; describing family
information answers; quantifiers:
personal all, nearly
information about all,
Listening for names, countries, and
ions and short life most, many, a lot of, some, not many,
classmates
school subjects “Is Your Name Trendy?”: Reading about
ct pronouns; and few; pronoun: no one
popular names PAGE 114
UNIT 6 PAGES 36–41
How often do you run? Asking about and describing Adverbs of frequency: always, almost Intona
Sports, fitness activities, and exercise; routines and exercise; talking about always, usually, often, sometimes, Listen
estions and Syllable
routines stress Writing a biography
frequency; ofsports
discussing a classmate
and “What
hardly ever,we have in
almost common”:
never, and never; free-t
when; time Listening to descriptions of jobs and athletes;
“My talking
Parents about
Don’t Understand Findinghow
abilities My Job!”:questions: similarities in classmates’
often, how long, how descr
around, early, daily routines Reading about four jobs daily schedules
well, and how good; short answers
after PAGE 115
PROGRESS CHECK PAGES 42–43

UNIT 7 PAGES 44–49

We went dancing! Talking about past events; giving Simple past yes/no and Reduc
hat, these, Sentence
Free-time stress
and weekend activities opinionsabout
Writing aboutfavorite
past experiences;
clothes Wh-questions, statements,
“Flea market”: Buying andandselling
short Listen
uestions: how Listening to people shopping; talking about
“Online vacations
Shopping: The Crazy Things answers
thingswith regular and irregular of pas
parisons with listening for items, colors, and prices People Buy”: Reading about unusual verbs; past 116–117
PAGES of be
UNIT 8 PAGES 50–55 online items
How’s the neighborhood? Asking about and describing There is/there are; one, any, and Reduc
ons with do; Stores and in
Intonation places in a city;
questions locationstext
Writing of places;
messagesasking about and some; prepositions
“Are ofweekend?”:
you free this place; Listen
bject pronouns; neighborhoods;
Listening for likeshouses and
and dislikes describing
“The neighborhoods;
World’s Most Powerfulasking
Female quantifiers; questions:
Making plans; howand
inviting many and
giving descr
b + to + verb apartments about quantities
Musician”: Reading about a famous howexcuses
much; count and noncount nouns
PROGRESS CHECK PAGES 56–57 musician PAGE 118

(from Interchange
vi Level 1 Student’s Book (5th Edition) by Richards, J. C., Hull, J. and Proctor, S. 2021)
s/no and Intonation in statements Writing an email about family “Is that true?”: Finding out
ents, and short information about classmates’
l, nearly all,
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Listening for Teaching“Do Families Spend a Lot of Time
family relationships
families
Together?”: Reading about four families
me, not many, PAGE 119
one
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 14 | The syllabus

Comment
This syllabus is, like most coursebook syllabuses these days, multi-strand, but based
primarily on the situational or topic-based syllabus, as defined in the first column
under the topic headings. These, however, are very clearly linked to the basic
grammatical features listed in the third column. It’s not clear whether the topic was
chosen in order to cover the grammar, or the other way round, or a combination:
in any case, the grammatical syllabus is clearly an important component. Other
components are subsumed under one or more of the four skills of listening,
speaking, reading and writing. The priority is clearly speaking, shown in the first
main column after the topic heading, and appearing also as the primary skill
in the last column ‘Interchange activity’. Functions and notions appear under
‘Speaking’, ‘Listening’, ‘Writing’; and communicative tasks in the ‘Interchange
activity’. There is no explicit lexical syllabus.

14.3 The CEFR and language syllabuses

The CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) was originally
published in 2001, and most recently updated in a Companion Volume in 2020. It has had
substantial influence on syllabus design in many places, though it is not in itself a syllabus
by the definition provided at the beginning of this chapter: it does not define what is to
be taught or learnt in any specific course or sequence of courses. It is, as its title states, a
frame of reference: it provides descriptors of what a learner should be able to do – in any
language – at specified levels of proficiency.
The levels are defined as Pre-A1, A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2, ranging from very elementary to
very advanced, and are divided into categories of communicative use. These categories
comprise production (speaking and writing), reception (listening and reading), interaction
(all four skills) and mediation. The different activities and strategies in each category
are defined as ‘can-dos: for example’, one of the definitions of abilities of a learner at A2
level in reading is, ‘can read very short simple texts’, and at C1, ‘can understand long and
complex factual and literary texts, appreciating distinctions of style’. These are sometimes
called ‘standards’ or ‘competencies’.
There have been some problems with these definitions of levels: for example, the original
CEFR did not include a ‘Pre-A1’ level, which is clearly needed, and this was introduced only
at a later stage. Then there is the fact that some of the categories are very broad – B1, for
example – and saying that a learner is a B1 level does not give a very precise idea of what
they know and can do in the target language. Others have tried to address this problem
by suggesting more precise divisions: for example, Pearson’s Global Scale of English
(www.pearson.com/asia/educator/english-language/global-scale-of-english.html) offers a
scale of 10–90, showing how the different scores match the CEFR one, but subdividing the
CEFR A2, for example, into A2 and A2+. The original CEFR definitions of level, however,
although less precise, are more popular and widely used. We find their terms referred
to by policy makers and syllabus writers in a large number of countries worldwide, and
international exams in English such as IELTS have aligned their grading system with them.

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 14 | The syllabus

The influence of other aspects of the CEFR on syllabus design has not been so clear-cut.
The distinction into receptive and productive skills has been around for a while, and
the concept of interpersonal and transactional interaction also predates the publication
of the CEFR; these have probably received more validation from their position as basic
CEFR divisions, and appear in many modern syllabuses. The ‘mediation’ category is more
difficult to grasp, and has not been adopted to the same extent. Time will tell if it is in fact
a separate, substantial and teachable aspect of language use.
Then there are the ‘can-do’ descriptors of learner performance at the different levels as
defining language proficiency. National and local authorities designing a new syllabus
(often called ‘curriculum’ in these contexts) have frequently adopted such definitions.
Even if these do not include the modal ‘can’, their main items are clearly modeled on the
CEFR and take the form of performance objectives like, ‘Listen and comprehend short
and simple instructions used in classroom activities’. CEFR-based curricula have been
introduced or adapted in other countries: Ecuador, Malaysia, Israel and many others.
Their success, however, has been mixed. This, in my view, is because, as stated at the
beginning of this section, the descriptions of communicative abilities at specific levels
does not constitute a syllabus, only what successful outcomes look like. And even these
outcomes are sometimes rather vague: what, for example is a ‘simple’ text as referred to
in the first paragraph of this section? In any case, knowing what an outcome is does not
tell you what the learner needs to do in order to achieve it, or what the teacher needs to
teach: and this is precisely the information that a good syllabus should provide. Syllabuses
based on the CEFR, therefore, have often needed eventually to be supplemented: with
grammatical or lexical syllabuses, or with other types suggested in the previous section.
Tools have been developed which can help design such syllabuses. For example, the
English Vocabulary Profile (www.englishprofile.org/wordlists) and the English Grammar
Profile (www.englishprofile.org/english-grammar-profile) provide lists of lexical items and
grammatical features allocated to each of the CEFR levels.

14.4 Using the syllabus

Many teachers work in institutions where the syllabus is determined by an authority: a
national curriculum, for example, determined by the Ministry of Education for use in state
schools, or a syllabus for English for Academic Purposes established by a university.
How might you use an approved syllabus? Would you keep to it carefully, consulting it
regularly? Or would you refer to it only rarely, to check yourself? Or would you ignore it?
Here are statements by five teachers, describing how they use an approved syllabus.
Anna: The syllabus of my language school is very comprehensive. It includes grammar,
vocabulary, functions, notions, situations, and it refers to material I can use. I use it all the
time and could not do without it. When preparing a class or series of classes, I go first to
the syllabus, decide what to teach next according to its programme, plan how to combine
and schedule the components I have selected, and take the relevant books or materials
from the library as I need them.

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 14 | The syllabus

Joseph: I teach English for Academic Purposes in a university. There is a syllabus approved
by the institution, rather like Anna’s, but we don’t have to use it. I simply ignore it,
because I prefer to do my own thing, based on the needs of my students. I use materials
and activities from different sources (books for teachers, textbooks, supplementary
materials, literature) to create a rich and varied programme that is flexible enough to be
adapted to student needs during the course.
Maria: I teach in a state school and was trained in a state institution. They made us read
the national curriculum in my teacher-training course, but I haven’t looked at it since.
What for? I use an approved coursebook which lays out all the language I have to teach,
as well as giving me texts, exercises and ideas for activities. I assume the Ministry would
not have authorized the book if it didn’t follow the curriculum, so there’s no reason for
me to double-check if I’m teaching the right things.
Lilly: I have the syllabus, and look at it occasionally, but mostly I work from the
coursebook that my school chose for the class. It’s just that sometimes I get a bit fed up
with the coursebook and want to do something different. So I do my own thing for a bit,
and then use the syllabus as a retrospective checklist, to make sure I’m still reasonably on
target with the content. After all, I’m being employed to teach a certain syllabus, so I can’t
stray too far.
David: I’m a new teacher, just qualified, and not very confident of my knowledge of
English. The school can’t afford books for all the children, so I’m supposed to base my
lessons on the syllabus, and create my own lessons and materials. But the syllabus isn’t
very helpful to me: it’s all about general standards (‘The pupils at this level will be able to
hold simple conversations’), and I really need to know what language to teach! Luckily, I
have very helpful colleagues.

Pause for thought

If you are teaching, with which of the teachers above do you empathize with most?
And why?

Comment
I taught in a public school in a country where English is not normally spoken
outside the classroom. There is a national curriculum, and the textbooks used in
the schools have to be approved by the Ministry of Education; so my position was
nearest to that of Maria. I did sometimes look through the curriculum to check if
there were things my textbook didn’t cover that I might add.

In general, how teachers use the syllabus varies very widely between different countries
and institutions, and depends on financial resources as well as on teaching approach. In
situations where there are enough resources to invest in creating very detailed syllabuses
and buying a wide variety of teaching materials, teachers may find it most effective to
work mainly from the syllabus, using specific materials as they need them, as Anna does.

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 14 | The syllabus

In other relatively affluent settings, there may be a policy of allowing teachers complete
freedom in designing their teaching programme. In these cases, the syllabus may be non-
existent or ignored, and teachers like Joseph may develop new, independent programmes,
based mainly on their preferences and students’ needs. A competent and creative teacher
working with mature students can turn this into a unique, exciting and satisfying
teaching/learning experience. However, in most contexts the disadvantages outweigh the
advantages. Apart from an enormous amount of work for the teacher, the abandonment
of a carefully pre-planned syllabus may result in gaps in the language content. This may
not matter so much in a situation where the students are already very advanced, or if the
students are studying in an English-speaking country and have plenty of exposure to the
language outside the classroom. In other situations, however, it may make it very difficult
to plan a systematic and effective teaching programme. Also, the lack of clear structure
may make it difficult for teachers or learners to feel a sense of progress or evaluate learning
outcomes. When one coursebook per student can be afforded, the book tends to take
over the function of a syllabus, particularly if (as in the case of Maria) the book has been
recommended for use by the same authority that drew up the syllabus. Here, the use or
non-use of the syllabus to supplement the book depends on the personality of the teacher,
and their willingness to put in extra effort – as exemplified by Lilly.
There are some situations, however, like David’s, where even one book per student is an
unknown luxury. In such cases, the teacher needs to rely heavily on the syllabus. If, as in
David’s case, the syllabus does not provide very helpful guidance, then the teacher has to
resort to the help of colleagues or their own creativity. Note that sometimes the syllabus
has an extra role to play: as a source of information and reassurance for teachers who are
not confident of their own knowledge of English. In such cases, a multi-strand syllabus is
very helpful.

Review: Check yourself

1 What is a syllabus?
2 What are some basic features of all syllabuses?
3 Can you recall one or two optional features of a syllabus?
4 What may a multi-strand syllabus include?
5 In what kinds of situations may teachers prefer to work directly from the
syllabus when planning their courses?
6 In what situations might the syllabus not be very helpful?
7 What other function(s), besides helping to plan a course, can the
syllabus perform?

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 14 | The syllabus

Further reading
Brumfit, C. J. (Ed.) (1984). General English Syllabus Design (ELT Documents 118). Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
(A still very relevant collection of articles on principles of language syllabuses;
particularly useful papers by Brumfit and Stern)
Macalister, J. and Nation, I. S. P. (2019). Language Curriculum Design. Routledge.
(Comprehensive coverage of the main issues in syllabus design)
Richards, J. C. (2017). Curriculum Development in Language Teaching (2nd Edition).
Cambridge University Press.
(The stages of syllabus design, from needs assessment to evaluation, with
discussion questions)

References
Brown, D., Stewart, J., Stoeckel, T. and McLean, S. (2021). The coming paradigm shift in
the use of lexical units. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 43(5), 950–953.
Robinson, P. (2007). Criteria for classifying and sequencing pedagogic tasks. In Mayo, M.
(Ed.), Investigating tasks in formal language learning. Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
Council of Europe (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning,
Teaching, Assessment, Companion Volume. COUNCIL OF EUROPE.
https://rm.coe.int/common-european-framework-of-reference-for-languages-learning-
teaching/16809ea0d4
Richards, J. C., Hull, J. and Proctor, S. (2021). Interchange Level 1 Student’s Book (5th Edition).
Cambridge University Press.

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 15 Teaching/learning materials

Overview

15.1 The coursebook: approach, components, presentation.

15.2 How necessary is a coursebook? Advantages and disadvantages.
15.3 Evaluating the coursebook. Some criteria for evaluating a coursebook
when selecting or deciding how to use it.
15.4 Using course materials. Some suggestions for how to add to, shorten or
change course materials to make them more appropriate for a particular class.
15.5 Other materials and resources. Various kinds of materials that can
supplement those provided by a coursebook.

15.1 The coursebook: approach, components, presentation

The most common type of teaching/learning materials used in English teaching
worldwide is the coursebook or textbook. Here, I’ll make a distinction between these two
terms. Coursebook will be used to designate the book that covers all the texts, tasks and
language points that will be taught in a course. Textbook, in contrast, is a more general
term: it could refer to a coursebook, but could also be a book of grammar exercises, or of
reading texts with comprehension questions.
Both are most frequently used in the form of conventional paper books. Online or digital
course materials are on the increase, but the evidence is that a substantial majority of
students prefer paper textbooks, at least at university level (Baron et al., 2017), and this
may well be true of younger students as well.

Approach
A coursebook follows – or sometimes only claims to follow – a certain approach to
language teaching and learning, leading to a preferred methodology, which is often
explained in the introduction or the blurb on the back cover. This approach may or may
not be implemented in the content of the book. For example, many modern coursebooks
claim to follow the communicative approach, but in fact much, if not most, of their space
is taken up with activities whose main aim is getting the language right – vocabulary,
grammar and pronunciation – rather than engaging learners in communicative tasks.

Components
The main components in any coursebook are:
• the syllabus, usually laid out as a table of contents at the beginning;

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• reading and listening texts with following comprehension work;

• writing and speaking tasks;
• explanations of language points (usually grammar);
• grammar and vocabulary exercises;
• lists of new vocabulary.
It may also provide:
• transcripts of listening comprehension texts;
• a glossary of vocabulary items at the end of the book;
• tests;
• extra practice exercises on grammar and vocabulary, (sometimes in a separate
workbook);
• a teacher’s book, or teacher’s guide, in a separate book;
• a website, with further guidance or materials.

Presentation
An important aspect of the coursebook is how it is presented: what the page looks
like, how easy it is to identify headings and navigate to different pages and texts. Most
coursebooks these days are full colour, with plenty of pictures. Pages are often divided into
two columns in order to get as much material as possible on each page.

Pause for thought

Have a look at a coursebook you know. Check out its approach, components and
presentation. Did you find any components not listed here? Was anything missing?
Do you have any particular comments?

Comment
I looked at a locally published textbook for use in schools (A2–B1-level teenagers)3.
Its syllabus is laid out using ‘can-dos’ modelled on the CEFR (see 14 The syllabus),
under the headings of reading, listening, speaking, writing, collaborative task,
vocabulary and grammar. Its blurb on the back cover shows how it is coordinated
with the national curriculum, which is CEFR-based, but there is no indication of
an explicit approach to language teaching: perhaps this is taken for granted in
the local context. All the components mentioned above are there: vocabulary is
particularly prominent, with lists of words and many vocabulary exercises. The page
layout is spaced and easy to navigate, with a lot of pictures and coloured headings.

3
Moshe, S. (2021). Teamwork. Eric Cohen Books.

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15.2 How necessary is a coursebook?

Pause for thought

In the context of a teaching situation you are familiar with, whether as teacher
or learner, what would your own answer be to the question in the heading of
this section?

Comment
In my own teaching situation (public schools within a state education system),
I could not have managed without the coursebook: I simply did not have the
time to search for appropriate texts and tasks to give my students. Even today,
with the enormous quantity and variety of resources quickly and easily available
online, it would take too long to search, copy and adapt. So my answer is: it was
absolutely necessary, for me. But this does not mean that I taught only and fully
what was in the book; and I allowed myself considerable liberties with how, and
how much, I used it. So I could do my own thing occasionally, knowing that I had a
structured programme to return to. It is my experience that the students also prefer
to have a coursebook. The classes which I have tried to teach using a selection of
materials from different sources have complained of a sense of lack of purpose.
Interestingly, they also said that they felt that their studies – and, by implication,
they themselves – were not taken seriously. It seems that having a coursebook may
carry a certain prestige.

Advantages and disadvantages

In some places, it is taken for granted that coursebooks are used as the basis for courses.
In others, they may not be used at all, and the teacher bases their teaching on a syllabus,
or their own programme based on an evaluation of the learners’ needs, using personally
selected teaching materials. A third situation is a compromise, where a coursebook is used
selectively, not necessarily in sequence, and is extensively supplemented by other materials.
Below is a list of advantages and disadvantages of using a coursebook, whether print or digital.

Advantages
• Framework. A coursebook provides a clear framework. Teachers and students know
where they are going and what is coming next, so there is a sense of structure and
progress.
• Syllabus. In many places, the coursebook is used as a syllabus. If it is followed
systematically, an appropriate and graded selection of content (language items or other
aspects such as topics or tasks) will be covered (see 14 The syllabus).
• Ready-made texts and tasks. The coursebook provides texts and learning tasks which
are likely to be of an appropriate level for most of the class. This saves time for the
teacher, who would otherwise have to prepare their own.

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• Guidance. For inexperienced teachers, the coursebook can give useful guidance and
support; it can even fulfil a teacher training/development function in that it provides
ideas on how to plan and teach lessons, as well as explanations of language points and
suggestions for how to activate students.
• Learner autonomy. The student can use the coursebook to learn new material, and
review and monitor their own progress autonomously. A student without a coursebook
is likely to be much more teacher-dependent.

Disadvantages of a coursebook
• Inadequacy. Every individual class has their own learning needs. No single coursebook
can possibly meet all of these satisfactorily.
• Irrelevance, lack of interest. The topics in the coursebook may not be relevant or
interesting for your class. And they may date rapidly, whereas materials you choose
yourself can be more up to date.
• Cultural inappropriateness. The content of a coursebook may be culturally
inappropriate, which not only may make it irrelevant or uninteresting, but can also
cause discomfort or even offence.
• Limited range of level. Coursebooks target a particular level and rarely cater for the
wide range of levels of ability or proficiency that exist in most classes.
• Possible negative effect on teaching. Teachers may follow the coursebook uncritically
and be discouraged from using their own initiative: they may find themselves
functioning merely as mediators of its content instead of as teachers in their own right.

Further comments and conclusion

Through my own teaching, I have come to appreciate the advantages of using a coursebook
as described in my comment on the Pause for thought on the previous page. But the
experience of other teachers is different. Meddings and Thornbury (2009), for example,
relate the story of a teacher who found himself bereft of all textbooks (and with no online
resources available), teaching a programme based only on the needs of his students, and his
attempts to address those needs – with excellent results. The Dogme approach, described in
the same book, supports a materials-light approach: using materials as an auxiliary resource,
certainly, but not allowing them to dominate or dictate the process of classroom teaching,
which is essentially based on a dialogue between teacher and learner(s).
Coursebooks are certainly widely used – but this may not mean that they are necessary.
On the positive side, their widespread use may be taken as evidence that coursebooks
are useful or even important for effective teaching. More negative reasons could be that
teachers are too lazy or unprofessional to make their own materials, or that the publishers
are very good at marketing, or even that the authority that approves their purchase and
use sees them as a means of controlling how learners are taught.
In any case, coursebooks are not about to disappear any time soon, and for many, the
question in the heading of this section is purely academic. If your course is built on
a coursebook, for whatever reason, the most important issue that you are likely to be
interested in is not whether or not to use it, but how (see Section 4).

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15.3 Evaluating the coursebook

If you are to use a coursebook, whether as the basis of your course or as an occasional
resource, it is worth thinking about how you recognize a good one, and why you might
reject or substantially adapt it. In other words, what are your main criteria for evaluation?
These criteria may be general (suitable for any language-teaching materials) or specific
(looking at the appropriateness of a set of materials for a certain course or group of
learners). An example of a general criterion might be: ‘clear layout and font’, or ‘provides
regular review or test sections’. A specific criterion for a class of younger learners might
be: ‘attractive and colourful illustrations’, or for a class of medical students: ‘vocabulary
and texts relevant to medicine’. The criteria suggested below are my own, but they rely on
ideas suggested in a number of books and articles on the subject (see some useful sources
in Further reading on page 219). They apply both to print and digital materials.
Read the list of criteria for evaluating language-learning coursebooks below. If you do not
want to do the task in Pause for thought, then skip to the following Comment.

Pause for thought

Have a look at the list of criteria below. How important do you feel each criterion is
for selecting a coursebook? Under ‘Importance’ use the following symbols to note
your opinion: ✓✓ for ‘essential’ (without this I wouldn’t use the coursebook); ✓ for
‘quite important’; ? for ‘not sure’; ✗ for ‘not important’; ✗✗ for ‘totally unimportant’
(it wouldn’t make any difference to me if it was there or not). Then, optionally, add
further criteria you feel are significant, and note their importance.

Criterion Importance
1 The methodological approach and objectives are clearly explained in
the introduction, and implemented in the material.
2 The approach is culturally acceptable to the target students.
3 There is an explicit syllabus, which is covered systematically.
4 The layout is clear and attractive, and the print is easy to read. If
digital, then it is easy to navigate from page to page.
5 The texts and tasks are interesting.
6 The texts and tasks are varied in level and style, afford learning
opportunities for different learner levels, learning styles, interests, etc.
7 Instructions are clear.
8 There are review and test sections.
9 There are pronunciation and spelling explanations and practice.
10 There are vocabulary explanations and practice.

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11 There are grammar explanations and practice.

12 There are tasks that activate the students in listening, speaking, reading
and writing.
13 The material encourages learners to develop their own learning
strategies and to become independent in their learning.
14 There is adequate guidance for the teacher (teacher’s guide, or
teacher’s notes).
15 There are audio recordings available.
16 There are visual materials available: posters, video, flashcards, etc.
17 There is a coursebook website, with guidance and supplementary
materials available.
18 The material is easily available and not too expensive.

Comment
1 Approach and objectives. This is important, but check that the objectives
expressed in the introduction to the coursebook are in fact implemented.
Sometimes they are not!
2 Cultural aspects. How important this is depends on your teaching context.
Some communities are more sensitive than others.
3 Syllabus. Essential. Check what kind of a syllabus the coursebook has. This
should be clear from the table of contents at the beginning (see 14 The
syllabus). Does it provide coverage of all the items you think are essential?
And are these items in fact covered in the material itself? You may need
to make sure that the coursebook follows syllabuses which are relevant to
your teaching situation: a national syllabus, for example, or one relevant to
an international exam like IELTS.
4 Layout. This is vitally important. The material has to be not only pleasing to
the eye, but also clear and navigable: both you and your students need to
be able to find your way around it quickly and smoothly. The texts should be
very clear and readable (so it is not a good idea to have overly decorative
fonts, or pictures behind text, which make reading difficult, particularly for
anyone suffering from dyslexia). The same applies to digital material: you
also need to be able to move around it easily, and any hyperlinks need to
work readily.

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5 Interest. I would rank this as quite important. On the one hand, skilful and
imaginative teaching can make even the most boring texts and tasks
interesting (and conversely bad teaching can kill the most interesting
ones!). On the other hand, it helps a lot if the book provides interesting
material that you will enjoy using, adapting as necessary for your classes.
6 Varied learning opportunities. Quite important. This quality is one that is
often missing in coursebooks. There should be some texts which are easier
or more difficult. Tasks should be designed to allow for performance at
different levels. Texts and tasks should vary also in the topic, the language
style, the type of participation or learning strategies they require, etc. The
lack of such variation is not a reason to reject the book, but if it exists, it is a
positive feature.
7 Clear instructions. Essential. For a monolingual class of beginners, this may
mean providing instructions and explanations in the L1.
8 Reviews and tests. The inclusion of these features may or may not be
important to you. Review exercises and tests are sometimes provided on the
course website rather than in the main materials themselves. Often, however,
you will prefer to create your own. What you actually teach is never exactly
what the coursebook provides: you may skip some bits and add others, in
which case the coursebook reviews and tests might not be suitable. So this
component is probably less essential than some of the others.
9 Pronunciation and spelling. How much emphasis is put on these depends
on the approach in your teaching situation, so the evaluation here will also
vary. Pronunciation problems can often be dealt with as they come up, so
you do not necessarily need a systematic programme in the coursebook.
Spelling is surprisingly rarely taught or practised in many coursebooks, so
you may need to initiate work on it yourself.
10 Vocabulary. This is an essential component. The materials should provide
plenty of vocabulary expansion and review activities.
11 Grammar. In many contexts, substantial grammar coverage is required, but
in others it is not. So the evaluation is likely to range from ‘essential’ to ‘not sure’.
12 Listening, speaking, reading and writing. Essential. Tasks activating the
four skills are the main basis for communicative practice. The coursebook
should provide texts and tasks that promote fluency and accuracy in the
four skills in communicative situations, as well as opportunities for students
to do mixed-skills activities.
13 Learner independence. Whether the materials encourage learner
independence and autonomy is quite important, but it is a very difficult aspect
to evaluate. Some things to look for are computer-based tasks which enable
self-checking, and tasks that require initiative on the part of the students.

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14 Teacher’s guides. Teacher’s guides are quite important, particularly – but

not only – for novice teachers. The teacher’s materials provide not only keys
to exercises and audioscripts, but also useful tips on ways of dealing with
texts and tasks.
15 Audio and video recordings. This is an essential component for oral input
and listening comprehension. It’s quite important that at least some of
these recordings should be video.
16 Visual materials. Visual materials such as posters and flashcards, whether
on paper or displayed digitally, are essential for classes of younger learners.
They provide an enjoyable break from the printed pages of coursebooks,
focus attention and are likely to improve learning. For older or more
advanced classes, they may be useful but less essential.
17 Website. The course website is a fairly standard component, even if the
main book is paper. Often the audio/video recordings and teacher’s guide
can be found there, as well as supplementary exercises, tests and texts, and
links to other useful websites. It is not absolutely necessary, but it may be
quite an important added resource.
18 Availability. This is perhaps obvious, but essential. The most desirable
coursebook in the world cannot be used if it is too expensive for your
institution or students to afford, or if it is not easily available in your country.

Pause for thought

Have a look at a textbook you have used yourself, either as a teacher or as a

learner. How would you evaluate it, using the above criteria?

Comment
Very often, even if your evaluation of many of the points above is fairly negative,
you may have no choice, as a teacher, as to whether to use the book or not: the
institution or some other authority may have chosen it for you. The evaluation,
however, can give you a solid basis for deciding which aspects of it to supplement
or adapt. Some ideas on adaptation are shown in the next section.

15.4 Using course materials

This section applies both to standard coursebooks, as discussed above, and to other kinds
of materials, such as grammar or reading comprehension supplementary textbooks,
worksheets, websites providing any of these, audio and video recordings, and more.

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When looking through materials we are going to use in class, we need to be aware
of what they do well and what is missing or could be improved. For example, if the
coursebook does not provide enough reading texts or grammar practice, we might
want to supplement it by using free-access material available online. But problems with
specific components that you want to use within teaching units can only be solved by
you yourself in the classroom. You may find it necessary to make substantial changes,
deletions and additions. Here is a sample of problems that teachers in particular situations
might encounter with coursebook texts or tasks. Note that no criticism is intended of the
extracts in themselves; it’s just that they may not, for various reasons, address the needs of
a particular group of students.

Using the materials: some issues

Paolo (teaching in a primary school in Italy)
I have this grammar exercise in my book.
1 Venice is ……………………… (beautiful) than London.
2 This school is …………………………… (big) than that one.
3 This was ……………………………. (bad) day of my life!
4 Which is ………………………………. (heavy): a pound or a kilo?
5 Which supermarket has the ………………………….. (cheap) vegetables?
6 She was ……………………………. (popular) singer in the festival.
7 For me, mathematics is ………………………. (difficult) than English
I feel it’s important to do lots of grammar practice with my students, but exercises like this
one are rather boring; the students get fed up doing them, and they’re pretty meaningless
– my students could get them all right without understanding most of the sentences.
Finally, they’re too short: they don’t give enough opportunities for (meaningful) practice.
Emilia (teaching in a private language school in Brazil).
I used this as a reading comprehension text.
Who was Robin Hood? Nobody knows. In the film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Robin
was rich, but this probably wasn’t true. We know that he was a popular hero in the
13th century. It’s possible the real man was born before then. Who were the Merry
Men? Little John and Will Scarlet were famous Merry Men. Robin Hood was the leader
of this group of men (and women). Why were Robin Hood and his Merry Men famous?
They were famous for robbing rich people. But Robin Hood and his Merry Men weren’t
robbers – the money was for poor people.
(adapted from Active Grammar 1, Davis, F. and Rimmer, W. 2011)
It’s interesting, and my students relate well to the topic, but it’s a bit too short and easy
for my class of 12-year-old students. They need more challenge.

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 Burglars / Kidnappers stole
items worth more than
15 | Teaching/learning materials
kidnap £50,000 in three months.

Hugo
e Now(teaching in a university
go to Vocabulary in France).
Focus 8B on p.161
I wanted to get my adult students (about B2 level) to talk, and my coursebook suggested
5 SPEAKING
this activity:
a Read the following situations. What would you
have done?
• ‘I saw my best friend stealing something in the
supermarket. Of course I didn’t tell anyone – she’s my
friend.’
• ‘A colleague in my office lied about the company accounts.
I was the only one who knew he was lying. I sent my
manager an anonymous note.’
• ‘In our final exam at university, I saw a student in our year
look at answers on a small piece of paper. I didn’t say
anything. It wasn’t anything to do with me.’

