What makes effective language teachers? Method or something else?
What makes effective language teachers? There seem to be two routes taken in answering this question. The first is methodology. Some would suggest that the only effective teacher is one working within, say, task-based teaching. The second route might be described as ‘affective’ factors: the ‘quality’ of the teacher, how they are and how they behave in the classroom. I was reminded of this debate when I heard the sad news of the passing of Luke Prodromou.
A few years ago, I was speaking at a conference in Greece along where he was also a plenary speaker. He was talking about The Ten Secrets of Effective Language Teaching. As Luke wryly pointed out in his talk, I was going to talk more about methodology, so I might be disappointed to hear that none of the ten secrets mentioned a method like the lexical approach (or grammar translation, or task-based learning for that matter).
The ten secrets of effective teaching
In fact, I wasn’t disappointed. Apart from the playfulness and humanity that Luke always brought to his talks, there was nothing in his ten secrets that I could disagree with. Here are those ten teacher qualities and behaviours:
- they are friendly
- they are enthusiastic
- they have authority
- they have presence
- they are good at explaining language issues
- they are interactive
- they notice their students and their needs
- they have made classroom a routine skill
- they can engage students at a deeper level
- they question what they do
They are all qualities that immediately resonated and took me back to my own best teachers and the most effective classes I had been in. However, I wouldn’t see this as an either/or issue. I think think we can see a focus on methodology and specifically teaching lexically as compatible with these secrets to effective teaching. Perhaps we need to talk more about methodology alongside more ‘affective’ features of effective teaching!
Methodology and Questioning what you do
The last point in Luke’s list is perhaps the best starting point to how methodology and ‘non-methodological factors combine to create effective language teachers. Thinking about principles and methodology is fundamentally about questioning what you do. Furthermore, being clear about your principles gives you a framework for ongoing questions about if and how you should use different activities or technology. We are not questioning ourselves from a point of anxiety and insecurity, but rather from the basis of confidence and understanding.
That confidence and understanding of basic principle can also contribute to other factors in the list such as presence and authority. This I think is especially so when the method is congruent with the teachers own beliefs and personality. That in turn may give teachers the headspace to focus on extra aspects of teaching in terms of care an attention to students including as ‘social workers’. In effect this was a point that Luke himself made in an earlier article when discussing inner and outer circles of being a good teacher.
Of course, this is true of whatever approach a teacher adopts and I have seen effective teachers working in different methods. They were doing things differently to me, but it was clear that students were engaged and in that sense the teaching was effective. But what about the specifics of Teaching Lexically. How could that fit with Prodromou’s list – and perhaps even encourage these behaviours?
Teaching Lexically: being interactive and noticing needs
A key part of what we build our approach on in Teaching Lexically is interaction and noticing students and their needs. This starts from seeing the goal of language learning as (as the CEFR puts it): the business of everyday life, the exchange of thoughts and feelings and deepening understanding of other people’s cultures. In Outcomes and our online classes, the starting point of writing material is to break these ideas down into topics or situations. We then think of types of conversation, texts and tasks within these topics and situations. Finally, we work back from these texts or tasks to think about what language we can present to help students fdeal with them more effectively.
During and after the task, as I discussed in this previous post, we also recommend paying attention to students’ wants and desires. We need to focus as much on what they actually say as what we provide to support students before a task.
Questions to engage on a deeper level
But interaction and noticing students’ needs also relates to the process of teaching language itself. In Teaching Lexically we suggest using questions that are not purely display questions aimed at testing students. Instead, we ask questions that get students to explore how words are used. In doing so, we also find out what vocabulary students know and don’t know.
These semi-display questions can also lead to personalised responses and class discussions. Through this process we are also getting students to elaborate on the words they learn. Elaboration is a feature of what Brown et al see as effective learning, but it could also be an example of Prodromou’s effective language teaching and engaging with students at a deeper level. This is especially true when we move on to a further stage of putting language in to practice through students talking about their lives and doing the tasks we discussed in the previous section.
