Becoming a Good Teacher

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

What are the qualities of great teachers? According to Jeremy Harmer, good teachers are attentive, understanding, good listeners, passionate. They give interesting classes. They bring their personalities and life experience into the classroom, and develop common ground with their students. They are flexible, student-centred, professional and knowledgeable, empathetic and motivating. They know their students’ names.

There is more. Good teachers adjust their language to a level students can understand without sounding unnatural or patronizing (this is called “modified input”.) They also use gestures, expressions and mime to communicate (this is called “comprehensible input”.)

The qualities students want in a teacher vary from culture to culture. For example, a TEFL student recently undertook a survey of Thai students in a TEFL class. What do Thai students want in a teacher? First, they want a teacher who is kind. They also want a teacher who understands the subject and is prepared for class. They want a teacher who is “human”, by which they explained that he should not be egotistical. And they want a teacher who arrives in class on time. These ideas are largely consistent with Harmers, but you can see cultural differences brought on by the insistence on kindness, humanity and being on time. (Thais are more frequently late than in the West.)

Here are some other ideas about the teacher’s roles and responsibilities. According to one writer, “great teaching comes from preparing thoroughly, challenging the students, listening carefully and respectfully, constantly learning as you teach, and including in every class a clear, insightful, new concept.” According to another, “the teacher’s main responsibilities are to choose class materials and to set class standards.” And according to a third, teaching and learning are part of the human condition. “We are all here to teach and learn.”

So those are the qualities of the good teacher. And there are as many ways to be a good teacher as there are teachers who are determined to do a good job. However, one choice that does seem to go a long way toward helping the teacher become a better teacher is the decision to use inductive methods. Here is a brief explanation of how that works, with examples.

Inductive and Deductive Teaching: Let’s start with the basics. English language teaching consists of applying four linguistic skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) to three groups of language items (structural, lexical and phonological). The latter correspond roughly to grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation; they amount to linguistic content.

There is endless discussion among teachers about the relative merits of “inductive teaching” compared to “deductive teaching.” In inductive teaching, the students practice language forms, but discover rules or generalizations on their own. They induce the rules from the examples they have practiced. In inductive presentation, the teacher makes the rules explicit by asking students to provide the answer. In deductive teaching, the teacher first gives the students the rules for a language form. Then they practice using them.

Here are examples of each.

Inductive Teaching
1.Write the following sentence on the board (or give it to them as a handout): “She gave me a beautiful big old brown Chinese hat.”
2.Then give them additional sentences, and ask them to put the adjectives in the right order. Example: “I want to buy a ____ ____ ____ ____ ____motorcycle.” (Japanese, red, pretty, new, small).
3.Make the scrambled adjectives increasingly more challenging in the worksheet sentences. Thus, they have to think a bit harder with each new sentence. In this way they will figure out for themselves (induce) how to place adjectives.
4.Elicit ideas from the students about the correct order of adjectives. Using that input, write the rule on the board.

Deductive Teaching:
1. Give the students the following information in a handout:

In English, adjectives come before a noun in a particular order. The order of adjectives is the following:

A. First comes opinion: (Lovely)
B. Then we provide physical description, in a certain order:

1. Size (big)
2. Age (old)
3. Condition (faded)
4. Colour (red)
5. Shape (elongated)
6. Sex (N/A)

C. Then origin: (Canadian)
D. Then material: (birch bark)
E. Then purpose: (racing)
F. And the noun brings up the rear: canoe

2. Give them some adjectives and ask them to write sentences using three or more adjectives in the right order. Their job is to "deduce" the right answers from the rule you set out at the beginning.
3. Check the sentences to see whether they got them right.

These two forms of teaching practice are quite different. In general, use inductive teaching. This may require putting more work into your lesson plans, but it is worth it.

Classroom Management and Student Discipline

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

I recently encountered two of my former students in a Chiang Mai restaurant, and asked them how they were doing in the job market. They had completed their training in December, and both quickly began to teach. But their working situations are as different as chalk and cheese. One teaches six classes of young Thai teenagers in a public school, and each of her classes has perhaps 50 students enrolled. The other works as a one-to-one English tutor, and teaches only 18 hours per week. His students are mostly Thai adults, but they also include two Korean teenagers.