(from
b Which Empower
of these Upper-intermediate/B2
situations do you think is most Student’s Book 2nd Edition, by Doff, A. et al. 2022)
serious? Why?
But after they’d done the task (each said what they would have done), they stopped
talking. Howit’scan
c Do you think I get
always them to
important tobetalk more?
honest?

Takumi
© Cambridge University (teaching in a boys’ school in Japan)
Press
For reference purposes only
I have this text in my book: 97

Tac k lin g o b e s it y
A Obesity is becoming a major problem in D Some people argue that foods that are
many parts of the world. In Britain alone, high in fat, such as pizza and potato
there was a 30% increase in the number chips, and those high in refined sugar, like
of people being admitted to hospital chocolate and sweets, should be taxed.
with problems related to obesity last year. This would make junk food too expensive
An estimated 60% of British adults are for people to buy in large quantities. In
overweight. Denmark, there is now a tax on products
B One way of tackling obesity is to eat less that contain more than 2.3% of saturated
but to eat more healthily. An average fat. However, taxing fast food is difficult
man needs around 2,500 calories per because fast food companies are rich and
day, while an average woman requires powerful.
around 2,000 per day. We should eat a E The role of advertising should not be
balanced diet which consists of a variety forgotten. Advertising junk food at times
of foods in order to maintain a healthy when children are watching TV was
weight. A healthy diet should include banned in Malaysia in 2007. This was
approximately 35% fruit and vegetables; designed to better protect them from the
35% carbohydrates, such as bread, rice, influence of advertising while they learn
potatoes and pasta (or other starchy food); how to choose between treats and foods
around 15% dairy products like milk and that are good for them. On the other
cheese; 10% proteins, for example meat, hand, there have also been TV education
fish, eggs and beans; and only around 5% campaigns to encourage people to eat
should be sweet foods – namely cakes or five portions of fruit and vegetables per
biscuits – especially those that are high in day. It has been estimated that if people
fat and sugar. ate enough fruit and vegetables, up to 2.7
C In many countries, nutritional values are million lives per year could be saved.
shown on food packaging. In Britain, F Governments need to promote healthy
there is a traffic light system to show eating and the importance of five portions
more clearly how good or bad a particular of fruit and vegetables per day. Similarly,
food product is. Red next to ‘sugar’, for they need to fight obesity by discouraging
example, means that the product is high people from eating fats and sugars. They
in that particular item; yellow means must also encourage people to be more
the product is neither high nor low in active by providing opportunities for
sugar; and green means the product only everyone to get fit, no matter how rich
has a small amount of sugar in it. The or poor they may be. If governments can
traffic light system helps people to know change people’s habits, the world will be a
immediately whether the food product is healthier place in the future.
good for them.

(from Unlock 3 Student’s Book 2nd Edition by Westbrook, C., Baker, L. and Sowton, C. 2021)
Reading for detail
Reading for detail means reading the text carefully to extract important details
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The topic is quite interesting, but it’s too difficult: some of the vocabulary is really
advanced (obesity, for example), and the text is far too long.

Pause for thought

Before reading on … What would you suggest to these teachers? What could they
do with the tasks or texts in order to address the issues they bring up?

Comment
Adapting material from a coursebook means freeing ourselves from the
assumption that materials should be used in the way the author seems to have
intended, and allowing ourselves to change the instructions, or even the actual
text, so that they are accessible to, and provide for more learning by, our students.
Your ideas are probably based on such strategies, as are my suggestions below.

Paolo: boring, meaningless and too-short grammar exercises.

Here are some ideas for Paolo which will help add interest and length. Probably it’s a good
idea to do the exercise once very quickly as is, and then do one or more of the following:
• Tell students to close their books and try to recall all seven of the completed sentences.
They can work in pairs. Then, in full class, check answers. So that gives you more
practice – and it’s actually meaningful, too, because as a rule we don’t remember things
that are meaningless. If they remember them, they probably understand them, too.
• For any sentence(s) students choose: tell them to ignore the adjective in brackets, and
suggest any other comparative or superlative adjectives that make sense with the rest of
the sentence. For example, the first sentence could be ‘Venice is warmer than London’
or ‘Venice is smaller than London’. This obviously has to be meaningful, and provides
extra, more interesting, practice.
• Again, for any sentence(s) students choose: tell them to ignore the sentence endings,
and invent their own, using comparatives or superlatives: so sentence 5 might be
‘Which supermarket has the freshest fruit?’ This adds meaning, more practice and is
more interesting.
• Ask students to change selected statements (it doesn’t work for questions) in whatever
way they like in order to make them true for them. So for sentence 7, for example,
they might say ‘For me, mathematics is more difficult than Italian.’ This is still
practising comparative and superlative of adjectives, but adding more practice and a
personal aspect.
• Tell students to ignore all the sentences, except for the adjective in brackets, and
invent sentences using that adjective in the comparative or superlative to make true
sentences. (Or, for fun, false sentences!) Again, you get more, and more meaningful and
interesting, practice.

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Emilia: short, easy reading passage

This is indeed quite an easy text, though you might need to teach your students words
like leader, merry (note that merry is a relatively rare word, a bit archaic, but leader more
useful). Some things you might do to make it more challenging are:
• Give students five minutes to work on their own, inserting as many adjectives and
adverbs as they can in the passage. Then share the results. This immediately makes the
passage longer and more advanced.
• Tell students to take pairs of simple sentences from the text, and combine them into
one sentence; or a pair of parallel clauses, and combine them into one. They can
change the wording as necessary. For example, ‘In the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,
Robin was rich, but this probably wasn’t true,’ might be changed to ‘Although in the
film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Robin was rich, this probably wasn’t true.’ This adds
more advanced grammar.
• Send students to the internet to find out as much as they can about Robin Hood, write
notes, and share the information they have found in the following lesson, either orally
or in writing.
• Display the text on the board and invite students to insert whole phrases or sentences
of at least three words, wherever they like, provided they make sense. This can easily be
done if you have digital text – and is feasible even using handwriting on a whiteboard.
If students have done the internet research, as suggested above, then the insertions
could relate to what they have found out.
• Select specific words from the text (for example, hero, real, rich, popular, etc.), and tell
students for homework to find out from dictionaries, thesauri or by searching online as
many other words of similar meaning as they can for each.

Hugo: they stop talking.

The basic issue that students are asked to talk about is an interesting one, but the task
invites only one response from each participant, which may or may not develop into a
general discussion – in Hugo’s class, it obviously didn’t.
Here are two adaptations that could help, both of which require consensus and are
therefore more likely to get the student to continue the discussion beyond initial
responses.
• Delete the last sentence (or two sentences in the third bullet point), leaving only the
description of the dishonest behaviour. Then tell students they need to agree on a new
final sentence – what ‘I’ did in response – which should express their own agreed ideas
on an appropriate response by the writer.
• Leave the passages as they are, but change the task. The group of students are the
editorial team of a website which provides advice to people who write in with their
problems. The writer in each case has written to say they aren’t sure they responded
rightly, and to ask the team for their response and advice. The team has to agree on the
wording of a short letter in response.

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Takumi: long, difficult passage

Takumi mentions two problems here: vocabulary and length.
Vocabulary
• Don’t try to preteach all previously unknown vocabulary before reading – that would
just overwhelm and discourage the students. They need to discover the rest of the new
items gradually, preferably in context. But it’s useful to pre-teach the main key words
(such as, in this case, obesity, tackle, carbohydrates).
• Use the title of the article to initiate a discussion of the topic. Such a discussion may
well throw up more useful vocabulary, and awareness of the issues to be discussed will
make understanding the main text easier when they come to it.
• If you have a digital version of the text, then before presenting the passage, delete the
difficult bits wherever you can without altering the basic message, and present the text
the first time without them. Present the full text later.
Length
• Read the text bit by bit, so that the students are not faced with the entire text at one
session. In the first lesson, work only on the first few sentences, perhaps simplified as
suggested above, teaching new vocabulary as necessary. Challenge students to predict
what more information will be provided later in this report; then continue reading,
working on each paragraph on its own before progressing to the next.
• When you have finished working through the entire passage, read it aloud to the
students again, to familiarize further.
• Only after the students know the basic content and sequence of argument of the
simplified passage, let them read the original with the deleted items reinstated, and
work on these as necessary.

Bottom line
The coursebook provides you with useful texts and tasks which you can use as the
basis for your teaching programme. But that is essentially what it is: a good basis. The
coursebook authors do not know your class: you do. You are the best person to decide
how much of the material to use, and how. Be selective and critical, using your own
professional judgement to decide where it needs to be changed and where it does not.
As the examples above show, coursebook materials can be adapted (sometimes quite
drastically) in order to create appropriate, learning-rich and interesting activities for
your class.

15.5 Other materials and resources

Whether or not you are using a coursebook, you will sooner or later want to resort to
other types of material to enrich your teaching.

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Reference books
In spite of the fact that online dictionaries, thesauri and grammars are used a lot, I find
that I often also look up language items in my print editions, particularly the thesaurus.
You probably need both.
The main type of reference book is, of course, the dictionary. A monolingual English
dictionary such as the Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary, for example, or The Merriam-Webster
Dictionary, is traditionally seen as preferable to bilingual. Personally, I prefer to send students
to look up words in bilingual ones: it’s quicker and in many ways more reliable. Where
the monolingual dictionary comes in useful is in vocabulary-expansion activities: sending
students to look up words they know, for example, in order to learn more about them.
Other useful reference books are the thesaurus (e.g., Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and
Phrases) and a good teacher’s grammar (I usually use Michael Swan’s Practical English Usage).

Textbooks
You will find it useful to have a variety of English-teaching textbooks on your shelves,
or stored digitally. These could include coursebooks designed for other courses, but
also books focusing on particular aspects of language such as grammar, vocabulary,
pronunciation, style and so on. If you are designing your own materials for a course,
these will be invaluable as resources to dip into; or they can be used to supplement a
coursebook where you feel something is missing or inadequately covered.

Teacher handbooks
Teacher handbooks are collections of practical suggestions for classroom activities to promote
language learning. There are an enormous number of them available, as well as websites
that provide ideas for lessons or individual activities. They are, however of very variable
quality, and probably most of them not appropriate for your needs: they may focus on a
specific student population which may not have much in common with yours, or suggest
ideas that are not practicable in your classes. Searching for useful material can take a lot of
time. Look for books or online resources coming from reputable publishers (the Cambridge
Handbooks for Language Teachers, for example) or well-known organizations such as TESOL.
Take every opportunity to browse through the teacher handbooks at teachers’ conferences or
in bookshops, and ask experienced colleagues which handbooks they have found useful.

Books and simplified readers for extensive reading

The importance of extensive reading has already been discussed in 10 Teaching reading.
A library of suitable books is therefore essential for any institution where English is
taught. It’s not advisable to base this on online material, since even today it appears
that most people prefer to use conventional books for reading for pleasure. There should
be plenty of simplified readers, fiction and non-fiction, at different levels as well as
unsimplified books for more advanced learners. Getting a group of students to read such
books regularly is easier said than done, as many experienced teachers will testify. It
requires ongoing monitoring of book borrowing and returning, and constant investment

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in new books. However, it is certainly worthwhile: the expense is relatively small, and the
benefits for language learning are substantial.

Worksheets and test papers

Teachers very often prepare worksheets for their students with extra reading or language
practice, as well as class tests. It’s true that there is an enormous number of worksheets
and tests available on the internet: the problem is that, as with suggestions for classroom
activities discussed above, it takes a lot of searching to find what you want, and the
material you eventually find may need further adaptation before you can use it.
Worksheets and tests prepared by teachers for classes within the institution, on the other
hand, are likely to be useful also to other teachers in the same institution later. So it is
worth storing both digital and paper forms of such materials for future use by others.

Pictures and other graphic material

Pictures are invaluable, particularly (though not only) for younger learners. The time is gone
when teachers used to spend hours leafing through glossy magazines and colour supplements
of newspapers to find suitable pictures: today, we can find and download all the pictures we
need at the click of a mouse. These can then be glued onto card, or even laminated if they
are to be used repeatedly, and filed. It is, of course, possible to display digital pictures with a
projector or interactive whiteboard, or send them to students’ own digital devices: but paper
materials have the advantage that they can be easily handled, moved and exchanged rather
than stuck to a computer screen. Bottom line: there is a place for both.

Corpora and corpus-based resources

It is very useful to have some of the major corpora readily available on the institution’s
computer system: to check out the frequency of a particular word, or how a vocabulary
item collocates with other words, or in which varieties of English a particular word is
more, or less, common. One useful source is English Corpora (www.english-corpora.org),
which provides COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), BNC (the British
National Corpus), GloWbe (the Global Web-based English), and others. Some useful
online corpus-based resources are:
• Sketch Engine (sketchengine.eu), a very reader-friendly, quick way of finding out the
frequency of a given word, its contexts of use and most common collocations;
• Vocabulary Profilers, which can identify the frequency of words in any given text (see
5 Texts, Section 4 for more details);
• Google Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams), which shows you whether a
word, or phrase, is becoming more, or less, widely used over time.
Some writers on ELT have suggested that students be invited to check out such issues
themselves by having direct recourse to a corpus, in what is called DDL (data-driven learning).
There have been some good results in terms of learning outcomes (e.g., Lee et al., 2019). On

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the other hand, the time taken to access information by studying a corpus is much longer
than the time it would take for the learners to get the same information directly from a
teacher or by looking it up online. It is doubtful whether the added learning value is worth
the investment in time and effort.
Other digital resources available online
For a detailed discussion of these, see 18 Digital technology and online teaching.

Review: Check yourself

1 What are some components that are very likely to be found in all coursebooks?
2 Can you think of at least three arguments in favour of using a coursebook, and
three against?
3 What are some key criteria to use if you need to select a new coursebook?
4 What sorts of things can be done to improve a textbook grammar exercise that
is boring and does not provide enough practice?
5 What might be done to make a difficult text easier for the class to cope with?
6 What are some important teaching materials and resources other than
the coursebook?

Further reading
McGrath, I. (2013). Teaching Materials and the Roles of EFL/ESL teachers: Practice and Theory.
London: Bloomsbury Academic.
(Various aspects of the design and use of materials, from the teacher’s perspective)
Mishan, F. and Timmis, I. (2015). Materials Development for TESOL. Edinburgh University Press.
(Mainly targeting the materials designer; aspects of design and processes of
production and evaluation)
Tomlinson, B. (Ed.) (2011). Materials Development for Language Teaching (2nd Edition).
Cambridge University Press.
(A collection of articles about different aspects of materials development and use)

References
Baron, N. S., Calixte, R. M. and Havewala, M. (2017). The persistence of print among
university students: An exploratory study. Telematics and Informatics, 34(5), 590–604.
Davis, F. and Rimmer, W. (2011). Active Grammar 1. Cambridge University Press.
Doff, A., Thaine, C., Puchta, H., Stranks, J. and Lewis-Jones, P. (2022). Empower Upper-
intermediate/B2 Student’s Book 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press.

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 15 | Teaching/learning materials

Lee, H., Warschauer, M. and Lee, J. H. (2019). The effects of corpus use on second language
vocabulary learning: A multilevel meta-analysis. Applied Linguistics, 40(5), 721–753.
Meddings, L. and Thornbury, S. (2009). Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in English Language
Teaching. Delta Publishing.
Westbrook, C., Baker, L. and Sowton, C. (2021). Unlock 3 Student’s Book 2nd Edition.
Cambridge University Press.

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 16 Teaching content

Overview

16.1 Different kinds of content. The different types of subject matter included in
English courses.
16.2 Cultural content. Various kinds of cultural content, and the fostering of
intercultural competence.
16.3 Teaching subject matter through English: CLIL and EMI. Associated issues
and some guidelines on implementation.
16.4 Literature as a component of the English course. Advantages and
disadvantages of the inclusion of literature in the course.
16.5 Underlying messages. Checking the underlying values-based or cultural
implications of teaching materials.

16.1 Different kinds of content

By content I mean the subject matter that texts or tasks engage with, as distinct from the
target language features, such as grammar and vocabulary. Here are some samples:
• Zero or trivial content. Bland, fairly neutral characters and events; superficially
interesting topics with no cultural or other information or connection with real-
world issues: for example, sentences about a fictional ‘John and Mary’ doing everyday
activities; descriptions of conventional families; trivial anecdotes.
• The students themselves. Exploration of students’ own experiences, knowledge,
opinions and feelings: for example, activities that ask students to write about someone
they know, or compare tastes in food and drink.
• The local environment. Treatment of institutions, people, places, events, etc. from the
students’ own town, country or background: for example, Greek students might discuss
places they would recommend that tourists should visit in Greece.
• Moral, educational, political or social issues. Presentation of topics showing different
points of view, and encouraging students to express opinions: for example, an article
describing a social conflict, or a dilemma to which students suggest a solution.
• An academic subject. Topics based on other subjects on the school or university
curriculum, such as science or history. In some cases, an entire school subject, or an
entire university course, may be taught in English (for a more detailed discussion,
see Section 3).

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• Occupation-linked content. Subjects relevant to a particular area of employment: for

example, business, tourism or medicine.
• The English-speaking countries. Discussion of institutions, etc. from countries where
English is the predominant language. Materials might cover British or American
history, culture and customs, famous people, etc.
• General knowledge. Information about any subject in the arts, sciences, history,
current affairs and more; celebrities; natural phenomena; social and cultural topics.
• Literature. To some extent a part of culture, but important enough to be listed as a
separate section: stories, novels, plays and poetry written in English or translated into it.
See Section 4.
• The English language itself. Apart from explanations of the grammar or other features
of the language, other topics may be included, such as the history and development
of the English language, the etymology or morphology of words, other interesting
linguistic phenomena.
Why different courses emphasize some types of content and not others depends mainly
on the objectives of the course and the target student population. If your students are
immigrants whose purpose is to integrate into an English-speaking community, then
topics that are based on that community will be very important. If, on the other hand,
they are learning English as an international language for general communication
purposes, then the focus will be more on other subjects, such as general knowledge or
international cultures. If the course is ESP, then the content will target the subject of the
course: for example, engineering, medicine or tourism. If you are a schoolteacher and see
yourself as an educator as much as an instructor in English, you may want to emphasize
educational content: so you might prefer to choose material that emphasizes different
educational issues or world or general knowledge.

Pause for thought

Thinking back to language courses (not necessarily in English) that you yourself
have either taught or participated in as a learner, which of the subjects above do
you remember as being predominant? Which were less used?

Comment
Most of the courses I am familiar with are based on mainly informational
content – topics listed under ‘General knowledge’ above – very often laid out as
newspaper articles. Subjects to do with the English-speaking nations were still
included in courses taught 30 years ago, but are on the decline now, as English
is today seen as mainly a tool of international communication. Literature is also
taught, as it is a requirement for the national school-leaving exams. Finally, there is
a substantial component of local-interest content: tourist attractions, for example,
or local customs.

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16.2 Cultural content

Our courses also include cultural content, although some of this may be embodied in
underlying messages – how the surface subject matter is presented – as much as in the
subject matter itself: see Section 5.
The term culture may refer to a number of different things; it is a notoriously difficult
and complex concept to define. In its narrower sense (sometimes known as higher culture,
or Culture with a capital C ), the term includes only artefacts created by members of a
particular community that are seen as valuable: literature, art, music, etc. In its wider
sense, it refers also to the behaviours, customs, attitudes and beliefs of a community. It
would thus include things like dress, festivals, religion and conventions of acceptable and
unacceptable behaviour. In this section, I am using the term in this wider sense.

Cultural content of teaching materials and classroom process

The cultural content in an English course may come from four main sources:
• the home culture of the students;
• the culture of the English-speaking peoples;
• the culture of other communities in the world;
• global, or international culture.
Home culture. The topics relate to the students’ home country, such as those suggested
under The local environment in Section 1. In a monolingual class studying in their home
country, such content would include local issues, places, personalities, customs, festivals and
so on. The way the materials deal with the content may also reflect the home culture: not
only the actual texts, but also the design. For example, in some contexts it is unacceptable
to show bare-armed or bare-legged women in illustrations due to religious beliefs. Both
materials and classroom process will also conform to the culture of learning of the local
community: they may, for instance, give fewer activities based on group work in classes
where students prefer teacher-fronted process. Where the students all speak different
languages and come from different countries, topics based on a home culture will usually
need to be elicited from individual students, or groups of students from similar backgrounds.
The culture of the English-speaking nations. For most of the twentieth century,
many English language teaching materials, especially at more advanced levels, included a
large component of British and American culture. They included not only literature (see
Section 4), but also texts about British or American customs or institutions. (The culture
of other English-speaking countries was also occasionally referred to, but less often. This is
perhaps partly because the major ELT publishers were (and still are) British and American,
and local publishers tended to follow their lead.) It was assumed that the learner
wanted to imitate an L1 English speaker, not only in language proficiency, but also in
cultural knowledge and behaviours. Today, in most institutions in non-English-speaking
countries, the goal is the use of English as an international means of communication
(see 1 Teaching English today), and knowledge of the cultures of English-speaking
communities is therefore less important.

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Cultures of a range of different communities. This component is noticeably more

important in modern materials. A typical coursebook today will include units on different
countries and peoples, and cultural institutions and customs from various sources.
One reason is simply that because of faster and more widely used communications and
increasing travel, people are far more aware of events and cultures elsewhere. Another,
related, reason is that today’s students are likely to need English to communicate with
other English speakers with a different L1 and a different culture, and so they need
intercultural communicative competence (see below). A starting point for the development of
such competence is awareness of the diversity of world cultures.
Global cultural norms. This is a rapidly developing area. Culture with a capital C has
for some time been international. Museums displaying Asian or African art, concerts of
music by European composers, and libraries with translated books from authors of all
nationalities can be found in most countries. But it is a relatively recent phenomenon
that certain norms and conventions (culture with a small c) have begun to be accepted
and used worldwide. These include things like dress, politeness norms and forms of
communication, particularly digital. They are used in contexts where it is likely that
different cultures may meet, for example at conferences, at airports, in international
businesses, at higher-education institutions and in tourist destinations. Home cultural
norms are naturally maintained in more local contexts: the home, the town or village,
in basic education, and community meeting-places. But in more international social
interaction, global cultural norms have taken over. For example, formal dress for a man,
all over the world, is likely to be a suit, while informal dress for teenagers may mean
T-shirts and jeans. Interactional politeness norms are also developing: for example,
formal introductions will usually be accompanied by hand-shaking. In the area of written
communication, generally-accepted norms are even more obvious: email conventions, for
example, or the format of academic research papers or newspapers. All these are reflected
in the content of modern coursebooks and English teaching.

Intercultural communicative competence

The concept of intercultural communicative competence has already been mentioned in
1 Teaching English today. It refers to a person’s ability to interact with others in a
cultural context that is not their own, to be aware of and respect the cultures of other
people, and to behave in a way that will be acceptable to them. The content of teaching
materials and classroom process has a crucial role to play here. It can raise students’
awareness about a range of aspects of cultures different from their own, and also develop
attitudes of acceptance and respect for people from different backgrounds. This means
including texts and tasks that look at different cultural norms, as well as drawing students’
attention to cultural implications that they might not otherwise notice.
Cultural awareness does not, incidentally, relate only to the cultures of other people. One
useful by-product of attention to the cultures of other communities is the raised awareness
of features of one’s own culture in contrast. Linked to this is increased sensitivity to
how one’s own cultural norms might appear to others. It is important for students to
detach themselves from an ethnocentric point of view, to see their own community as
part of a worldwide mosaic, and to begin to learn about the differences and relationships
between them.

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Pause for thought

What are some features of your own home culture which might be seen as
different by people coming from other cultural communities?

Comment
As I mentioned in 1 Teaching English today, one feature of my own interactional
culture which I found I needed to change when I moved to a different country,
was how I entered into a casual transactional dialogue – i.e., one whose goal
was some sort of purposeful exchange of information – with a friend. At home, my
interlocutor and I would simply say ‘hi’ and then move straight into the question
or discussion that was the target of our interaction. In the new culture, this would
be considered rude, and I was expected at least to greet with a ‘Good morning/
afternoon/evening’, and even perform a ‘How are you?’-type exchange before
embarking on the business of the day. I found myself regarded as rather rude and
abrupt, until I learned to adopt the local interactional conventions.

16.3 Teaching subject matter through English: CLIL and EMI

The use of texts which contain content which is useful to learn in itself, rather than
just a medium to display language, has been around for some years. It began with CBI
(content-based instruction), which has been taken a step further with CLIL (content and
language integrated learning) and EMI (English as a medium of instruction). CLIL refers to
the teaching of school curriculum subjects such as mathematics or biology in a language
other than the L1, in order to achieve the dual aims of improving the students’ knowledge
of this language and learning the subject. In principle, the language of instruction could
be any language other than the students’ L1, but in practice it is usually English, as the
main language of international communication. EMI is the term used to refer to courses
– sometimes complete programmes – that are taught in English in universities where the
normal language of instruction is another language. In such situations, there may be some
language teaching through occasional error correction or explanation of new vocabulary,
but in principle the main focus is the subject being studied, and the language is used
primarily as the means of instruction and engagement with the subject matter.
CLIL is an initiative which began and continues to develop mainly in Europe, though it
has also been implemented elsewhere. It is seen as an important means of achieving goals
stated by the European Commission: to increase cultural and linguistic diversity in the
school and to promote multilingualism among European students. Its use is based on the
following assumptions:
• Language acquisition. Learners will acquire English well when using it
communicatively to understand content.
• Authenticity. Using English to learn subjects will entail real-life, authentic use of
the language.

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• Integration of English into the curriculum. English will be integrated into the school
curriculum in general, rather than treated as a separate subject.
• Motivation. Students will be motivated to learn English when they are using it to learn
content that they are interested in.
• Further education. Students will need English in many cases for further studies after
school (e.g., EMI courses at university): CLIL will provide a good basis for this.
• Diversification of learning. CLIL will add variety and diversity to lessons, teaching
and learning.
• Increase in exposure to English. Students will get more hours of exposure to, and use
of, English, which will promote acquisition.
• Different perspectives. Studying a subject through English will provide different
cultural and educational perspectives.
• Increase in vocabulary. CLIL will increase students’ vocabulary, particularly that
associated with the specific subject.
• Improvement of oral skills. Since lessons are primarily oral interaction, students’ oral
skills will be improved (particularly listening).
There are, however, some issues that need to be addressed. Where parents and educators
have reservations about the introduction of CLIL (using English as the medium of
instruction), these are based chiefly on the following points:
• Lack of teacher expertise. Teachers who are experts in their subjects may not know
English very well and may not be able to teach effectively in that language. English
teachers, on the other hand, may not have sufficient expertise in other subjects to be
able to teach them.
• Level of subject teaching. Even if the above does not apply, the subject may be
taught and learnt at a lower level than it would be in the L1, because the students may
not understand advanced English, and the teacher is forced to simplify in order to
be understood.
• Lack of teacher courses. Only in recent years have some countries (Italy, for example)
started to provide CLIL-oriented teacher preparation courses (Lopriore, 2020). In many
places, there is still no focused guidance for teachers in this area.
These reservations apply also to EMI, but perhaps not so much: an increasing number of
university teachers coming from a non-English-speaking community are fluent in English
and have no problem teaching their subject in either that language or their L1. Hopefully
this trend will continue and the time will come when it will be taken for granted that any
university lecturer can teach in English as well as in their own L1.

Pause for thought

In a non-English-speaking country with which you are familiar, is CLIL used in

schools? Is EMI used in universities or other institutions of higher education? What, as
far as you know, is the attitude towards the integration of CLIL courses in the country?

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Comment
In many countries, it is taken for granted that some courses are taught in English
at university level, and the number of such courses is increasing. This is partly,
but not only, in order to accommodate foreign students coming to study in the
country. CLIL is slightly less universally used. In some countries, reservations as to
the adoption of either model are at least partly due to the fact that the language
of the country is felt to be under threat as a result of the expansion of English. In
such cases, the authorities may feel it important to use the local language as the
medium of instruction in educational institutions as a means of supporting and
preserving it.

Research findings on CLIL

There does not seem to be any evidence to support the claim that CLIL students will
learn the target subject less well than those studying it in their first language. Their grades
appear to be similar to those of students learning the same subject in their L1 (Dalton-
Puffer et al., 2010). As for English proficiency: CLIL students also show overall superiority,
particularly in vocabulary knowledge (mainly, as one would expect, of items associated
with the subject being studied) and listening comprehension. However, we need here to
take into account the fact that participation in CLIL classes is very often voluntary, and
participants tend to be those who are academically able and already relatively proficient in
English (Broca, 2016).

Conclusions and discussion

Although both CLIL and EMI are increasingly implemented in schools and universities, it
does not appear likely that they will completely replace conventional English lessons, for
various reasons. For one thing, English medium instruction can only be used when the
students’ level of English is good enough to cope with it. Attempts to use CLIL to teach
English to beginners have not, on the whole, been successful. In the Punjab, for example,
English medium instruction was introduced at Primary level in 2009, but the results were
so unsatisfactory in the younger classes that six years later Urdu was reinstated for grades
1–3. At earlier stages, focused English lessons are needed. Even at later stages, it appears
that CLIL improves some aspects of students’ English (listening comprehension, for
example), but has less effect on others (general vocabulary expansion outside the subject
being taught, for example), so instruction is needed to compensate for this imbalance.
Finally, there is evidence that optimal learning of English through content takes place
when communicative use is supported by explicit teaching through explanation, focused
practice, and error correction (see 7 Teaching grammar). The best solution seems,
therefore, to be the continued provision of English lessons alongside the teaching of
selected subjects through English; and even within CLIL lessons, it is recommended to
include some explicit language teaching (Lyster, 2007).
The points discussed above can be expressed as practical tips for CLIL teachers, as shown on
the next page.

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Practical tips
1 Pause occasionally to focus on language. Feel free to pause in your instruction of the
subject in order to take occasional time out to focus on a language point: to teach new
words or focus on a student error.
2 Present new items using L1. Tell students what the L1 equivalents are for particular
subject-linked terminology the first time you introduce them. After that, use only the
English words.
3 Correct mistakes. Correct students’ errors of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar
as quickly as you can, but make sure they have noticed them (see 12 Feedback and
error correction).
4 Create opportunities for students to speak. A lot of the lesson time will naturally
be devoted to your own input of content information; however, make opportunities
for students to produce language themselves: to answer questions at length, or to do
group tasks or project work.
5 Create opportunities for students to write. Again, content teaching usually requires
quite a lot of reading. Require writing assignments in the target subject in English as
well. And again, correct language as well as content.

