Learning Teaching

Jim Scrivener

Macmillan Books for Teachers

Macmillan Books for Teachers

Learning Teaching
A guidebook for English
language teachers
Second Edition

Jim Scrivener

MACMILLAN
 Contents
Help index 5

About the series 9

Introduction 10

Chapter I Classrooms at work 11

1 Looking round some classroom doors 11
2 What's a teacher for? 15
3 Teaching and learning 20
4 Different kinds of teacher 22

Chapcer2 Starting out

1 The subject matter of language teaching 27
2 First lessons —hints and strategies 34
3 Method? What method? 38

Chapter 3 Classroom activities

I Running an activity 41
2 Exploiting an activity 47
3 Pairwork information gaps 52
4 Small-group discussions 56
5 Pairwork grammar activities 58

Chapter 4 Who are the learners?

1 Individuals and groups 61
2 Whatlevel are my students? 66
3 Learners and their needs 69
4 Getting feedback from learners 74
S Learner training 77

Chapter5 Toolkit classroom management

1:
1 What is classroom management? 79
2 Classroom interaction 84
3 Seating 87
4 Giving instructions 89
5 Participate, monitor or vanish? 92
6 Gestures 94
7 Using the board well 95
8 Board drawing 97
9 Eliciting 98
10 Students using their own language 100
11 Intuition 101
12 I-low to prevent learning — some popular techniques 104

Chapter 6 Planning lessons and courses

1 Planning is a thinking skill 109
2 How do people learn a language 111
3 Sequencing lesson components 115
4 Formal lesson planning 118
5 Lesson aims 124
6 A very short section on 'challenge' 128
 7 Alternatives to formal planning 128
8 Planning a course 133
9 Unrealistic requirements 141
10 English and teaching in the world 142

Chapter 7 Speaking
1 Conversation and discussion classes 146
2 Communicative activities 152
3 Role-play, real-play and simulation 155
4 Fluency, accuracy and communication 160
5 Different kinds of speaking 163

Chapter 8 Receptive skills: listening and reading

1 Task-based listening 170
2 The task—feedback circle 174
3 How do we listen? 178
4 Listening ideas 181
5 Approaches to reading 184
6 Extensive reading 188

Chapter 9 Writing
1Helping students to write 192
2 Writing in class 197
3 Responses to writing 200

Chapter 10 Language analysis

1 Analysing grammar: an introduction 206
2 Analysing language: grammatical form 206
3 Welcome to English grammar 209
4 Analysing concept: the meanings ofwords 214
5 Analysing concept: grammatical meanmg 219
6 Analysing communicative function 221

Chapter 11 Lexis
1 What is lexis? 226
2 Lexis in the classroom 228
3 Lexis and skills work 230
4 Presenting lexis 234
5 Lexical-practice activities and games 236
6 Remembering lexical items 239
7 Knowing a lexical item 246

Chapter 12 Grammar
1 What is grammar? 252
2 Restricted output: drills, exercises, dialogues and games 255
3 Clarification 265
4 Present and practise 271
5 Other ways to grammar 279

Chapter 13 Phonology: the sound of English

1 Pronunciation ideas 284
2 Which pronunciation? 285
3 Sounds 287
 4 Word stress 289
5 Prominence 290
6 Connected speech 291

Chapter 14 Toolkit 2: focusing on language

1 Errors and correction 298
2 Testing 302
3 Using the learners' first language 308
4 Cuisenaire rods 312
5 Dictionaries 317
6 'Timelines 319
7 A useful correction technique: fingers 321

Chapter 15 Teaching different classes

1 ESP and Business English 324
2 Exam classes 326
3 Teenage classes (age 13—16) 328
4 Large classes 331

Chapter 16 Toolkit 3: tools, techniques, activities

1 Flashcards 333
2 Picture stories 334
3 Storytelling 337
4 Songs and music 338
5 Getting 'to know a new class 340
6 Fillers 345
7 Lexical games 347
8 TV, DVD and video 350
9 Computers and the Internet 354
10 Dictation 357
11 Sound-effects recordings 359
12 Poetry 360
13 Drama 362
14 Projects 364
15 The pack of cards 366

