Foreword: A personal note

Before: the initiative and the motive

Famous educationalist. He said ¨Doctors pass on their knowledge to other younger doctors but the secrets
of a teacher go with him/her to the grave¨. She thought it was sad but pretty true, because teachers don´t
go to each other class very much, don´t talk to each other enough probably and the research has nothing to
do with practical classroom. What she was going to do with 30 years of experience and all the accumulated
practical wisdom that she had accumulated and she had to wrote it down and publish it. Before she was too
old. She started writing. Tips on the Cambridge English teaching website. Then make it into a book.

During: finding out what I think

As she was writing it she discovered a lot more. It´s an interesting mechanism. A very famous quotes by
Ian Foster. ¨How do I know what I think till I hear what I say¨. As far as she was concerned how do I know
what I think till I see what I have written. Very much very often the actual act of writing clarifies my own
thinking.

After: reflecting on the substance, function and sources of such tips, in terms of teacher knowledge

After she written it she started thinking about what teaching tips are and there is not quite as simple as it
sounds. Hope we see what the tips are, their function is and what the relationship is between tips, theory,
and practice.

1. The relationship between practice and theory in language teaching.

Commonly heard from teachers

 ¨We had too much theory on our course¨

 ¨Give us practical ideas we can take into the classroom tomorrow¨. (a sort of anti theory feel about a
lot of teachers feedback to courses particularly academic university courses on teaching and when I
give talks or courses teachers often say to me give us practical ideas that´s what we want from you,
want. The theory doesn´t help us very much).
 ¨Most research-based theory is irrelevant to professional practice¨.

What ¨theories¨ are they referring to?

 Theory as generalizations, accounting for a range of real-world phenomena (this in general

happens, this in in general it´s true where it come covers a lot of actual practical events in the
classroom.)
 Theory as concepts, hypotheses or general recommendations.

For example:

 Classifications of learning styles. (audio, oral, visual, or kinaesthetic, all this sort of stuff. Theoretical
concepts about learning styles).
  The teachability hypothesis (natural order of acquisition): the idea you acquire grammatical
structures in a certain natural order and the order in which you´re taught them won’t make any
difference to that so you can only learn grammar in a certain order.
 ¨Teach language as communication¨. (a general overall sort of exhortation to teach languages
communication not teach language as an object or an inert collection of words and structures).
 The teacher as facilitator. (concept fashionable for the last few years, teacher facilitator rather than
the teacher as instructor).

What ¨practical ideas¨ are they referring to?

Practical classroom procedures (things like grammar practice activities or vocabulary activities or speaking
discussion activities and so on).

…as presented in task, handbooks, websites or course materials.

For example

 Dictations: (practical activity) dictate 10 recently-learnt new words to your students, and check if
they have spelt correctly.
 Communicative task: tell students to share with their partners information about…
 Teach the following vocabulary
 Do this grammar exercise
 Perform this listening comprehension task

(All this is very practical and it´s what teachers say they want, which helps them in the class, or something
they typically they say something I can take with me into the classroom on Monday morning)

Theory: pros and cons (advantages and disadvantages)

The reason why a lot of teachers don´t like them very much is that they are often rather vague, complex
and difficult to understand in terms of real-world action. What does it actually mean in terms of real-world
teaching that there is a natural order of acquisition, what does it mean to be a facilitator and so on.

But

If they are not vague, if they are clear, not complex but simple, if they are not too difficult to understand but
are comprehensible and clearly applicable to practice, then, they can

1. Be very useful they can give us some underlying understanding why some practical procedures
work/fail
2. And they can generate a huge number of practical ideas.

These kinds of good theories, the ones which actually do relate to practice and do generate practice are the
reason why Kurt Lewin coined his famous dictum:

Kurt Levin

¨There is nothing so practical as a good theory¨ (a theory that is good does relate to practice, a bad theory
doesn´t get you anywhere, it´s a dead end)
Practical procedures: pros and cons

The advantages of practical procedure like dictations or communicative tasks or lists of vocabulary to do,
things with is it you can Immediately usable in the classroom in all the activities.

