Teaching Methodology — The Complete Cheat Sheet

Lecture 1 — Introduction COLD • 1 question in 4 papers

Read it once and move on. Only two things here have ever been examined, but they matter because they set up everything else.

Lecture 2 — Chapter 1: The World of ELT HOT • 38 questions (21%)

The history of English

Kachru's three circles (1985) — the most examined model in the course

• Kachru = an Indian-American linguist. The numbers are informed 'guesstimates' (data gathering is unreliable) and are out of date because English is spoken by more people than before.
• His own prediction: by 2000 non-native speakers would outnumber native speakers — fulfilled. More people learn English in China than the entire population of the USA.
• Morocco is the contrast case: there the dominant foreign language is French.

Varieties & ELF

Seidlhofer's FOUR features of ELF speech

• 1. Omits the third person singular -s → She look very sad
• 2. Uses who and which interchangeably → a book who, a person which
• 3. All-purpose question tags → isn't it? / no?
• 4. Pluralises uncountables → furnitures, advices

Who learns English — ESL vs EFL

• Children learn because English is on the curriculum, or to enter an English-medium school (India: English schools vs Hindi schools). Adults choose: travel, social media, online gaming, living abroad.
• The distinction is weakening: (1) immigrants speak to other ESL speakers, not natives; (2) much English happens in cyberspace — “the internet is an English-speaking country”, so “maybe everyone is an ESL student!”

General English vs ESP

• EAP skills: referencing, essay structuring, note-taking, making presentations.
• Needs analysis — the key question: “Why do you want to learn English and how do you want to use it?” Good designers also ask the learners themselves, who want some degree of control over the course.
• David Wood analysed workplace language chunks and used role-play (trainee nurses). Henry Emery built aviation English by watching cockpits / ATC towers.
• Business English: commonplace because English is the lingua franca of international commerce. Two questions: where do lessons take place and what stage of their business life. In-company teaching uses business role-play. Chinese learners want phrases, not grammar or pronunciation.

Lecture 3 — Chapter 4: Popular Methodology HOT • 41 questions (23%)

The four terms — asked in three different shapes every year

The ‘three and a half’ traditional methods

• GT origins: taught Latin and Greek from literature and the Bible; teachers were priests, not friendly. Before the 19th century only scholars learned languages, from grammar rules and dictionaries.
• Direct Method legacy: created a powerful prejudice against the L1 in language lessons.
• ALM drill: “There's a cup on the table… Spoon.” → “There's a spoon on the table.” Reinforcement = teacher praise, or simply the drill continuing.
• OS principle: nothing said before it is heard; nothing read or written before it is spoken.

CLT — the communicative revolution

Lecture 4 — More Methods and Approaches WARM • 7 questions

Dogme ELT / Teaching Unplugged

• 1995: Lars von Trier (Danish) and the Dogme 95 film collective pledged to rescue cinema from big-budget, special-effects Hollywood — back to core values, no artificial lighting or special effects.
• Scott Thornbury wrote the provocative article; with Luke Meddings he codified it as “teaching unplugged”, challenging “an over-reliance on materials and technical wizardry”. The here-and-now means focusing on the actual learners and content relevant to them.
• 3 features: (1) conversation-driven — the teacher scaffolds and exploits affordances (chance moments); (2) purposefully materials-light; (3) focuses on emergent {spontaneous} language — errors are learning opportunities.
• 4 criticisms: favours native-speaker teachers; impossible in large classes; syllabuses are necessary and coursebooks are prized; teaching is more than talking (Angeles Clemente; Philip Chappell — record, transcribe and analyse your classroom talk).
• Unplanned language produces ‘magic’ or Dogme moments. Whether it is an approach or a method is uncertain.

Task-Based Learning (TBL / TBI / TBLT)

• Nunan: TBL is the realisation of CLT philosophy — “CLT addresses the question why? TBLT answers the question how?”
• Dave & Jane Willis: advocates rejected a reliance on presentation methodology (i.e. PPP); the basis of development is the learner's attempt to deploy language for meaning.
• 3 stages: Pre-task (teacher explores the topic, highlights useful words, clarifies instructions; students may hear a recording of others doing it) → Task cycle (pairs/small groups do it while the teacher monitors from a distance; they plan, then report orally or in writing) → Language focus (examine the language the task produced; ‘offline correction’).
• The language grows out of the task, not the other way round. Task repetition is extremely effective. Teacher = facilitator, not a sage on the stage; feedback comes from the other students. Needs small classes; raises motivation because students work in groups and present.