Chapter 17 Learning teaching

1 Learning teaching 370
2 Observed lessons 373
3 Studying your own teaching: feedback, reflection and
action research 375
4 A closing comment: language and people 380

Appendices Photocopiable materials

1 Observation tasks 381
2 Resources 393

Some key terminology 421

Abbreviations 426
Bibliography and references 427
Index 429
Help index
Basics
I need to Chapter Section

survive my first lessons 2 2

learn students' names 16 5

plan 'getting to know you' activities 16 5

run a 'Find someone who ... activity 16 5

find general instructions for running an activity 3 1

run a pairwork information-gap activity 3 3

run a small-group discussion 3 4

run a pairwork grammar activity 3 5

use classroom management techniques 5 2-9

Classroom management skills

HOW can I
use varied interaction patterns in class 5 2

arrange the seating in class 5 3

use the board 5 7

give clear instructions 5 4

monitor activities 5 5

use gestures to help instructions 5 6

elicit language and ideas from learners 5 9

get feedback from students 4 4
avoid talking unnecessarily 5 4, 12

Planning

use Needs analysis to find what learners want and need 4 3

plan a lesson 6 1-7

write a lesson plan 6 4

write alms 6 5

plan informally 6 7
plan a course 6 8

5
Help Index

Speaking
HOW can I Chapter Section

plan and run a discussion/conversation lesson 7 1

plan and run a communicative activity 7 2

encourage students to use English 5 10

run a pyramid discussion 7 2

plan and run a role-play 7 3

plan and run a real-play 7 3

use scaffolding techniques to help learner speaking 7 4

correct after a fluency activity 7 4
14 1

Listening, reading, writing

How can I e?

set listening tasks 8

use the task—feedback circle with skills work 8 2

use jigsaw listening/reading tasks 8 4

set skimming and scanning tasks 8 5

plan top-down listening and reading lessons 8 3

integrate lexis and skills work 11 3

12 4

plan a writing lesson 9

use fast-writing techniques for collecting ideas 9 2

use brainstorming techniques for collecting ideas 9 2

use a computer for writing work 9 2

16 9
correct (or not correct) writing work 9 3

Language systems
HOW can I
analyse grammatical form 10 2

get an overview of English grammar 10 3

analyse concept (with lexis) 10 4

make and use concept questions (with grammar) 10 5

understand how lexis is different from grammar 11 1

analyse communicative function 10 6

6
 Help Index

Language systems (cont.) Chapter Section

pre-teach lexis before skills work 11 3

12 4
integrate lexis and skills work 3

encourage learners to record lexis in useful ways 11 6

prepare and use grammatical drills 12 2

prepare and use elicited dialogues 12 2

prepare and use written grammar exercises 12 2
present and practise grammar 12 4

give explanations about grammar 12 3

teach grammar using guided discovery 12 3

teach grammar using a situational presentation 12 4

teach grammar using test-teach-test 12 5
try some safe phonology activities 13 1

learn phonemes 13 3

learn about word stress, prominence, weak forms, etc 13 4—6

Materials
I'd like to know how to use
Cuisenaire rods 14 4
dictation 16 10
dictionaries 14 5
drama 16 13
drills 12 2
fillers 16 6
flashcards 16 1

the Internet 16 9
intuition 5 11

picture stories 16 2

poetry 16 12

projects 16 14
readers (i.e. books for learners to read) 8 6
songs and music 16 4
sound-effects recordings 16 11

storytelling activities 16 3

the learners' first language 14 3

timelines 14 6
video or DVD 16 8
word games 11 5

7
Help Index

Different classes
How can I teach Chapter Section

ESP or Business English 15 1

exam classes 15 2

large classes 15 4

teenagers 15 3

Further questions
I want to find out about .