Teaching Lexically: a framework for effective explanations
There are methodologies, such as strong forms of task-based learning that actually discourage explanation of language issues. Proponents of these methods argue that explicit teaching is not effective language teaching. We have never thought that explicit teaching is bad but do understand its limitations, especially in terms of giving ever more nuanced rules and definitions. In our approach we have described a triple X process: explain, exemplify and expand.
This starts with a general explanation or translation (ideally within a collocation/phrase). You follow this with different examples that show some of the key word’s collocational range, how a chunk might be varied, or the common co-text of the collocation or chunk. We then ask students questions (as I discussed already) to expand or elaborate on the word/chunk and find the limits of their knowledge and understanding. This process of thinking about what is an effective explanation derives from principles of methodology.
Making classroom skills routine
When we wrote Teaching Lexically, we had understood that processes such as the triple X or using students output to teach new language are difficult skills. This is why Teaching Lexically is not really a recipe book of activities, but rather a series of tasks to develop and routinise these skills. It’s also why we see a role for coursebooks as it allows teachers a basis to develop skills that they can put to use in lessons they create themselves.
A method for being friendly and enthusiastic?
This leaves two of Prodromou’s secrets of effective teaching: Friendliness an enthusiasm. Surely, these are purely personal traits. We can’t claim a methodology as encouraging these teacher qualities, can we? Well, OK on one level, of course there is nothing to stop a grammar translator from being friendly and enthusiastic. As I suggested earlier, if you feel confident in your method and it matches your beliefs about learning and life, it is easier to sell your approach enthusiastically.
However, my own contrasting experiences of learning Russian in two different classes did make me think. Maybe there is something in a focus on vocabulary and genuine usage that enables a certain ‘friendliness’. It is generally easier to relate words to your life and use them to get to know each other compared to working on the correctness of forms or rules. And the effort and ‘failures’ in genuine communication seems to create a different emotional response to getting an exercise wrong.
If you want conversation on all aspects of life, why not join one of our English or Spanish classes? Want to develop your effectiveness as a teacher? We have all kinds of online teacher development courses for you.
Emergence proficiency is, to me, critical to be an effective teacher. It is impossible to teach without this.
What do you exactly mean by ’emergence proficiency’?
I really enjoyed this post, Andrew. It actually made me think of Stoical “virtue ethics” – from moral philosophy – rather than following a system of ethical rules.
Teachers need principles, and some methodologies (like TBL) reflect these principles strongly. But it’s the enthusiasm and the ability to teach reactively (including dealing with emergent language) that really counts.
Glad you enjoyed it. You lost me a bit on the Stoical virtue ethics – one of the many many gaps in my knowledge of philosophy! I basically agree with you that teaching in response to what students say, brings an energy to a class and ticks several boxes in Prodromou’s list.
I also think TBL doesn’t discourage explanation; some deep-end practitioners might, following Krashen et al. There’s always a role for Focus on Form – which is explicit teaching. The difference is that’s TBL favours *reactive* teaching, rather than rehearsing bits of language just for the sake of it.
I really like “explain, exemplify, expand”. For my trainee teachers, you could add “elicit” to these three! 😉
Of course you are right and I think I did say some strong forms of TBL not liking explicit teaching. And just to be clear, I think tasks and TBL models for lessons can be good. I’m just a little bit more flexible on when the teaching happens (as I think maybe you are, right?).
I suppose what I am really saying though is that Teaching Lexically is offering a framework for the explicit teaching /focus on form because it has a particular view of language. But there is of course no reason why a TBLT practitioner may adopt the same approach! We should see ourselves as sharing core values even if we don’t do things exactly the same way. And maybe the core values should be Luke’s list before methodology.
On that basis eliciting has a value because of it’s interactive nature. However, eliciting is also not an entirely straightforward process to say it’s always good! One for another post I think!
Whenever I’ve seen you and Hugh teach, it looks really similar to what I do, and recommend. It’s mostly reactive, isn’t it, with lexical “upgrades”? And we both agree, I think, with Michael Lewis, that specific lexis doesn’t need to be practised immediately.
The whole implicit/explicit thing is a rather pointless debate in some ways. We all know from experience that explicit teaching can help, and we all believe that implicit processes are the *principal* ones at play in language acquisition.