As far as classroom management is concerned, this study in contrasts illustrates the extremes that English language teachers are likely to experience.

Think about it: The teacher with hundreds of students is dealing with individuals she will never know by name. The situation militates against her being able to give personal attention to anyone. Her students are there because the law requires them to study English. Their previous English teaching has been from teachers with mixed (generally poor) language instruction skills. The distractions of the classroom are legion for both teacher and student. Many of her students have raging hormones and little motivation to learn English.

In the tutor-teacher’s case, the situation is upside down – or, some would say, right side up. The students only get personal care. The teacher gets to know them quite well. They are studying English because they want to learn the language, and are therefore highly motivated. Their previous language instruction is irrelevant, because their tutor rough tunes to their level, and heals the areas important to them. And besides having motivation, his students are more mature. They do not let their hormones disrupt the operation of the classroom.

Without a doubt these classes illustrate two extremes in classroom management. But has one of these teachers been dealt a bad hand in the gin rummy of teaching, while the other got a royal flush? I suggest not. When I asked the two teachers how their first month had gone, both said “I love it!” Different strokes for different folks.

Classroom Management: And this brings us around to the issue of good classroom management. Teachers have to manage their classrooms well so their teaching can be effective. Good management creates an environment that helps students learn. Good classroom management reveals and influences your attitude, talents, perceived role, voice and body language. It strongly affects teacher-student interactions, including the challenges associated with teaching to large groups.

Okay, enough of the abstractions. What exactly is classroom management? It is what you do to make your teaching area a good place to learn in. For example, the physical environment of the classroom can contribute to student learning; while all classroom seating arrangements have strengths and weaknesses, you have to decide which one works best for you. There are ways to arrange classroom seating to encourage student interaction. Should you set your students’ chairs in a horseshoe? A circle? How about the old standby, rows of student desks? Each works best in different situations. As a classroom manager, your job is to think through seating plans and other physical arrangements (like making sure the classroom isn’t too hot) that will work best for your students.

What else can you do to optimize the learning process? Perhaps nothing is more important in a classroom than letting your students feel safe – the process Stephen Krashen calls lowering the affective filter. A huge part of your role as a teacher is to build a positive climate, letting your students know there are rewards for taking risks in your classroom. Classroom management involves looking after such details as having a place to post student essays, for example.

One way to make students feel safe is to clarify classroom procedures and rules. Part of helping students feel secure is to establish clear rules and class routines. And it involves discipline. Let’s talk about that.

The Learner’s Age: One place to start is to consider that each class you teach is likely to include students of about the same age. Thus, your students will probably be children, adolescents or adults, not all three. So let’s look at those three groups in age rank.

1. When you teach children, it is important to differentiate between two life stages – young children who are 5-8 years old, and mature children who are 8-11. In terms of how their minds work, the mature children are cognitively close to adolescents and adults. Young children, by contrast, are cognitively closer to Martians. According to one popular text on teaching English to children,

The adult world and the child's world are not the same. Children do not always understand what adults are talking about. Adults do not always understand what children are talking about. The difference is that adults usually find out by asking questions, but children don't always ask. They either pretend to understand, or they understand in their own terms and do what they think you want them to do.

In both cases, young learners have special requirements. They have short attention spans, and require lots of physical play and teacher patience. They sometimes have trouble differentiating between fact and fiction. They have little life experience, but buckets of honesty. And while they may have respect for authority, they have a great deal of imagination. A teacher may feel that on some levels communication is impossible.

2. When you teach adolescents, you are dealing with a different crowd. They often have attitude. They respond to peer-pressure. They are often insecure, their hormones may be running wild, and they are developing life experience. As they go through the rapid transition between childhood and adulthood, they are often seeking knowledge and self-identity. Many challenge authority, and in the language classroom that means you.