accuracy compared with fluency 7 4

Carl Rogers 1 4

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) 2 3

Community Language Learning (CLL) 2 3

different methods 2 3

English as an international language 6 10

extensive reading 8 6

genre 7 5

gist 8 3
Grammar—Translation Method 2 3

individual differences 4 1

language systems compared with language skills 2 1

learning from observing teachers and being observed 17 2

skimming and scanning 8 5

Task-Based Learning (TBL) 2 3

the Common European Framework 6 8

the experiential learning cycle 1 3

the transmission view of teaching 1 2

top-down compared with bottom-up 8 3

Total Physical Response (TPR) 2 3

world Englishes 6 10
writing hot and cold feedback 17 3

8
About the author
Jim became an English teacher as a temporary measure until he could decide
what career to choose. His first post was with Voluntary Service Overseas in a
rural school in Kenya, and since then he has worked as a Lecturer with the British
Council in the USSR, as Director of Education at International House Hungary
and as Director of Studies of Teacher Training at International House, Hastings
(the town he seems to keep coming back to). 'He has run numerous short courses
around the world and is a regular conference speaker.
Jim was leader of the team that designed the EURO language exams. He has
written Teaching Grammar (Oxford) and is author of teacher's books and
resource materials for the Straightfonvard coursebook series. He writes a monthly
'teaching tips' column for the Guardün Weekly and onestopenglish.com. He has an
MA in Creative Writing, but hasn't yet worked out what he can do with it.

About the series

Welcome to the Macmillan Books for Teachers These books are for you if
series.

you are a trainee teacher, practising teacher or teacher trainer. They help you to:
develop your skills and confidence;
• reflect on what you do and why you do it;
• improve your practice and inform it with theory;
become the best teacher you can be.
The books, written from a humanistic and student-centred perspective, offer:

practical techniques and ideas for classroom activities;

key insights into relevant background theory;
• ways to apply techniques and insights in your work.
The authors are teachers and trainers. We take a 'learning as you go' approach
in sharing our experience with you. We help you reflect on ways you can
facilitate learning, and bring your personal strengths to your work. We offer
you insights from research into language and language learning and suggest
ways of using these insights in your classroom. You can also go to
http://www.onestopenglish.com and ask the authors for advice.

We encourage you to experiment and to develop variety and choice, so that

you can understand the how and why of your work and develop confidence in
your own teaching and in your ability to respond creatively to new situations.
Adrian Underhill

Titles in the series

Beyond the Sentence Scott Thornbury
Children Imrning English Jayne Moon
Discover English Rod Bolitho and Brian Tomlinson
Learning Teaching Jim Scrivener
Sound Foundations Adrian Underhill
Teaching Practice Roger Gower, Diane Phillips and Steve Walters
Teaching Reading Skills Christine Nuttall
Uncovering Grammar Scott Thornbury
700 Classroom Activities David Seymour and Maria Popova

9
 Introduction
Teacher: One who carries on his education in public. Theodore Roethke

This is a book for language teachers. Mostly it's a guide to methodology to what
might work in the classroom.
Learning Teaching can help you learn to teach in more effective ways. It is about a
kind of teaching where you are also learning. 'However, it is not a book about the
right way to teach. Indeed, there is no scientific basis yet for writing such a
description of an ideal teaching methodology. Instead, we can observe teachers
and learners at work
and take note of strategies and approaches that seem to be
more beneficial than others, not necessarily in order to copy them, but to become
more aware of what is possible.
The act of teaching is essentially a constant processing of options. At every point
in each lesson, a teacher has a number of options available; he or she can decide
to do something, or to do something else, or not to do anything at all. In order to
become a better teacher, it seems important to be aware of as many options as
possible. This may enable you to generate your own rules and guidelines as to
what works and what doesn't.
Language teaching happens in a wide variety of locations and contexts, with a
wide variety of colleagues and learners. Whatever I describe in this 'book, your
own experiences will be different. For that reason, no book like this can
definitively tell you how to do it. You can get ideas and step-by-step guidelines
and a little inspiration, but bear in mind that everything you read also needs to go
through the filter of your own understanding and be checked out in terms of the
local context you work in.