The Lexical Approach

• Dave Willis (1990), popularised by Michael Lewis (1993, 1997). Claim: language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary but of multi-word prefabricated chunks — lexical phrases, collocations, idioms, fixed and semi-fixed phrases. Adults have thousands.
• Fluency = a large store of these chunks, which are “the foundation for any linguistic novelty or creativity”. Instead of teaching will, teach archetypical utterances: I'll give you a ring, I'll be in touch, I'll see what I can do.
• Lewis: exposure to enough suitable input, not formal teaching, is the key — “most vocabulary is acquired, not taught”. Dellar & Walkley: always teach words together with other words.

The FOUR humanistic methods (1970s–80s)

PPP — a PROCEDURE, not a method

• Close ties to audiolingual and oral-situational teaching; still widely used at lower levels.
• Presentation — a situation contextualises the language, then: model → isolate → explain → distort → write → put back together → model naturally. (Meera the doctor; present simple gets.)
• Practice — accurate reproduction: choral repetition (the teacher 'conducting') then individual repetition; the cue-response drill — give the cue BEFORE nominating, and avoid a predictable order, to keep everyone alert; then pairs.
• Production — the end point, called 'immediate creativity'; students use the new language in their own sentences. Talking about themselves = personalisation, an important form of meaningful practice.
• The teacher is central in the first two stages and steps back in the third (mainly correcting). A teacher-centred class means accuracy with no fluency — but focusing only on fluency is also insufficient.

Lecture 5 — Chapter 5: Being Learners COLD • 2 questions

Barely examined — but the age and kinaesthetic facts have both appeared, and the content feeds Lecture 6.

The age factor

• Age is a major deciding factor. People of different ages have different needs, competences and cognitive skills asked as True/False → FALSE. Children acquire through play; adults use abstract thought.
• Three bands: young learners & older children 3–12 • teenagers 12–17 • adults 18+.
• The belief that young children learn fastest may be a myth. Their one real advantage is pronunciation (Lynne Cameron: they reproduce the teacher's accent “with deadly accuracy”; Carol Read's pupil parodying her). Apart from pronunciation, older children (12+) do better, given the right circumstances.
• Early learning brings citizenship, democracy, tolerance, multiculturalism, but is undermined by poor transfer of skills from primary to secondary.
• CPH: proposed by Penfield & Roberts (1959), popularised by Lennenberg (1967); the critical period ends around puberty. But older learners may simply be retaining their cultural and linguistic identity, and they have compensatory mechanisms (they can think about what they are doing).

Learner characteristics — the contrast he would test

Learner styles & multiple intelligences

• Purpura's 3 strategy types: metacognitive (planning, monitoring) • social (collaborating) • affective (adjusting feelings, beliefs, attitudes). These + feelings + motivation + perceptual preferences = learner styles. Many commentators are sceptical of their value; Rosenberg defends them.
• NLP's 5 perceptual preferences: Visual • Auditory • Kinaesthetic (movement) • Olfactory (smell) • Gustatory (taste). Most people have one primary system.
• Gardner (Frames of Mind): not one intelligence but 7 — musical/rhythmical, verbal/linguistic, visual/spatial, bodily/kinaesthetic, logical/mathematical, intrapersonal, interpersonal. Everyone has all; one is more pronounced. End states: logical/mathematical → scientist; visual/spatial → navigator. Gardner added an 8th: naturalistic; Goleman added a 9th: emotional intelligence (empathise, control impulse, self-motivate).

Lecture 6 — Being Learners (cont.) WARM • 11 questions

Processing styles & aptitude

Motivation — confirmed seminar territory

• Williams & Burden: motivation is a “state of cognitive arousal” → a “decision to act” → “sustained intellectual and/or physical effort” → a “previously set goal”. Jane Arnold adds the affective element: wanting to do something enough to put out the effort.

• Dörnyei (2014), three factors: (1) the Ideal L2 self — who the learner wants to be; the gap must be closed; the image must be plausible, clearly different, and “fought for”; (2) the Ought-to L2 self — attributes needed to avoid negative outcomes; (3) the L2 learning experience.
• Sakui & Cowie (2012) studied Japanese university students and found the ‘dark side’ — ‘unmotivation’: aggressive negativity, or simple lack of interest.