3. Adults are another story. They have life experience and, because they are unlikely to be taking English because they have to, they are likely to be well motivated. They are also likely to be more tolerant and self-aware, but they may be status conscious. This latter issue can be an issue in a number of ways. For one, in terms of age they are peers of the teacher. If they are wealthy, older or high-status professionals, they may consider themselves to outrank you. Therein lay minefields. Don’t ever believe that adult students won’t ever give you discipline problems. Most won’t, but some do.

An article by US educator Budd Churchward suggests a way to apply the thought of psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg to the problem of classroom discipline for children and adolescents. His ideas put the lie to the urban myth that a class full of young adolescents is a class out of control. Purveyors of this notion, which is common in the United States, for example, support it with such unexamined statistics as the one that the dropout rate for America’s urban teachers is 40-50 percent. Does this mean the students were out of control, the teachers got offers for better jobs, or the teachers were ready for a change?

Kohlberg developed theories about the stages of moral and ethical reasoning among people. Through his work, which included in-depth studies of youngsters from many parts of the world, he developed a scheme of moral development consisting of three levels (each made up of two separate stages). He suggested that almost everyone, regardless of culture, race, or sex, experiences at least the first four stages.

The Encyclopedia of Psychology explains the four stages thus:

Each stage involves increasingly complex thought patterns, and as children arrive at a given stage they tend to consider the bases for previous judgments as invalid. Children from the ages of seven through ten act on the pre-conventional level, at which they defer to adults and obey rules based on the immediate consequences of their actions. The behaviour of children at this level is essentially pre-moral. At Stage 1, they obey rules in order to avoid punishment, while at Stage 2 their behaviour is mostly motivated by the desire to obtain rewards. Starting at around age ten, children enter the conventional level, where their behaviour is guided by the opinions of other people and the desire to conform. At Stage 3, the emphasis is on being a "good boy" or "good girl" in order to win approval and avoid disapproval, while at Stage 4 the concept of doing one's duty and upholding the social order becomes predominant. At this stage, respecting and obeying authority (of parents, teachers, God) is an end in itself, without reference to higher principles. By the age of 13, most moral questions are resolved on the conventional level.

For purposes of classroom discipline, Churchward says that only these four of Kohlberg’s stages are important.

The Learner’s Stage: At the risk of over-simplifying his ideas, here is a brief review of the approach to discipline that Churchward develops. It strongly reflects Kohlberg’s stages.

1. Stage 1 discipline problems, he argues, involve recalcitrant behaviour. This is the power stage, in which might makes right. The students refuse to follow directions. They are defiant and require a great deal of attention. “Fortunately, says Churchward, “few of the students we see in our classrooms function at this stage. Those who do, follow rules as long as the imbalance of power tilts against them. Assertive teachers with a constant eye on these students can keep them in line. Turn your back on them, and they are out of control.”

2. Self-serving behaviour is the ruling characteristic of Stage 2; Churchward calls it the reward and punishment stage, in which the student’s key question is, “What’s in it for me?” In class, these students behave either because they will receive candy, free time or some other reward, or because they do not like what will happen to them if they do not behave. “Most children are moving beyond this stage by the time they are eight or nine years old”, Churchward explains. “Older students who still function at this stage do best in classrooms with assertive teachers.” Assertive teachers – the ones who insist on class control – are the ones who fare best with stage 1 and 2 students.

3. Churchward characterizes Stage 3 as one of interpersonal discipline, in which the student is out to make the teacher’s day. In this stage the student’s main question is “How can I please you?” He adds, “Students functioning at Stage 3 make up most of the youngsters in our middle and junior high schools. These kids have started to develop a sense of discipline. They behave because you ask them. This is the mutual interpersonal stage. They care what others think about them, and they want you to like them.” These children need little discipline. Ask them to settle down and they will. They rarely need a heavy-handed approach to classroom discipline.

4. The last stage of classroom discipline involves self-discipline. This is the social order stage, characterized by the student belief that “I must behave because it is the right thing to do.”