But

The problem is that as soon as you use them, that´s it. You do them and that´s it. They don´t actually
generate more ideas, they don´t cover a range of classroom procedures. You do them, ok, that was a good
activity, now give another one. Dead ends. You do them, and that´s it. They only help you create more
ideas if you understand the underlying principles (theories).

3. Practical tips as a bridge between practice and theory.

What´s the meaning of my tips. They are a sort of bridge between practice and theory, they´ve got aspects
of practice in that they are clearly applicable to classroom practice but they don´t have the disadvantage of
practice in that they are applicable to a wide range of events are not a dead end, they don´t finish there,
you can apply them to all sorts of different situations.

Teaching tips

They describe practical classroom action (don´t give homework last thing at the end of the lesson)

But

Are generalizations repeatedly applicable in different lessons whereas the practical activities aren´t.

(Games): involve all, or most, students: try to make sure that your games have all, or most the students
actively playing, rather than single individuals.

(Error correction): draw attention to correct answers: in most cases, it doesn’t naturally occur to us to
comment on something correct in students´s production. But it´s a great learning opportunity.

(Heterogenous classes): limit tasks by time, not amount: learning tasks are normally defined by quantity:
¨Do six questions, finish reading the text, write a paragraph¨ and so on. But for a heterogenous class it´s
better to define by time: ¨Do much as you can in 10 minutes¨.

The continuum

Theory, theoretical recommendation

Teaching tips

Specific tasks or texts

Teaching tips are in a sense good theories, they lead to a lot of specific tasks or texts but often they´re
grounded in some kind of underlying generalization.
They describe practical classroom action

But

Are often followed by explanation of underlying theoretical models or constructs

They are generalizations

But

Are often followed by a set of illustrations in the form of practical procedures.

Example 1

Tip

Underlying theory

Reference (research reference)

Example

Keep (grammar) explanations short: the tip

The firs time you explain a grammatical feature, make it short and simple: keep it to a ¨need to
know¨ basis. (minimally and simply)

What the students need is to get the basic idea of how the grammar works in order to enable them to
understand examples in context as soon as possible, and try using themselves.

Rationale and reference

Note that there´s a payoff between brevity and truth: the more true and accurate the rule you give, the more
difficult and lengthy the explanation…

Example 2

Tip

Actual procedures to illustrate

Allow lots of right answers: the tip

Most coursebook grammar and vocabulary exercises are ¨closed ended¨: there´s one right answer for each
item. But it´s easy to change them so that lots of right answers are possible, making the exercise available
to many more levels of student, as well as more interesting and fun to do.
Practical examples

…if you have a set of questions like the following:

Write the sentence in the past:

She ________ at six o´clock. (leave)

Make it open ended. Tell the students to ignore the verb in brackets and suggest any verb they like in the
past: ¨came¨, ¨spoke¨, ¨woke¨…

Or leave the verb in, and delete the end of the sentence (¨at six o´clock¨); then invite the students to create
their own continuations after ¨left¨: ¨She left London¨, ¨left school¨, ¨left her husband…¨

Involve all, or most, students: the tip

Try to make sure that your games have all, or most, of the students actively playing them, rather than single
individuals.

Games that directly involve only 1 or 2 students while the rest look on not only lead to less learning, but
also tend to be less interesting and fun for all concerned. An example is team games where one team
representative comes to the board to perform a task and gain a point for their team, while everyone else is
inactive. So adapt games so that most, or all, of the students are cute for most, or all, of the time.

Practical examples 1

In the usual version of ¨Simon says¨, for example…anyone who does the action when they shouldn´t is
¨out¨ and sits down. But to increase participation, tell them to keep playing, and continue until you feel they,
or you had enough. Then they have to tell you how many times they got it wrong (never, once, twice, or
more than twice).