16.4 Literature as a component of the English course

Literature is not always included in English courses. It is, in a sense, a luxury item, not
essential for social or work-related communication. If the main purpose of English
teaching today is to enable students to use English as an international language for
practical purposes – to form personal relationships, to run a business, to engage in further
study, etc. – then it would seem that literature is not a relevant source of content. On
the other hand, there are those who claim that it has a place in English courses for other
reasons. As Geoff Hall puts it: ‘Literature can be used to engage and motivate students, to
get them to notice and work with language forms expressively, to explore new personal
and imaginative worlds, and to communicate authentically’ (Hall, 2016, p. 456). See the
next page for a more detailed discussion of the pros and cons.
If we are to include literature, then which? It used to be taken for granted that this should
be classic British or American fiction, drama or poetry. Later, this was expanded to include
more modern English literature, and works written by authors from other countries where
English is an official or major language, such as Canada, Nigeria or India. More recently,
the range has been widened still further to include translated literature. Today, given the
function of English as the tool of international communication, it would make sense to
choose works from as wide a range of sources as possible, including all these categories.

Pause for thought

When you were learning a new language in school, did you study its literature?
If so, what were the benefits and problems? If not, do you think you would have
liked to?

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Comment
I was taught French in school, and literature was one of the required elements
in the syllabus. The same was true of school courses in Spanish or German or
other languages. The works were chosen from the canon of classical literature;
I enjoyed reading them and I think benefited from both the linguistic and the
cultural knowledge they conveyed. But of course, French was taught primarily as a
national language, which is rather different from the rationale underlying English
teaching today.

Advantages of teaching literature in an English course

• It can be enjoyable and motivating.
• It can widen students’ horizons by providing knowledge about the culture which is the
background to the text.
• It encourages empathetic, critical and creative thinking.
• It presents a wide range of human situations and conflicts.
• It provides examples of different styles of writing, and representations of various
authentic uses of the language.
• It is a good basis for vocabulary expansion.
• It develops reading skills.
• It can provide an excellent starting point for discussion or writing.
• It raises awareness as to the creative potential of language.
Disadvantages
• A lot of literature is written in language that may be difficult for students to read (you
can use simplified versions, but these are inevitably inferior to the original).
• Many literary texts are long and time-consuming to teach.
• The culture on which the literature is based is alien to students and may be difficult for
them to relate to.
• By using texts as a basis for language teaching, you may spoil students’ enjoyment and
appreciation of them as literature.
• Many students may feel that literature is irrelevant to their needs (e.g., students
learning English for business or other specific purposes).
If you do decide to teach literature, the problems of length, difficulty and alien content
are very real ones. They can be solved by careful selection of texts or by using only part of
a long text. In some cases, simplified or abbreviated versions can be used, if enough of the
literary value of the original appears to be preserved.

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Practical tips
1 Choose literature you like. If you can choose which literary works to teach, select
ones that are favourites of your own. You will probably teach them better and enjoy
the process; students are also likely to learn and enjoy them more.
2 Don’t do much language work. Use the literary text mainly for discussion of
meanings and interpretations. Don’t milk it for grammar and vocabulary to teach, as
you do with other kinds of texts. Doing so may reduce its literary value and students’
enjoyment.
3 Don’t over-analyse. Let the literature make its own impact as much as possible. When
doing discussion and analysis, try to involve the students and elicit their responses
rather than telling them. Note that too much pre-reading work on themes and content
can dilute the impact, as can detailed literary analysis later.
4 Do teach style. The exception to tips 2 and 3 above is the aspect of style. If there are
stylistic features that contribute to the impact (drama, aesthetic impression, humour,
etc.) of the work, then this is an ideal context for teaching about them.
5 Re-read at the end. Finish your teaching of the work by re-reading the entire piece (if
it is short) or a significant section of it (if it is long). The students should be left with
the literature itself echoing in their minds, not the discussion!
6 Look for other versions. Enrich the study of a particular work by adding adaptations
or different versions. Show them the movie of a book, or a video of a poem being read.
Alternatively, compare the literary text with a modern book or movie which adapts or
reinterprets the plot and characters of the original.

16.5 Underlying messages

The content of material we teach often carries underlying messages that go beyond factual
information. These may be related to religious or political beliefs, or attitudes towards
certain kinds of people, nationalities or cultures. It is very important to be aware of such
subtext for two major reasons. First, for your own professional integrity: you want to be
sure you are teaching what you intend to teach, and not unconsciously expressing support
for attitudes you do not approve of. Second, because students who identify with groups
who are discriminated against in content may feel disadvantaged and learn less well: for
example, female students using materials which consistently present the male as superior.
Favourable or unfavourable attitudes may be expressed in various ways. One is a hidden
bias: for example, learners are implicitly asked to identify with people who belong to a
specific group, or who express opinions that reflect a particular stance. Another is invisibility
of opinions that are disapproved of, or of a discriminated-against group; for example, if
only young adults are shown in illustrations in materials, with little or no representation of
the middle-aged or elderly. A third – rarer, but easier to detect – is explicitly discriminatory
statements: for example, implying that one language is superior to another.
Many prejudices which we reject intellectually are very deeply ingrained in our thinking:
so much so that we may betray them without realizing it. I often, for example, find

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myself automatically using masculine pronouns in examples of grammar, although I

consider myself a committed feminist! It often takes a conscious effort to counteract such
tendencies. Indeed, both teachers and coursebook writers these days are far more aware
of the possible hidden messages of course materials and make efforts to ensure that the
underlying messages are acceptable.
Here are some ways materials betray bias, and how you can detect it.
1 Sexism. Illustrations or texts show women doing work that is associated with
home or family rather than a profession. Grammar exercises tend to use masculine
pronouns or subjects.
2 Ageism. Illustrations in a book for adults show mainly young adults, with relatively
few middle-aged or older people.
3 Cultural orientation. The texts and exercises are based on a specific culture, or
promote a particular kind of lifestyle. For example, Western textbooks have been
criticized for promoting a middle-class and materialistic culture, including things like
prestigious professions, hotels, airports, expensive leisure activities, and so on.
On the other hand, there is a problem of excessive efforts to avoid bias that results
sometimes in unrealistic scenarios. For example, a picture may portray a bus driver as a
woman to avoid stereotyping, but in the real world, bus drivers are in fact mostly men.
It can be tricky to avoid being criticized for stereotyping, on the one hand, and for being
unrealistic on the other; sometimes this may result in rather bland, uninteresting content.

Pause for thought

Take any coursebook or English-teaching website and check it out for any of the
above. For example, have a look at interactive grammar exercises online and
count the number of masculine versus feminine pronouns; or look for the age-
span of the adults portrayed in a coursebook for adults.

Comment
I looked at a book published in 2019 (which shall be nameless!), which targets an
international market of English adult learners, and asked the computer to count
the number of occurrences of (single whole-word) he as compared to (single
whole-word) she. The result was 1,806 occurrences of he as opposed to 954
occurrences of she. I then checked a coursebook for teenagers, and found more
or less equal numbers of males and females in both texts and illustrations, and no
particular occupational bias. In the first case, the inequality is certainly there, but
I might not have been aware of it without a numerical check. In the second, the
survey provided a reassurance that the balance is acceptable.

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Classroom implications
If you are using materials that display some kind of orientation that you do not find
acceptable, what might you do about it? Some possibilities:
• Omit texts or tasks that you find inappropriate.
• Ignore the bias, and try in your teaching to make sure that your own input and
teacher-led activities are more balanced in content.
• Compensate by adding extra material of your own which supplies the deficit and
makes for a better balance.
• Draw your students’ attention to the inappropriate content, and lead an open critical
discussion to raise their awareness of it.

Review: Check yourself

1 Can you remember at least seven different kinds of topics that are used in
English courses?
2 What kinds of things does the term culture include?
3 What are the main sources of the cultural content we find in course materials?
4 What is intercultural competence?
5 What is the difference between CLIL and EMI?
6 Can you suggest some advantages and disadvantages of the implementation
of CLIL in schools?
7 Can you list at least three arguments for and three against using literature in
your English course?
8 How are underlying messages to do with cultural, social or political values
conveyed through teaching materials?

Further reading
Alkhaleefah, T. A. (2017). What is the place of English literature in ELT classrooms?
A review of related studies. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English
Literature, 6(7), 192–197.
(An overview of the issues relating to the use of English literature in the teaching
of English, with some recommendations)
Collie, J. and Slater, S. (1987). Literature in the Language Classroom. Cambridge
University Press.
(Discussion of some general issues, followed by a variety of practical literature-
teaching techniques, relating to a range of literary genres)

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Cortazzi, M. and Lixian, J. (1999). Cultural mirrors: materials and methods in the EFL
classroom. In Hinkel, E. (Ed.), Culture in Second Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 196–
219). Cambridge University Press.
(A readable summary of issues to do with culture and intercultural competence in
English-teaching materials, with recommendations)
Lazar, G. (1993). Literature and Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
(A good text to use to teach yourself how to teach literature: comprehensive,
readable, with plenty of illustrative tasks accompanied by suggested answers)
Dale, L. and Tanner, R. (2012). CLIL Activities: A resource for subject and language teachers.
Cambridge University Press.
(Practical ideas for use in CLIL lessons)

References
Broca, Á. (2016). CLIL and non-CLIL: Differences from the outset. ELT Journal, 70(3),
320–331.
Dalton-Puffer, C., Nikula, T. and Smit, U. (2010). Language Use and Language Learning in
CLIL Classrooms. John Benjamins.
Hall, G. (2016). Using literature in ELT. In Hall, G. (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of English
Language Teaching (pp. 456–469). Routledge.
Lopriore, L. (2020). Reframing teaching knowledge in Content and Language Integrated
Learning (CLIL): a European perspective. Language Teaching Research, 24(1), 94–104.
Lyster, R. (2007). Learning and Teaching Languages Through Content: A counterbalanced
approach. John Benjamins.

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 17 Classroom discipline

Overview

17.1 What is classroom discipline? A definition and description of some aspects

of a disciplined, smooth-running classroom process.
17.2 What teachers can do to create a disciplined classroom. General
guidelines and practical tips for making sure lessons run smoothly.
17.3 Dealing with discipline problems. Some practical ideas for how to deal with
teacher–student conflicts and discipline problems in the classroom.

17.1 What is classroom discipline?

Classroom discipline can be defined as the situation that exists when teacher and students
accept and consistently observe a set of rules relating to classroom behaviour in order to
facilitate smooth and efficient teaching and learning. Many teacher-preparation courses
avoid the term discipline – because it sounds rather old-fashioned and seems to imply an
authoritarian classroom regime – and prefer to focus on classroom management: but they
are not the same thing. Classroom management has to do with the way teachers organize
the interactions that take place during a learning activity: how they run question-and-
answer sessions, for example, how they move students in and out of group work, how
they open and close lessons. It is important, but it is only one of the means through
which classroom discipline, as defined above, can be achieved.
What does a disciplined classroom look like in practice? Here are some possible
characteristics.
1 Learning is taking place.
2 It is quiet.
3 The teacher is in control.
4 The teacher and students are cooperating.
5 Students are motivated.
6 The lesson is proceeding according to plan.
7 The teacher and students are aiming for the same objectives.
If you do not wish to do the task shown in Pause for thought on the next page, then read
on to the Comment below it.

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Pause for thought

Which of the features listed on the previous page seem to you, in the light of your
own experience as student or teacher, characteristics of a disciplined classroom?
Do you have any reservations about any of them? Make a note of your responses,
and then read on.

Comment
1 Learning is taking place. The question of the relationship between discipline
and learning is crucial. It seems fairly clear that in a disciplined classroom, it is
easier to activate students in the way you want, and that time will be probably
spent on-task, rather than wasted on organizational problems or disruptive
behaviour. However, I have seen well-disciplined classes in which little or no
learning was taking place, simply because the tasks had themselves little
learning value (see 4 Tasks). So a disciplined classroom does not, in itself,
necessarily entail good learning. On the other hand, the converse is probably
nearer the truth: there is unlikely to be much learning in a totally undisciplined
classroom. We might sum up by saying that discipline is a necessary, but not
sufficient, condition for good learning to take place.
2 It is quiet. It is tempting to claim that this is irrelevant. What about well-
disciplined classes where noisy pair- or group work is going on? However,
think about the following points. First, cooperative work involving talk takes up
only a part of lesson time, probably a minority – what about the rest? Second,
imagine walking down the corridor of a school, listening at the door of each
classroom, and hearing noise in some and quiet in others. If you had to guess
which were the better-disciplined ones, what would you say? The bottom line
is that disciplined classes may or may not be quiet, but undisciplined ones
are always noisy. Therefore, there is arguably a positive association between
quietness and discipline. The teacher needs to ensure that the class is quiet
enough for students to hear the teacher and each other, and to complete
tasks without being disturbed.
3 The teacher is in control. Yes, definitely. However, the fact that a teacher is in
control does not necessarily mean that they are standing in front of the class
telling everyone what to do. The students may have been given the initiative
in a particular activity. Nevertheless, it was the teacher who took the decision
about the handover of initiative, and they may, at any point, take it back. As it is
often said, ‘The classroom is not a democracy’. The underlying responsibility for
the control of any disciplined classroom has to be in the hands of the teacher.
How authoritarian or liberal, rigid or flexible they are in using this control is
another question.

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4 The teacher and students are cooperating. A smooth-running lesson is the

main evidence of discipline in the classroom, and the participants have to
cooperate to produce this. Such cooperation may occur because it is part of the
culture of learning, an expected norm in the educational context; or it may be
because of the authoritative personality of the teacher; or because the students
fear punishment if they do not cooperate. Whatever the reason, smooth ongoing
cooperative work is a clear indication of a disciplined classroom.
5 Students are motivated. It is fairly easy to imagine a class of unmotivated
students which is disciplined, or a class of motivated students which is, perhaps
temporarily, out of control. So this feature is not as clear or necessary as the
previous one. The association between motivation and discipline is one of
probability: if the class is motivated to learn, it is more likely to be disciplined.
6 The lesson is proceeding according to plan. Again, we have a case of
probability rather than certainty. It is true that some lessons that are improvised
or changed as they proceed may be disciplined, but on the whole, a lesson
which is mostly going according to plan is more likely to be so. The teacher
knows where they are going, activities are well prepared and organized,
and the awareness that the sequence of events is clearly organized boosts
teacher confidence and student trust, which in their turn also contribute to
good discipline.
7 The teacher and students are aiming for the same objectives. Clearly,
if students are aware of the objectives of a lesson and accept them (or
occasionally even help to plan them), the lesson is far more likely to be
disciplined. On the other hand, the students may be totally unaware of the
objectives of the lesson and still happily cooperate with the teacher. But if they
have their own agenda that contradicts the teacher’s, the result is likely to be
conflict. A shared knowledge of and agreement on lesson objectives probably
therefore contribute to smooth process.

17.2 What teachers can do to create a disciplined classroom

Some teachers are gifted with charismatic authority: they walk into a classroom and are
immediately in charge; the students willingly listening and doing what they are told.
Some teachers have this gift, most do not. The good news is that the classes of teachers
who do not possess natural authority (and I speak as one myself!) can be equally smoothly
run: we just have to work at it harder.

Pause for thought

Do you remember a teacher with charismatic authority from your school days, or
later? Did you feel you learned well from them? Do you have any further thoughts
on this issue?

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Comment
I remember a charismatic visiting lecturer in a teacher-training course who held
me, and the other trainees, spellbound during his talk, and received rapturous
applause at the end; but later I found it difficult to identify what useful content
I had in fact learned from his session. A more positive example is a colleague
I observed in my early years of teaching, and remember being envious of her
effortless control of the adoring students in her class! She was, in this case, also a
very conscientious and successful English teacher.

Below is a list of some factors that are conducive to a disciplined classroom, and what you
can do about them.
Classroom management skills. As defined earlier, these include things like opening and
closing lessons, running question-answer sessions, organizing group work, giving clear
instructions. Novice teachers usually model their classroom-management techniques on
those used by their own teachers when they were in school: but they quickly find out
that many of them are not as easy as they look! You need to learn how, for example, to
give instructions so that they are clear but not too long-winded, and how to make sure
that students have understood them; the different methods of dividing students into
groups; varying methods of eliciting responses and how these work with different classes
(Scrivener, 2012).
Selection of an appropriate methodology. If students feel that they are learning through
procedures that are appropriate for them, they will be willing to cooperate. If they feel
they are being made to do activities that they feel are irrelevant, too childish, or in any
way unsuitable to their own learning culture, one result is likely to be discipline problems.
Good interpersonal relationships. This does not mean that you have to love – or even
necessarily like! – your students. But it does mean that you need to maintain an attitude
of respect and goodwill towards them, and try to encourage similar attitudes between the
students themselves.
Good planning. A carefully and clearly organized lesson is likely to contribute to good
discipline. It is not usually a good idea to improvise a lesson as you go. Good planning
does not mean abandoning improvised variations: it means having a solid basic
programme which may or may not be changed as the lesson proceeds (see 2 The lesson).
Student motivation. This is a key factor, and one that can be enhanced by teacher action.
The more interesting and motivating the learning activity, the more likely it is that
students will be cooperative and stay on-task (see 4 Tasks).

Some tips for maintaining classroom discipline

On the next page are some tips for beginner teachers (adapted from Wragg, 1981, p. 22)
based on responses from new teachers to the question ‘What advice on classroom
discipline did you find most helpful?’ So they are probably all useful, and cover all the
factors listed above.

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1 Be firm with students at the start: you can relax later.

2 Get silence before you start speaking to the class.
3 Know and use the students’ names.
4 Prepare lessons thoroughly and structure them firmly.
5 Be mobile: walk around the class.
6 Start the lesson with a bang, and sustain interest and curiosity.
7 Speak clearly.
8 Make sure your instructions are clear.
9 Have extra material prepared (e.g., for slower-/faster-working students).
10 Look at the class when speaking, and learn how to scan (keep an eye on what is going
on in all parts of the room).
11 Make work appropriate (e.g., to students’ age, ability, cultural background).
12 Develop an effective questioning technique.
13 Develop the art of timing your lesson to fit the available period.
14 Vary your teaching techniques.
15 Anticipate discipline problems and act quickly.
16 Avoid confrontations.
17 Clarify fixed rules and standards, and be consistent in applying them.
18 Show yourself as supporter and helper to the students.
19 Don’t patronize students; treat them with respect.
20 Use humour constructively.

Pause for thought

Read through the list and decide which are the ten most important tips for you.
You can, of course, add any you think are missing.

Comment
The 20 items above are listed in order of importance, according to the original
respondents’ opinions. In other words, the most useful ten tips for them were
items 1–10. I personally agree with most of the original respondents’ priorities,
but not all. Your own list, if you did the task above, was also probably different.
The choices made by an individual depend very much on personal experience
and an awareness of one’s own strong and weak points as a teacher.

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The next step: student self-discipline

Although the teacher has responsibility for classroom discipline initially, the ultimate goal
is for students to take on or at least share this responsibility. Self-discipline depends on the
maturity of the student to some extent, but it can be promoted by the teacher. The way
to do this is not simply to try to hand over responsibility to the students for running the
lesson – this teaches little, and can be disastrous. It is more a matter of fostering a general
mindset based on learner autonomy: that the learning of English is essentially their
responsibility, not just an outcome of doing what the teacher says.
We have already seen how such a mindset may be supported by, for example, the use of
individual work (3 Classroom interaction) or getting students to design their own tests
(13 Assessment and testing). In the area of discipline, it may be fostered by including
the students in decisions on the running of lessons or on policy with regard to discipline
problems: see some ideas in the following section.

17.3 Dealing with discipline problems

Below are some useful practical principles for dealing with problems with student
behaviour in class. These are based on my own experience as a teacher who had to learn
the hard way how to teach unruly classes of adolescents in a country to which I was
an immigrant, and whose language I did not speak very well. They are, therefore, most
relevant to this age group, but they may also be found useful when dealing with younger
or older students.

Before the problem arises

The teachers who are most successful in maintaining discipline in class are not those who
are good at dealing with problems, but those who know how to prevent them from arising
in the first place. I suggest four main strategies for this. Some of these have already appeared
as brief practical tips in the previous section, but are here discussed in more detail.
• Make an agreement. At an early stage, work out a written agreement, or contract,
with the class, stating clearly what is and is not acceptable. It should describe student
participation during lessons, and the penalties for unacceptable behaviour. You can
start by suggesting yourself what the rules and penalties should be, but give the class
an opportunity to discuss and change them before finalizing.
• Plan the lesson carefully. When a lesson is clearly planned and organized, there is likely
to be constant momentum and a feeling of purpose, which keep students focused on the
current task. This prevents gaps when nothing particular is going on, which may be filled
by distracting or counterproductive activity. Moreover, the awareness that there is a clear
plan contributes a great deal to your own confidence, and to your ability to win the trust
of the students.
• Instruct clearly. Problems often arise due to student uncertainty about what they are
supposed to be doing. Even though instructions take up a very small proportion of lesson
time, they are crucial. You need to clarify precisely what the task involves and what the
options are (see 4 Tasks). This is not incompatible with student-teacher negotiation about

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what to do. However, too much hesitation and mind-changing can distract and bore
students, and reduce their confidence in the teacher’s authority, with obvious implications
for discipline.
• Keep in touch. You need to be sensitive to what students are doing. Scan the classroom
constantly so that you can immediately pick up any lack of attention on the part of
individual students. This achieves two things. First, students know you are aware of them
all the time, which encourages participation and personal contact on the one hand, and
discourages deviant activity on the other. Second, you are able to notice immediately
if a student loses interest or gets distracted, and do something about it before it becomes
a problem.

When the problem is beginning

Students are beginning to chat quietly between themselves; one student is obviously not
listening, another is starting to do something that is not connected to the task … Inexperienced
teachers often ignore minor problems like this, in the hope that they will go away by
themselves. Occasionally they do, but more often they don’t, and are likely to escalate. In most
cases, it is advisable to respond promptly and pro-actively to any emerging problem you detect.
• Deal with it quickly and quietly. The best action is a quiet but clear-cut response,
keeping the problem as low-profile as possible. For example, if a student has not opened
their book in response to an instruction from you, it is better to go up to them quietly
and open the book yourself than draw the attention of the whole class by a reprimand
or loud, repeated instruction. Over-assertive reactions can lead to the very escalation you
wish to avoid.
• Don’t take it personally. This is a difficult instruction to follow sometimes, but an
important one. Inexperienced teachers of adolescents are often upset by remarks that
were not intended personally, or allow unpleasant conflicts to continue annoying them
long after the student has forgotten they ever happened. Try to see the problem, not
the student, as the object to be attacked and dealt with. Don’t let the student pull you
into personal conflict.
• Don’t use threats. Threats are often a sign of weakness; use the formula ‘If you …,
then …’ only as a real, factual option that you are ready to put into practice, not as a
weapon to make an impression or intimidate.

When the problem has exploded

The explosion may be an unacceptable level of noise in the classroom, a confrontational,
rude comment by a student, or a refusal by the class to do something you have asked them
to do. In some cases, it may take the form of unacceptable behaviour between students:
bullying, or even physical violence. The priority here is to act quickly in order to get the
class to return to smooth functioning as quickly as possible. Often it is preferable to take
a decision fast, even if it is not the best one, than to hesitate or do nothing. Don’t allow
yourself to be drawn into a public confrontation. Confrontations mean time-wasting
arguments that are likely to complicate rather than solve the problem. Stop the problem in
its tracks with one of the ideas below.

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1 Explode yourself. Often a quick, loud command will do the trick, with a display of
anger. This is provided, of course, that you do not really lose your temper or become
aggressive! The trouble with displaying anger is that you cannot do it too often, or it
loses its effect.
2 Give in. For example, if students refuse to do homework you might say, ‘All right,
don’t. Instead, let’s …’ This is a perfectly respectable option, which is unfortunately
rejected by many teachers who feel they risk losing face. Its advantage is that it
immediately defuses the situation and, if done quickly and decisively, will not be seen
as dishonourable surrender! It also puts you in a position to demand something from
them in return! But again, it cannot be used too often.
3 Make them an offer they can’t refuse. Sometimes you find that students are
pushing you into a confrontation, and you cannot give in but do not wish to impose
your decision by assertive commands. You need to look for a way of avoiding the
confrontation by one of the following strategies: postponement (‘Let’s come back to this
tomorrow at the beginning of the lesson. Remind me.’); compromise (‘I’ll tell you what:
you have to do all the assignments, but I’ll give you extra time to finish them …’); or
arbitration (‘Let’s discuss this with the class teacher, and accept their decision …’).
4 Call in assistance from a higher authority. Calling in the class teacher, school principal
or other authoritative figure may appear to lessen your own authority. However, if none
of the previous strategies have worked, then it is better to call for help than to let the
situation escalate. This is particularly true if you have a situation of bullying or violence
between students. If you do this, then make sure that later you hold a follow-up discussion
with the class in order to come to an agreement with them on measures to prevent the
problem from happening again.

Pause for thought

Read through the descriptions of episodes below and think about or discuss the
following questions with colleagues:
What caused the problem?
What could the teacher have done to prevent it?
Once it had arisen, what would you advise the teacher to do?

Episode 1. The teacher of a mixed-level class of 13-year-olds is working through a class

reader in an English lesson. He asks Dina to read out a passage. ‘Do we have to do this
book?’ says Dina. ‘It’s boring.’ Some members of the class smile, one says, ‘I like it,’ others
are silent awaiting the teacher’s reaction. (Adapted from Wragg, 1981, p. 12.)
Episode 2. The teacher is explaining a story. Many of the students are inattentive, and
there is a murmur of quiet talk between them. The teacher ignores the noise and speaks
to those who are listening. Finally, she reprimands, in a gentle and sympathetic way, one
student who is talking particularly noticeably. The student stops talking for a minute or
two, and then carries on. This happens once or twice more, with different students. The

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teacher does not get angry, and continues to explain, trying (with only partial success) to
draw students’ attention through occasional questions. (Adapted from Reinhorn-Lurie, 1992.)
Episode 3. The teacher is explaining how to do a worksheet. His explanation has carried
on so long that John, having lost interest, begins to tap a ruler on his desk. At first, the
tapping is not too noticeable, but John begins to tap more frequently and noisily, building
up to a final climax when he hits the table with a loud bang. The class falls silent and
looks at John and the teacher to see what will happen. (Adapted from Wragg, 1981, p. 18.)
Episode 4. The teacher begins by giving out classroom books and collecting homework
books.
Teacher (to one of the students): This book’s very thin.
Student 1: Yeah, ’tis, isn’t it.
Teacher: Why is that?
Student 2: He’s been using it for toilet paper, sir. (Uproar) (Adapted from Wragg and
Wood, 1984, p. 32.)
Episode 5. The students have been asked to interview each other for homework and write
reports. In this lesson, they are asked to read aloud their reports. A few students refuse to
do so. The teacher tells these students to stand up before the class and be interviewed by
them. They stand up, but do not take the questions seriously. They answer with jokes, or
in their L1, or not at all. The teacher eventually sends them back to their places and goes
on to the next planned activity, a textbook exercise. (Adapted from Reinhorn-Lurie, 1992.)

Comment
Episode 1 (Dina refuses to read, says the book is boring). The causes of this were,
possibly, that the book is indeed boring; or that Dina is looking for a way to avoid
reading aloud; or that she simply wants to challenge the teacher and take a break
from work. It is difficult to see how the teacher could have foreseen or prevented the
incident. Now the priority is to neutralize the challenge and get the class back on
task. The most appropriate answer to Dina’s question is probably a postponement:
‘Yes, we do have to do this book; we’ll discuss whether it’s boring later. Please
read.’ This commits the teacher to discussing the book later with the class. But this
discussion will be initiated and managed by the teacher, which is a totally different
situation from what would have happened had the teacher allowed themself to be
drawn into an argument in the original lesson. Another secondary question arises
here, and that is whether you should insist on a student reading aloud if they don’t
want to. You may, as suggested above, insist on the nominated student reading,
with no exceptions. But there may be very good reasons for allowing students not
to read aloud if they don’t want to (and reading aloud is of questionable learning
value; see 5 Texts, Section 3). It may be better to adopt a ground rule that a student
does not have to read aloud if they don’t want to than to face opposition from those
students who hate doing it.

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Episode 2 (students keep chatting during teacher explanation). This situation is

very common and is probably caused by a lack of firm and consistent rules in
the classroom, or by the teacher’s failure to insist on them. As a result, a number
of students are learning little or nothing from the lesson. The teacher should have
insisted on quiet and attention from the start, and stopped each murmur as it
began. Possibly she is afraid of losing popularity, as her reprimands lack attack
and are quickly ignored; the result being that constant inattention and chat
become an acceptable and normal situation for the students. To reverse the
situation when it has got this far is extremely difficult. It may be necessary to hold a
serious discussion with the class at the beginning of the next lesson, agree on new
ground rules and insist on them from then on.
Episode 3 (John bangs a ruler while teacher is explaining). Here, the incident was
caused by the teacher’s over-lengthy explanation, the boy’s impatience, and the
failure of the teacher to notice and stop the disturbance when it started (perhaps
by going to John and quietly removing the ruler, promising to return it later). Most
people’s intuitive reaction when the class has fallen silent would be to reprimand
John. However, a more effective response would probably be to use the silence
to instruct the class firmly to start work on the worksheet, promising to deal with
any further problems in response to raised hands. Once the class is working, the
teacher could talk to John, make it clear that his behaviour is unacceptable, but
that the incident is now over and he should be working. A further word or two with
him after the lesson may make it less likely that he will repeat the behaviour.
Episode 4 (student is cheeky to teacher about a notebook with pages missing).
The immediate cause of this incident, given the confident and cheeky character
of members of the class, was the teacher’s mistake in getting into a public
argument with one of them in the middle of an organizational routine involving
all the class. The argument then escalated rapidly into a full-class crisis. The
teacher should have finished distributing and collecting books and dealt with the
notebook problem later, privately. Now that the class is in uproar, the priority should
be to abandon the individual problem, and concentrate on regaining order and
finishing the book collection and distribution as quickly as possible.
Episode 5 (students refuse to read aloud their reports). The cause of this was the
refusal of the students to read out their work, and the mistaken response of the
teacher. It was fairly obvious that if these students refused to read out their work
from where they were sitting, they would also not cooperate if standing before the
class. The fact that they were a group, reinforcing each other’s responses, only made
things worse. Only one student should have been nominated to stand up and
answer questions, and it should have been the one who was least likely to make fun
of the task. Given the very uncomfortable situation of students actually making fun
of a teacher-directed task, the reaction of stopping it and going on to the next bit of
the lesson was the right one, although late. However, the teacher should talk to each
student later, alone, in order to make it clear that this behaviour was unacceptable
and to try to prevent it from happening again. As with Episode 1, there is also the

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problem of students not wanting to read aloud. Again you need to decide whether
this type of reading is compulsory or optional. Either way, if the reading text is a
composition by the student, it is often a good idea for you to read it out yourself. You
can make it sound much better than the student can, and the fact that you are
presenting the composition to the class is a subtle compliment to the author.