“Students functioning at Stage 4 rarely get into any trouble at all,” Churchward says. “They have a sense of right and wrong. Although many middle school and junior high school students will occasionally function at this level, only a few consistently do. These are the youngsters we enjoy working with so much….You can leave these kids alone with a project and come back 20 or 30 minutes later and find them still on task.” Many adolescent students do not operate at this stage, but they are near enough to it that they understand how it works. “Cooperative learning activities encourage students to function at this level,” he adds. “The teacher who sets up several groups within the classroom gives students a chance to practice working at this level.” You should wait close by, though, ready to step in when needed.

Churchward’s ideas are useful and relevant, and he does a good job of developing a practical application for Kohlberg's theoretical concepts. Put in the context of managing the classroom, his thinking offers a helpful understanding of the psychology of our younger learners, and contributes to the larger issue of class management.

On Churchward's website – which also promotes a computer system for managing classroom discipline (free trial available) – is a description of 11 techniques for better classroom discipline. I recommend you take a look at it.

Using the Mother Tongue to Teach another Tongue

I recently updated my book Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

“Language teaching must start afresh!” was the battle cry of a German language teacher, Wilhelm Viëtor, who published a manifesto of that name in 1886. His text lays out the weaknesses of the then-current grammar translation approach to language teaching, and proposes a surprisingly modern method to replace it.

This was one of the seminal moments for the Reform Movement in language teaching, and communicative language teaching is clearly part of the tradition that Fricke described so many years ago.

His thoughts on using the foreign language and the students’ native language in the classroom are worth noting. “It goes without saying that that the foreign language should always be spoken in class,” he says. However, “in certain circumstances, (questions about the content of a text) may have to be put in German first, then in the foreign language….” In his thoughtful commentary, he thus comes down on what I take to be the right side of an issue that has bedeviled reformers from his day to the present.

Sometimes called the principle of monolingualism, the idea is that you should essentially banish your students’ mother tongue from the foreign language classroom. This notion, which is very convenient for teachers who do not know the native language of the students they are teaching, has many advocates. This practice is essentially a product of the twentieth century. In no other age have language teachers been forbidden as a matter of principle to communicate with their students in their native language.

The widely respected methodology writer Jeremy Harmer, for example, makes a concession to the mother tongue in these words: “Where students all share the same mother tongue (which the teacher also understands), a member of the class can be asked to translate the instructions as a check that they have understood them.” The very wording of this proposal implies that the teacher should ban the mother tongue from the classroom. It certainly sounds as though Harmer wouldn’t stoop to use it himself!

Does this make sense? For some, using the students’ native language is not an option. These teachers may work in western countries where attendance sheets read like UN committee lists. Or they may have monolingual classes in developing countries whose language they have not mastered or even attempted. Much conventional wisdom about language teaching suggests that these situations are irrelevant, since the ideal language classroom should involve communication in the foreign language only. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there are strong arguments that the monolingual principle is an impediment to effective language teaching.

The balance of this commentary will reflect the ideas of a worthy successor to Viëtor, the 19th century German pamphleteer. Now a retired professor of language instruction in Aachen, Germany, Dr. Wolfgang Butzkamm argues that having the ability to speak the first language of your learners is a gift to be valued. All else being equal, a teacher fluent in her students’ mother tongue will be a better teacher than one who blunders in that language or doesn't know it at all. He assumes that the students are at least seven years old, by which time their native language is well established.

Here is his essential argument.

Using the mother tongue, we have learned to think, learned to communicate and acquired an intuitive understanding of grammar. The mother tongue opens the door not only to its own grammar, but to all grammars, inasmuch as it awakens the potential for universal grammar that lies within all of us….For this reason, the mother tongue is the master key to foreign languages, the tool which gives us the fastest, surest, most precise, and most complete means of accessing a foreign language.

