In this article, we explore some approaches and techniques that are key to effective teaching – both for new TEFL teachers wishing to form good habits, and as a reminder for more experienced English teachers – and how returning to these five basic principles will change the way you teach.
1. Using learners as resources
Your learners pick up English from all sorts of places: they most likely know songs or watch movies in English, they might have friends who speak good English, they have been on holiday, they have had other teachers from other parts of the world… Put simply, each individual probably knows a great deal of English that can be shared with the rest of the group.
All too often teachers go into a lesson with the eight or 10 pieces of vocabulary that they plan to teach, yet it is sometimes astounding the phrases your learners will come out with. In a recent lesson on giving opinions about holiday destinations, I overheard an intermediate learner say, “It’s not at the top of my list, but…” – an excellent opinion phrase I had not even considered!
Even at very low levels, you will occasionally notice a student use an idiomatic phrase or grammatical structure that could easily be exploited, and this is a great opportunity to highlight, praise and explore such language use. So when feeding back after a task, take these phrases as examples of great language use. Have the learner who used the phrase share the meaning with the rest of the group – perhaps they can even add more phrases. The important point is to always respond to student output, as it is often more relevant and interesting than what is prescribed by a one-size-fits-all coursebook!
2. Questioning
Perhaps the original pedagogical technique, questioning was first presented as a learning tool in the Socratic Method. It is as valuable today as it was in the Athens of 480 BC, but its uses have expanded to serve a variety of different functions. Where Socrates used questioning to challenge the assumptions of his students and peers, teachers today use them to check learners’ understanding of instructions for tasks (Information Checking Questions, or ICQs), comprehension (Concept Checking Questions – CCQs), and to encourage deeper analysis of linguistic devices (Deep Thinking Questions – DTQs).
Each type of question can be either closed or open, and this choice can be made based on the perceived ability of the learner to answer correctly or have the linguistic ability to answer. This form of on-the-spot differentiation is known as ‘targeted questioning’. Closed questions are easier to answer and can therefore be asked of lower ability students. They usually come in the form of simple yes/no questions, multiple choice questions (MCQs), or questions with a single word answer.
Open questions, on the other hand, ask much more of the learner. They require more expansive answers involving higher order thinking skills and will be familiar to most of you from high school essay papers. Verbs like “explain”, “evaluate” and “analyse” are common to these questions, but often a good old-fashioned “why?” will suffice.
The way we use questions in the classroom can have an incredible impact on task achievement, level of challenge, and the development of our learners’ interlanguage. It is therefore one of, if not the, most basic and important skills for anyone working in education.
3. Feedback loops
Another key pedagogical technique is feedback. Any teacher worth their salt will provide feedback after each task, but one element is often lacking: student response. A good deal of recent research has focused on the impact of different types of feedback, and the findings suggest that feedback that requires a response from the learner is by far the most effective, and is in fact a massive driver in interlanguage development.
Feedback loops involve the teacher providing feedback, the student responding to it, and the teacher commenting on the learner’s response, thus creating a dialogue between teacher and student (or perhaps even student and student!). The teacher’s final comment may seem like a step too far, but if we do not value student responses then why should the student?
Feedback loops may sound like a lot of work, but they can be built into class routines across a sequence of lessons and, if done well, can actually reduce marking while increasing learning. One tip is to always provide clear success criteria, even on a separate feedback sheet. This way you can simply tick the criteria that were achieved, leaving the learner to improve upon the other criteria.
4. Teaching ‘chunks’ of language
In the mid-nineties, Michael Lewis published a book titled The Lexical Approach. By challenging the prominence of grammar in second language learning, Lewis began a discussion that is still one of the most contentious issues in TEFL today. The Lexical Approach grew out of corpus linguistics and cognitive science at a time when computers were being used to analyse huge amounts of authentic language use and to scan the brain to better understand how information is stored and retrieved. Put simply, The Lexical Approach posits that, in the majority of cases, meaning is more a property of lexis than it is of grammar. So in the question “What is your name?”, the content words “What name?” would be sufficient for a listener to answer appropriately, whereas using nothing but the grammar words “is your?” would leave even the most sympathetic listener puzzled.
This brings us to the teaching of chunks – i.e. units of meaning in which words are normally found together. Cognitive science has shown that language is stored in the memory as meaningful chunks, rather than individual words. What this means for our learners is that it is easier to learn a full phrase which can be used as is and stored for analysis at a later point, than it is to try and construct a phrase from individual words. For example, our learners are unlikely to combine ‘heavy’ with ‘traffic’ or ‘smoker’ to produce the collocations ‘heavy traffic’ and ‘heavy smoker’, as the words taken individually do not have the same meaning as the collocations treated as units of meaning. Likewise, in a lesson on email writing, the phrase “I look forward to hearing from you.” should be taught as is, as students would be unlikely to put the words ‘look’ and ‘forward’ together based on their individual meaning.
This has the added value of maintaining an authentic context for the phrase which will aid retention and, if dealing with spoken phrases, also presents them as they appear in connected speech.
5. Developing metacognition
One final area of language instruction that has been proven effective by recent research is that of metacognitive instruction. Metacognition can be explained as thinking about how you think. This involves consideration of the processes involved in planning, monitoring and evaluating both understanding and performance.
For example, by encouraging learners to think about and discuss how they approach a task, we can help them to consider other possible approaches to the same task. They can then try out and evaluate different approaches to see what works best for them. This is particularly helpful with exam classes and EAP (English for Academic Purposes), as it forms the basis of ‘exam literacy’. A student sitting a reading test may need to consider whether it is best to skim the text first, highlight key words in the questions, scan for specific information, or engage in close-reading of a particular paragraph. Of course, all of these techniques may be employed in one task, but the way in which they are employed can greatly increase reading efficiency, and each learner may have a certain approach that works best for them.
With these five simple but effective ideas, you will be sure to find your learners engaged in deep learning, and challenging themselves to take their language use to the next stage.
