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.