This is a radical notion, but in many ways it makes great sense. The trick is to use the mother tongue sparingly in class. Offer brief explanations and instructions where necessary, but do not do so randomly; Butzkamm suggests particular techniques to use in the classroom. He adds,

In principle, conveying meaning is not a matter of vocabulary, but concerns the text, i.e. it takes place simultaneously on a lexical, grammatical and pragmatic level. The pupil first wants to understand not what an individual word is saying, but what the text is saying, as accurately and completely as possible. An oral utterance equivalent in the mother tongue is the best and fastest way to fulfill this basic need.

He adds that “interferences, those unwelcome imports from the mother tongue, are avoided by the sandwich technique.” The sandwich technique? This is when the teacher “inserts a translation between repetitions of an unknown phrase, almost as an aside, or with a slight break in the flow of speech to mark it as an ‘intruder’.” In this way the teacher briefly uses the mother tongue, but quickly re-establishes syntax for his students.

Butzkamm’s arguments are often complex, but they fall well within the structure of communicative language teaching. For example, he suggests that using teaching aids in the mother tongue can “promote more authentic, message-oriented communications than might be found in lessons where they are avoided…. (Also,) mother tongue techniques allow teachers to use richer, more authentic texts sooner. This means more comprehensible input and faster acquisition.”

In a comment on this post, Butzkamm pointed out that "my argument stands even if there is no such thing as a universal grammar common to all languages...in the Chomskyan sense." He continues,

Mother tongue grammars have paved the way to foreign grammars in as much as they have prepared the learner to expect and understand underlying basic concepts such as possession, number, agent, instrument, cause, condition etc, no matter by what linguistic means they are expressed in a given language. Naturally, if both the target language and the FL have adjectives, relative clauses or the pluperfect tense in common, they need not be taught from scratch, but are directly available for incorporation into the L2 system. However, the path breaking power of L1 grammar is not dependent on the fact that both languages share such grammatical features. One natural language is enough to open the door for the grammars of other languages because all languages are cut from the same conceptual cloth.

At first, some of his arguments sound like those of a CL teacher gone mad. Consider the beginning of this argument, for example: “Mother tongue aids make it easier to conduct whole lessons in the foreign language.” This sounds almost surreal until he explains that using such aids enables “pupils to gain in confidence and, paradoxically, become less dependent on their mother tongue.”

The mother tongue has a role in explaining vocabulary, Butzkamm says, but we have to me careful about it, as his explanation of the sandwich technique illustrates. In language teaching, other approaches do not work as well, he says, and can even be harmful. As importantly, “we need to associate the new with the old. To exclude mother tongue links would deprive us of our richest source” for building associations with words we already know. In general, he says, “the foreign language learner must build upon existing skills and knowledge acquired in and through the mother tongue.”

Butzkamm is not modest about his ideas. His theory, he says,

restores the mother tongue to its rightful place as the most important ally a foreign language can have, one which would, at the same time, redeem some 2000 years of documented foreign language teaching, which has always held the mother tongue in high esteem.

Hardly the first linguist to argue against the principle of monolingualism, Butzkamm’s arguments may be the most coherent and compelling. Language teachers – especially those whose students speak a common language – should remember a simple truth: knowing and judiciously using your students’ native language can make you better teachers.

A Beginning, a Middle and an End

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Whichever language skill you are teaching, each component of your lesson should comprise beginning, middle and end. On the surface, this sounds obvious. But in language teaching, nothing is as it seems – or so it seems.

A better way to describe this issue is to talk about pre-skill, skill and post-skill activities. The three sections of a lesson segment should include an introduction that activates any schema the learners may need to succeed in the activity; the activity itself; and a review of the activity. To use reading as an example, the moving parts of a good teaching activity should include pre-reading, reading and post-reading components.

In the balance of this discussion, we will use reading and writing activities to illustrate this general idea. However, you can equally apply it to instruction in listening and speaking.

The communicative language teacher’s main responsibilities are to choose class materials and activities and to set class standards; in many ways, the choices are the hardest part. CL teachers should adapt readings to the level and interest of their students. All else being equal, students learn best when they read items that interest them. When you are presenting a text to students, there are a number of steps you should take to help your students get the most from their reading.