What teachers can do — the five A's

Levels & the CEFR

Learner autonomy

• Learners take some or all responsibility for their learning. The ultimate goal of language teaching is that the student no longer needs a teacher.
• John Field: “True empowerment consists of the freedom to learn outside the teaching context and the ability to continue learning after the instruction has finished.”
• Autonomy comes with motivation. Do not treat students as empty vessels — you will not be their teacher forever.

Lecture 7 — Chapter 6: Being Teachers HOTTEST • 50 questions (28%)

If you learn only one lecture, learn this one. More than a quarter of every question ever asked comes from here.

Why do we need teachers?

• Gary Marcus (Guitar Zero), four reasons: teachers know things students don't • they motivate • they provide incentive • they help pinpoint errors and target weaknesses.
• Sugata Mitra: put a computer in a wall in a New Delhi slum; children taught themselves. Proposes MIE (minimally invasive education): groups of 4–5 in SOLEs answer big questions (What is a soul? Can animals think?). The teacher's role is not to tell but to encourage investigation.
• Sage on the stage (expert, transmission) vs guide on the side (facilitator) — traced by Popik to 1972. Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet): the wise teacher “leads you to the threshold of your own mind”.
• Scaffolding (Bruner, 1950s), 4 steps: make the child interested → break the task into small steps → keep them focused → show other ways. It works when the learner is in Vygotsky's ZPD — ready to do it with guidance. “What the child can do in collaboration today, he will do independently tomorrow.”
• Dörnyei & Murphey: teaching is group leadership; the principal responsibility is fostering good relationships. At first students expect leadership and direction (focus + security); as group identity develops the teacher relaxes and becomes more democratic. But democracy takes more effort, and autonomy is culturally biased (in Japan students deeply respect teachers).
• Persona: Scrivener wants contact “human to human”. Keisner: experiment with activities and styles, solicit student feedback, and keep a journal.

Qualities of a good teacher — the three studies

Rapport — the single most repeated topic in the course

• Longman: “friendly agreement and understanding between people”. Good rapport makes respect, humour and safety palpable; students trust the teacher to be even-handed and know they will be listened to with interest.
• “A good teacher is someone who knows our names” (an eleven-year-old). 7 ways: a seating plan • name cards on desks • name badges • notes in the register • study the register beforehand • a class photo with names • students say their name before speaking.
• Rapport is vulnerable / fragile when students misbehave — how you react decides whether it survives. The saying that teachers are “born, not made” makes little sense: most enter by accident and learn through continual professional development.
• Scrivener: be welcoming, encouraging, remember positive things. Rose Senior: be ‘with’ the students not against them; give the benefit of the doubt; be ‘generous-minded’.

Inside the classroom

• Reflection-in-action = thinking on your feet, deciding from what is happening at that very moment. Szesztay: we draw on skills, knowledge and intuition at the same time. Gabbrielli: actions are informed by thought → interactive decision-making.
• A lesson plan is a “proposal for action”, not a blueprint to be slavishly followed.

The roles teachers 'play' (Shakespeare, As You Like It: Jaques — “All the world's a stage”)

The FIVE ways of talking to students

1. Providing comprehensible input — all the incidental classroom language (greetings, asking about the weekend). Vital for triggering language acquisition; experienced teachers subconsciously ‘rough-tune’ {simplify} it, so learners understand what they could not produce.
2. Conversing — the struggle / negotiation of meaning provokes genuine learning (the teaching-unplugged claim).
3. Modelling language — give clear models to imitate, through choral and individual repetition (as in PPP). Sound natural and extremely clear at once. (Two faces on the board, standing in front of each in turn.)
4. Reading aloud — Mark Almond: teaching is a performance art; teachers should rehearse the passage first.
5. Giving instructions — fails when teachers give too much, too little, or get it mixed up.

The teacher as a teaching 'aid' — and the gesture table he loves

Careers and burnout

• New teachers are excited and enthusiastic. They must handle classroom management, facts about the language, learning resources and developing a persona.
• Burnout = the state where enthusiasm for the job, investment in planning and interest in the students drain away — emotional exhaustion, not a physical illness. Teachers are not the only people who suffer it; over a long career many go through burnout 'stages', which may be life-changing or merely temporary.

Lecture 8 — Chapter 22: Testing and Evaluation HOT • 30 questions (17%)

The best value in the course: the shortest chapter, and almost every sentence in it has been examined at least twice.

Summative vs Formative

The THREE qualities of a good test

The FIVE types of test

Portfolio assessment — both sides, both examined