Thus, rather than saying 'This is how to do it,' I've tried to say 'Here are some
ways that seem to work.' I aim to give you a 'toolkit' of possibilities from which
you can take those ideas and options that you find most useful.
Situations and examples are mainly drawn from the world of English teaching,
but the ideas and techniques may also be useful to teachers of other languages.
The book is primarily aimed at teachers starting out on a training course or in
their first year or two of work, but I hope that you will find something interesting
in it wherever you are in your career.

The order of chapters in this book may partly reflect the order a new teacher finds
topics of interest and importance when learning to teach. I aim to give you some
essential background information and core survival techniques early on. I also
suggest that you use the Help index at the front of the book to find whatever
sections are of live interest to you.

To encourage you to engage with the material in the book, there are many tasks.
Sometimes these are questions to answer or think about; sometimes they are
bigger problems or things to try out. If you prefer, you can simply read the tasks
and go straight on to the commentaries.
In this book, I use he and she, him and her largely at random.

Jim Scrivener

10
Chapter 1 Classrooms at work

This chapter offers a general introduction to ways of working in a language

classroom and using a range of teacher and learner roles. It also asks how
people learn.

1 Looking round some classroom doors

Task 1: Classroom snapshots

A friend who knows nothing about language teaching has asked you to describe a
'snapshot' of a typical moment in a language classroom a picture that captures
the look, the atmosphere, the learners' mood, the teacher's attitude, etc. What
would your instant snapshot show?

Commentary oD
Your image probably captures some assumptions you hold about what a
teacher's job is, what learners can do and how they should work, etc. If you are on
a training course and haven't started teaching yet, your snapshot might be very
different from, say, a teacher who has been working for twenty years. In this book,
we will look in detail at lots of lesson ideas, activities, methods and techniques; but
before that, it may be useful just to get a more general picture of what goes on in
language teaching — to look round a few classroom doors and glimpse what's
going on inside.

Watching different classes

In my own teaching career, I have found that one of the most useful things is
simply to watch other people teach. away tangible things from this
I often take
observation, such as ideas for specific activities, the pace they work at or a
particular 'something' that the teacher said or did. Over the years, I find that I
have incorporated a lot from 'this into my own teaching.
Some aspects of lessons can be difficult to interpret. Sometimes I feel that the
'atmosphere' in a room is excellent or that the class is particularly engaged or
working in a distinctively autonomous manner. But it isn't always easy to work
out how these apparently 'natural' things have been achieved.

One thing I have concluded over the years is that much of the 'magic' that makes
a good lesson (often attributed purely to 'natural' skill or epersonality') is

something that is almost always achieved by very specific actions, comments and
attitudes even when the teacher isn't aware of what he or she has done. And
because of this, we can study these things and learn from them.

Task 2: Different lessons

Read the following brief 'snapshot' descriptions of moments from different
lessons in different locations.

Which one (if any) ismost like how you see yourself as a teacher? Are there any
characteristics or approaches you find interesting and would like to use yourself—
or would reject?

11
Chapter 1 Classrooms at work

Classroom 1 : Andrea

Andrea working with 34 fourteen-year-old learners. Although the large desks

is

are fixed in their places, she has asked the students to move so that they are sitting
around both sides in ways that they can work in groups of six or seven. Each
group has just finished discussing and designing a youth club on a sheet ofA3
paper and is now working on agreeing a list of ten good arguments to persuade
the other groups to choose its youth club design (rather than one of the others).
Each group will have to make a presentation of its arguments in front of the class
in about ten minutes' time.

There is a lot of noise in the classroom. Andrea

walking around listening in
is

unobtrusively to what is going on in the groups. She smiles when she hears good
ideas, but she isn't intervening or taking any active part in the conversations. She
answers basic questions when a learner asks (e.g. if someone wants to know the
word for something), but she avoids getting involved in working closely with a
group, even with one group that is getting stuck — in this case, she makes a quick
suggestion for moving forward and then walks away to another group.

Classroom 2: Maia

At a first glance, nothing much seems to be happening here. Maia is sitting down
in a circle with her eight students, and they are chatting, fairly naturally, about
some events from the previous day's news. Although Maia isn't doing much overt
correction, after watching the lesson for a while it's possible to notice that she is

doing some very discreet 'teaching', i.e. she is managing the conversation a little,
bringing in quieter students by asking what they think and helping all learners to
speak by encouraging, asking helpful questions, echoing what they have said,
repeating one or two hard-to-understand sentences in corrected English, etc.