These include pre-teaching essential vocabulary and engaging the students by having them try to predict the content before they actually do the reading. If you have a class full of young adults, for example, you might begin the section with the observation, “We are about to read a short love story. What do you think will happen?” These kinds of pre-reading activities promote comprehension. In turn, this encourages your students to react personally to what they are reading.

You should base a sequence of classroom activities on your reading text. In this way, you can integrate better reading with improvements in one or more of the other skills – listening, speaking and writing.

Student Generated Reading Materials: Sometimes, of course, you won’t want to provide your students with canned material. You may opt instead to have them generate their own reading material.

You can have intermediate or advanced students choose their own research topic and find their own study materials in the newspaper or on the Internet. Once they have chosen their reading materials, you can put them through pre-reading, reading and post-reading exercises. This kind of project will extend over several classes, or even several weeks.

If you have lower-level students, you can use the “language experience approach” to help a class of beginners extend their spoken language into reading and writing activities. Begin by discussing a shared experience in class. Then lead the students in telling you a story. Write words and phrases on the board. Gradually develop their language contributions into a story, prompting revisions as you go. Read and reread the story together. Depending on the language skills of your students, use “repeat after me” or “choral reading” approaches. You may want to extend the story by having the students illustrate it.

After it is complete, you can further exploit this exercise by preparing flash cards that give brief cues to the story. Then erase the board, and have each student tell the story using only these cues. You will probably want your learners to tell these stories in small groups, so they get maximum language practice.

Make student-generated material go a long way, by pointing out elements such as punctuation and repetitive grammatical forms. Point out parts of speech, and use readings as springboards for speaking, listening, and writing. Finally, post student-generated writings on the wall to remind students of what they have learned.

Also, after you isolate a word, phrase or sentence, put it back into context so you can re-establish “syntax.” Syntax is the teacher’s word for the rules we use to combine words into phrases and sentences.

Reading Skills: Of course, in reading lessons it is also important to present strategies for effective comprehension. Here are three key skills.

• Skimming is used to quickly identify the main ideas of a text. When you read the newspaper, you're probably not reading it word-by-word; instead you're skimming the text. Skimming is done at a speed three to four times faster than normal reading.
• Scanning is a technique you often use when looking up a word in the telephone book or dictionary. You search for key words or ideas. In most cases, you know what you're looking for, so you're concentrating on finding a particular answer. Scanning involves moving your eyes quickly down the page seeking specific words and phrases.
• Surveying a text involves beginning a reading by examining some of its parts. Read the headlines and sub-heads, the first and last paragraphs, captions, charts and tables and other graphic materials. These will give you the main ideas of an article or brochure before you begin more intensive reading.

Teaching these learning strategies can greatly improve your learner’s reading comprehension.You can learn about other strategies to improve reading in teachers’ books and on many Internet sites.

Teaching Writing: Writing reinforces general language development and helps develop language proficiency, but it is also a valuable form of self-expression. CLT gives listening and speaking skills a certain primacy, but students do not always have to speak before they can write. (Of course, when you are working with students who have not yet learned the Roman alphabet, writing is usually a long time coming!)

The well-known applied linguist Doug (H. Douglas) Brown lists six principles for designing good writing lessons.

First, he says we should teach our students what good writers do. What do good writers do? Well, they focus on the main idea. They consider their audience. They constantly revise their writing. They follow a general outline as they write. And they get feedback on their writing from others. Build these practices into your writing lessons.

Brown also talks about balancing process and product. When you work with your students on process, you are inwardly focused, on the writer. You help your learners understand what the writer must do to generate ideas and so on. A focus on the writing product is outwardly directed. Who are the audience and what are they willing to read? What form should the piece of writing take? You also need to explain why correctness is so vital.

Another of Brown’s principles is to show differences between writing in English and writing in the first language. The focus here is style rather than language. For overseas teachers who cannot speak the local language or read the local script, this is impossible, of course.

His fourth principle is to connect reading and writing activities. This follows the general principle that CL teachers should wring as much as they can from a given task, stopping well short of boredom.