All of these are useful to the teacher

As professionals:

 We need a range of strategies of behaviours that ¨work¨ in the classroom (tips).

 We need to have a repertoire of texts and tasks (from the materials or own initiative).
 We need to understand underlaying theoretical concepts and generalizations.

Moving from…to…and back again

Theoretical Practical

General Specific

Wider application Narrower application

Indirect implementation Direct implementation

And back to the personal: where the tips come from?

Again: from both theory and practice, implemented in my classroom

Example 1

A specific experience which led to a generalization:

Task-based oral fluency practice

Give task rather than topics (speaking): if you tell a class ¨Talk about X¨, you´ll often find that students
run out of things to say fairly soon. If you tell them ¨Produce Y¨, where they can only produce Y produce
through talking, they are more likely to continue the discussion…

…A task…can be defined as something the students are asked to do that has a clear outcome, one that
can be said, written down or drawn.

(Came to as class and gave them a topic of over-possessive parents and ask their opinion is, their
experiences of it and discuss it and she brought it into the classroom and it just fell completely flat and they
said 1 or 2 things and they stop talking and she though there´s something wrong here, what can I do about
this, and she went off and she wrote a case study of a particular girl, gave her a name and particular
parents, particular events, where the parents were over dominating and over-possessive and not giving her
the freedom she wanted and she brought this case study into the classroom and thought that maybe the
problem is that it wasn´t specific enough and if you give them specific things to talk about, then they´ll talk
more and she brought it in and was a bit better. It still didn´t work and then she went off and took that case
study and transformed into a letter from the girl to the advice column of a magazine and the girl was writing
saying I´ve these terrible parents who don´t let me do anything on my own and I have to be back in the
house by six o´clock in the afternoon and they won´t let me buy my own clothes and they won´t let me go
out with my friends and so on and I´m desperate and I´m going to run away help me. Came into the
classroom, brought this letter, distributed it, put the students into groups and said to them: you are the
editorial committee of this column in the magazine, please will you decide together what, how you´re going
to answer this letter and give it to me at the end of the lesson, and it took off, they talked and they talked
and at the end of the lesson it wasn’t actually time for them to write the letter so I gave them the letter to
write for homework and they gave it to me next time and she went off and though well I did something right
here, what was it. And the solution of course was the fact, I gave them the task, I did not actually use the
word talk, I said get into groups and decide together what the answer to this letter has to be and though
well this is the key if you ask students to do something like decide together or brainstorm something or
solve a problem or all sort of things which they have to do together and they can only do by interacting then
they´ll talk because they have to perform a task. If you just tell them talk they probably won´t. Grew out of a
practical experience at failing experience and a gradually more successful experience which I went away
and thought about and came up with a theory task rather than a topic, which is actually presented here as a
tip which grew out of a practical classroom experience. Communicative purpose. They have to produce
something at the end in the case, they know they have to produce a letter, sometimes it´s a list, sometimes
it´s a picture, a set of priorities, sometimes it´s a solution sometimes it´s multiple solutions but it´s
something they have to produce, not just tall for the sake of talking and grew out of as I say a personal
teaching experience, sometimes the failing experience in our classroom can teach us as much as the
successful ones).
Example 2: Specifying from a general theory

Importance of learner motivation (in general, theory that learners need to be motivated is very important.
But what you need to do is say well, what is motivation and how do you motivate them and the answer is
that you motivate them by doing interesting things in the classroom. How can I do interesting things in the
classroom?)

A range of tips about creating and maintaining student interest in lessons. (creating interest you can
sometimes create just by having an interesting initial topic but the problem is that even a brilliant topic can
be killed by deathly tasks and a boring topic can be brought to life by a good task so the question is a good
task what is an interesting task and I came with a few guidelines and made created some tips which are
based on how to interest students ideas for interesting students for example:)

Personalize

It´s usually more interesting and easier to talk about things that are personally relevant than about things
detached from students own lives.

