Question:

Submitted by Naseer, Afghanistan

What is the differences between approach, principles, method and technique?

Dr. Richards responds:

• Approach: the theoretical framework that supports an instructional design
• Principles: Guiding statements and beliefs based on the approach
• Method: a teaching design based on a particular approach
• Techniques: teaching procedures that are employed with a particular method

Question:

Submitted by Jean Marie Vianney, Rwanda

How can the teacher best make use of teaching materials while delivering his/her lesson?

Dr. Richards responds:

If you are referring to textbooks, it’s important to remember that a textbook is intended as a support for teaching and should not dictate the way you teach. You can regard it as a springboard, from which you can add or develop follow up activities of your own that best reflect the needs of your learners. Remember it is the teacher that teaches, not the textbook or materials. You should look for ways of adapting the book, customizing it to fit your teaching context.

Question:

Submitted by SM Hosseini, Iran

We have only a session (75 minutes) in a week to teach English in junior schools and are asked to use CLT as the approach? What is your view?

Professor Richards Responds:

It is not possible to learn a language with only 75 minutes a week of classroom input. Under those circumstances very specific and restricted targets should be established, in terms of what is reasonable to expect in terms of vocabulary acquisition, reading, and so on. CLT is a general approach that is based on the principle that one learns a language through communication and that classroom activities should involve interaction and communication through English. However a reasonable level of proficiency is needed before this is possible so it would be unrealistic to expect CLT principles to be very effective in these circumstances. Perhaps reading ability would be a more realistic goal.

Question:

Submitted by Arwa Abdelhamid, The United Arab Emirates

What are some positive elements of language teaching and learning that a non-native English speaking teacher can bring to the ESL/EFL classroom?

Professor Richards Responds:

His or her understanding of the cultural and linguistic background of the learners will be very useful, as well as his or her experience as a second or foreign language learner.

Question:

Submitted by Jamal Zakeri, Iran

How important is the teacher’s book in teaching?

Professor Richards Responds:

A good teacher’s book lays out the basic principles of the coursebook and the recommended procedures for using the book. As such is it a guide for teachers, particulalry novice teachers who may have little teacher training or classroom experience.  It is like the instruction manual that comes with a new car. Once you are familiar with the car you won’t need to consult the manual very often. However with a course book the situation is a little different, since books are used in many different contexts and the information in the teacher’s book is likely to be very general and may need to be adapted to match the specific school context. It should be regarded as a springboard  to support creative teaching rather than a straight-jacket.

Question:

Submitted by Tourya Saada, Morocco

What are the stages of a speaking lesson?

Professor Richards Responds:

It depends of what kind of speaking activity it is and what the demands are of that activity. For example in their Book Teaching Speaking, Goh and Burns recommend a seven-stage cycle of activities in a speaking lesson:

    1.     Focus learners’attention on speaking: Students think about a speaking activity, what it involves and what they can anticipate.

    2.     Provide input and/or guide planning: This may involve pre-teaching vocabulary, expressions or discourse features and planning for an activity they will carry out in class (e.g. a presentation or a transaction).

    3.     Conduct speaking task: Students practise a communicative speaking task with a focus on fluency.

    4.     Focus on language/skills/strategies: Students examine their performance or look at other performances of the task, as well as transcripts of how the task can be carried out, and review different features of the task.

    5.     Repeat speaking task: The activity is performed a second time.

    6.     Direct learners’reflection on learning: Students review and reflect on what they have learned and difficulties they encountered.

    7.     Facilitate feedback on learning: Teacher provides feedback on their performance.

Question:

Submitted by Hanene Turqui, Algeria

Should a teacher to implement a specific method or adopt a more eclectic approach?