Also, he says, make writing as realistic as possible. Have students write for a real purpose. There are many varieties of writing that you can teach, and they exist for just about every student level. A few writing schema your students will be familiar with include email, letters, postcards, stories and newspaper articles. Forms they may be less familiar with include essays, poetry and business letters. As you begin a writing exercise, you should be sure your students understand the form (schema) they will be working on. Once they understand the form, the rest will be easier.

Finally, Brown says, teach writing in three stages.

• Generating content is the first. He calls this prewriting, and it involves research, brainstorming and other techniques for idea formation.
• Planning, organizing and preparing the first draft make up the second stage. At higher levels, for example, common planning and organizing techniques include writing a thesis statement, preparing outlines and developing topic sentences.
• Revision and editing come last. Except in special cases (for example, advanced students), it is not helpful to correct all the mistakes you can find in your students’ writing assignments. Like the other aspects of language, the development of writing is a gradual process. However, you should encourage your students to get feedback on their writing from other students by peer review. Also, your students should have opportunities to rewrite their work after you (or their peers) have corrected it.

And this, of course, takes us back to the beginning. Good activities for teaching language skills comprise beginning, middle and end.

Language Teaching: Some Notes on Method

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown


As a teacher, I use the communicative approach to language teaching, and this blog provides much information about its theory and practice. In some ways, the heart of CLT is the lesson planning cycle, which we stress from the beginning. (To download a PDF of my book on the topic, click here.)

To put CLT and lesson planning into context, it will be helpful to tell some of the story of teaching methods. We begin with the tale of teaching approaches and methods. Then we describe the two bêtes noire of language teaching – grammar translation and audiolingualism – before reviewing the direct method and CLT.

Approach, Method, Design and Procedure: In 1963, applied linguist Edward Anthony defined the terms “approach,” “method” and “technique” as they apply to language teaching and his ideas had a great impact on teachers and those who guide them. In his ground-breaking work, Anthony suggested that an approach is the large system of ideas and thought behind a teacher’s lesson plans. Method refers to specific ways to teach English, and each method uses a variety of specific techniques.

Here is what Anthony actually said: “The arrangement is hierarchical. The organizational key is that techniques carry out a method which is consistent with an approach….
• “…An approach is a set of correlative assumptions dealing with the nature of language teaching and learning. An approach is axiomatic. It describes the nature of the subject matter to be taught….
• “…Method is an overall plan for the orderly presentation of language material, no part of which contradicts, and all of which is based upon, the selected approach. An approach is axiomatic, a method is procedural…..Within one approach, there can be many methods….
• “A technique is implementational – that which actually takes place in a classroom. It is a particular trick, stratagem, or contrivance used to accomplish an immediate objective. Techniques must be consistent with a method, and therefore in harmony with an approach as well.”

In a review of Anthony’s ideas, two later thinkers – Jack Richards and Ted Rodgers – suggest a rethinking of this hierarchy. Anthony’s package can be improved, they suggest, by eliminating the notion of technique from the pyramid, and adding design and procedure. The following two categories replaced technique at the bottom of their hierarchy.
• Design: The two thinkers propose that design is “that level in which objectives, syllabus, and content are determined, and in which objectives, the roles of teachers, learners and instructional materials are specified.”
• Procedure: The implementation phase of language classes is where the rubber hits the road – the activities that help language learning occur. Rather than use the term implementation, they prefer the “slightly more comprehensive term procedure.”

The two men sum up their revised model with the words: “…a method is theoretically related to an approach, is organizationally determined by a design, and is practically realized in a procedure.” The lesson planning cycle used extensively in this course mirrors Richards’ and Rodgers’ revisions to Anthony’s pioneering work.

In the following discussion, we will talk about methods only, because we are concerned with how language is taught in the classroom rather than the theory behind individual methods. We will not, in other words, discuss the approaches behind the following four methods.

The Grammar Translation Method: The grammar translation method emerged when people of the western world wanted to learn such foreign languages as Latin and Greek. The focus is on learning grammatical rules and memorizing vocabulary and language declensions and conjugations. Typical classroom activities and homework includes text translation and written exercises.