Review: Check yourself

1 Can you remember, more or less, how classroom discipline is defined here?
2 What are three or four characteristics of a disciplined classroom?
3 What is the connection between classroom discipline and learning?
4 What, apart from classroom management skills, should the teacher pay
attention to in order to ensure that the classroom will be disciplined?
5 List as many of the short tips under Some tips for maintaining classroom
discipline that you can remember (there were 20 in all).
6 What things can you do in advance to try to ensure that discipline problems
do not arise?
7 What are some options when you have a discipline crisis in the classroom,
such as students rudely refusing to do what you ask?

Further reading
Charles, C. M. (2010). Building Classroom Discipline (10th Edition). Boston: Pearson
Education.
(Practical and readable, written for trainee or practising teachers; a summary of
various models of classroom discipline and guidelines for practical application)
Cohen, L., Manion, L., Morrison, K. and Wyse, D. (2010). A Guide to Teaching Practice
(5th Edition). Routledge.
(A widely read and practical guide to various aspects of school teaching)
Scrivener, J. (2012). Classroom Management Techniques. Cambridge University Press.
(A collection of techniques for managing various aspects of classroom interaction)

References
Reinhorn-Lurie, S. (1992). Unpublished research project on classroom discipline, Oranim
School of Education, Haifa.
Scrivener, J. (2012). Classroom Management Techniques. Cambridge University Press.
Wragg, E. C. (1981). Classroom Management and Control. Macmillan.
Wragg. E. C. and Wood, E. K. (1984). Pupil appraisals of teaching. In Wragg, E. C. (Ed.),
Classroom Teaching Skills. Croom Helm.

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 18 Digital technology and online
teaching

Overview

18.1 Digital literacies. Some skills and awarenesses that students need to
develop for effective and safe use of digital technology, both on- and offline.
18.2 The place of digital technology in the classroom. A brief overview of
some basic issues: the hardware; using internet resources; fundamental
considerations in selecting digital tools for use in the classroom.
18.3 Teaching different aspects of language using digital technology. Practical
ideas for enhancing learning of listening, speaking, reading, writing,
grammar and vocabulary using digital technology.
18.4 Teaching online. Teaching language through videoconferencing: issues
and suggestions.

Preliminary note. The particular websites and apps mentioned in this chapter may have
been renamed or even have disappeared by the time you read this; you may need to find
updated ones through a search engine.

18.1 Digital literacies

In order to make best use of the learning opportunities that online digital technology
offers, students need to possess not just one but a number of digital literacies. In this
section, I’ll summarise those that seem to me most important for language learners: for a
longer and more detailed list, see the first chapter of Pegrum et al. (2022).

Print literacy
At its most basic level, print literacy is the same literacy as that needed to read books and
other kinds of paper-based publications. Research indicates that most students still prefer
reading longer texts from paper rather than from a screen (Baron, 2017), and that their
comprehension tends to be better when based on reading from a print version (Mangen
et al., 2013). My impression is that this applies to the wider population as well. (I myself
prefer reading from a screen, but am aware that I am in the minority!) In any case,
everyone today needs to know how to cope with online reading, including ease of reading
different design formats (infographics, for example) and the use of hyperlinks to move
between different texts.
Print production literacy is the ability to use a keyboard fluently and accurately to
produce written English text. Most students develop this skill gradually as they get used

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to using a keyboard as well as pen and paper for their writing, but it can be improved by
learning to touch-type using one of the many available online courses.
Editing literacy means using online tools appropriately for editing; not just the word-
processing tools of emboldening, italicizing, enlarging, contracting, deleting, cutting-and-
pasting, inserting and moving text, but also the more sophisticated annotating tools such as
inserting margin- or footnotes, or using editing tools such as track changes in Microsoft Word.
Hyperlink literacy involves knowing when it is worth clicking on a hyperlink in order to
follow it up, and how to return to the main text later, as well as how to insert your own
hyperlinks. More importantly, it means being able to follow up links to other texts and
return from them without losing awareness of the sequence of thought of the main text: a
new demand on the ability to read fluently which was rarely needed before digital text.
Texting literacy is the ability to create text suitable for smartphone texting using tools
such as WhatsApp. This includes a knowledge of the most popular emojis and their
meanings, as well as commonly used abbreviations such as U for you, 4 for for. Note,
however, that there appears to be a decrease in the use of such abbreviations parallel to the
increasing use of text prediction, automatic correction and speech to text (STT) technology:
why bother to shorten a word if the texting tool can write out the full one for you?
Search literacy relates to the effective use of search engines. With the enormous, and
daily increasing, number of websites that include any particular search word, students
need to know how to focus their search in order not to be faced with hundreds of
thousands, even millions, of websites to browse through. Techniques include the use of
quotation marks to mark the beginning and end of a multi-word sequence; the use of
the minus sign to eliminate search words and the capitalized OR to indicate you want
either one word or another. Other more advanced options are available from, for example,
Google’s Advanced Search (or the ‘Advanced search’ option within Google Scholar).
Prompt literacy is a new literacy needed today to be able to deal with Generative Pre-
trained Transform (GPT) tools effectively. Whether and/or how we let our learners use
GPT to compose text is a question I’ve already discussed in 11 Teaching writing. But if
they do, they need to know how to compose a prompt in order to elicit what they want.
Some guidelines:
• Make a prompt as detailed as possible, relating to content, style (e.g., ‘academic’ or
’informal’), specific things to include, specific things to exclude, level of language,
overall length, whatever further detail they can think of.
• Use ‘regenerate’ to get alternative texts.
• Get a revised text, by directing the GPT tool to make specific changes/additions/
deletions to the original.
• Check through any text produced by GPT to make sure it is what they intended, and to
verify facts.
• Don’t ask GPT to produce quotations, references, facts or evidence they can’t check: it
will produce convincing responses that may be wrong.

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Critical information literacy is the ability to relate critically to information provided online,
without assuming that it is necessarily true. When the internet first started to be widely used
as a source of information, there were people who claimed that this meant we did not need
to teach students facts any more, only provide them with the tools necessary to find them on
the internet. Today, the opposite is true: it is vital for students to possess factual information
about a variety of subjects. There is so much information available on the internet – some
true, some untrue, some a mixture – that unless the student starts off with at least some
reliable knowledge about the field, they may find it difficult to disentangle truth from fiction.
The number of websites providing unreliable information – whether for commercial or
political reasons, or maliciously, or simply for fun (the so-called ‘spoof’ websites) – has
increased to such an extent that a whole set of new terms has been coined to describe or
discuss them: fake news, fake websites, spoofing, truthiness, post-truth and more. Students
need to be aware that a website stating as fact something that appears surprising probably
needs to be checked out by trying to answer some or all of the following questions:
• Is the content likely to be true according to my previous knowledge of the area?
• Is the parent website a reputable public institution?
• Does the website provide sources of information?
• Does it represent commercial or political interests?
• Does the information excite an immediate positive or negative emotional reaction?
• Does there seem to be a commercial or political interest underlying the content?
• Is the website trying to persuade you to spend money based on the information
it presents?
• Did it reach you through social media?
If one or more of the answers to questions 1, 2 and 3 are ‘no’ and most of the rest are ‘yes’,
then the website is suspect. However, some spoof websites are very carefully constructed
to tick at least some of the ‘reliable’ boxes, so you may be thrown back on your own
common sense, real-world knowledge and judgement (see the Pause for thought below).
The Snopes website is dedicated to checking out the reliability of information provided on
the internet and is worth a visit.

Pause for thought

Look at the well-known spoof website ‘tree octopus’ (https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus).

What have the designers done to make it convincing?

Comment
The website is cleverly designed to target conservationists (‘Help save the …’),
provides deepfake illustrations and some authentic hyperlinks (e.g., to the Olympic
rainforest). Have a look at the parallel Wikipedia entry.

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Personal literacy means taking care of of one’s personal privacy, and keeping safe. One
of the problems of the very wide use of online resources is the dangers associated with
undisciplined internet surfing. As soon as a user accesses and uses a site that requires an
email address and a password, they leave a digital footprint, and the information may be
available to third parties. Phishing messages from a source claiming to be a bank or other
reputable concern can elicit more information by requiring details of, for example, a credit
card or passport. However elicited, personal information can later be used for trolling or
cyberbullying, or for identity theft, which can be exploited to make purchases or engage
in transactions without the knowledge or permission of the original user. For a school to
ban the use of smartphones or outlaw specific sites will not solve the problem. Students
need to know that they should not reveal personal information, that passwords should
be opaque (not to use their name or birthdate, for example) and regularly changed, that
emails or text messages from sources they don’t recognize should be deleted; and so on.

Pause for thought

A very useful activity related to personal literacy when using social media,
suggested in Pegrum et al. (2022), pp. 218–219, provides a series of scenarios and
invites teenage students to say what they would do in each of the cases. Have a
look at the four examples shown below and discuss what the answers might be
before checking the following Comment.

1 Someone has been posting unpleasant messages on a social media platform under your
username. You don’t know who it is. What do you do?
2 You have been exchanging private messages on a social media platform with a friend
you haven’t met. He is the same age as you and has similar interests. He sends you a
new photo of himself, and asks you to send him a new photo of yourself. What do
you do?
3 Your friends are talking about a new social networking site they are all using. When
you go to sign up yourself, you see that the website wants a picture of you, your email
address, your home address and your mobile phone number. What do you do?
4 At a recent party, your friend took some photos of you that you don’t like, and he has
now shared them on social media, tagged with your name. What do you do?

Comment
The answers suggested by the authors are as follows:
1 It’s likely that your account has been hacked, so immediately change
your password (and your username as well if you wish). Then post publicly,
disclaiming the unpleasant messages. If the messages are threatening or
libellous enough, the police may get involved and may be able to track
the origins.

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2 If you send photos of yourself to a stranger, they may use them in contexts
you are not happy with. More generally, it’s important to realise that when
you post photos on social media platforms, they may belong to the
platform, not to you. This means your photos could be used by the platform
for advertising or any other purpose without your explicit permission.
3 Never enter your personal details on a website without being aware of the
privacy policy, and what the site can do with your information. There have
been several internet scams where users enter their mobile phone number
and then agree to the terms and conditions on the site, only to receive
expensive daily mobile phone messages – which they have agreed to pay
for by agreeing to the terms and conditions.
4 Many social media platforms allow you to untag (remove your own name
from) a photo. This is the first step. Then contact your friend and ask him to
remove the photo. If he refuses, you may be within your rights to demand
this, depending on the rules of the platform and the law in your country.

18.2 The place of digital technology in the classroom

Hardware
The trend today is away from heavy desktop computers and towards lighter personal
digital devices: laptops, tablets and smartphones. The latter are forbidden in many
classrooms, for obvious reasons; but more and more teachers are coming to realize the
potential for learning that they can offer: the use of language-learning apps, searching
for information on the internet, writing activities and more. And for less well-endowed
institutions or individuals, the feature phone is a more affordable version of the
smartphone which still provides most of its essential functions.
Other types of hardware used in language teaching today include the interactive
whiteboard (IWB) and headsets for extended reality (ER), including virtual reality (VR) and
augmented reality (AR). The IWB has been around for a while, but on the whole, results
in terms of leading to better learning or making things easier for the teacher do not seem
to justify the considerable financial investment involved, since most of its functions can
be supplied as easily by using a normal whiteboard, doubling as a screen for a computer-
linked projector. If it is already there, however, it’s clearly a useful – and fun! – tool. It can
be used to involve students, but on the whole, its use tends to result in a more teacher-
led process. As to ER headsets, you will find some interesting ideas on how to use ER in
the classroom on YouTube videos. However, at the time of writing, this technology is not
widely used in language teaching. This is not so much because of the expense (headsets
are relatively cheap, and some AR activities can be done using a smartphone), as because
at the moment ER does not seem to make an obvious added contribution to learning
outcomes. However, this may change as the technology develops and teachers become
more experienced in using it.

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Using Internet resources

When using the digital technology in your teaching, you may wish to download different
kinds of content from the internet: recordings, graphic material, written texts. But you
need to be cautious, as some may be copyright, and not legally usable without permission.
Many such items, however, are freely available for use by teachers in their classrooms,
though there may be conditions attached, such as acknowledging the source. Check out
Creative Commons and OER Commons on the internet.

To use or not to use: do we have a choice?

Sometimes there are situations where there is no choice as to whether to use digital
technology or not. For example, integrating digital technology into teaching might
simply not be an option in a situation where the necessary equipment and facilities are
not available, or affordable. Conversely, its use was obligatory, wherever it was available,
during the COVID pandemic, when the only way many students could attend lessons was
through online videoconferencing tools like Zoom. But in most situations today, there is a
choice: the hardware is there, the software is easily available and usually cheap or free: the
question is if, how and when to use it.

Deciding if/how/when to use it

Both low-tech and high-tech can be beneficial, in different situations. There is a place
for typing in text to a computer as well as for handwriting on paper; there is a place
for reading off a screen, as well as for reading from a book or journal; and so on. No
evidence has been produced, as far as I know, to show that using technology, in and of
itself, is conducive to better language acquisition (Macaro et al., 2012). And there is some
indication that very extensive use of computers in school can actually be detrimental to
learning (OECD, 2015). But where it is well used, it can help both teachers and learners, in
class and outside it.
The crucial question is whether the use of a particular digital tool is worthwhile in terms
of learning outcomes. This can be expressed in questions like the following:
• How much time, effort and money are required to prepare, set up and run it, relative to
the learning or motivational benefits?
• What did I sacrifice or omit from the lesson in order to include the digital component,
and was it worth it?
What we need to remember is that digital tools are just that: tools. It is how they are
used that is important, not their existence itself. In other words, it is the appropriate
application of the technology, rather than the technology itself, which today can make a
significant contribution to effective English teaching.

Solutions looking for problems?

Hence, ‘Should I be using digital technology in my teaching?’ is the wrong question.
There is no value in using digital technology for its own sake. A more useful question is:
‘I have a certain problem to solve in my teaching: can the technology help me?’ Similarly,
an expert in high-tech who develops a new digital tool and asks ‘How can this be used to
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help language teaching?’ is also asking the wrong question. Digital tools should not be
seen as solutions looking for problems.
One example of solutions being applied to problems instead of the other way round
is the use of corpora in language teaching: what is called DDL (data-driven learning).
Corpora – enormous databases of spoken or written language in use – are an essential
tool for establishing, for example, the frequency of a particular word or expression, or
the most common collocations for a given word. And they have furnished the basis
for some important linguistics research. It has been suggested, therefore, that there is a
place for using corpora in language teaching: getting students to check out hypotheses
about language – collocational links, for example – by checking through corpus-based
concordances (lists of sentence-length contexts for a given word). Research on DDL has,
on the whole, been in favour of its use (e.g., Gilquin and Granger, 2022); but the question
is whether the same information could not have been accessed more quickly through
a dictionary or information from a teacher, and whether the improvement in learning
outcomes warrants the substantial investment of time and effort.

Issues that the technology can help with

For this reason, the organizing principle of Section 3 on practical uses of the technology
is not types of digital tools and how they can be used, but the other way round: some key
aspects of language acquisition and how the use of the technology in the classroom can
facilitate them or help solve related teaching problems. The section will thus pull together
some suggestions already made in earlier chapters, and add more.

Pause for thought

Can you think of an example from your own learning of any subject where digital
tools definitely helped you in your learning, better than the equivalent low-tech
tool would have done? And why? Conversely, can you think of an example where
low-tech was better?

Comment
In my own learning, I could not do without technology as a means of keeping up
to date with the latest research and reading. If I had to rely on paper books and
journals, this would be a lot more expensive and involve time-consuming ordering
of books or travelling to libraries. On the other hand, I learned Spanish from
face-to-face lessons with a teacher immeasurably better than I did using an online
language-teaching program.

18.3 Teaching different aspects of language using digital technology

This section relates to uses of digital technology in teaching and assessing listening,
speaking, reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary.

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Listening
The most important source of listening practice is arguably that which learners get by
listening to their teacher (see 8 Teaching listening). But this needs to be supplemented
by the use of online recordings in order to provide experience of different kinds of speech,
accents and interactional contexts. The internet provides an enormous range and variety
of such listening texts; the problem, of course, is how to find and select appropriate ones.
On the whole, it is better to use video rather than audio recordings in the classroom:
in most authentic listening situations the speaker is visible, and it is much easier to
understand someone whose face you can see. So use movies, recorded lectures like TED
talks or shorter video extracts rather than podcasts for listening practice. Note that on both
YouTube and Vimeo there is a useful facility on the ‘settings’ menu which enables you to
change the speed of the speech, so you can slow it down if necessary to make it easier for
your students to understand. You can also display or hide subtitles and/or the transcript. If
you can’t find exactly what you want, you can make your own videos from a text using AI
(artificial intelligence) tools like Fliki or Steve AI. You might combine digital with low-tech:
for example, show a cartoon or video clip of a story, but turn off the sound and compose
your own voice-over, to make sure the text is appropriate for the level of your students.
The exception to the recommendation to use video is when you are preparing students
for an exam where you know they are going to be tested using audio recordings, in which
case the examination authority normally will provide practice recordings for preparation.

Speaking
Chatbots – for example, chat.D-ID – are AI tools which enable learners to converse with
a convincingly human-sounding interlocutor. There are also the virtual assistants like
Alexa (Amazon), Cortana (Microsoft) and Siri (Apple) who will answer questions and make
suggestions, though they cannot at the time of writing develop a full human-like discussion.
Such tools cannot function as a substitute for practice in real conversational English
– which in my view needs to be based primarily on real interaction with a human
interlocutor – but can usefully provide a basis for short supplementary speaking tasks. For
example, the learner can be asked to elicit from a digital assistant information on a set of
topics – ‘Can you tell me about …?’ ‘Give me some information about …?’ – or answers to
a set of questions, or suggestions to solve a given problem. Such activities can be done in
class, using smartphones, or they can be done at home and recorded. Note that such tasks
can only be completed successfully if the learners are speaking comprehensible English, so
they provide reassurance to the speaker as to the comprehensibility of their speech.
Technology can also help with providing opportunities for real interaction with a human
interlocutor in English: Tandem, for example, pairs speakers from different linguistic
backgrounds to help them learn each other’s languages. Finally, videoconferencing tools
like Zoom can provide a platform for conversations between teacher and student in the
one-to-one or small-group classroom.

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The other important digital tools to support the teaching of speaking are the recording
and video recording tools: Audacity, for example, for audio, or ScreenPal, Loom or
Capture for video. Learners can thus record conversations with an AI interlocutor in a
chatbot, as suggested above, or they can record any conversations or interviews they are
asked to do for homework. Perhaps most importantly, they can record oral presentations.
Presentations are an important component of many English courses, particularly in EAP
or business English courses, where graduates will need to give lectures or presentations
as part of their future jobs. In the past, such presentations were always given in class,
which was very time-consuming, stressful for the presenter and often rather boring for
the audience. Today, screencasting tools mean that they can easily be recorded, and then
watched and assessed by the teacher later.

Reading
From the teacher’s point of view, the main change in the teaching of reading has been the
increased choice and accessibility of reading texts. Time was when a teacher who wanted
to choose readings for a class was either limited to those available in textbooks, or had
to search through books and make photocopies. Today, the amount of reading material
available at the click of a mouse is mind-boggling; as with listening texts, the problem is
not finding, but scanning through and selecting.
A second, more recent, change in the teaching of reading as a result of digital technology
is the increased ease of creating original texts through GPT. An appropriate prompt to
tools like GPT-4 or Bing will produce an entire text which you have not actually written,
but which is composed according to your requirements. You need to make sure that your
prompt is very specific (see ‘Prompt literacy’ in Section 1). If you are teaching a mixed-
level class, for example, you can tell GPT to make a longer and more advanced version
of a text, or a shorter, simpler one for different students to work on. You will still need to
check it through (this goes for any AI-generated text), but this tool saves you an enormous
amount of work. For younger learners, it’s easy to develop your own text into digital book
form with illustrations through tools such as Storywizard.ai or Tome.
An example of a particular use of GPT for the creation of texts is to support the process
called narrow reading. If a class has read a text that includes a number of vocabulary items
that you want students to acquire, it is useful to get them to read another text later that
uses the same items in a different context. Finding or composing such a text, however,
used to be time-consuming and difficult; today, with the help of GPT, it can be produced
in a few seconds.
From the reader/learner’s point of view, two digital tools which make reading a lot easier
are text-to-speech and translation. A learner can easily get the computer to read aloud or
translate either single words or complete passages – a ‘text to speech’ tool and translation
into a large number of languages is built into modern versions of MS Word, for example.
Adding extensions like Read Aloud or Google Translate to a browser will, again, enable the
learner to click on any word and immediately access how it sounds when read aloud and/
or how it translates into their first language.

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Writing
Interpersonal communication in the twentieth century was mostly spoken: either face-to-
face or through the telephone. Today, a lot of it is in writing, through email, texting, social
media or other forms of computer-mediated communication. Hence there is a rise in the
importance of learning to write. It is still essential to be able to handwrite, and will continue
to be so for the foreseeable future; but most writing is today done through the keyboard.
The most obvious form of interpersonal written online communication is email, but this
is used less for language teaching these days than text-messaging tools such as WhatsApp,
WeChat, and others. These readily lend themselves to real-time interactive written
communications such as questions and answers between students, or queries to the teacher.
For example, you might practise question forms by getting students to send questions
through a messaging app to each other during a lesson; each answer has to be accompanied
by another question which is answered, and so on. Other types of interaction involve the
students responding in different ways to a particular text, cue or picture: these can take
place perhaps more conveniently on blogs set up through, for example, WordPress.com, or
using noticeboards such as Jamboard or Padlet. Writing of extended texts is normally done
through typing into word-processing programs like MS Word, and then submitted to the
teacher online, through uploading to a school website or as an email attachment.
A learner can take advantage today of automated writing evaluation (AWE) tools such as
Grammarly or Write and Improve, which scan a text, locate errors such as misspelling or
grammatical mistakes, and suggest corrections. Note that GPT can do the same. The use
of AWE has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the learner can, without
resorting to a dictionary or grammar, find out what their mistakes are, at the level of
accuracy of things like spelling, grammar and punctuation, and correct them before
submitting the assignment. On the other, if the assignment needs to be assessed, it is
difficult for the teacher to know if the fact that a piece of writing is error-free does in
fact prove that the learner is able to write at this level. Also, note that AWE tools cannot
evaluate very well more general aspects of a piece of writing such as coherence, relevance,
organization and so on. Even more problematic is the use of machine translation (MT) tools
(Google Translate, DeepL, or, again, GPT) which can today produce results at a level close to
the performance of an expert human translator. For this reason, many institutions ban the
use of MT, and severely penalize those students who are found to have been using it.
If writing is not done for assessment, however, but rather for learning purposes, both MT
and AWE tools can be useful. MT can be used, in a monolingual class, as a basis for some
interesting translation-based exercises: analysing, for example, the differences between the
translations made of a specific passage by Google Translate as compared to those produced
by DeepL; or comparing students’ own translation of a sentence with an MT version.
The corrections suggested by AWE can result in substantial learning of specific language
points, as well as improvement in students’ writing. Note, however, that the use of such
tools does not eliminate the need for teacher checking: even Grammarly occasionally
corrects non-existent mistakes, or fails to correct existing ones. In other words, AWE – like
many other digital tools – can save work for a teacher, but cannot entirely replace them.
When the teacher is personally providing the feedback, the process can be made a lot
easier by the use of appropriate technology: through annotating or track changes tools in

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a word processor or, even more quickly and easily, through recording oral feedback using
one of the screencasting tools mentioned earlier.

Mixed skills
Finally, technology can help with the use of two or more skills together to reinforce each
other or support comprehension. For example, text-to-speech, or speech-to-text tools are
easily available, using Gboard or the relevant command on MS Word; alternatively, there
are specific programs targeting text-to-speech or text-to-speech (for example, VEED or
SpeechTexter, respectively). So if students are having trouble understanding an audio text,
they can access the written version, or ask the computer to read aloud a text as they read
it silently themselves. Or they can speak into a microphone and check that what they are
saying is comprehensible and can be transformed into written text. For comprehension
work also, mixed-skills tools are invaluable: for example, tools like Edpuzzle can insert
occasional reading or writing tasks into video recordings or films.

Vocabulary and grammar

Many of the tools mentioned above relating to the four skills are clearly also relevant to
the teaching of vocabulary and grammar. Some others that specifically target lexical and
grammatical accuracy are the following.
Dictionaries and grammars. Online dictionaries have the advantage that they are
not only easy and quick to use, often with hyperlinks that will provide you with more
information about a word and associated phrases, but also provide spoken versions – a
vast improvement on the sometimes rather opaque phonemic representation in print
dictionaries. On the other hand, there is some evidence that the use of paper dictionaries
leads to better retention of new vocabulary (Chiu and Liu, 2013), so don’t discard them
completely! Grammars are also available online: for example, my own favourite, Practical
English Usage (Swan, 2017).
Vocabulary work. The digital equivalent of word cards or vocabulary notebooks can be
found in tools such as Quizlet and Wordwall. The advantage of these over their paper
counterparts is that the programs are able to create games, activities and tests that use
the listed words or expressions for varied types of review. These can be planned for
classroom use, or assigned for homework. Other tools like Visuwords™ or WordArt display
vocabulary connected to a basic theme, through word clouds or networks.

Language exercises and tests

Test questions which can also furnish the basis for exercises, either done interactively
with a teacher or online with optional self-check facilities, can be created through Google
Forms, Microsoft Forms or Quizizz. Socrative is another useful tool, more appropriate for
use within a lesson than for homework. In all of these, questions may be either closed
(multiple-choice, for example) or open (short or full-paragraph answers). A very useful
combination is to get a GPT tool to compose an exercise (you can tell it what kinds of
questions to ask and what items you want to include), and then transfer this exercise into
programs like Wordwall or Socrative for students to actually do (and, if wished, check
their own answers).

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Pause for thought

Scan through this section and highlight in blue all those tools which you have
experience using, and have been successful; in green those which you don’t yet
have experience of but would like to try out; in yellow those you don’t think you are
likely to use; in red those which you have tried out and were not very successful, for
whatever reason.

Comment
As I wrote earlier, there is no virtue in using technology for its own sake: we need to
be critical and selective, and to learn from experience. And it is just as important to
know what tools to avoid as to know which ones to adopt. Just because another
teacher has used something successfully does not mean that you, or I, will also find
it effective in our classrooms. It’s often difficult to judge this in advance – particularly
as the websites are obviously keen to sell their product, and present a perhaps
over-optimistic picture of what you can do with it and how effective it is for language
learning! So it’s often a good idea to try out a new tool in class at least once to see
what the results are, and only then decide whether or not to continue using it in the
future. Many websites allow you a free experimental period before they start requiring
money, or provide basic free versions which can be upgraded to paid premium ones.

18.4 Teaching online

Online teaching compared to face-to-face

During the COVID pandemic, many schools moved entirely to online teaching due to the
rules on social distancing enforced in many countries. There is evidence that such teaching
produced, on the whole, lower learning outcomes (Dodgson, 2020; Moser et al., 2020).
This of course was particularly true in countries where the necessary hardware and internet
access were inadequate, or mainly confined to urban areas (British Council, 2021), but it
was observable even in places where the technology was widely available.
There are, of course, exceptions: teachers and students who felt that the learning process is
at least as successful as face-to-face. See, for example, the first item in the anecdotes below.
My own experience chatting to teachers and students during the pandemic, and observing
student behaviour, corresponds broadly with the above assessment. Here are some
anecdotal snippets.
• A gifted secondary-school student told me she was relieved to be learning online, since
time in the face-to-face lessons was often wasted on discipline problems; online, the
teacher could get on with the substance of the lesson without distractions.
• An elementary-school pupil suffering from mild ADHD simply opted out, and did not
participate in the online lessons, even when sitting in front of the screen while the
lesson was going on.

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• An elementary school teacher expressed relief at the prospect of returning to face-to-face.

• A university-level student admitted that the main reason he preferred online sessions was
the convenience of not having to travel, the comfort of sitting at home, and the time-saved.
• In a Zoom session held with a group of teacher trainees for whom the session was
compulsory, two or three turned off their cameras and did not respond to questions; and
one was (with his camera on but microphone off!) clearly chatting with someone off-screen
for most of the session.

Pause for thought

What is your own experience of teaching and learning online? Overall, do you
prefer distance learning, or face-to-face? Or does it depend? On what?

Comment
My own preference is for face-to-face, both as learner and as teacher: I like to have
the feeling of personal interaction with my teacher or my students in the same
room. The exception is where I’m learning mostly factual information. Then the
interaction with the teacher is not so important, and I can get a lot of the material
simply by reading off the screen.

Why are the results of distance learning often disappointing?

It seems likely that distance teaching/learning is in general less effective in most contexts
than face-to-face. This is not just because of technical problems, but also, and mainly,
because using a platform like Zoom, teacher and students can see only a small square
two-dimensional picture of each other’s head-and-shoulders; this picture may be very
small, perhaps not always visible if the group is a large one; and many students prefer to
turn off their cameras, in which case they will not be seen at all. The physical presence of
participants enables:
• enhanced visibility and clarity of facial expression;
• communication through body language;
• the chance to rearrange positions of the teacher and/or learners;
• the possibility of using interactive procedures such as fluid mingling;
• scanning of the entire class by the teacher to check up on attention and learner activity.
The whole, moreover, is more than the sum of its parts: being physically together is in
itself conducive to real communication. This is the reason why, incidentally, for high-
stakes political or business negotiations the negotiators prefer to fly to other countries in
order to meet up face-to-face rather than discuss issues online.
Then there is the phenomenon of ‘Zoom fatigue’: the fact that teaching for long hours online
is tiring, much more so than conventional classroom teaching. Reasons for this include:

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• the difficulty of listening to and understanding oral input for long periods, which may
or may not be clearly audible, with only minimal support from facial expression, and
none from body language;
• the lack of physical mobility;
• the stress deriving from having to look at one’s own face for extended periods (though
in fact some platforms allow you to hide your own picture if you wish);
• the fact that online teaching appears to require rather more preparation than does
conventional classroom teaching.