12
 1 Inoking round some classroom doors

Classroom 3: Lee

Lee is standing at the front ofa class of eleven young adult students. He is
introducing going to as a way of talking about predicted events in the future. He
has put up a large wallchart picture on the board showing a policeman watching a
number of things in the town centre. The picture seems to immediately suggest a
number of going to sentences such as They're going to rob the bank, He isn't going to
stop and It's going tofall down. Lee is pointing at parts of the picture and
encouraging learners to risk trying to say a going to sentence. When they do, he
gently corrects them and gets them to say it again better. Sometimes he gets the
whole class to repeatan interesting sentence. It's interesting that he's actually
saying very little himself; most of his Interventions are nods, gestures, facial
expressions and one- or two-word instructions or short corrections. Generally,
the learners are talking rather more than the teacher.

Classroom 4: Paoli

Paoli's lesson is teachingsome new vocabulary to an adult evening class of older

learners; the current lesson stage is focused on learner practice of the new items.
Everyone in class is sitting in a pair, face to face. They are using a handout
designed by Paoli which gives the learners in each pair (known as A and B)
slightly different information. The task requires them to use some of the new
vocabulary in relatively natural ways to try and discover information from their
partner. There is a lot of talking in the room, though it's clear that not everyone is
participating to an equal degree. One or 'two pairs are almost silent, and one pair
seems to be whispering in their own language rather than in English. Paoli is
moving round the room trying to notice any such problems and encouraging
students to complete the task in the intended way.

13
Chapter 1 Classrooms at work

Commentary o
We have glimpsed four different lessons. The descriptions below summarise
some distinctive features of each.

Some typical language-teaching classes

The first class described above involved groups working co-operatively on a task.
The teacher saw her role as primarily 'managerial', making sure that the activity
was set up properly and being done properly. She took care that she allowed
enough space (i.e. time to think and plan without interference or 'unhelpful
help') so that learners could get on and achieve the result.

In the second we saw a teacher apparently doing fairly little that might be
class,
traditionally viewed as 'teaching'. However, even at this glimpse, we have noticed
that something was going on and the teacher was 'managing' the conversation
and the language more than might have been apparent at first glance. Is this a
valid lesson? We'll look at possible aims for lessons like the first and second
snapshots when we get to Chapter 7.
The third class involves a lesson type known as a 'presentation', i.e. the teacher is
drawing everyone's attention to his focus on language. Interestingly, although the
teacher is introducing new language, he is doing this without a great deal of overt
explanation or a high quantity of teacher talk. We look at grammar presentations
in Chapter 12.

In the fourth lesson, the learners are doing a pairwork vocabulary task. The
teacher's role was up the activity, and at the end it will be to manage
initially to set
feedback and checking. At the moment, he can relax a little more, as nothing
much requires to be done beyond monitoring if it is being done correctly.
Out of these four lessons (which I think may be fairly typical snapshots of modern
language classroom life), we have seen relatively little overt 'teaching' in the
traditional manner, although we have seen a number of instances of the teacher
'managing' the seating and groupings, 'managing' the activities (starting,
monitoring, closing them), smanaging' the learners and their participation levels,
and 'managing' the flow of the conversation and work.
I think reasonable to argue that much of modern language teaching involves
it's

this 'classroom management' as much or more than it involves the upfront

explanations and testing that many people imagine as the core ofa teacher's job.
This is partly to do with the peculiar subject matter we work with, i.e. the
language we are using to teach with is also the thing we are teaching.
Although there is a body of 'content' in language teaching, the main thing we
want our students to do is use the language themselves and therefore there are
many reasons why we mainly want our students to do more and therefore for us
to do (and talk) less.

You could now use:

Observation Task 1 (in Appendix 1 at the back of the book) to make 'snapshot'
observations of teachers at work in your school;
Observation Task 2 to get a more detailed picture of classroom management in
their lessons.

14