My work is on the overlap of entertainment and education and I have come to believe from my experience (and without your admirable level of study and research it must be said) that creating a positive learning atmosphere in the classroom is the absolute key to teaching well. This is a skill I believe teachers can develop by studying entertainers and from realising that they are essentially already in the entertainment business themselves, although most of them do not think of their work in that way.
I enjoyed this article, as a teacher, we are dealing with human beings not robots so we need feelings to add in the classroom.
Thanks for your comment. In a world of AI it probably means paying extra attention to these more affective factors.
I’m working on a practical problem: how do you help an adult learner who is already living abroad, already working, and has limited time start functioning in English not in five years, but now?
My approach starts from a small corpus of real interactions within a specific professional context, for example a handyman, a nail technician, or a truck driver. I tend to do the initial noticing myself by identifying the high-frequency patterns that actually carry the interaction, and I use those as the foundation for teaching.
For example
I can fix / replace / check
I have to buy / call / schedule
Let me check / see / take a look / open / show
I will fix / replace / come back / call / check
I need to buy / call / schedule / check
What I find interesting about these patterns is that they don’t stay within the job. A handyman who learns I have to call the supplier can just as easily say I have to call the school or I have to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The patterns transfer and start doing work across the learner’s whole life, not just their professional context.
So the goal isn’t to narrow English permanently, but to give learners a deployable framework that works now, while the language continues to expand through use.
Speaking is then developed through task-based practice built around these patterns. Grammar isn’t removed, but treated more as a separate system, not the spine of every lesson.
Does this combination of corpus-based selection, guided noticing, transferable lexical patterns, and task-based practice align with how you think about Teaching Lexically? Or do you see a risk in starting from such a narrow base?
I aligns well I think. If I were working one-to-one with someone I would probably start from the interactions they have in their work – I’m not sure from your comment what this is. But I absolutely agree that working with patterns in one context certainly are transferable to other, and it probably helps to get the student to notice and think about how they might transfer them as well as providing opportunities to recall and use this language in tasks.
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. This genuinely helps me, because I’m only starting to look at language learning outside of the program I was working within, where I was limited by state requirements and institutional expectations.
My context is this: I work with Russian-speaking immigrants in the US, mostly in their first years here. They are already working, already dealing with real situations, and they need to function in English now, not after completing a course.
And I feel strongly that the lexical approach is what can actually change their lives. It fits the reality they’re living in.
The point you made about getting students to notice and think about how patterns transfer — this is the part that excites me most. Because I see this as a shift: I do the initial noticing for them, but the goal is that over time they start noticing on their own. That moment when a learner says “wait, I can use this same phrase here too” — that’s when something real starts to happen.
But grammar is something I still carry with me. And I see it everywhere online too, in other teachers, in discussions, in how courses are structured. It sits very deep, almost like a default we return to without questioning it.
So I’m curious: how do you think about grammar in contexts like this, where the learner has almost no time and needs to be functional very quickly?
This is a central focus of our course on teaching low levels and also a mini-course on getting learners to B1. The paradox is that in a way learners need more grammar at low levels, because the most frequent words are low content ‘grammar’ words. Courses structured in a building block way around grammar actually reduce the grammar learners see and what they may say in class (outside of class of course they will face all language and not be bound by these restrictions). With a more lexical approach focused on concrete genuine conversations the learners want/need to have, you might expect to show learners more chunks and patterns containing ‘grammar’ that they haven’t mastered. However, our expectations are that they will be NOT be consistently accurate. The aim is not accuracy, but to meet more directly their needs. The belief is that learners may be more motivated as a result. We would also argue there is a learning benefit to basing a syllabus around genuine communicative outcomes and tasks. 1) students will re-encounter core language more frequently, 2) it’ll be interleaved (mixed grammar forms) 3) they have greater opportunity to elaborate on language for themselves, 4) they will have to struggle to recall language: all of which supports long-term memory and retention. You can find out more about our teacher development membership here: https://www.lexicallab.com/online-teacher-development/