Increasing the effectiveness of online teaching and learning

In any case, distance teaching/learning through videoconferencing is here to stay. Often
the question whether it is more or less effective than face-to-face is academic, and it may
be being used for a variety of other reasons: because, as during the pandemic, face-to-face
is not an option; because there are too many student participants to fit in a classroom;
because the students and/or the teacher live too far away; because it does not require
travel; because it is cheaper.
The most important question is therefore: given that we shall continue, at least some of
the time, to teach online, what can make our teaching more effective?
Some basic factors are the following.
Control of the technology. Clearly this is fundamental; inability to use digital tools
effectively can ruin even the most promising lesson plans. This does not just mean being
able to log in to the chosen platform and use cameras and microphones, but also seamless
integration of other interactive tools available. These include the chatbox, the whiteboard
and possibilities of drawing or typing on it, breakout rooms and polls – all of which are
included in the Zoom package and other videoconferencing platforms.
Synchronous versus asynchronous. A synchronous online session is the conventional
webinar where teachers and students are both attending the session together, in real time.
In asynchronous online teaching, there is no set time for a lesson: the teacher records
material, or gives assignments which the students can study in their own time, and
submit their responses as they are ready. Asynchronous tasks are virtually homework,
and the interaction with the teacher is less direct. In the context of language teaching,
particularly in schools, synchronous lessons on the whole probably lead to better learning
than asynchronous, though there is a place for a combination of the two, particularly
in the context of higher education. They can be combined in what is called the flipped
classroom: students study the material in advance, through a video recorded by the teacher
or through reading, and then the actual lesson is devoted to discussion or developing
the information studied. The flipped classroom is not very widely used in schools,
mainly because it has been found that many schoolchildren simply do not do the pre-
lesson study task. The same sometimes happens even in higher education. As soon as a
substantial minority of the class fail to prepare, the whole procedure is doomed to failure.
Where the students can be relied upon to do the preparation, however, it can work well
(particularly for subjects which rely heavily on factual knowledge: history, for example).

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Rules. Some basic rules need to be established with the learners in online lessons to
make sure they run smoothly. Some of these are similar to those that apply to any lesson
(see 17 Classroom discipline); some of them are specific to online ones. Online rules that
teachers have told me are useful include things like:
• Keep your camera open during the lesson;
• Turn off your microphone except when you are called on, or volunteer, to speak;
• Use the chatbox only for contributions that are relevant to current lesson activity.
Lesson planning and preparation. Teachers’ experience indicates that successful online
lessons require rather more preparation than conventional ones. A major reason for this is
that, for many students, the online framework is less engaging, and there is the constant
risk of boredom and wandering attention. The lesson, therefore, needs to be composed
of a variety of different kinds of content, including plenty of images (see ideas on using
pictures based on digital sources in 19 Learner differences 1: age, Section 2) and active
participation by students (see the next paragraph). If online tools such as those mentioned
earlier in this chapter are used, they need to be selected and made ready, their link located
on your screen so that they can be activated smoothly at the click of a mouse.
Interaction. With online teaching, it is too easy to fall into lecture mode, using perhaps a
PowerPoint or Canva presentation with the share-screen facility. Students are likely to get
bored if they have no opportunity to respond and contribute. With relatively small groups –
20 students or fewer – it is possible to run a full-class discussion; but with larger groups
such discussions are likely to result in the neglect of most of the members of the group,
who may cease to attend. Some better possibilities for interactive process that activate all
the participants, or most of them simultaneously, are to use the following tools:
• The chatbox for responses, particularly if these are open-ended. Some examples: ‘Write
in the chatbox as many adjectives as you can that might describe a road’, or ‘Write up
ideas for questions that might get the answer maybe.’ Such brainstorms are an excellent
way of keeping students busy and attentive as they gather at the beginning of the lesson.
• Break-out rooms for small-group discussion tasks. These cannot go on for too long –
five to ten minutes is usually plenty – and should have a clear goal. Note that on most
platforms, you cannot share-screen at the same time as you have breakout rooms, so
you will need to send the instructions separately, or write them into the chatbox.
• Polls (the inbuilt ‘poll’ facility in Zoom, for example, or other tools such as Poll
Everywhere for questions requiring limited response, or Mentimeter). These are good
for survey-type activities, eliciting students’ feedback, preferences or experiences, as
well as for closed-ended language exercises.
• Questions and tasks interwoven with a Canva or PowerPoint presentation. You might,
for example, use ClassPoint to insert interactive tasks between slides, with the
possibility of immediate or delayed feedback.

Combination with face-to-face

Online teaching can be combined with face-to-face, usually in one of three models: the
flipped classroom (as described above under ‘Synchronous versus asynchronous’), where the
follow-up lesson is face-to-face; blended teaching/learning; and hybrid teaching/learning.
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Blended teaching/learning. Blended teaching/learning takes place when some of the

lessons are online and some face-to-face. Students may, for example, attend one lesson
a week online, and the rest face-to-face – or vice versa. This is a situation which we see
developing in many institutions as a result of having to use distance learning during the
COVID era. While many, perhaps most, teachers and students prefer the conventional
classroom, they are also more aware than previously of the potential benefits of the
online teaching/learning experience, have amassed considerable expertise in using the
technology, and are happy to combine the two.
Hybrid teaching/learning. This term is not to be confused with blended teaching/
learning. It refers to the situation where the lesson is being taught by a teacher in a
conventional classroom, but some of the students are in fact elsewhere, participating
online. This seems like a good solution for times when some students can attend and
others not, but it is very tricky. Cameras, screens, microphones and loudspeakers need to
be carefully placed so that students who are physically in the classroom can see and hear
those online, and vice versa, and so that all can see any teaching materials the teacher is
using. There are also limitations on how much the teacher and students can move around
the classroom, and on types of interactive tasks that can be used. See Nicky Hockly’s more
detailed discussion of this issue (Hockly, 2022, pp. 27–28).

Review: Check yourself

1 How many kinds of digital literacies can you recall? Which, in your view, are the
most important?
2 What is the main criterion for determining whether or not to use a particular
digital technology in the language classroom?
3 What are some useful digital tools to help your students improve their speaking
and writing?
4 What are some useful digital tools to help your students improve their listening
and reading?
5 What can be done to increase the effectiveness of online language teaching
using a webinar tool such as Zoom?

Further reading
Hockly, N. (2022). Nicky Hockly’s 50 Essentials for Using Learning Technologies. Cambridge
University Press.
(A brief, clear and accessible summary of the main issues in using the technology
in language teaching.)
Pegrum, M., Hockly, N. and Dudeney, G. (2022). Digital Literacies. Routledge.
(A comprehensive overview not only of digital literacies, but also of the various
uses of digital technology for language teaching. A number of practical activities
are suggested to support the learning of digital literacies for language learners.)

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 18 | Digital technology and online teaching

Russell Stannard (teacher training videos)

www.youtube.com/channel/UCKjOFIFE0q71IJ4GFx4brng
(A set of YouTube videos giving wide-ranging and practical advice by an expert on
the use of digital technology in language teaching.)

References
Baron, N. S. (2017). Reading in a digital age. Phi Delta Kappan, 99(2), 15–20.
British Council. (2021). Research and Analysis of School Closures response in the Americas
(RASCRA) – 2020. https://americas.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/final_report_-_
english.pdf
Chiu, L. and Liu, G. (2013). Effects of printed, pocket electronic, and online dictionaries
on high school students’ English vocabulary retention. The Asia-Pacific Education
Researcher, 22(4), 619–634.
Dodgson, D. (2020). Remote reflections – a term of online teaching. Modern English Teacher.
https://www.modernenglishteacher.com/remote-reflections-a-term-of-online-teaching
Gilquin, G. and Granger, S. (2022). Using data-driven learning in language teaching.
In O’Keeffe, A. and McCarthy, M. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics
(pp. 430–442). Routledge.
Hockly, N. (2022). Nicky Hockly’s 50 Essentials for Using Learning Technologies. Cambridge
University Press.
Macaro, E., Handley, Z. and Walter, C. (2012). A systematic review of CALL in English as
a second language: Focus on primary and secondary education. Language Teaching, 45(1),
1–43.
Mangen, A., Walgermo, B. R. and Brønnick, K. (2013). Reading linear texts on paper versus
computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension. International Journal of Educational
Research, 58, 61–68.
Moser, K. M., Wei, T. and Brenner, D. (2020). Remote teaching during COVID-19:
Implications from a national survey of language educators. System, 94, 102431.
OECD. (2015). Students, computers and learning: Making the connection. PISA. OECD
Publishing.
Pegrum, M., Hockly, N. and Dudeney, G. (2022). Digital Literacies. Routledge.
Swan, M. (2017). Practical English Usage (4th Edition). Oxford University Press.

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 19 Learner differences 1: age

Overview

19.1 Differences between younger and older learners. A discussion of the

critical period in language acquisition, and some language-learning
characteristics typical of younger/older learners.
19.2 Teaching young learners. Practical guidelines for the teaching of
young learners.
19.3 Teaching adolescents. Adolescents’ own opinions about how they like to be
taught, and some practical implications.
19.4 Teaching adults. The teaching of adults compared to that of adolescents
and young learners; some common types of adult courses.

19.1 Differences between younger and older learners

It is commonly assumed that young children learn languages better than older ones.
This is largely based on the observation that in immigrant families, young children
normally become – apparently effortlessly – highly proficient in the new language. Research
on children who did not have the opportunity to acquire language at an early age (‘wolf-
children’, or congenitally deaf children who recovered their hearing at a late age) indicate
that they found it very difficult to learn it later. According to the critical period hypothesis
(CPH), young children have a natural ability to learn languages which deteriorates when
they get older; though when exactly this critical period ends is a subject of debate.
The CPH has been the subject of much controversy and criticism (see, for example,
Marinova-Todd et al., 2000). In any case, the evidence summarized above has commonly
been used to justify starting foreign-language instruction in schools as early as possible;
but this conclusion is not in fact supported by the research. A longitudinal study of
children learning English in Barcelona comparing early with late starters in English
courses in schools showed that even given the larger number of total hours that younger
beginners had studied, their ultimate achievement was no better than that of the older
beginners (Muñoz, 2006). This result corresponds to the findings of Swain and her
colleagues in extensive studies of students in immersion courses in Canada (Swain, 2000).

Pause for thought

What are your own feelings about starting English lessons early in schools?

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Comment
In my country, English lessons are increasingly introduced – usually one or two
a week – in the early years of primary school, while all the rest of the curriculum
is taught in another language. When I ask the question on the previous page, I
get a lot of different answers, depending on who is being asked. Parents, school
principals, teachers of other subjects usually assume that starting English
early in schools is a good thing. The majority of English teachers and other ELT
professionals, on the other hand, are strongly opposed. Their opposition is not
only because of the reasons given below, but also because the teachers who
are leading these English lessons are usually not English teachers, but the class
homeroom teachers. These may or may not be fluent in English and in any case
do not have much knowledge of effective language-teaching procedures.

Younger learners learn less well in schools where English is taught as an additional
language than they do when learning in an English-speaking environment as
immigrants. Why is this?
1 Young children learn well in immigrant situations for a number of reasons which
have nothing to do with natural language-learning ability. First, once they enter
the education system of the new country, they have a huge number of daily hours of
exposure to the target language, as contrasted with the two, three or four hours a week
which are available to the learner of a foreign language in school. Second, they are
extremely motivated: for a child entering a kindergarten or school in a new country,
learning the language is a matter of survival; whereas a foreign language learned in
school is for the learner merely a subject on the curriculum. Third, their engagement
with the language is largely through one-to-one communication with local speakers
of it, most often children of their own age – as opposed to being one of a class of
20 children or more with one teacher.
2 Older students learn faster. Research on children learning an additional language
showed that, given the same amount of exposure to the foreign language, the older the
child the more they learn (Muñoz, 2006). The fact that younger children learn much
more slowly does not matter in an immigrant situation because they have plenty of time
to be exposed to and practise using the language; it does, however, make a big difference
if their learning depends on school-based instruction for a limited number of hours per
week. Older children learn faster, mainly because of their superior cognitive abilities:
it is commonly observed that school students who are best at English also tend to be
good at other subjects. The conclusion has to be that language learning in school is not
so much a function of a specific and independent predisposition to learn languages
well, but is associated rather with the cognitive ability that enables students to learn all
sorts of subjects successfully: how well they can understand, remember, problem-solve
and think critically and creatively. Moreover, these abilities increase with age, up to
adolescence. In other words, the older and/or more cognitively developed the child, the
more likely they are to be able to learn English well in school.

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So the answer to the question ‘Do younger learners learn languages better?’ is yes, if they
are in a total immersion situation where they have extensive exposure to the language,
high motivation and plenty of time; but no, if the context is school-based lessons where
another language is spoken outside the classroom. In school-based lessons, the older
they are, the more they will benefit from instruction. So it is probably unwise to insist on
children starting English in the early stages of primary school in a country where another
language is spoken outside the classroom, and preferable to invest language-teaching
hours at a later stage, when learners can make better use of them.
However, since the assumption that in foreign language learning younger is better is
widely believed, the Ministries of Education in most countries require an early start to
English teaching, and this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Given that in
many places children do start to learn English early in school – most commonly from
the age of eight or nine, but sometimes earlier – we need to explore how young students
learn, and to consider how best to teach them. It is necessary, therefore, to look at the
differences in the ways younger and older students learn languages.
1 Implicit versus explicit learning. Children learn best through implicit learning:
imitating, memorizing, acquiring intuitively through repeated exposure and
production in enjoyable or interesting activities (see Section 2 on the next page for
some examples). However, this kind of learning, though effective in the long term,
takes a lot of time. The older a student gets, the better they will be able to use explicit
learning processes: understanding and applying explanations, deliberate learning
of lists of vocabulary, testing hypotheses, focused practice (DeKeyser, 2012). These
are efficient, time-saving strategies: they do not replace the more implicit processes
involved in comprehension and production of communicative content, but rather
supplement them, and lead to more cost-effective and ultimately successful learning.
2 Discipline and cooperation. Adult classes tend to be more disciplined and
cooperative – as anyone who has moved from teaching children to teaching adults,
or vice versa, will have found (see Section 4). This may be because as they get older,
people learn to appreciate the value of self-restraint and disciplined cooperation
in order to achieve long-term gains. Younger learners are more impatient, and less
tolerant of tedious practice or difficult tasks with no immediate reward.
3 Concentration span. Teachers often notice that they cannot get young children to
concentrate on certain learning activities for as long as they can get older learners
to do so. However, the problem is not the attention span itself – children will
spend long periods of time on activities that really interest them – but the fact that
older learners are more likely to be willing to continue to focus attention on doing
something of no immediate interest to them because of its long-term benefits. One
implication for teaching is the need to give careful thought to the (intrinsic) interest
value of learning activities for younger learners.
4 Motivation. Most young learners and adolescents are learning English because they
have to: it is part of the curriculum at school, or their parents have decided to pay for
tuition. They may have little awareness of the reasons for learning, and neither young
nor adolescent students have much choice as to where, how or by whom they are
taught. So their motivation is likely to depend either on extrinsic factors such as test
results and grades, or on intrinsic ones such as the interest-value of the texts and tasks.

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19.2 Teaching young learners

Younger learners are defined here as those in the early classes of primary school, up to age
ten or so.

Pause for thought

What are some pluses and minuses of teaching classes of younger learners, in
your view?

Comment
Younger classes are those I most enjoy teaching. This is largely because I love
seeing my students succeeding in their learning – and with younger classes, since
they are usually beginners, you can easily perceive at the end of the year how
much they have progressed. But it is also because of the lift you experience during
lessons, when watching them enjoy things like performing dialogues and plays,
playing games, completing age-appropriate tasks and so on. On the other hand,
large classes of younger learners can be difficult to control, and sometimes things
get out of hand (see 17 Classroom discipline).

Some useful guidelines to bear in mind when teaching younger learners are the following:
The use of learning tasks that help implicit learning. This means providing lots of
exposure to meaningful language, with opportunities to learn such language by heart,
play with it or use it to convey messages. And it means less, or no, use of abstract
explanations, language analysis or exercises based on application of rules.
The arousal of motivation through activities and materials that will grab and maintain
learner interest. We can’t rely on long-term motivation to learn English; the students will
need to be motivated by the enjoyment or interest generated by the activities themselves.
Lessons that are planned to include a variety of relatively short components. Learning
tasks can vary in different ways: stirring (more exciting) activities versus settling (calmer)
ones; ones that demand physical activity versus ones done sitting down; collaborative
versus individual or teacher-led interaction. They also vary as to the skill being used:
listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Some practical ways in which we can implement these guidelines are through using visual
stimuli, stories, games and language play.

Visual stimuli
Lack of aural stimulus is relatively easy to tolerate: even young learners will work for a
while in silence without needing something to listen to. However, this is not true of visual
stimuli. Sight is a very dominant sense; so much so, that if young learners are not given
something to look at that is relevant to the current learning task, they will probably find
(and be distracted by) something that is not. The most obvious type of visual material for

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children is a picture, and the more clearly visible, interesting and colourful the better.
Pictures are very useful as the basis for language tasks and can be used for describing,
interpreting, dictating, comparing, and more. On the whole, professionally drawn pictures
or photographs are most commonly used: those in the textbook, or coloured posters, or
pictures downloaded from the internet and projected on a screen.
But there is also a place for the teacher’s own quick drawings on the board. Don’t be
discouraged from drawing because you feel you are not good enough! Even untidy and
inartistic drawings by the teacher are appreciated by young learners. Or use tools like
AutoDraw, which interprets your rough sketch and makes it look professional. If you are
looking for a very simple image, then modern versions of Microsoft Word provide a wide
variety of icons, drawings and photographs under its icons and pictures tabs.
For more complex or detailed pictures, there are also AI text-into-image tools like DALL-E2
or Stable Diffusion that will create pictures in response to a verbal description; but it takes
time to get exactly what you want, and probably you are better off typing a brief description
into Google Images and then scrolling through until you find something you like. You
need to be aware, however, that there may be a problem of copyright with some pictures
published online: see page 250.
Videos, particularly brief video clips, are also very attractive to children. Tools are available
to help you edit video recordings or insert questions or task (Edpuzzle, for example). There
are plenty of video versions of children’s stories available online through YouTube or
Vimeo, though the language of the text may be too difficult or spoken too fast. A useful
strategy to deal with this issue is to turn off the sound and supply your own voice-over at
a level and speed appropriate to your students.
Finally, young learners enjoy drawing their own pictures, to illustrate written compositions or
in response to activities like ‘Picture dictation’ (students draw, instead of writing, the meanings
of words or phrases that the teacher dictates). They can also draw on the board. This not only
provides student-created visual stimuli, but also gets them on their feet for some welcome
physical movement. Note that you can have two or three students at the board – or drawing
on an online whiteboard – simultaneously: it doesn’t have to be one at a time.

Stories
Stories are one of the simplest and richest sources of language input. Young children enjoy
and benefit from stories told in language they can understand.
Folk tales are particularly appropriate for younger learners. It doesn’t matter if they already
know the plot: they will enjoy hearing and understanding the English version. Folk tales
often involve repetition of similar phrases or sentences in a series of similar events that
build up to a climax, as in The Gingerbread Man, or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. (See
Taylor, Using Folktales (2000), for a collection of folk tales with suggestions for how to use
them in teaching.) Many modern stories for children include the same kind of repetitive
cycles (Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, for example). This kind of reiteration is very
good for language learning, and after a while, the students can themselves join in and
chant the key phrases with you as you get to them.

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A very effective combination in teaching is pictures and stories together; telling the class
stories from picture books, for example. If you can project the pictures on the screen as
you tell the story, so much the better; but in a conventional classroom it’s usually simpler
just to turn the book round to display the pictures as you go.
Many picture books with stories suitable for young learners are, however, intended for
L1 English speakers, and the language of the stories is therefore likely to be too difficult
for the students. A solution is to improvise the story in your own words, based on
the pictures, rather than reading aloud. This allows you to add, repeat, paraphrase or
occasionally translate, in order to make sure that your students are following. Narrating in
this way in the classroom also allows you to maintain more eye contact with the students
so that the storytelling becomes – as it should be – a form of personal interaction between
storyteller and listeners. It also makes it easier to stop and elicit responses.

Games
Children in general learn well when they are active; and when action is channelled into an
enjoyable game, they are often happy to invest a lot of time and effort in playing it. However,
games in a language lesson need to be carefully designed so that they do contribute to language
learning as well as being fun. Some games are largely a waste of time. In popular word games
like ‘Hangman’, ‘Wordsearch’, ‘Wordle’ and others, learners spend most of the time searching or
randomly guessing rather than actually engaging with meaningful English (see a more detailed
critique of ‘Hangman’ in 4 Tasks). Other types of games waste time in other ways – distributing
and gathering in boards, cards, dice and/or counters for board games, for example – so that
almost as much time is spent on setting them up as on playing them. Finally, there is the
problem of preparation time. Many online games take more time to prepare than they actually
take to play in the classroom: I stopped using ‘Kahoot!’, for example, for exactly this reason.
(Though such preparation may be worthwhile if you know you will use the result several times.)
The good news is that there are hundreds of games that are easy to set up, learning-rich
and enjoyable. Here are three of my own favourites.
1 Guessing games. There is a huge variety of guessing games that can be used for
language learning, focusing particularly on Yes/No question forms.
• What’s in the picture? (The picture is hidden, or students are shown a blurred
version, or a small corner of it, or a quick glance before it is hidden.)
• I spy with my little eye something beginning with [a letter] (but of course it doesn’t
have to be something that you can actually see at that moment, it could be any noun).
• What do I have in my bag? (Students guess what you have in a bag; objects can
include all sorts of things brought from home.)
• Who am I? (Choose a celebrity or someone all the students know.)
• What’s my job? (Perhaps give a hint through mime.)
• What am I doing? (mime)
• Twenty questions. (Give a hint, and then the students have 20 questions to enable
them to guess the answer.)

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2 Interpretations. Draw an abstract doodle on the board and invite students to say what
they think it represents. The idea you think most interesting or original wins, and that
student gets to draw the next doodle and judge the suggestions. Or display a picture
of a character, and invite students (in groups, or in the full class) to build a complete
character based on what they look like: name, age, nationality, family, occupation,
interests, ambitions, problems, past history, etc.
3 Name them. Students are put in pairs and each student is given a copy of the picture
shown below. In turn, each student chooses a character, decides on a name for them,
and tells their partner what it is (‘You see the man in the black hat, he’s smiling …
his name is Peter’). The condition is that students are not allowed to look at their
partners’ pictures. They can write in the names on their own pictures, but the
identification of the character to be named has to be done entirely through talking.
After a certain time, stop them. Students lay their pictures on their desks and check
that they have given the same names to the same people. As an optional follow-up,
ask them to tell each other what colour the faces, clothes and other things in the
picture are, and colour in accordingly.

Language play, songs, chants, rhymes

There are many very useful activities that are based on enjoyment of the sound of the language
and/or amusing or piquant meanings rather than serious communicative purpose (Cook,
2000). So, for example, we might introduce young learners to the onomatopoeic noises animals
make in English, as compared to the noises the same animals make in their own language. Or
play with rhyming phrases (e.g., ‘a blue shoe’, ‘Silly Billy’) or alliterative ones (e.g., ‘a happy
hippopotamus’, ‘a lonely lion’). Or write acrostic poems (poems where each line begins with
a letter of a word written vertically down the left-hand side of the page). (See Holmes and
Moulton, (2001), for this and other good ideas for poetry writing by younger learners.)
Other types of language play involve learning sequences of language by heart and then
performing them: songs, chants, rhymes and so on. The most obvious of these uses is
songs. Like stories, songs are enjoyed by younger learners and are a rich source of language.

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However, unlike stories, the enjoyment of songs is not dependent on understanding.

Children can enjoy hearing and singing songs that make no sense to them, so you do need
to make sure that they know what they are singing about! If you are singing songs regularly,
check every now and again that they remember the meanings of problematic words or
phrases. A useful strategy is to get them occasionally to say or chant the words of the song
rather than singing it. This will focus them on the spoken rhythm of the lyrics and make it
easier to transfer the words and phrases learnt through the song into their own speech.
For the reason given above, I find that chants are actually more useful for language learning
than songs, and can be very enjoyable. Carolyn Graham has popularized the use of what she
calls ‘jazz chants’ in English teaching (see, for example, Graham, (2006), or watch her on
video on www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_nPUuPryCs). Jazz chants are designed to replicate
the sound of natural speech, but because of the rhythmic quality are enjoyable to perform.
They can be done in different ways: very loudly, very softly; very fast, very slowly; starting
softly and getting louder (crescendo), or the reverse (diminuendo); in a high or low tone; and so
on. They can also be accompanied by appropriate actions or mime, as in the example below.

I can jump, (jump)

I can hop, (hop)
I can clap, (clap your hands)
And I can stop! (freeze like a statue)

I can jump, (jump)

I can hop, (hop)
I can run, (run on the spot)
And I can stop! (freeze like a statue)

(from Activities for Very Young Learners by Puchta, H. and Elliott, K., 2017)

Traditional or modern rhymes, tongue twisters, brief dialogues or other chunks of

language involving pleasing, humorous or dramatic combinations of words or phrases
can be taught and used in the same way as chants.

19.3 Teaching adolescents

Adolescents learn faster than do children (see Section 1), and they may use more
conscious, explicit strategies for language learning. However, motivation may not be very
high: most of them are still learning because they have to rather than because they want
to, and may therefore be reluctant to invest effort. There is the added factor of adolescent-
specific problems of identity, relationships, physical change and so on, which may make
it more difficult for them to concentrate. So adolescent classes may be more difficult to
motivate and manage, and it takes longer to build up trusting relationships.
One useful and reliable source about how to teach adolescents is the adolescents themselves.
Their opinions can be elicited through questionnaires, such as the one shown on the next
page. If you don’t want to do the Pause for thought, read on to the Comment below it.

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Pause for thought

What would be your own responses to the questions below? Make a note of what
you would answer to each one. What do you think would be the responses given
by an adolescent learner? If practicable, try asking an adolescent you know, or a
member of your family. Then read on to the Comment below.

Questionnaire
Write a tick in the appropriate column.
Very
Totally
A good teacher … much Agree Undecided Disagree
disagree
agree

1 … dresses nicely and looks good.

2 … cares a lot about their teaching.

3 … controls the class firmly.

4 … treats students with fairness

and respect.
5 … is warm and friendly to
students.

6 … knows and uses student names.

7 … is interested in each student as

a person.
8 … will change the lesson plan if
that’s what the students want.
9 … lets students mark their
own tests.
10 … lets students take over and run
the lesson.
11 … makes sure students have fun
in lessons.

12 … gets students to work hard.

13 … always gives interesting lessons.

14 … finds time to talk outside the

classroom if a student needs help.
(Questions 1, 8, 9, 11 are adapted from a questionnaire in ‘Pupil appraisals of teaching’ by
E. C. Wragg and E. K. Wood, in Wragg (1984), pp. 230–232.)

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Comment
The questionnaire was administered to two classes of 15-year-olds in the school
where I taught, and their responses are described below, together with my
own comments.
1 A good teacher dresses nicely and looks good.
There was agreement, but it was not unanimous. On the whole, I found that
students care a lot less about their teachers’ appearance than I would have
expected. Moreover, in the Wragg and Wood survey referred to on the previous
page, it was found that only a very small minority expected the teacher to be
very smartly dressed. So we probably do not need to worry too much about
appearance. However, note that this would depend also very much on the
surrounding culture and what is expected in the institution.
2 A good teacher cares a lot about their teaching.
Most of my respondents agreed, some strongly. It seems that our professional
commitment is very clearly communicated to students, through how well we
prepare lessons, how quickly and thoroughly we check assignments, how much
attention we pay to the progress of individual students and so on.
3 A good teacher controls the class firmly.
This was strongly agreed with. Most students like to feel that the teacher has
authority and is clearly in control. Interestingly, you may feel a contradictory
message coming across in many classes: the students may appear to be
opposing you, but in fact they are relieved if you are consistently firm with your
demands. There is a subtle distinction between being bossy (which students do
not like) and being firm (which they do). See 17 Classroom discipline.
4/ A good teacher treats students with fairness and respect. /
5 A good teacher is warm and friendly to students. These two statements both
relate to the kind of relationship students expect to have with you, and were
both predictably agreed with by most adolescents. The interesting point here
is that the first statement scored significantly higher than the second. Most
adolescents think it is more important for you to respect them than for you to
be their friend. The one, of course, may sometimes lead to the other, but what
needs to be established first is respect and fairness as the basis of a teacher–
student relationship.
6/ A good teacher knows and uses students’ names. / A good teacher is
7 interested in each student as a person. These two statements apparently relate
to the same teacher characteristic, and were both agreed with. My respondents,
however, were noticeably less enthusiastic about the second than about the
first. Adolescent students certainly want you to identify and relate to them as
individuals. However, they do not necessarily want you to be too interested in what

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may be seen as private territory. Be careful with adolescents when dealing with
personal matters. Sometimes they may welcome your interest, but at other times it
may be embarrassing or distressing.
     8/A good teacher will change the lesson plan and do something else if that
     9/is what the students want / A good teacher lets students mark their own
10 tests / I like it when the students take over and run the lesson. All three of
these relate to the idea that students should themselves take responsibility
for some learning decisions. Although many of my respondents were used to
being consulted in classroom affairs, their responses to statements 8 and 10
were very mixed, and to 9 there was complete disagreement. In the Wragg and
Wood survey referred to earlier, students actually identified 8 as a characteristic
of a bad teacher. My own conclusion would be that adolescent students
expect you to take the decisions. This does not mean that they should not be
consulted and their opinions taken into account, but the ultimate responsibility
for decisions about classroom management, lesson planning and assessment
is seen as the teacher’s.
11/A good teacher makes sure students have fun in lessons / A good teacher
12 gets students to work hard. These two questions relate to how serious and
learning-focused the students think lessons should be. My students agreed
with both statements, but they gave a higher score to the second. Students
like to enjoy themselves, but are very aware that they are in lessons to learn
English. In the vast majority of cases, they judge their teachers, ultimately, by
how much they learn from them, not by how much they enjoy their lessons.
Furthermore, as they get older, they understand more clearly that good
learning requires effort.
13 A good teacher always gives interesting lessons. Predictably, most
respondents agreed with this one fairly enthusiastically. This is all very well, but
they do not, naturally, consider whether it is reasonable to demand that all
lessons be consistently interesting! Both teachers and students need to be
realistic in their expectations.
14 A good teacher finds time to talk outside the classroom if a student needs
help. This was agreed with almost unanimously. Our responsibility as teachers
is not just to give lessons, but to do all we can to make sure that the students
learn English. If this means setting up brief meetings to chat to or advise
individual students outside lesson time, then it is important to try to make the
time to do so.