Professor Richards Responds:

Many different approaches and methods have been adopted at different times in language teaching. Perhaps the quest for more effective methods in language teaching reflects the fact that large-scale language programmes seldom meet the expectations of learners, employers and educational planners. Hence new language teaching proposals typically claim to be more effective than the ones they replace. However the adoption of new curriculum innovations in teaching is dependent upon a number of factors. These include:

• the extent to which an approach or method is officially adopted by educational authorities and educational organizations,
• the support it receives by authority figures or experts, such as academics and educational specialists,
• the extent to which it can provide the basis for educational resources, such as textbooks and educational software,
• the ease with which it can be understood and used by teachers;
• and the extent to which it aligns with national curriculum and assessment guidelines.

During their initial teacher training, teachers are often introduced to different teaching methods and approaches. It is sometimes suggested that they should pick and choose, or blend different methods, when they start teaching. In fact, method decisions are often made for them. If they teach in a private institute and are teaching courses in general English, it is likely that they will teach from a commercial textbook series based on the communicative approach. If they are teaching English for specific purposes (ESP) or English for academic purposes (EAP), they may find that the course is organized around skills, text types or project work – in which case, they will need to learn how to teach within the chosen framework. If they are preparing students for content classes taught in English, a content-based approach is likely to be recommended. And if they teach a course in a particular skill area, such as a reading course or a conversation course, they will need to familiarize themselves with the approaches and methods that are typically used in these types of courses.

Despite the differences in how course designers, materials’ writers and teachers approach how they plan and organize their teaching, once lessons begin, plans are transformed through the interactions between teachers and students during the lesson . Through these processes, teachers create lessons that are right for the moment, but which might not be right for the next lesson they teach. Allwright stated this forcefully many years ago when he wrote (1988: 51):

The method probably doesn’t matter very much … but what happens in the classroom still must matter. All the research so far has involved the implicit assumption that what is really happening in the classroom is simply that some particular method or technique is being used, and that more or less efficient learning might be taking place accordingly. It is however clear that much more is happening. People are interacting in a multiplicity of complex ways … We need studies of what actually happens – not of what recognisable teaching methods, strategies or techniques are employed by the teacher, but of what really happens between teacher and class.

In addition, teaching is ‘situated’; that is, it reflects the contexts in which it occurs, and, for this reason, there can be no ‘best method’ of teaching. Dogancay-Aktuna and Hardman (2012: 113) thus conclude:

One cannot identify a ‘best practice’, even for a given context. The situatedness of language teaching involves not just the matching of particular pedagogies with particular settings, but seeing good pedagogy as emergent from those settings.

The next chapter will examine the knowledge and skills teachers need to develop, in order both to match appropriate approaches to their settings and to reflect on and refine their pedagogy as they teach.

• Allwright, D. (1988) Observation in the Language Classroom, London: Longman.
• Dogancay, Aktuna, S. and_Hardman, J.(_2012_).‘Teacher_education for EIL:_ Working toward a situated meta-praxis’. In A. Matsuda (ed.) Principles and Practices of Teaching English as an International Language, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 103–118.

Question:

Submitted by Sopich Pin, Cambodia

Do drills still have a place in language teaching today?

Professor Richards Responds:

It is useful to distinguish between three different kinds of practice in teaching – mechanical, meaningful, and communicative.

Mechanical practice refers to a controlled practice activity which students can successfully carry out without necessarily understanding the language they are using. Examples of this kind of activity would be repetition drills and substitution drills designed to practice use of particular grammatical or other items. Activities of this kind are of limited value in developing communicative language use.

Meaningful practice refers to an activity where language control is still provided but where students are required to make meaningful choices when carrying out practice. For example, in order to practice the use of prepositions to describe locations of places, students might be given a street map with various buildings identified in different locations. They are also given a list of prepositions such as across from, on the corner of, near, on, next to. They then have to answer questions such as “Where is the book shop? Where is the café?” Etc. The practice is now meaningful because they have to respond according to the location of places on the map.

Communicative practice refers to activities where practice in using language within a real communicative context is the focus, where real information is exchanged, and where the language used is not totally predictable. For example students might have to draw a map of their neighborhood and answer questions about the location of different places in their neighborhood, such as the nearest bus stop, the nearest café, etc.

Exercise sequences in many communicative course book take students from mechanical, to meaningful to communicative practice but give priority to meaningful and communicative practice.

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