The teacher presents a grammar translation class in the student’s native tongue, and students are not actively encouraged to use the target language in class. The teacher provides elaborate explanations of the grammatical intricacies of the target language, and often focuses on the form and inflection of words. Accuracy receives a great deal of stress. Vocabulary study takes the form of learning lists of often isolated words, and the rules of grammar provide the blueprint for putting words together. Students begin early to read classical texts, which are treated as exercises in grammatical analysis. There is little stress on the content of those texts.

The Audio-lingual Method: Grammar Translation classes lingered in the West until well into the 1970s, and the method is still used in some schools, especially in less-developed countries. However, the system began to be replaced in Western schools in the mid-1950s by a new, “scientific,” method known as Audio-lingualism. Also called the “aural-oral” method, it gets its name from the Latin roots for hearing and speaking. Audiolingualism emphasises pattern drills and conversation practice.

In the audio-lingual classroom, the teacher generally presents new material in dialogue form, and students are expected to mimic her pronunciation and intonation, which receive a great deal of emphasis. There is a great deal of stress on memorizing set phrases and over learning; learners acquire language patterns through repetitive drills. There is little grammatical explanation; the student learns grammar through analogy rather than explanation.

Audio-lingual teachers place great importance on getting students to produce error-free speech. They immediately reinforce successful speech, and quickly correct errors. They teach vocabulary through pronunciation (not the written word), and they make regular use of tapes, language labs, and visual aids. In the classroom, the teacher strongly discourages the use of the student’s mother tongue.

The Direct Method: Although these methods dominated much of language teaching, there were better alternatives available. Notable among these is the direct method, which originated in the 19th century through the work of a number of important thinkers, notably Lambert Sauveur – a Frenchman who opened a language school in Boston in 1869. His system of teaching French became known as the natural method. The direct method is an offshoot.

The basic premise of the direct method is that second language learning should be more like first language learning. The method includes lots of oral interaction and the spontaneous use of language. The teacher discourages translation between first and second languages, and puts little emphasis on the rules of grammar.

The direct method classroom was one of small, intensive classes which stressed both speech and listening comprehension. The teacher gives instruction exclusively in the target language, teaching everyday vocabulary and sentences. The teacher develops oral communication skills in a careful progression that she frequently organizes around questions-and-answer exchanges. The teacher explains new teaching points through modeling and practice.

A direct approach instructor emphasizes correct pronunciation and grammar, which she teaches inductively. She presents concrete vocabulary through demonstration, realia and pictures, for example, and teaches abstract vocabulary through association of ideas. This method was the first to catch “the attention of both language teachers and language teaching specialists, and it offered a methodology that appeared to move language teaching into a new era.”

Communicative Language Teaching: In Western countries, at least, communicative language teaching is the generally accepted norm in the field of second language teaching. It is state-of-the-art.

CLT is based on theories about language acquisition, especially those developed by Stephen Krashen. At the considerable risk of oversimplification, here is a nutshell perspective on the fit between theory and practice. Krashen suggests that learners acquire language through using it for communication. Since most learners study language to use it for communication, this discovery represents a tidy fit between what works and what learners want.

The teacher’s job is to help his students develop communicative skills by experimenting with the second language in class and beyond. In the classroom, the CL teacher creates activities which simulate communication in real-world situations. His activities emphasize learning to communicate through interaction in the target language, and generally use a mix of the four language skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing. These activities enable his learners to internalize and activate their second or foreign language.

The communicative language teacher uses authentic materials and exercises in the classroom, since this enables his students to more easily take their language learning into the real world. The teacher provides opportunities for learners not only to activate the second language, but also to better understand the learning process. He might do this, for example, by helping his learners develop strategies that will speed up the learning process.

In a well-designed lesson, his efforts work together to improve his students’ communicative competence. He has a clear sense of the thinking behind the communicative approach, and the planning cycle enables him to integrate design and procedure into a master class.