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19.4 Teaching adults

The teaching of English to adults has increased in recent years, as more and more people
realize how important it is for them to know English. In theory, the number of adult
learners should decrease in coming years, as English is now taught in most schools
worldwide as a compulsory subject and required for many school-leaving exams. But the
fact is that many students leave school with a relatively low level of proficiency in the
language. This could be for various reasons: they may not have learnt well, or they may
have been badly taught, or they may have had to leave school early to get a job. And as the
relative number of older people who have retired from work grows in many countries, there
is also an increase in English courses for seniors.
The bottom line is that the demand for adult classes in English seems unlikely to fall in
the foreseeable future: on the contrary.

Advantages and disadvantages

The teaching of adults is in some ways easier than the teaching of children and
adolescents. Adults are usually learning voluntarily and are very aware of the need to
make progress. This means that they are likely to be disciplined, motivated and willing to
invest effort in both class- and homework. All of this makes it much easier for the teacher,
who does not usually have to worry about discipline or motivation problems. Adults
are also able to learn through more sophisticated conscious learning strategies, such as
finding and applying explanations, making their own lists of vocabulary to learn and
so on.
On the other hand, adults are also likely to be more critical and demanding, and ready
to complain to the teacher or the institution if they feel the teaching is unsatisfactory.
This critical attitude is reinforced if they are paying for the lessons themselves, in which
case they want to feel that they are getting their money’s worth. To put it another way, a
teacher of adults, particularly in private language schools, may be seen as a hired coach
rather than an authority or educator as they are in school. Some tact may be needed
in activating and giving feedback to adults, particularly those who are in management
posts and are used to having authority over others. They may find the role of student,
acknowledging the authority of the teacher, difficult to cope with, especially when they
make mistakes and are corrected, or when their work is assessed and criticized. And they
may find it very stressful speaking in English in class, where they are suddenly unable
to express themselves as fluently and authoritatively as they can in daily life. We need,
therefore, to make sure we treat these students respectfully and supportively when giving
feedback or inviting participation.

Teaching methods
As mentioned earlier, adults tend to learn the language well through conscious learning
strategies. They benefit from explicit descriptions of language, explanations of grammar,
and detailed definitions of meanings. They appreciate opportunities to apply language
rules in focused exercises. Many are also interested in learning about the language:
for example, the etymology of particular words, comparisons between American and

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British English, or contrasts with their own language. However, they also need plenty of
communicative practice, in all four skills: how much, and in what balance, will depend on
the type of course: see Types of courses below.
Many adult classes are relatively advanced. This means that you are likely, even with a
monolingual class whose L1 you know, to be able to conduct the entire lesson in English.
Their level, combined with high motivation, means that you can normally get through
much more in a session than with younger learners. Make sure you prepare plenty of
material, including a reserve that you can use if you finish everything you had planned.

Types of courses
The main types of adult English classes which you may be required to teach are listed below.
General English. Most courses for adults are aimed at improving general proficiency: the
students have found that the amount of English they learnt at school is inadequate for
their present needs, or for potential future employment. Such courses are often run by
private language schools or institutions such as the British Council, and might prepare
students for one of the international exams (such as IELTS).
English for Academic Purposes (EAP). These are courses that are provided in universities
or other institutions of higher education. The students may be learning English because
the university is itself located in an English-speaking country, so all the courses are run in
English. Or they may be studying at a university in a non-English-speaking country but
need a high level of academic English, both written and spoken, in order to access the
research literature, to write papers for international journals, hear and understand lectures
given by experts from abroad, or participate in international conferences. Also, the
number of courses given in English (EMI) in universities all over the world is increasing
(see 16 Teaching content). The emphasis is on the acquisition of academic vocabulary,
and on the development of a formal and correct English written and spoken style, rather
than communicative informal conversation.
Business English (BE). This is another field which is on the increase. Most university
business management programmes worldwide will include BE courses, and many large
international corporations run in-house courses for their employees. Teachers of such
courses are expected not only to teach English to a high level, but also to be knowledgeable
about the principles, practice and terminology of modern international business.
English for Specific Purposes (ESP). These are courses that are often run in language
schools or vocational training courses that focus on English for a particular occupation:
English for tourism, or English for nursing, for example. Their materials are based on
tasks and situations that are likely to occur in the course of work in the target occupation,
and are expected to provide useful vocabulary. The emphasis is less on the production
of accurate, formal English and more on effective communication in situations that the
students are likely to encounter in their professional practice.
Other. There is a wide range of other types of specific-focus courses available to adults
today: conversational English; written English; translation; and, of course, English for the
teachers of English themselves!

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Review: Check yourself

1 Suggest three reasons why immigrant children learn the language of the new
country well.
2 List some differences between the way young children learn a new language
and the way older students do.
3 What are some important principles to remember when teaching
younger learners?
4 Why are pictures important in the teaching of younger learners?
5 What should you take care to check when choosing or designing a game
for use in the classroom?
6 What are three or four clear preferences expressed by teenagers about the
way they like to be taught?
7 What are some common characteristics of adult learners that make it easier,
or more difficult, to teach them than younger learners?

Further reading
Guse, J. (2011). Communicative Activities for EAP. Cambridge University Press.
(Ideas for teaching adult academic classes, with ready-made photocopiable
material)
McKay, H. and Tom, A. (1999). Teaching Adult Second Language Learners. Cambridge
University Press.
(General advice and some useful activities for adult classes)
Moon, J. (2005). Children Learning English. Macmillan.
(Some very practical ideas for lesson planning and task design in younger classes)
Puchta, H. (2021). 101 Tips for Teaching Teenagers. Cambridge University Press.
(A number of practical ideas for activating teenagers)
Puchta, H. and Elliott, K. (2017). Activities for Very Young Learners. Cambridge University
Press.
(A valuable practical resource if you find you need to teach very young learners,
aged between three and seven)
Read, C. (2020). 101 Tips for Teaching Primary Children. Cambridge University Press.
(Some useful tips for teaching younger learners: teaching strategies and practical
activities)

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Ur, P. and Wright, A. (1991). Five-Minute Activities: A Resource Book of Short Activities.
Cambridge University Press.
(A collection of very short, easily prepared and administered game-like activities)
Wright, A. (1989). Pictures for Language Learning. Cambridge University Press.
(A large number of pictures and ideas on how to use them; also provides guidance
to teachers on how to produce their own pictures)
Wright, A., Betteridge, D. and Buckby, M. (2006). Games for Language Learning (3rd Edition).
Cambridge University Press.
(A useful collection of games, which can be used at all ages)

References
Cook, G. (2000). Language Play, Language Learning. Oxford University Press.
DeKeyser, R. (2012). Age effects in second language learning. In Gass, S. and Mackey,
A. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 442–460). Routledge.
Graham, C. (2006). Creating Chants and Songs. Oxford University Press.
Holmes, V. L. and Moulton, M. R. (2001). Writing Simple Poems: Pattern Poetry for
Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press.
Marinova-Todd, S. H., Bradford Marshall, D. and Snow, C. (2000). Three misconceptions
about age and L2 learning. TESOL Quarterly, 34(1), 9–34.
Muñoz, C. (2006). The effects of age on foreign language learning: The BAF project.
In Muñoz, C. (Ed.) Age and the rate of foreign language learning (pp. 1–40). Multilingual
Matters.
Swain, M. (2000). French immersion research in Canada: recent contributions to SLA and
applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 20, 199–211.
Taylor, E. (2000). Using Folk Tales. Cambridge University Press.
Wragg, E. C. and Wood, E. K. (1984). Pupil appraisals of teaching. In Wragg, E. C. (Ed.)
Classroom Teaching Skills (pp. 220–221). Croom Helm.

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 20 Learner differences 2: diversity and
inclusion

Overview

20.1 Diversity in groups of learners. The different ways in which students vary
within a single group.
20.2 Problems and advantages. Some common teaching difficulties which arise
in heterogeneous classes, and possible advantages.
20.3 Practical principles. General guidelines for the teaching of heterogeneous
classes, illustrated by ideas for classroom procedures.
20.4 Teaching high and low achievers. Catering for more advanced students
and (particularly) those who are lagging behind.

20.1 Diversity in groups of learners

In some institutions, classes are supposedly ‘homogeneous’ in that their members have
done a test which assigns them to a particular group at a specific level. However, even
in such groups – and how much more so in places where no such process takes place –
students vary enormously, in a number of different ways. All classes are to some extent
heterogeneous: there will always be diversity.

Pause for thought

What is ‘diversity’ in the classroom? In how many ways are students different from
each other? Make a list of all the ways that they are different which would have an
effect on how they need to be taught. Then compare your list with the one on the
next page.

Comment
A lot of the items in your list will be the same as mine, but you may have added
more, or omitted ones that I listed. The most obvious ones have to do with
language ability or level; but others, such as learning preferences, personality,
motivation and expectations, are also significant, and may substantially affect the
way we need to teach.

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Aspects of learner heterogeneity

Gender. In some mixed-gender classes, you may find differences between students that
are gender-linked. This to a large extent depends on the surrounding culture, and how
differently boys and girls are educated.
Age or maturity. Adult classes may be composed of students of widely varying ages. Even
in schools within an education system where students in any one class are usually all the
same age, they may have different levels of maturity, particularly in adolescent classes.
This will make a substantial difference to the way they prefer to learn, how motivated
they are, and more.
Proficiency in English. Members of a class will vary in their level of proficiency in
English. This may be because of the amount of instruction they have received, their
success or failure in previous courses or because they have had more, or less, exposure to
English in the past outside the classroom.
First language and other known languages. Students may know only the dominant
language of their own country, or they may (also) know other languages spoken by a local
community, or in the home, or learnt in school.
General knowledge. Students also vary as to the amount of general world knowledge
they have, based on their own life experience and the information they have learnt, either
in school or through extra-curricular activity.
Intelligences. According to Gardner’s (2011) theory of multiple intelligences, each
student has a different combination of various types of intelligence (mathematical,
spatial, linguistic, etc.). The theory has been criticized as being unscientific, but it provides
a useful way to look at and value the differing abilities of different students.
Abilities and disabilities. Some students have particular talents or abilities: they may
remember well, or be creative or very good at logical problem-solving. Others may have
particular disabilities: they may be hearing- or sight-impaired, for example, or have
learning disabilities like dyslexia or conditions like ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity
disorder). In some cases, the disablities may be so severe that a student may be diagnosed
as SEN (special educational needs), and need the support of trained professionals.
Personality. Students vary a lot in their personality: shy or confident, friendly or
withdrawn, dominant or submissive, talkative or quiet, and so on. This will influence not
only the way they learn but also the way they relate to you and to other students.
Learning style. The popular division into ‘visual’, ‘aural’ and ‘kinesthetic’ (VAK) learners
does not seem to be supported by research evidence (Lethaby and Harries, 2016), but it
remains true that individual students differ in the way they prefer to learn. For example,
some prefer to learn on their own, others like to work collaboratively; some learn through
doing, others are more reflective and receptive (Kolb, 2014).
Attitude and motivation. Some students come to the classroom with a positive attitude
to language and studying, others do not, and for many different reasons. For example,
they may or may not feel it is important to know English; they may have had positive or
negative experiences with learning it in the past.

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Tastes and interests. Students enjoy different kinds of books, television programmes or
films. They have different leisure-time activities and may be interested in different school,
or extra-curricular, subjects.
Cultural and linguistic background. In many places, you may find yourself teaching
students who come from different countries, or from different cultural groups within the
country where the school is located.
Learning experience and culture of learning. The way students behave in the classroom
will depend to some extent on their previous experiences learning English, which may
vary widely. They may be used to different cultures of learning.
Expectations. Linked to many of the previous items are the different student
expectations: how they expect the teacher to behave in the classroom, for example, or
what sorts of learning tasks they expect to be set, or how much homework they will
need to do.
When teaching any class, catering for different abilities and levels is the most prominent
problem for the teacher, and so this is inevitably the focus of much of the material in this
chapter. But it is important to remain aware of the other differences between the students
in our class, as listed above, and take care to foster an atmosphere of inclusivity and
respect for diversity.

20.2 Problems and advantages

Problems
Below are five teacher statements describing learning problems they have with their
heterogeneous class.
Mark: ‘I can’t make sure they’re all learning effectively; the tasks I provide are either
too difficult or too easy for many of them.’
Sara: ‘The material is unsuitable: the texts in my coursebook are targeted at students
at a particular level, and some of my students need easier or more difficult material.’
Tania: ‘I can’t activate them all: only a few students – the more proficient and
confident ones – seem to respond actively to my questions.’
Peter: ‘They get bored: I can’t find topics and activities that keep them all interested.’
Ella: ‘I have discipline problems in these classes; I find them difficult to control.’
If you don’t wish to do the Pause for thought below, then read on to the Comment on
the next page.

Pause for thought

Which of the problems above do you think are the most important? With which
teacher do you personally most sympathize?

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 20 | Learner differences 2: diversity and inclusion

Comment
Mark’s problem is crucial. Our main job is to make sure that all students are
included in the learning process. If some of them are not, then we have a major
professional challenge. In principle, the solution to the problem is what is called
differentiated instruction: providing individualized teaching appropriate to different
students. This is often interpreted as preparing different tasks appropriate to the
varying abilities of the members of the class, which is fine in theory, but not very
practical for teachers who are already working hard to prepare all their lessons!
See Section 3 for some alternatives.
Sara’s problem of level of materials is a very real one. Many of the exercises
in coursebooks are clearly aimed at a particular level, and the texts are also
often presented with very few options or ideas for making them more, or less,
challenging (see 15 Teaching/learning materials, Section 4 for some ideas on
adaptation).
Active participation is also a challenge in heterogeneous classes, as Tania
says. Inevitably, the moment we ask a question, it will be the more advanced
and confident students who volunteer answers, and it is sometimes difficult to
involve the others as well. We need to think of ways to provide opportunities
for the less able or confident students to participate without competing with
their more assertive classmates (see Individualization in Section 3).
Peter raises the issue of students getting bored. There are two main reasons
for student boredom in these types of classes. One is the varied interests of
different students and their different learning styles: a topic and/or task that are
fascinating for some members of the class may be totally uninteresting for others.
The second problem is associated with the different levels. In order to help the less
able students, a teacher must occasionally provide easier tasks, or take time to
explain things that the rest of the class already know. In either case, the students
who need more challenge or already know the material may get bored and will
consequently learn little.
The discipline problems which worry Ella arise as a direct result of the boredom
discussed above. When students are waiting for slower workers to finish a task,
or to understand what the teacher is explaining, they are very likely to start
talking or otherwise disturbing the class. The lower-level students may also start
disturbing the class because they don’t understand what is going on or are
unable to participate in a class activity because they don’t know the necessary
language.

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Advantages
Classes of very diverse learners are seen mostly as a problem. However, they have their
advantages as well, and some of these can be used to help solve the problems. For
example:
Human resources. Such classes provide a richer pool of human resources than more
homogeneous ones. Between them, the individuals have far more life experience and
knowledge, more varied opinions, more interests and ideas – all of which can be used in
classroom interaction.
Educational value. There is educational value in the close contact between very different
kinds of people: classmates get to know each other’s cultures, experiences, opinions, and so
increase their own knowledge and awareness of others as individuals. If there are people from
very different cultures in the group, then this contact may go some way towards challenging
stereotypes and helping students to understand and respect each other’s cultures.
Cooperation. The fact that the teacher is less able to pay attention to every individual
in the class means that for the class to function well, the students must help by teaching
each other and working together. Peer-teaching and collaboration are likely to be
common, contributing to a more inclusive, warm and supportive classroom climate.
Teacher development. These classes can be seen as very much more challenging and
interesting to teach, and provide greater opportunity for creativity, innovation and
general professional development on the part of the teacher.

20.3 Practical principles

The practical principles described in this section may not be able to completely solve
the problems described earlier, but they can go some way towards addressing them and
increasing inclusivity. They do not necessarily involve a large amount of preparation or
the creation of new materials. Rather, they are based on a slight tweak in the way tasks are
designed or presented, or simple adaptation of textbook materials.

Variation
In a heterogeneous class – particularly a large one – you cannot possibly be actively
teaching all the students all the time. There will be times when you are neglecting the
students who like to work in groups in order to provide activities that allow for individual
work. There will be others when you are neglecting more advanced students in order to
concentrate on helping the others to catch up. In other words, however much you favour
inclusion, there will be occasional temporary exclusion of individuals within a particular
learning procedure. Realistically, this cannot be completely avoided. What you can do
is make sure that you give time and attention to the different groups of students in a
balanced way, so that the inevitable occasional neglect of individuals is fairly distributed.
You can achieve balance by ensuring that you vary your lessons in the following ways:
• Level and pace. You can sometimes use more demanding texts and tasks, at other times
easier ones; and similarly, work sometimes at a faster pace, sometimes more slowly.

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• Type of classroom interaction. Some students like working with their classmates; some
like working alone; others prefer to interact directly with the teacher. Try not to get into
a routine of doing a lot of teacher-led work and very little individual work; or a lot of
group work but little that is clearly teacher-led. Make sure that there are opportunities
for all three types of interactional organization (see 3 Classroom interaction).
• Skills and learner activity. Keep a balance between the four skills, between tasks that
require more reception and/or reflection, and those that require more production
and activity.
• Topic. Usually, the topics will be determined by the coursebook; but if you notice
that the coursebook tends to use just one kind of topic, and some of the class are
getting bored, try to find out what they are interested in and bring in new topics to
supplement the book.
• Task. Vary the tasks, not only in the skill used, but also in the kind of mental activity they
require: applying rules, analysis, creativity, puzzle-solving, game-like challenge and so on.

Interest
Inevitably, as mentioned above, we will be sometimes working at a speed or level which is
inappropriate for some of the students. These students may then become bored and stop
participating, or even start misbehaving. The trick is to try to keep them all engaged, so
that even if the task is inappropriate for their level, preferences or interaction style, they
will continue to participate because they find the task interesting. An interesting topic
does not help very much, because there are not many topics that all the class will find
interesting. It is also very easy to kill an interesting topic by using a boring task. However,
the opposite is also true: the most boring topic can be made interesting by using it in a
stimulating task. To take a brief example: the topic of cardinal numbers (one, two, three …)
is fairly boring. However, suppose we do the following: ask students each to choose a
number which is significant for them (for example, the year of an important event in
their lives, the number of brothers and sisters they have or their phone number), and
then to tell their classmates what the number is and invite them to guess its significance
(revealing the right answer later if it isn’t guessed). This activity is likely to be interesting
for everyone, including students who already know the numbers and do not need to
practise them. In this case the interest is based on personalization (which is discussed
in more detail later); but there are other task-design features which also help to maintain
interest (see Interest in 4 Tasks, Section 4).

Individualization
Individualization relates to students’ learning level and includes strategies which enable
them to learn at an appropriate pace and level, even when they are doing a routine
teacher-led or coursebook exercise. When leading a question-answer session based on
a language or comprehension exercise, for example, the conventional procedure is
IRF: Initiation (the teacher asks a question or gives a cue), Response (students volunteer
responses) and Feedback (the teacher comments on student responses) (see 3 Classroom
interaction for more detail on this). Such patterns are sometimes called lockstep: everyone

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is expected to be doing the same thing at the same time. There is no latitude for learner
individualization: no choice as to which question to answer, for example, or how long to
take working on it, or whether or not to work collaboratively. Consider, when leading a
question-answer session like this, the following options:
1 Invite students to read through the questions, to choose one to which they are fairly
sure they know the answer and raise their hands to volunteer the answer to it. And
then another. If there are any questions to which nobody knows the answer, provide it
yourself and explain.
2 Tell students to spend a few minutes working on the questions individually or in pairs,
as they choose, and after they have done as much as they can in the time you have
allotted, invite answers as in 1 above.
3 Invite students to work as in 1 or 2 above; then display or distribute the answers:
students self-check.
In this way, students are able to choose which questions to answer, and take as much time as
they need to work on the ones they select. The slower-working students will do fewer, faster-
working ones will do more, but each is working according to their own pace and ability.
Another useful individualized procedure is ‘Pass it on’. An exercise or worksheet or
vocabulary task is distributed: for example, the one shown below.

Opposites
Write in no more than four opposites of the words below.
boring ___________ high ___________ day ___________ full ___________

noisy ___________ white ___________ happy ___________ go ___________

long ___________ under ___________ up ___________ boy ___________

small ___________ outside ___________ sit ___________ slowly ___________

Each student writes in any four opposites, taking as long as they need to, and then raises
the sheet and looks to find someone else who has also finished and raised the sheet. They
exchange sheets and fill in another four; and so on. An alternative is to say, ‘Fill in as
many as you can until I say “Stop!”, and then exchange; again, students do as much as
they comfortably can in the time, then move on. Either way, there is a choice as to which
items to respond to and how quickly or slowly they work; and the less-advanced students
are not stressed by the fact that there are some items to which, perhaps, they do not know
the answers. And all the students are actively participating, all of the time. At the end,
the teacher provides the answers. Any worksheet which requires a number of different
responses would work as a basis for this activity.
(For more on individual work, see 3 Classroom interaction, Section 3.)

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Personalization
Personalization relates to the whole person, not just proficiency or speed as in
individualization: personality, interests, experience, opinions and so on. You might invite
students to choose their favourite foods (or places, or clothes, or whatever) and then post
pictures and captions on an online notice board like Padlet. Or, at very elementary level,
tell your students to imagine that they are six years old and that their parents have offered
to buy them a pet: they can choose a cat, dog or pony; small, big or medium; white, black
or brown: which would they choose? Distribute the table below, and ask each student to
mark their preference.

I want a … small white cat

Do you want a …? big black dog
medium brown pony

Then invite the students to get up and mingle: meet a classmate, and ask what their pet
will be, then another … the goal is to find at least one classmate who wants exactly the
same – more than one, if possible.
At a more advanced level, you might, as suggested at the beginning of 2 The lesson, give
students a selection of metaphors for the English lesson, invite them to to choose the one
they feel is most appropriate, and to explain why.

Collaboration
Collaboration in this context means working together in order to achieve a better
outcome than a single student could on their own. Allowing students to work together
on completing a task encourages peer-teaching, supportive relationships, and is likely to
include more of the students in active participation.
Collaboration is often interpreted as meaning group or pair work. But in fact there are
other kinds of collaboration that accord with the definition above. Class brainstorming,
for example, where all members of the class can contribute to a pool of responses to a
given cue. Or the ‘pass it on’ technique described above under Individualization. Or the
mingling described above under Personalization.
Group or pair work is, however, probably the most common form of collaboration,
and is an essential tool to get students to practise talking in English. The negotiation
of meanings that commonly occurs in such work also facilitates language acquisition
in general.
Not all tasks are suitable for group work. If you put a stronger student with a weaker one
to collaborate on doing a written exercise, for example, the stronger one will probably do
most, sometimes all, of the work, and may wonder ‘what’s in it for me?’. Group or pair
work is best used either for tasks that involve negotiation and consensus, or for those
where a larger number of students will always get better results, regardless of their level:
brainstorming, for example, or recalling a number of items. See, for example, Recall and
share as described in 11 Teaching writing, Section 5.

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Open-ending
Closed-ended cues have one right answer: for example, in order to practise the present
perfect, you might give the sentence-completion cue: Sue won’t be here today. (Her car /
break down). The students are required to write the response: Her car has broken down.
Students who are at a lower level are likely to be excluded, since they have not yet
mastered the relevant verb forms or vocabulary, so they will either not respond at all,
or are likely to get the answer wrong. The more advanced students are also neglected,
because the item is easy and boring, and provides them with no opportunity to show
what they can do or to engage with language of an appropriate level.
Open-ended cues, on the other hand, provide opportunities for responses at various
levels. In this case, we might rephrase the above cue as follows: Sue won’t be here today.
What do you think has happened? The students can make up reasons at various levels
of proficiency: She has fallen ill, she has forgotten to come, she has overslept, she has had an
accident. The less advanced can listen to other learners’ responses and use them as models
before volunteering ideas of their own. In either case, the target grammatical feature is
practised (and a lot more than it would have been in the original). Some added benefits
are that more students get to participate, that there is some latitude for expression of
personal experience and opinion, and that the whole exercise becomes much more
interesting.
Closed-ended textbook exercises can often easily be adapted to make them open-ended.
For example, you can delete the cues in a gapfill or sentence-completion exercise so that
students can fill the gaps with whatever they like (as long as it makes sense and is in
acceptable English). Or you can delete one of the columns in a matching exercise and
ask students to invent the matches themselves (see some examples of such adaptation in
15 Teaching/learning materials, Section 4).

Core plus optional

The idea here is to have a compulsory core task which is easy enough to be successfully
completed by all members of the class, plus an extra component which is longer and more
challenging, but clearly defined as optional. In this way, all members of the class can be
included in engagement with the basic task, while there is enough extra work to keep the
more advanced or faster-working students busy, challenged and learning at an appropriate
level. Almost any classroom task to be done by individuals can be presented in this way.
The key phrase in the instructions is at least: ‘Do at least five of the following questions
(more if you can)’; ‘Find at least five vocabulary items to put in each column (more if you
can)’; ‘Write a story of at least 100 words: if you can, then make it longer.’ Sometimes
an extra task can be added explicitly, with the instruction if you have time: ‘Finish this
exercise for homework; if you have time, do the next one as well.’ This can easily be done
with listening comprehension, for example. Instead of giving the class comprehension
questions on a spoken text, ask them to listen to a description or report containing quite
a lot of factual material (you could, for example, describe members of your own family!)
and tell them that their task is to write down at least four facts they have learnt from their

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listening. At the end, ask them if they have at least four facts. In my experience, they
almost all have more, and are eager to tell you what they are.
A problem that teachers bring up here is, ‘How do I get students to work according to
their full potential? Given the choice, surely they will opt for the easier “compulsory”
work?’ I have only rarely come across this problem in my classes. On the contrary: if I
have a problem, it is that the less advanced students try to do too much. I am not sure
why this is. Perhaps they prefer challenge and interest to easiness and boredom. It may
also be partly from considerations of self-image (‘I wish to see myself as the kind of
student who does more advanced work’). In any case, usually these motives seem to be
more powerful than the wish to take easy options. If, however, you do have students who
do less than they should, you probably know who they are and can tell them in advance
that you expect them to do the optional as well as the core task.
The ‘core plus optional’ principle can also be applied to tests. One of the problems with
classroom tests is that not only are they too easy for some and too difficult for others, but
also that some students finish early and are left with nothing to do – and it is not always
possible for them simply to get up and leave. They can, of course, be asked to read or get
on with some other learning task. However, it is simpler to add an extra optional item,
which is more challenging and flexible in the amount of time it may take. They could be
asked to compose more questions on a reading text and answer them, to write a story, to
express their opinion on a text and so on. The problem is then how do you grade this extra
item? It is only fair to allow 100 percent of marks on the core components. The optional
ones would then receive a bonus of 10 or 20 marks. This sometimes produces grades of, for
example, 110 percent, but I don’t think this matters in a class test for formative assessment
(see 13 Assessment and testing). The main point is to give the students who invest extra
work some kind of acknowledgement of their effort and achievement.

Pause for thought

Have a look at a textbook you are familiar with. How flexible are the tasks, in the
sense of being accessible to different kinds of students in the class – particularly
with regard to level? Are any of the ideas listed above used in them?

Comment
In the coursebooks I looked at, I found that there is quite a lot of variation and
interest, in the sense that there is a range of use of the different skills, different
topics, use of individual, group and teacher-led work and interesting texts and
tasks. But the individual tasks are on the whole inflexible: there is one right answer
to most of the exercise items, and no suggestions as to simpler or more complex
ways of doing tasks in the Student’s book. Sometimes, however, the Teacher’s book
gives some ideas, so this is worth checking out.

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20.4 Teaching high and low achievers

High achievers
Some students complete tasks easily and to a high level, and are in danger of feeling bored and
frustrated when working on material which is below their level or with other students who
are less proficient. Often the last two strategies suggested in the previous section (open-ending
and core plus optional) can help to keep such students on-task and learning. But you might find
that you need occasionally to give them extra, or alternative, work to do, such as projects or
extensive reading of books of their choice. On the whole, however, the high achievers are very
much less problematic than the low achievers, to whom most of this section will be devoted.
Low achievers
If students are not doing very well in your class, this could be for one of the following
reasons, or a combination:
• They may have learnt badly before joining your class and are unable to catch up, in
spite of their best efforts.
• They may be unmotivated, see no point in learning English and refuse to invest effort in it.
• They may have done badly in most subjects up to now and are convinced that they
cannot do well in English: a problem of self-image.
• They may suffer from a clinical condition that limits their functioning in some way:
they are sight- or hearing-impaired, or find it difficult to control and coordinate
physical movement.
• They may have a specific learning disability, such as reading disabilities of various
kinds or ADHD.
• They may have personal emotional problems based on their home background or
social conflicts.
Most of us are not qualified to diagnose the more specific disabilities. Nevertheless, if you
see that a member of the class is not doing very well, is disturbing the lesson a lot, or
otherwise behaving abnormally, you need to try to find out why, and may be able to take
steps to help them. If a student is hearing-impaired, for example, you need to know that
they need to sit near the front, and you need to speak very clearly, facing them. You may
need expert advice on how exactly to relate to students with specific mental or physical
issues. Consult the classroom teacher if you are in a school, or the parents, or any previous
teachers of the individual student, or a professional with appropriate clinical qualifications.
Where the learners are assigned to different classes according to entry levels – as described
at the beginning of this chapter – the differences between the higher and lower achievers
are likely to be manageable. In schools within a country’s education system, however,
students are in a specific class primarily because of the age group they belong to; the
differences in level may be extreme and very difficult for the teacher to cope with. In
such situations, the low achievers are sometimes taken out and taught in separate groups.
Teaching such groups is very challenging: not only are the individual students having
difficulties, but also the group itself is still likely to be very mixed. The tips on the next
page can help, and you may be able to apply some of them to under-achieving students
who are studying in a general class.