…Writing and speaking tasks are fairly easy to personalize: for example, you can ask students to write
about their own experiences (¨Write about a time when you were disappointed/amazed/delighted¨), or give
them discussion tasks to exchange information about each other (¨Find out 5 things you didn’t know before
about your partner¨). In work in listening and reading, you can ask students for their own responses (¨What
would you have done…¨ ¨What do you think of…¨) to complement the standard comprehension questions.

Use higher-order thinking skills

Doing something through the use of higher-order thinking skills, such as…prioritizing, generalizing,
classifying, problem-solving…is much more interesting than using lower-order thinking skills such as
identifying or recalling single items…

…instead of the conventional ¨odd one out¨ exercise with one obvious exception (e.g ¨elephants, horse,
dog, fish, sheep¨), provide a set of items where there is no obvious exception (e.g. ¨elephant, horse, dog,
sheep, monkey¨), and invite students to think up reasons to justify each in turn as the ¨odd one out¨.

Example 3: Research finding that made me think again about practice (very often non obvious things
that are common sense, not things that you take for granted but which research has provided very solid
evidence that they are true and when you start applying them, yes, they are true, example…)

Read aloud while the students follow

It can be difficult for students do try to cope with a new text on their own. It´s made a lot easier if the
teacher reads aloud while they follow using their own written text.

(Students comprehension went up when reading aloud. The only problem is with lower level students that
they are often raising their eyes from their text and looking at me and so the whole thing became listening
comprehension instead of reading which was not what I wanted so when I do this I have to keep stopping
and making sure that they are with me, I could see where their eyes are, where they´re heads are, what
their body language is doing and make sure they are in fact following and it can be very very helpful, so
reading aloud something non-intuitive but something which research shows is useful and I think research is
a very useful tip. The teacher can take it as a speed which she choose which suits the students you can put
in translations if you need to, explanations where you need to it´s really easier, on the students if you are
doing the reading aloud rather than a recording).

and another example.

Minimize guessing from context: (people keep telling us you ought to ask the students to guess from
context, which actually what the research shows us and here´s one of the research studies which shows
that it´s unreliable in fact what message he found in his research is that more than 50% of the time students
went totally wrong and even in her of the 40 odd percent where they were more or less right a lot of
guesses were partially right most of the time it´s not because the students don´t know English, it´s not
because they´re learners, it´s because by the nature of text, text is very rarely betrays exactly the meaning
of a missing word, it just gives maybe a general idea and sometimes not even that and when I´ve done
exercises with teachers, showing, giving them a blank in a text in English, people who really know English
very well, they very often can´t guess it or they guess it wrong and so if the strategy, if the aim is to get
students to know what the word is, there´s probably better just to tell them what it means rather than telling
them to guess of course you need guessing when you´re reading on your own, I´m not saying it´s a bad
strategy always, but it´s not a reliable way to access meaning, this is something I learned from the research
and implemented in my own teaching). guessing from context is a reading strategy engaged by many
methodologists; but actually it´s surprisingly unreliable as a way of accessing word meaning.

In conclusion…

(In my book has to do with teacher talking time and what I say in brief is teacher talking time is a good thing
and for many of our students it´s the only opportunity they have to hear spoken English, spoken
comprehensible, comprehensible English adapted for them to their level and addressed to them so it´s a
very valuable source of input, of course we want them to be activated as well but just to say that teacher
talking time should be minimalized I think is a very bad tip. I think teacher talking time should be used quite
a lot in in conjunction of course with student).

Why do we need books of teaching tips?

 They are simply a collection of useful strategies that apply to a range of common classroom
situations.
 They provide a means of applying valid theories or insights from research findings, in actual
classroom practice, and a means of accessing underlying rationales for ¨things that work¨ in the
classroom.
 They are a channel for experienced teachers to pass on their accumulated wisdom to the next
generation.