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Practical tips
1 Find time to relate to students individually. This includes checking and
commenting on their written work regularly, and having occasional chats outside the
lesson. These are important for any class, but particularly for one composed of lower
achievers. Moreover, here they are more feasible, because these classes tend to be quite
small in size. Students need to know you are aware of them as individuals, care about
them and are monitoring their progress.
2 Make sure the tasks are success-oriented. Adapt coursebook tasks and texts, or
add your own, that are clearly doable by the students. This may mean providing
differentiated tasks and tests (see Core plus optional in Section 3 above), but the
principle is to make sure that the students can, with a bit of effort, succeed. Having
done that, you will be justified in making demands, as described in the next tip.
3 Make demands. Keep your expectations high. One of the main problems with under-
achieving students is that they have often simply accepted that they are failures and
don’t expect to do well. So an important teaching goal is to convince them that they can
succeed. You will quickly learn what they are capable of. Don’t just say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t
matter, don’t worry about it,’ when they fail to do a task. When designing tasks and
tests, set a standard for success that is appropriate for the students, as described in the
previous tip, and then insist that they achieve it, conveying the message ‘you can do it!’.
4 Give praise where it is deserved. It is, of course, important to boost the students’
confidence by praising them often, but make sure this is not indiscriminate. Over-
frequent, unearned compliments soon lose their value and are ignored by students.
Only give a compliment when the students have actually succeeded as a result of
effort, and when both they and you know that the praise is deserved.
5 Use a coursebook. In some cases, it may be appropriate to to write or select specific
materials for such groups rather than using a coursebook. However, where most
classes in the institution are using coursebooks, the students may interpret this as
discrimination: ‘Other classes get coursebooks, why don’t we? The teacher obviously
doesn’t think we’re up to it.’ The use of a coursebook conveys the message that you
expect the students to complete a programme and syllabus, and make systematic
progress. You can always supplement the coursebook with extra materials or skip bits
of it as necessary.

Review: Check yourself

1 Why is ‘heterogeneous’ or ‘diverse’ a better way to describe these classes than

‘mixed level’ or ‘mixed ability’?
2 Recall at least seven ways in which individual students differ from one another
in a heterogeneous class.
3 Suggest at least three problems in achieving inclusivity and providing learning
opportunities for all in the classroom.
4 What kinds of tasks are suitable for group or pair work?

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5 What does open-ending mean? How can you transform a closed-ended

classroom exercise into an open-ended task?
6 What does core plus optional mean? Can you give an example?
7 Suggest at least three reasons why some students might be performing below
the expected class level.
8 List four practical things you can do to help low achievers make progress.

Further reading
Hess, N. (2001). Teaching Large Multilevel Classes. Cambridge University Press.
(A practically oriented handbook, providing ideas for teaching large
heterogeneous classes)
Kormos, J. and Smith, A. M. (2012). Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning
Differences. Multilingual matters.
(A thorough discussion of various kinds of learning disabilities and how to cope
with them in language teaching)
Pham, H. L. (2012). Differentiated instruction and the need to integrate teaching and
practice. Journal of College Teaching and Learning (TLC), 9(1), 13–20.
(Teaching mixed classes in higher education)
Prodromou, L. (1992) Mixed-Ability Classes. Macmillan.
(Thought-provoking and readable, with suggestions for activities and tasks to
stimulate learning and teacher thinking)
Purcell, S. (2013). Mixed-ability teaching. English Teaching Professional, (84), 8–10.
(Some more practical tips on teaching mixed-ability classes)

References
Gardner, H. (2011). Frames of Mind. Basic Books.
Kolb, D. (2014). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development
(2nd Edition). Pearson FT Press.
Lethaby, C. and Harries, P. (2016). Learning styles and teacher training: are we
perpetuating neuromyths? ELT Journal, 70(1), 16–27.

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 21 Teacher development

Overview

21.1 The first year of teaching. Possible initial problems and suggestions on how
to overcome them.
21.2 Lesson observation. Critical evaluation of lessons; using an observer
evaluation form.
21.3 Ongoing development. Professional development through reflection, writing
and collaborative work with colleagues.
21.4 Development through reading and further study. Reading, courses and
conferences as tools to facilitate more advanced professional development.
21.5 Further development. Your own contribution: giving presentations at
conferences, publishing in professional journals.

21.1 The first year of teaching

For many teachers, the first year is hard (but it gets better later!). If your first year is smooth
and easy, you are one of the lucky ones. However, the need to overcome a variety of
professional problems as you begin to teach results in a great deal of learning, perhaps the
most effective learning there is. What you can learn from courses or books like this one is
limited; there are some competencies and aspects of professional knowledge that you learn
only from experience.

Pause for thought 21.1

Either a) think about your own first year teaching: how was it, and what did you
learn? or b) if you haven’t yet started teaching, ask an experienced teacher what
their first year was like and what they learnt from it.

Comment
My first year of teaching English in a (non-English-speaking) country to which I
had recently moved was in a primary school. I had two classes of 10- and 12-year-
olds. I had a fairly hard time. Lessons rarely went smoothly, I had trouble getting
the students to do what I wanted, and they were often cheeky. There were, it is true,
some positive aspects: an end-of-year play that children and parents enjoyed;
the awareness that the students were progressing; the occasional sparkle in the

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 21 | Teacher development

eyes of a child who had succeeded in a task or suddenly become aware how
much they knew. However, I also remember investing an enormous amount of time
and effort in preparing lessons and materials, much of which was, I felt, wasted;
feelings of disappointment and sometimes humiliation. The turning point was an
event at the end of that first year. I went to the class teacher of one of the classes
I had been teaching and told him I thought I was unsuited to be a teacher and
wished to leave. He told me to think less about my own feelings and to look at the
students. ‘Ask yourself,’ he advised me, ‘what they have got out of your teaching.
Not only how much English they have learnt from your lessons, but also whether
their motivation and attitude to the language have improved.’ He said that if
I honestly thought they had not progressed and that they didn’t like learning
English, I should leave. I stayed.

What can help?

A mentor. Your school should allocate an experienced teacher to you as a mentor for
your first year. If they do not, ask for one. A mentor’s job is to keep in touch with you
continually, and be ready to meet you regularly to chat and discuss any problems. The
problems may be practical, such as how to use the school’s website or manage contact
with parents or employers. Or they may be about classroom management or difficulties
with particular students. Some mentors actually observe lessons of new teachers and give
feedback, or invite the new teachers to see theirs. In any case, having a mentor means that
you are not alone, and it can considerably reduce stress to know that there is someone
available to consult and share with.
Reflection and discussion. Take time at the end of the day to think about things that
went particularly well or badly, or any particularly interesting events or experiences. Some
teachers actually keep journals, which helps a lot to structure thinking and get the most
out of it. It is even better if you have someone to talk to. This could be your mentor, but it
is perhaps better to talk to someone you feel comfortable with: another new teacher who
is going through similar experiences, a friend, your partner or a family member.
Staff meetings Make sure you participate in staff meetings. The topics discussed may be
administrative matters (whether to buy new computerized equipment or software, cover
for a colleague who is going to be away on maternity leave, etc.). However, they may also
discuss issues you can learn from: criticisms from parents, for example, or particularly
problematic classes. And your participation, even if at first you do not actively contribute,
will be appreciated and will help you feel part of the teaching team.

21.2 Lesson observation

Lessons may be observed for various reasons and by various people.
• Observation for appraisal. The appraiser observing your class may be an inspector
representing the Ministry of Education checking teaching standards, or a senior
member of staff representing your employers, who are considering whether to extend
your teaching contract or to promote you. Appraisal will probably take into account

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 21 | Teacher development

the opinions of your immediate superior, other members of staff and perhaps the exam
record of the classes you have taught. Less commonly, students might be asked for
their opinions. But almost always the major consideration is your actual teaching as
evaluated through observation.
• Observation for teacher development. In this case, lesson observation and evaluation
are a source of learning and development for the observing or observed teacher. You may
be observed by a trainer, mentor or colleague and then get feedback that will contribute
to your professional development. Or you may yourself observe an experienced teacher
in order to learn from their professional abilities in action. Asking a colleague to observe
one of your lessons and give feedback is an excellent strategy for development, but there
are some difficulties to be overcome: most of us feel uncomfortable about being observed
and cannot function naturally when we know an observer is in the room. It takes some
courage to deliberately open yourself to criticism in this way. And there is always the
problem of finding time. Nevertheless, it is worth doing. One possibility is to make a
mutual arrangement with a like-minded colleague: ‘I’ll observe your lesson, you observe
mine, and we’ll share feedback.’

Criteria for lesson evaluation

Whether you are observing another teacher, or someone else is observing you, it is
important to be aware of the major features the observer may be looking for. The
following are some possible criteria for evaluation:
1 Tasks and activities have clear goals in terms of learning (including review or practice).
2 Tasks and activities are appropriate to the level of the students (challenging but do-able).
3 The teacher’s speech is clear and comprehensible to the the learners.
4 The learners are attentive and on-task.
5 The learners get and understand appropriate feedback from the teacher.
6 The learners are motivated to participate.
7 The lesson is varied.
8 English is used communicatively.

Pause for thought

Note by each item above ✓✓✓ (essential), ✓✓ (very important), ✓ (quite

important), ? (not so important, or not sure), and note your reasons.

Comment
Probably all these are important, but there may be situations where 7 and 8 may
be less relevant. On the whole, I have found that even academics at a high level
prefer to have some variation in a session, but occasionally with such classes it
may be appropriate to devote an entire hour to one task – reading and discussing

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a research article, for example. Communicative use of English: again, this is

normally desirable, but it may happen that a teacher once in a while wishes
to devote a large proportion of the lesson to activities such as those based on
contrastive analysis or translation, or on accuracy-oriented work.
In principle, the definition of a good lesson is one that has led to good learning
outcomes. The problem is that it is very difficult from observation to establish
that such learning outcomes exist! However, if the tasks and activities are clearly
facilitating learning and appropriate to the level (items 1 and 2), the teacher’s
input is clear (3) and the students are on-task (4) and receiving appropriate
feedback (5), then it is very likely that there will be learning. Items 6–8 are less
essential, perhaps, but clearly facilitating factors. Students may learn in spite of
not being motivated, or from a not very varied sequence of activities, or from tasks
that are not communicative; but they are certainly more likely to succeed in their
learning during a lesson if these conditions exist.

Lesson observation forms

In some cases, detailed lesson observation forms are used with lists of aspects of the
lesson to assess. Below are a few samples of items adapted from a variety of online
observation checklists.

Yes Somewhat No Comment

The teacher was well-prepared.

The lesson started and ended

on time.
A variety of questioning and
activation techniques was used.
The teacher responded appropriately
to students’ input.
The teacher used the board
appropriately.
The teacher provided activities for
collaborative group work.
The teacher prepared and used
appropriate visual materials.
The teacher used both print- and
digital resources.
The teacher asked questions that
elicited higher-order thinking skills.

… etc.

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The actual checklists are normally much longer than this, with typically 20 or more
items to be related to (try searching online for “lesson observation checklists”), in an
attempt to cover all aspects of a good lesson. It is, however, very difficult for observers to
fill in such forms. First, if they try to complete them during the lesson, it is distracting:
while considering how to fill in one section, they may miss something going on in the
classroom that may be relevant to another; and if the form is filled in later, not everything
may be remembered. Second, this type of form, however long, cannot be entirely
comprehensive. It may not direct attention to some significant or interesting points: for
example, how the teacher opened and closed the lesson. And there remains the problem
of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts: even if a teacher scores well on
‘technical’ observable aspects such as organizing group work, appropriate use of the board
or of digital or print materials, the lesson as a whole may turn out boring and lacking
opportunities for real learning. During the lesson, it is most convenient to make notes
on a more open form, such as the one shown below. It simply asks for the events, their
timing and any comments or questions that occur to the observer at that point.

(Name of teacher, class, date)

Time Lesson component Comment

Sometimes there may be a specific focus to the observation. If you are being observed by
a colleague, you could ask him or her to focus on a particular aspect of your teaching that
you find problematic (e.g., how you move around the classroom, or how the students are
responding). Or your trainer may ask you to focus on a similar specific feature, or set of
features, when observing an experienced teacher.

Feedback
Observer feedback is a vital source of teacher development, so it is important to schedule
a feedback session after the lesson. This does not have to be immediately after, if the
observer has to rush off to another lesson, but it should be on the same day if possible.
Feedback sessions need to involve two main components: frank criticisms, both positive and
negative, from the observer; and input by the teacher being observed, concerning their own
performance. Some observers focus too much on one or the other, so that the session may
be limited either to a lecture by the observer, or an unhelpful elicitation session (‘What did
you feel about the lesson …?’) based mainly on input from the teacher being observed. So
whether you are observer or observed, try to make sure that both kinds of input are included.

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The feedback should include substantial and detailed, not vague, comments. Comments
such as ‘a well-planned lesson’ or ‘you need to improve your questioning skills’ are not
very helpful to the teacher who has been observed. If you are being observed, ask for
actual examples of what they mean, and if it is a negative criticism, then also ask for
practical, specific suggestions for change.
Here are some practical tips for the teacher being observed and for the observer.

If you are being observed:

1 Tell the class. Remember to tell the class in advance that an observer is coming, and
that they are going to observe your teaching, not their learning. This is a courtesy, but
it also may work to your advantage, as the class is likely to cooperate in presenting a
good lesson to the observer.
2 Plan a routine lesson. Don’t try to do unusual things that you think will impress your
observer. Include familiar lesson components that you feel confident that you know how
to manage.
3 Thank the observer. If the observer is giving you feedback in order to contribute to
your own development, remember to thank them at the end of the feedback session.

If you are observing a lesson:

1 Take notes. You won’t remember everything you have observed or want to discuss
after the lesson, so you need to take notes and look through them later.
2 Sit at the side of the class. If you sit at the front, you will find it difficult to observe
the teacher, and you will distract the class. If you sit at the back, you won’t be able to
see clearly what the students are doing.
3 Thank and chat to the teacher afterwards. Even experienced teachers find it
stressful to be observed! Thank them, share with them what you have learnt from the
observation, and ask them about anything that was not clear to you.

21.3 Ongoing development

Ongoing teacher development during work at school is important not only for your own
sense of progress and professional advancement; in some cases it may even make a crucial
difference between job satisfaction on the one hand and burnout on the other. Observation
and feedback (see Section 2) can help, as can further study (see Section 4). However, the
main tools for professional development are available within your own teaching routine: your
own teaching experience and your reflections on it; discussion with other teachers in your
institution; feedback from students.

Personal reflection
The first and most important basis for professional progress is simply your own reflection
on daily events. This mostly takes place inside the classroom, but also occasionally outside
it. Often this reflection is spontaneous and informal, and happens without any conscious

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intention. Travelling to and from your classes, or at other odd moments when you have
nothing particular to occupy you, things that happened in the classroom come to mind
and you start puzzling about what to do about a problem, work out why something
was successful or rethink a part of your lesson plan. This sort of spontaneous reflection
is the necessary basis and starting point for further development. Such spontaneous
reflection, however, can help you only up to a certain point. Its limitations are rooted in
its unsystematic and undisciplined nature. You will find your thoughts are easily diverted
into less productive channels (irritation at an argument with a colleague or student, for
example, and what you should have said if you had thought of it!). Also, you may not
have access to all the information you need to draw useful conclusions, and even if you
have a brilliant idea, you may not remember it later.
In order to address these problems, you will need at some stage to write something
down. This may be a brief note on a piece of paper or on your phone, calendar or tasks
list: a reminder to yourself when you start preparing the next lesson. For many teachers,
systematic journal writing is even more productive: entries are made regularly in a
notebook or in a computer document, recording events, plans, reminders, thoughts
or ideas. Journals can be re-read later to contribute to further reflection and learning.
Another advantage of writing is that putting things into words forces you to work out
exactly what you mean. E. M. Forster famously said: ‘How can I know what I think until
I see what I say?’ This can be applied also to writing: ‘How do I know what I think until I
see what I’ve written?’ Many people (myself included) only discover what they really think
when they have to express it in writing (see Section 5). In a sense, writing is thinking, but
thinking that must be disciplined, rational and able to be communicated to a reader, even if
that reader is only oneself.

Discussion with colleagues

Another problem with the personal reflection described above is that it means you can
only use your own experience. Experience is indeed the main source of professional
learning, but there comes a point when it is not enough. Even the most brilliant and
creative of us can learn from others things we could not learn on our own. Informal
discussions with a colleague you feel comfortable with can contribute a lot to your own
development, as well as boost morale. What you share may be negative or positive. You
may want to find a solution to a problem, admit a failure or get an idea for how to teach
something; or you may wish to tell someone about an original solution you have found to
a problem, share your pleasure at a success or discuss a new teaching idea you have had.
Sharing problems. Unfortunately, teachers often feel uncomfortable about sharing
problems: perhaps because of a sense of shame, or inhibition, or a fear of losing face.
However, once such feelings are overcome, the results are likely to be rewarding.
Colleagues will rarely criticize you; they are far more likely to be sympathetic, recall
similar incidents from their own experience and suggest solutions. Even if they cannot
provide solutions, the act of sharing and the awareness that other people have similar
problems relieves tensions.

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Sharing successes. In some institutions there is a feeling of rivalry between teachers which
stops them revealing professional secrets to one another for fear of being overtaken in
some kind of professional race. And sometimes you may feel shy of boasting about things
that went well. However, sharing good ideas is helpful to everyone, so find opportunities
to do so. Colleagues are unlikely to feel you are boasting if your goal in telling them is
frankly stated, and they are given the choice whether to listen or not: ‘I had a marvellous
experience today – I’ve got to tell someone about it. Have you got time to listen?’; or ‘You
remember that problem we were talking about the other day? I think I have an idea about
how to solve it – can we find time to talk?’.

Pause for thought

If you have teaching experience, can you recall informally sharing problems or
successes with a colleague? What was it like, and what were its results?

Comment
In my school, we had a regular weekly meeting, where we could share problems,
successes, new ideas, or tests or worksheets we’d composed, and it was really
helpful, besides contributing to a sense of team solidarity. More recently, I consulted
a colleague about digital resources which I felt I didn’t know enough about, or was
using inappropriately, and was delighted to get an enormous number of practical
ideas, useful references, caveats and tips I could immediately put into practice.

Student feedback
It is relatively unusual for teachers to ask their students for feedback on their teaching:
maybe because teachers have a fear of undermining their authority or of losing face.
This is a pity. Students are an excellent source of feedback on your teaching: arguably
the best. Their information is based on a whole series of lessons rather than on isolated
examples, and they usually have a fairly clear idea of how well they are learning and
why. Moreover, they appreciate being consulted and usually make serious efforts to give
helpful feedback. In my experience, the process tends to improve rather than damage
teacher-student relationships. Questions to students should be phrased so as to direct
their appraisal towards themselves as well as to you, and should encourage constructive
suggestions rather than negative criticisms. A structured, written questionnaire, such as
the one shown on the next page, ensures that students will provide relevant information.
With less advanced students whose language you know, the questionnaire can be written
in their L1.

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Student questionnaire
1 On the whole I feel I am learning very well / fairly well / don’t know / not very well /
badly.
2 I find the lessons interesting / moderately interesting / boring.
3 Things I would like to do MORE of in our course: pronunciation practice / vocabulary /
grammar / listening / speaking / reading / writing / homework / group or pair work /
individual work / other (say what):
4 Things I would like to do LESS of in our course: pronunciation practice / vocabulary /
grammar / listening / speaking / reading / writing / homework / group or pair work /
individual work / other (say what):
5 In order to get the most out of the course, I need to try to
6 In order to make the course better, my suggestions to my teacher are
7 Further comments and suggestions:

Another less structured method, which is useful with more advanced or older classes, is to
write the students a letter. Give them your own feedback and your opinion about how the
course is going, and ask for their responses and suggestions in an answering letter.
Either way, the results are not always clear-cut. There are sometimes contradictory
messages from different students, due to differing student personalities and needs, and
some responses may be confusing or unhelpful. Nevertheless, I have found when doing
this myself that there is usually enough consensus to provide useful and constructive
feedback that I can use to inform and improve my teaching.

21.4 Development through reading and further study

As you develop as a teacher, it is important to start looking for sources of further
professional knowledge outside your own school. One of the characteristics of the expert,
in any profession, is that they never stop learning. In contrast, the phenomenon of
burnout is strongly linked with lack of further learning.
Sooner or later, you will start looking for ways to learn more, to broaden your knowledge
and start thinking about the teaching of English outside the immediate resources of your
own institution or personal practice.

Reading
The first and perhaps best way to learn more is to access both theoretical and practical
information through reading. Most educational institutions have a basic library of
professional literature, and this is where you will probably start. Professional journals,
available in print and digital form in university libraries, are an excellent and convenient
source of reading material. Their articles are easier to cope with than a full book, and recent
issues will have up-to-date news and ideas. Also, the bibliographies at the end of most

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articles and book reviews will give you ideas for further reading. See Further reading at the
end of this chapter for a list of references related to English teaching in general, and similar
lists at the ends of other chapters for more specific areas.
Online sources include not only books and articles, but also, and increasingly, blogs
and other kinds of websites that make available information and teaching ideas. See,
for example, the British Council’s Teaching English website which includes a number of
easily-accessible posts, resources and webinars on a variety of topics.
Accessing reading material that is relevant to your interests has been made easier in recent
years through online tools, particularly Google Scholar and RSS. Google Scholar will easily
find a particular publication or author you are interested in; and articles are increasingly
available to read free online. Using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) you can tag a
particular source (a blog, for example, or a website that provides up to date information)
and receive regular updates or feeds. For this, you need an RSS reader: Inoreader, for
example, or Feedly.
The main problem today with such topics is the sheer amount of resources available on the
subject of English language teaching in print and online. How do you choose what to read?
Some tips:
The author. If the name of the author is known to you, or you have already read
something written by them that you liked, then search for more of their publications.
The source. There is a large, and increasing, number of journals on teaching English or
applied linguistics: some of the most well-known ones at the time of writing are those listed
under Further reading at the end of this chapter. Or if it’s a book, the best ones are likely
to be published by reputable publishers: publishing companies associated with a university,
for example, or ones that specialize in English language teaching like Pearson, Heinemann,
Macmillan, Helbling and more.
Courses, conferences. The reading lists added to ELT courses are good sources, as are any
references mentioned by lecturers.
Personal recommendation. Ask colleagues or other ELT professionals what book(s)
or articles they would recommend: ones that have had substantial influence on their
professional thinking, or have been most useful for their teaching.

Courses
If you have the opportunity, it is worthwhile to take further courses of study. This usually
means a degree, or another academic course at a university, in English language teaching
or an associated subject: pure or applied linguistics, the various branches of education,
psychology or sociology. Or, if you do not yet have a formal qualification, you may
wish to take a course that gives you one. The attraction of such studies is not only the
satisfaction of the learning itself and its contribution to your professional expertise,
but also an internationally recognized qualification, with its associated prestige and aid
to promotion.

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These courses provide a valuable opportunity to take a step back from the demands of
everyday practice, reflect quietly on what you do, and rethink your own principles and
practice in the light of other people’s theories and research.

Conferences
Conferences are being organized by English teachers’ organizations with increasing
frequency in many countries. During the COVID pandemic they were temporarily held
online: but online conferences, it appears, are a poor substitute for the full face-to-face event.
Conferences offer a rich selection of lectures, workshops, seminars, panel discussions and
more. They enable you to update your knowledge on the latest research and controversies,
learn new techniques and methods, find out about recently published materials and meet
other professionals. There is a large number of conferences on English language teaching,
ranging from the very large international ones such as IATEFL and TESOL, to the national
conferences such as BrazTESOL in Brazil, or the smaller regional ones such as APAC in
Catalonia, Spain. The strength of conferences is the huge number and variety of sessions
and materials available to participants; but this carries with it the problem of choice. Usually,
the schedule is based on a number of concurrent sessions, so you can attend only a small
proportion of them. Moreover, they vary widely in level and effectiveness as well as in topic.
The sessions you select may or may not satisfy you, and it is unlikely that you will find
everything you attend worthwhile. In fact, if each day you feel that one or two of the events
you attended were of real value to you, you are doing well!
Conferences cannot supply the systematic coverage of topics that you get from formal
courses, but you may well come across new materials or ideas which trigger insights or
ideas of your own. Their other major advantage is the opportunities they provide for
networking: meeting teachers from other places, exchanging ideas and learning about
each other’s problems and solutions. Arguably, at least as much interesting learning takes
place between sessions as during them.

Webinars and online courses

These are becoming very frequent, and are a good source of professional learning. They
are relatively cheap: webinars are often free, and courses vary a lot in how much they
cost. When signing up for either, check out carefully the credentials of the company or
authority that is running them, as well as the syllabus and the teacher(s).

21.5 Further development

This section suggests ways in which you can publish your own ideas, through conference
presentations or written publication. This not only benefits others in the field; it also
indirectly contributes to your own development, as writing down your thoughts and
presenting them in a way that makes them accessible to others is an excellent way to
clarify things for yourself and develop your own thinking.

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Presentations
Very often the first step in this direction for practising teachers is sharing a practical
classroom innovation: a technique, a bit of material, an idea that worked. You describe
it to a colleague and they are enthusiastic. So why not let other teachers benefit as well?
Organizers of conferences (both national and international) are likely to welcome your
contribution. Moreover, conference-goers often prefer attending this kind of session to
the more theoretical lectures given by researchers who often have not taught an English
lesson for years, if ever. Workshops are probably the best format for practical topics of
this type: a clear explanation followed or preceded by trying something out (such as
an example of the target activity type) and plenty of opportunity for the audience to
participate and discuss.

Articles
Practical ideas can reach a wider audience if described in an article. If your local English
teachers’ association has its own journal, start with this. Or you could try ones with a
more international circulation. Keep your article short, and make sure ideas are clearly
expressed in straightforward language and illustrated by practical examples. It is a good
idea to ask colleagues to read through your article and make comments before finalizing
it and sending it off. Don’t be discouraged if your first article is not accepted. Take note of
any constructive criticisms, and keep trying.

Online publication
You can set up your own website, or publish something you have written online. Or you
might start up a blog, through which you can reach and interact with a wide audience.
Social media such as Facebook or X (what used to be Twitter) are another popular way for
teachers and ELT experts to exchange brief teaching ideas and references to useful reading
or websites.

Materials writing
You may wish to contribute to the profession by writing English teaching materials. This
often means coursebooks, but not always. Today there is a need – and a market – for a
wide range of supplementary materials: books or websites aimed at students, providing
texts or tasks focused on one or more aspects of language learning; simplified readers;
teaching materials or handbooks suggesting ideas for classroom procedures or lesson
plans. The best materials are undoubtedly those written by authors who are themselves
practising teachers or have had extensive teaching experience.
The way into this kind of writing is producing material for local consumers: worksheets
for your own class, and texts and tasks for use in your own institution. If you get positive
feedback, you could offer your services to a commercial publisher. Publishers, both local
and international, are constantly looking for new authors with teaching experience and
interesting and original ideas, but they do demand, obviously, a high standard of good,
clear and organized writing. Don’t expect them to publish your ready-made material. If
the publisher thinks they might be able to employ you, they will ask for a sample of your
material, and will then decide whether to commission further work.

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Classroom research
The term research may be defined, after Stenhouse (1984), as ‘systematic inquiry made
public’. It does not have to be based on complicated statistics or long, detailed observation
or experiments. Furthermore, the results do not necessarily have to apply to other
situations. It does, however, have to be disciplined and accurate, and to apply objective
criteria. It also has to state clearly its own limitations. Some simple small-scale research
projects by participants are often an integral part of pre-service training.
Research on foreign language teaching and learning does not need to be the monopoly
of the academic establishment. As in medicine, any practitioner may do research in their
field. However, not many practitioners have the knowledge, time or financial resources
to do the kind of research that academics can. We are usually limited to small-scale
projects, based on classrooms and resources which are easily available to us. Our research
is therefore nearly always context-specific and of limited generalizability.
Nevertheless, as long as this is made clear, the results can be interesting and valuable, both
to professionals working in other contexts and to professional researchers. A bit of research
on your classroom may inspire an examination of similar topics in mine or someone else’s,
stimulate new thinking, and lead to significant innovation or further research.
One model that has been suggested as appropriate for practising teachers is known as
action research: research carried out by teachers in their own classrooms. It is based on a
systematic cycle based on the following stages:
1 A problem is identified.
2 Relevant data are gathered and recorded.
3 Practical action is suggested that might solve the problem.
4 A plan of action is designed.
5 The plan is implemented.
6 Results are monitored and recorded.
7 If the original problem has been solved, the researchers may begin work on another;
if not, the original problem is redefined and the cycle is repeated.
For example, a teacher may be wondering whether it is better to read aloud a story or
tell it in their own words. The teacher may try out these methods in different classes on
different occasions, and ask a colleague to observe and compare the students’ behaviour
during the two types of storytelling. They then draw conclusions as to which will
be implemented in future teaching.
The teacher’s results should also be shared with other teachers: first within their own
school, and later, possibly, through conference presentations and published articles.

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Review: Check yourself

1 What are some things that can help or support a teacher in the first year
of teaching?
2 What are some important criteria by which to evaluate an English lesson?
3 What are some points to think about when giving or getting feedback on an
observed lesson?
4 What kinds of things can contribute to a teacher’s ongoing development
while teaching?
5 What are some things that can help you choose what to read out of the huge
range available today online?
6 What is action research?

Further reading
Books
Brown, H. D. (2007). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy
(3rd Edition). Pearson Longman.
(A readable guide to language teaching, covering a wide selection of topics and
including discussion questions and suggestions for further reading)
Cohen, L., Manion, L and Morrison, K. (2017). Research Methods in Education (8th Edition).
Routledge.
(A clearly written and comprehensive guide to research on learning and teaching)
Farrell, T. S. C. (2020). Reflective Teaching. TESOL Press.
(A guide to teacher development through systematic reflection)
Harmer, J. (2015). The Practice of English Language Teaching (5th Edition). Pearson.
(A readable and comprehensive treatment of the topic: provides extensive
information on both practice and underlying theory)
Lightbown, P. M. and Spada, N. (2021). How Languages Are Learned (5th Edition). Oxford
University Press.
(A not-too-long, readable summary of theories and research on first and second
language learning)
Richards, J. C. (2017). 50 Tips for Teacher Development. Cambridge University Press.
(Brief, readable tips on how to develop professionally while teaching)

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Scrivener, J. (2011). Learning Teaching: The Essential Guide to English Language Teaching
(3rd Edition). Macmillan Education.
(A common-sense and accessible book on teaching English)
Journals
ELT Journal
(Articles often research-based but have clear practical implications; includes
discussions of controversial teaching issues)
Language Teaching
(Regular overviews on specific areas of English language teaching, up-todate
information on issues and research)
Modern English Teacher
(Practical teaching ideas and photocopiable material for a variety of teaching
contexts, incorporating a previous excellent journal English Teaching Professional)
Websites
Teaching English: www.teachingenglish.org.uk/professional-development/teachers
(The teacher development branch of the British Council’s website on teaching
English)
The Teacher Trainer Journal: https://pilgrimsttj.com/
(Free online, provides useful information for the teacher and teacher trainer)

Reference
Stenhouse, L. (1984). ‘Evaluating curriculum evaluation.’ In Adelman, C. (Ed.) The Politics
and Ethics of Evaluation, (pp. 77–86). Croom Helm.

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 Glossary

AI: Artificial intelligence: the basis of a range of digital tools which perform
functions based on human-like intelligence: GPT, for example, or AWE
antonym: a word which means the opposite of another word; for example, big is
the antonym of small
asynchronous: not at the same time; usually relating to distance learning, where
the learners perform tasks in their own time, not in a synchronous session with
a teacher
auditory/aural: relating to hearing
AWE: Automated writing evaluation: a digital tool like Grammarly which can
detect errors in a written text and suggest corrections, and provide overall
assessment
backchannel: a brief verbal indication by a listener that they are listening to and
understanding the speaker (for example, Mmm, Uh-huh, Yes …)
BE: Business English
BICS: Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills: proficiency in the kind of
language used in informal conversation or messaging, as contrasted with CALP
bottom-up reading: reading by focusing on the meanings of all the words of a
text, as contrasted with top-down reading
CALL: Computer-Assisted Language Learning
CALP: Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency: proficiency in language used
for more formal speech or writing, as contrasted with BICS
CEFR: Common European Framework of Reference for languages: a document
describing the standards by which different levels of language proficiency are
defined in the European Union
CLIL: Content and language integrated learning: learning academic subjects in
school through a language which is not the students’ L1
closed-ended: a question or cue which has one right answer, as contrasted with
open-ended
coherence: the way the different parts of a text hang together to make a
logical whole
cohesion: how words and expressions are used to connect phrases, sentences or
paragraphs and achieve overall coherence
collocation: the tendency of words to occur together with certain other words,
for example, you make (not do) a mistake
connotation: the underlying ‘feel’ of a word (usually positive or negative)
as distinct from its denotation; for example, moist (positive connotation) as
contrasted with damp (negative connotation)
corpus (plural corpora): a large database of written and/or spoken texts in
a language
critical period hypothesis: the theory that the ability to learn languages
declines after a certain age

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 Glossary

culture of learning: the way learners in a particular culture are used to learning
and being taught
decode: transform written symbols into sounds
deductive (grammar-teaching process): students learn a rule and then apply it
in practice exercises, as contrasted with inductive
denotation: the meaning of a word, what it refers to in the real world
dictogloss: a classroom procedure where learners listen to and may take notes
on a written text read aloud by the teacher, and then in small groups try to
reconstruct the text
differentiated teaching: teaching different levels in a class through giving more/
less difficult tasks and texts to different students
digraph: a pair of letters that are pronounced as one sound; for example, ‘sh’ is
pronounced /∫/
direct method: a method based on the use of English only to teach English,
without grammatical explanations
discourse: a written or spoken text and its component and interconnected parts
drill: a simple exercise, usually of grammar, that focuses on repeated production
of correct sentences
dyslexia: a reading disability which makes it difficult for a learner to decode and
make sense of the written word
EAP: English for Academic Purposes
EIL: English for international communication (see EPIC)
elicited imitation: oral repetition by a learner of a sentence they hear, used as an
assessment tool
ellipsis: the elimination of a word or words, typically in a conversation or
text message, as it is understood by the speaker and listener; for example, ‘You
coming?’ for Are you coming?
elision: the disappearance of a word or sound in informal speech; for example,
/fiθ/ for fifth
EMI: English-medium instruction: the use of English as a medium of instruction
in courses in universities or other higher-education institutions
EPIC: English for purposes of international communication, also known as ELF
or EIL
ELF: English as a lingua franca: similar to EPIC and EIL, but focusing on the
use of English to communicate between speakers of English as an additional
language
ELT: English language teaching
ESP: English for Specific Purposes; for example, English for nursing, or English
for tourism
etymology: the origin or history of a word
expanding rehearsal: the timing of (vocabulary or grammar) review activities so
that the gaps between them get longer as time goes on
explicit (language acquisition): learning or teaching language through
deliberate explanations and definitions, as contrasted with implicit

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 Glossary

extensive (reading or listening): fluent reading of, or listening to, a text for
general information or enjoyment, as contrasted with intensive
flipped classroom: a lesson sequence wherein the content to be learned is
studied in advance by students (often through a video recording); the subsequent
face-to-face lesson is devoted to discussion and elaboration of content
formative assessment: assessment whose aim is to improve learning, as
contrasted with summative assessment
global method: teaching reading by getting learners to recognize full words at
sight, as contrasted with phonic method
gloss: explanatory note
GPT: generative pre-trained transformer; an AI tool which can produce text
according to specification
GSE: the Global Scale of English produced by Pearson as an alternative to CEFR.
higher-order thinking skills: thinking skills such as analysing, prioritizing,
deducing and associating, as contrasted with lower-order thinking skills
homonyms: words that sound and are spelt the same, but have different
meanings, for example, bear the animal, and bear to tolerate
hyponym: a word that is one of the items covered by a general term, as contrasted
with superordinate; for example, dog is a hyponym of the word animal
IELTS: The International English Language Testing System, an international
exam run jointly by the British Council and by Cambridge University Press &
Assessment
immersion: a situation where the learner is exposed for most of their waking
time to the language being learnt
implicit (language acquisition): learning or teaching language without any actual
explanations, but through exposure or communicative use only, as contrasted with
explicit
inductive (grammar-teaching process): a procedure in which the teacher
provides students with language data, from which they work out the rule
themselves, as contrasted with deductive
inferencing: a strategy by which learners work out the meaning of words from
their context
input hypothesis: a theory proposed by Stephen Krashen that comprehensible
input is a necessary and sufficient condition for language acquisition to take place
intensive (reading or listening): in-depth study of a text in order to learn
language features from it, as contrasted with extensive
Intercultural communicative competence: the ability to recognize and respond
appropriately to different cultural conventions
IRF: a common form of classroom interaction, where the teacher initiates, a
student responds, and the teacher provides feedback
IWB: Interactive Whiteboard
jigsaw: a type of group work where after the initial task, groups are reorganized
so that at least one member from each ‘parent’ group is in each new group
L1: a person’s first language
L2: a person’s second language

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 Glossary

lemma: a base word, roughly equivalent to the headword in a dictionary, not

including regular inflections: so the lemma walk includes walks, walking, walked
lexical: relating to vocabulary
LMS: Learning Management System: a computer program composed of
various tools which allow teachers to provide texts and exercises, hold online
discussions, receive, check and grade assignments, etc.
lower-order thinking skills: thinking skills involving only simple recall or basic
comprehension, as contrasted with higher-order thinking skills
metalanguage, metalinguistic: terminology that defines aspects of language, for
example, noun, verb, or the present perfect
minimal pairs: two words which differ from one another in one sound
(phoneme) only, for example, ship and sheep
mode (of a text): written or spoken
mnemonic: a strategy to help you remember something, for example,
connecting the French word blanc (white) to a ‘blank’ white sheet of paper
morpheme: a component of a word that has meaning, for example, the word
unbreakable has three morphemes: un + break + able
morphology: the study of how words are formed, for example, the addition of
prefixes and suffixes (see also morpheme)
‘noise’: (when applied to listening comprehension) chunks of text that we do
not perceive or understand because they are unclear or incomprehensible
open-ended: (of a question or cue) that has more than one right response, as
contrasted with closed-ended
peer-teaching: a situation where students teach each other
phoneme: a sound (vowel or consonant) used in a specific language
phonemic awareness: a pre-reading stage where the students become aware of
the separate sounds in the language for which they will later learn the
corresponding letters
phonic method: teaching reading through teaching first the separate letters and
their sounds, and later putting them together, as contrasted with global method
phonology: all the phonemes (sounds) of a language
plosives: consonants whose pronunciation involves a brief stop and release of
the flow of air: for example, /p/, /k/, /t/
PPP: Presentation, Practice, Production: a model of language teaching where the
teacher presents a new language feature, the learners do practice exercises in it
and then produce it themselves
prefix: a morpheme added to the beginning of a word, as contrasted with suffix,
for example, sub in the word subway
process writing: students rewrite their written composition in response to
feedback, possibly several times, before finalizing
realia: real-life objects or toy representations used in the classroom to illustrate
new vocabulary, or as the basis for a task
redundancy: a situation where a section of a text is not essential for
understanding of its meaning

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 Glossary

register: the level of formality of a text (the term sometimes includes also other
features of communicative context)
retrieval: the act of recalling from memory the form or meaning of a word in
response to a question or cue
schwa: the neutral vowel sound /ə/; for example, in the word away, pronounced
/əweɪ/
SLA: second language acquisition
SSR: sustained silent reading, sometimes called ‘reading for pleasure’ or extensive reading
suffix: a morpheme added to the end of a word, as contrasted with prefix,
for example, -ment in the word government
summative assessment: assessment that provides a final evaluation at the end of
a course or period of study, as contrasted with formative assessment
superordinate: a general term which covers a number of actual items, as
contrasted with hyponym, for example, furniture, animal
synchronous: happening at the same time; usually relating to an online session,
where teachers and learners are communicating in a session they all attend at the
same time; as contrasted with asynchronous
synonyms: two (or more) words that mean more or less the same thing, for
example, big and large
syntax: the study of the structure of sentences
TOEFL: the Test of English as a Foreign Language, an internationally recognized
English exam managed by the Educational Testing Service based in the USA
TBLT: task-based language teaching
target language: the language being taught or learnt
texting/text messaging: brief-entry communication through writing using a
smartphone app such as WhatsApp
top-down reading: the use of real-world knowledge to assist the understanding
of a text, as contrasted with bottom-up reading
unvoiced: see voiced
voiced: consonants that are pronounced using the vocal cords, as opposed to
unvoiced ones which are pronounced in a whisper; for example, /z/ is the voiced
version of /s/
word family: a set of words derived from the same basic root: so a word family
associated with act would include acting, acted, acts, action, active, inactive, activity,
inactivity, etc.
WTC: Willingness to communicate: a criterion relating to how ready, or
reluctant, a learner is to participate in oral interactions

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Websites

Russell Stannard (teacher training videos)

www.youtube.com/channel/UCKjOFIFE0q71IJ4GFx4brng
Teaching English: www.teachingenglish.org.uk/professional-development/teachers
The Teacher Trainer Journal: https://pilgrimsttj.com/

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 Index

academic writing, 6–7, 201, 274 apps, 245

see also professional literature see also digital technology
accuracy, standards of grammatical AR see augmented reality (AR)
acceptability, 85–87 articles, for teacher development, 301
accuracy testing, 182–188 artificial intelligence (AI), 154–155, 158,
action research, 302 246, 252, 253, 305
activation, teacher questioning, 19, 29 assessment, 176–193
activation, teacher’s role, 17–18 administering tests in class, 191–193
activities see tasks formative, 177
adjectives, 68, 93, 214 function of the teacher, 18
adolescents as learners, 269–272 types of, 176–177
adult learners, 273–274 functions 176
Business English (BE), 274 giving a grade, 179–182
English for Academic Purposes process writing, 156
(EAP), 6–7, 201, 274 self-assessment, 178–179
English for Specific Purposes summative, 177
(ESP), 6–7, 274 test design, 187–188
adverbs, 67 test items, 183–187
age of learners, 262–276 testing accuracy, 182–188
differences between younger testing comprehension and
and older learners, 262–264 fluency, 188–191
heterogeneous classes, 278 tools, 177–179
motivation, 264, 265–266, 273 types, 177
teaching adolescents, 269–272 see also feedback; error
teaching adults, 273–274 correction
teaching younger learners, asynchronous online teaching,
264–269 258, 305
ageism, 231 audiolingualism, 10
AI see artificial intelligence (AI) augmented reality (AR), 249
alphabet automated writing evaluation
L1 language, 132, 134 (AWE) tools, 174, 254, 305
learning the letters, 132, 133, autonomy see learner autonomy
148–151 AWE see automated writing
phonemic awareness, 131 evaluation (AWE) tools
see also letters
alphabetical order, 133, 196
American English, 4, 5–6 backwash (also known as
analytic syllabuses, 195 washback), 177
antonyms, 74, 305 BE see Business English (BE)
approaches and methods, 9–11 behavourism, 9
BICS, 305

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blended learning, 12, 259–260 collaboration/cooperation, 281, 284

blogs, 66, 146, 254, 299 in writing, 155
boredom, 279–280, 282 see also group work
see also classroom discipline colleagues, 296–297
bottom-up processes, 99–100, 130 collocation, 72, 305
British English, 4, 5–6 Common European Framework of
Business English (BE), 6, 274 Reference (CEFR), 11–12, 176,
199–200, 305
communicative approach, 10–11
capital letters, 160–161 coursebooks, 204
career progression, see teacher grammar, 87, 88
development the syllabus, 197
CEFR see Common European see also task based language
Framework of Reference (CEFR) teaching (TBLT)
chants, 119, 268–269 comprehension
chatbots, 252 assessment of, 188–191
see also artificial intelligence (AI) basic features of listening
children as learners, 264–269 comprehension, 99–100
see also younger learners how to check, 20
Chomsky, Noam, 9 of texts, 55–56, 58–62
classroom discipline, 234–244 concentration span, 264
dealing with problems, 239–244 conditional clauses, 93
definition of, 234 conferences, for teacher
differences between younger development, 300
and older learners, 264 conjunctions, 49, 67
heterogeneous classes, 279–280 connotation, 72–73, 305
online teaching, 256 consciousness-raising, 91
student self-discipline, 239 consonant pronunciation, 125
what teachers can do, 236–239 content, 231–233
classroom interaction, 27–40 content-based learning, 11
full-class interactions, 19, 24 content-based syllabus, 197
group and pair work, 33–36 cultural, 223–225
individual work, 36–38 different kinds of, 220–221
teacher-led, 27–33 literature as a component, 228–230
varied interactions, 38–39 underlying messages, 230–232
classroom management skills, 234, 237 see also the syllabus
classroom organization, 18–21 content and language-based learning
classroom research, 302 (CLIL), 11, 225–228, 305
CLIL see content and language-based continuing professional
learning (CLIL) development see teacher
closed-ended cues, 29, 183, 285, 305 development
cloze activity, 110, 184, 187, 189 continuous assessment, 178
cognates, 78, 135, 151 cooperative learning, 281, 284
coherence, cohesion, 67, 305 see also collaboration
co-hyponyms, 74 copying, 53, 136–137, 151

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copyright, in using online in the classroom, 249–251

materials, 250 digital literacies, 245–249
core plus optional tasks, 285–286 for online learning, 12, 256–260
corpus/corpora, 218–219, 250–251, 305 teaching different aspects of
correction, corrective feedback see language using, 251–256
error correction websites and apps, 245
coursebooks direct method, 10, 306
advantages and disadvantages, 206–207 disabilities (learning), 287
approach, 204 discipline see classroom discipline
components, 204–205 discourse, 56, 58, 65–68, 306
distinction from textbooks, 204 distance learning see online teaching
evaluation, 208–211 diversity, 277–289
how necessary is a coursebook? differences between younger
206–207 and older learners, 264
presentation, 205 heterogeneous classes, 278–286
using course materials, 211–216 high and low achievers, 287–288
courses, for teacher development, domains, 6
299–300
CPH see critical period hypothesis (CPH)
creative writing, 154 EAP see English for Academic
criterion-referenced assessment, 181 Purposes (EAP)
critical period hypothesis (CPH), 262, 305 echoing, 33
culture, 223 editing literacy, 246
cultural content for study, 223–225 ELF see English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)
intercultural communicative elicitation, 18, 27–33, 169, 170
competence, 7, 224 EMI see English as a medium of
representation in texts, 231 instruction (EMI)
culture of learning, 11, 235, 305 ending the lesson, 24
curriculum, as term, 195 English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), 4, 306
see also syllabus English as an international
cursive writing, 149, 150 language (EIL), 4, 306
English as a medium of instruction
(EMI), 11, 225, 227, 306
debate, 121 English for Academic Purposes
denotation (meaning), 72, 306 (EAP), 6–7, 201, 274
dictation, 33, 82, 151, 159–160, English for purposes of international
161, 184, 186–187, 188 communication (EPIC) 3–6, 306
dictionary, 37, 51, 64, 78, 115, changing function of English, 3–4
138, 140, 215, 217, 255 implications for teaching, 7–8
online, 255 language modes, registers and domains, 6
monolingual, 217 English for Specific Purposes (ESP),
bilingual, 217 6–7, 274, 306
dictogloss, 38, 111, 306 English, L1 v L2 speakers, 3–4
digital technology, 245–261 English-speaking nations, studying
artificial intelligence (AI), 154–155, 246 the culture of, 221, 223

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EPIC see English for purposes of low achievers, 288

international communication (EPIC) teaching writing, 156–157
ER see extended reality (ER) see also assessment, error
error correction, 163–175 correction
adult learners, 273 first language see L1
basic issues, 163–166 flexibility of level 42
correcting writing, 157–158 flipped classroom, 51, 258,
correcting errors during oral 259–260, 307
fluency work, 115, 170–171 fluency
distinction between errors and assessment of, 188–191
mistakes, 164 correcting errors during oral
from peers, 116, 157, 168 fluency work, 115, 170–171
goal of, 164 in reading, 137–142
learner preferences, 167–169 in speech, 21, 115
oral correction, 167, 169–171 in writing, 151–155
test design, 187 see also speaking
written correction, 171–174 focus on form/forms, 10, 88
see also feedback follow-up tasks, 68–69
errors formal writing, 147–148
contribution to learning, 164 formative assessment, 177, 307
distinction between errors and forums, 66–67
mistakes, 164 full-class interactions, 19, 24
variants and errors 7, 86 functional-notional syllabus, 197
see also error correction
ESP see English for Specific
Purposes (ESP) games, 49–50, 119, 255, 267–268
evaluation of task, 42–46 gapfills, 186
expanding rehearsal, 81, 306 Gardner, H., 278
explicit teaching/learning, 9, 264, gender, 278
269, 306 genre, 65–66, 68
extended reality (ER) 249 gloss 59, 62, 307
extensive reading, 142–144, Google Ngram Viewer, 218
217–218, 307 GPT (AI tool), 154–155, 246, 253, 307
extensive text study, 55 grading, 179–182
see also feedback, assessment
grammar, 85–98
familiarization with text, 20 acceptability, 85–87
feedback, 163–175 activities, 21, 44, 45, 48–50
after lesson observation, 291–295 checking understanding, 20
from students, 297–298 deductive teaching 90, 306
from the teacher, 18 definition of, 85
for teacher development, drill, 92, 306
294–295, 297–298 explaining grammar, 88–91
homework tasks, 52 from texts, 56, 62–65
language-learning tasks, 47 how best to teach, 87–88

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inductive teaching, 90, 307 individual-referenced assessment, 180

of new vocabulary, 72 individual work, 19, 36–38, 39, 280–281
practice exercises, 91–96 informal speech, 101–104
rules, 88–89 informal writing, 66–67, 147–148
second language acquisition (SLA), 9 Initiation-Response-Feedback
standards of grammatical (IRF), 27, 307
acceptability, 85–87 input hypothesis, 11, 307
terminology, 89 instructions, 46–47
using digital technology, 253 intensive text study, 55, 307
what students need to learn, 85–87 interaction hypothesis, 87
grammar translation method, 10, 87 interactive whiteboard (IWB), 249
Grammarly, 158, 174, 254, 305 intercultural communicative
grammatical items, 71 competence, 7, 224, 307
group work interest, 279–280, 282
advantages, 34 see also motivation
classroom interaction, 33–36 interference (from L1), 164
classroom organization, 19, 21 international communication see
collaboration in learning, 284 English for purposes of international
disadvantages, 34–35 communication (EPIC)
speaking, 114–115 intonation, 124–125
IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback)
pattern, 27, 307
handwriting, 149, 150–151
see also writing
hardware, for technology, 249 jazz chants, 119, 269
heterogeneous classes, 116, 278–286 jigsaw activities, 38, 307
problems, 279–280 joined-up writing, 149, 150
advantages, 281 journal articles, for teacher
practical principles in teaching, 281–286 development, 301
high achieving learners, 287–288
home culture, 223
homework, 50–53 Krashen, Stephen, 11, 87, 99
individualized learning, 37 KWL (Know – Want to know – Learnt), 142
when to hand out, 24
hybrid learning, 12, 260
lemma, 76, 197, 308
hyperlink literacy, 246
L1 as English, 3–4
hyponyms, 74, 307
L1, 307
heterogeneous classes, 278
immersion, 9, 263–264, 307 interference, 164
immigrant learners, 263 number of L1 v L2 English speakers, 3–4
implicit teaching/learning, 9, 307 place of the learner’s L1, 8
differences between younger teachers’ knowledge of English, 7
and older learners, 264 teaching grammar, 88, 89
grammar, 87 use in the classroom, 114, 115
younger learners, 265 language modes, 6

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learner autonomy 17, 34, 36, 207, 210, 239 local environment, 220, 223
learner differences low achieving learners, 287–288
age, 262–264 Lyster, R., 169, 170
diversity, 277–279
heterogeneous classes, 278–286
high and low achievers, 287–288 machine translation (MT), 254
teaching adolescents, 269–272 matching, 186
teaching adults, 273–274 materials, 204–230
teaching younger learners, 264–269 non-coursebook resources, 216–219
learning environment (classroom using course materials, 211–216
organization), 18–21 see also coursebooks
learning goals, 25 mentorship, for first year teachers, 291
Learning Management Systems metaphors, lesson perspectives, 15–16
(LMSs), 53, 308 methods/methodologies, 10–11
learning style, 278 mingling activities, 39, 284
lemmas, 76, 196, 308 mistakes see errors
lesson, 15–26 mixed skills, 111, 210
classroom organization, 18–21 mnemonics, 79, 308
different perspectives, 15–16 modals, 94
functions of the teacher, 17–18 mode, 6, 23, 26, 308
lesson planning, 21–26 morphemes, 74, 308
online learning, 259 morphology, 85, 308
written lesson plans, 24–26 motivation
lesson observation, 291–295 adult learners, 273
letters classroom discipline, 236, 237
capitals, 160–161 differences between younger and
learning to read, 132–135 older learners, 264, 265–266
teaching writing, 148–151 function of the teacher, 18
see also alphabet heterogeneous classes, 278, 279–282
lexical items, 71, 308 high and low achievers, 287–288
lexical syllabus, 196–197 student interest in tasks, 42, 47–50
listening, 99–112 see also interest
activity design, 100–109 MT see machine translation (MT)
basic features of listening multicompetent language users, 8
comprehension, 99–100 multicultural awareness, 7
pronunciation awareness- see also intercultural
raising, 126 communicative competence
tasks, 104–111 multiple-choice questions, 186
test design, 187–188 multiple intelligences theory, 278
texts, 100–104
using digital technology, 251–252 noise levels in the classroom, 35,
literature, 228–230 235, 240, 241–242
LMS, see Learning Management norm-referenced assessment, 180
Systems (LMSs) note-taking, 38, 45, 106, 111, 189, 295

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‘obeying instructions’ activity, 110 proficiency standards, 11–12, 176

observation of lessons, 291–295 see also Common European
online teaching, 12, 256–260 Framework of Reference (CEFR)
combination with face-to-face, prompt literacy, 246, 253
259–260 pronouns, 67, 68, 71, 231
compared to face-to-face, 256–257 pronunciation, 103, 124–126
effectiveness of, 257–259 publications, for teacher
increasing effectiveness, 258–259 development, 298–299, 301
open-ended cues, 29, 49, 51, 118, punctuation, 103, 124–126
285, 308
oral fluency see speaking
output hypothesis, 87 quantity, 41–42
questioning, 27–33
closed-ended, 29, 183, 285
pair work, 19, 24, 33–36, 115, 190, 284 individualized learning, 36–37
paraphrasing, 67, 103, 104, 184, 267 open-ended, 29, 49, 118, 285
‘pass it on’ activity, 39, 283, 284 types of, 28–29
peer development, 296–297 wait-time, 32
see also teacher development
peer correction, 116, 157, 168
peer teaching, 281, 284, 308 Ranta, L., 169, 170
personal literacy, 248–249 ‘reader’s theatre’ activity, 119
personality, 278 reading, 128–145
personalization, 284 aloud, 59–60
phonemic awareness, 131–132, 308 beginning reading tasks, 134–137
phonology, 10, 308 extensive reading, 142–144,
pictures, 33, 48–49, 61, 78, 79, 91, 218–219
94, 120, 134, 135, 137, 190, 191, fluency, 137–142
218, 265–266 how do we read? 128–131
permission to use, 250 learning the letters, 132–134
play, 267–269 phonemic awareness, 131–132
plosives, 125, 308 test design, 188
poems, poetry, 39, 51, 54, 65, 66, using digital technology, 253
67–68, 152, 226, 111, 119, 228 reading for pleasure, 142–144,
portfolio assessment, 179 217–218
pre-teaching vocabulary, 59, 139, 216 reading professional literature,
prediction, 138, 140 298–299, 302
prefixes, 74–75, 308 ‘recall and share’ activity, 160, 161
presentations, 121–123, 190, 252–253 recast, 169, 170
print literacy, 245–246 reference books, 217
privacy, online, 248–249 reflection (for teacher
process-writing, 155–158, 308 development), 295–296
professional development see register, 6, 309
teacher development reliability, 178
professional literature, 298–299, 302 repetition, 33, 46, 51, 67, 104,
170, 188, 266

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research on teaching and learning, stories, 20, 38, 39, 106, 110, 112, 139,
298–299, 302 152, 155, 221, 266–267, 302
see also second language stress (pronunciation), 125
acquisition (SLA) structural syllabus, 196
reserve activities, 46 student feedback, 297–298
retrieval, 81, 309 style, 66–67
rhymes, 268–269 subject matter see content
rhythm in speech, 124 success-orientation, 42
role play, 120–121 suffixes, 74–75, 309
summarizing, 111, 152
summative assessment, 177, 309
scaffolded activities, speaking, 119 superordinates, 74, 79, 309
scanning, 110, 139 sustained silent reading (SSR),
schwa sound, 103, 124, 309 142–144, 217–218, 309
search literacy, 246 Swain, M., 87
second language acquisition (SLA), 9, 309 syllable-timing, 124
self-access centres, 36 syllabus, 195–203
sexism, 231 basic features, 196
situational syllabus, 197 CEFR and language syllabuses,
Sketch Engine, 218 199–200
skimming, 110, 139 in coursebooks, 204–205
SLA see second language acquisition (SLA), how to use, 200–202
Snopes website, 247 types of language syllabus, 196–199
songs, 110, 268–269 see also content
sounds, 124, 126, 131–132 synchronous online teaching, 258, 309
speaking, 113–127 synonyms, 74, 309
activity design, 115–117 syntax, 85, 309
from beginner to advanced, 117–121 see also grammar
goals, 113–114 synthetic syllabuses, 195
presentations, 121–123
problems, 114
pronunciation, 124–126 target culture, 7
test design, 189–191 target language, 9, 10, 164, 263, 309
using digital technology, 252–253 task-based language teaching
spelling (TBLT), 10, 309
teaching new vocabulary, 72 task-based syllabus, 197
teaching writing, 159–160 tasks, 41–53
SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, basis for speaking, 33–34
Recall, Review), 142 evaluation of, 42–45
SSR (sustained silent reading) see individualized, 37
sustained silent reading (SSR) based on texts, 56, 60–62, 68–69
staff meetings, 291 core plus optional, 285–286
standards of proficiency, 11–12, 176 grammar, 91–96
see also Common European homework, 50–53
Framework of Reference (CEFR) listening, 100–111

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organizing tasks, 46–47 topic-based syllabus, 197

reading, 134–137 translation, 8, 78, 79, 82, 87, 160,
review tasks, 82 253–254
speaking, 115–123 for testing, 184, 187
student interest, 42, 47–50 see also machine translation (MT)
task evaluation, 42–46 true/false, 110, 186
TBLT see task-based language typing, 150
teaching (TBLT)
teachability hypothesis, 91
teacher development, 290–304 validity, 41, 178
first year of teaching, 290–291 variation in a lesson, 22–23
further development, 300–302 video, 51, 104, 106, 110, 122, 211,
heterogeneous classes, 281 252, 266
lesson observation, 291–295 videoconferencing see online teaching
ongoing development, 295–298 virtual reality (VR), 249
through reading and further visual stimuli, 94, 106, 211, 218, 265–266
study, 298–300 vocabulary, 71–84, 42, 45–46, 138,
teacher-fronted classrooms, 18–19 156, 226
teacher functions, 17–18 activities, 44, 45–46, 48, 49
teacher handbooks, 217 appropriateness of words, 73
teacher-led interaction, 27–33 coursebook, 207, 209, 212, 216
teacher questioning see from texts, 56, 57, 58, 62–65
questioning inferring meanings, inferencing,
teacher talk, 18–19 65, 76, 307
see also feedback lists, 200
teaching/learning materials, 204 presenting new, 78–81
see also coursebooks pre-teaching, 59
tense, 85, 93–96, 184 review, 81–82
testing see assessment selection of new vocabulary, 77–78
textbooks, 217 testing, 172, 182–188
see also coursebooks using digital technology, 255
texting, 6, 66, 147–148, 246, 309 what students need to learn, 71–75
texts, 54–70 word family, 76, 309
comprehension of, 55–56, 58–62 see also retrieval, dictionary, corpus
definition of, 54 Vocabulary Profilers, 63, 218
as discourse, 65–68 vowel pronunciation, 103, 125
follow-up tasks, 56, 68–69 VR see virtual reality (VR)
goals for teaching the text, 55–58
intensive and extensive study, 55 wait-time (questioning), 32
language learning from, 62–65 washback see backwash
literature as a component of the webinars, for teacher
English course, 228–230 development, 300
‘ticking off items’ activity, 110 websites, 245, 247, 252–255
top-down processes, 99–100, 130, 309 see also digital technology

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willingness to communicate spelling, 159–160

(WTC), 114, 170, 309 tasks that promote fluency,
word families, 76–77, 309 151–155
word formation, 74–75 teaching letters, 148–151
word games, 42, 267–268 test design, 191
word meanings, see vocabulary using digital technology, 253–254
word stress (pronunciation), 125 see also spelling
wordsearches, 42, 267 WTC see willingness to
worksheets, 37, 218 communicate (WTC)
see also tasks
writing, 146–158
characteristics of, 146–148 younger learners, 190, 218, 227,
feedback on, 156–158 262–269
process-writing, 155–158 YouTube, 19, 57, 252, 266, 269
punctuation, 160–161

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