Being Learners
Being Learners
Being Learners
Being learners
Learning a language involves, for our students, challenges to their cognitive abilities, their
self-esteem and, frequently, their social skills. It is, in Rebecca Oxford’s words, a ‘courageous
process’ (Oxford 2013: 105). It is thus vitally important to know how our learners feel, what
they need and what helps them to be successful. Such knowledge is half the secret of how to
be a good teacher.
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also have something to do with the way they are taught or, quite simply, the number of
hours that are given to English at the different ages. What this suggests is that if we really
want young learner teaching to be successful, we will have to think carefully about our
goals for the learners, the amount of time we can give for the enterprise, and the type of
educational experience we wish to give them. Singing songs and doing arts and craft work
in the English class may be extremely enjoyable for younger learners, but unless there is
enough time to expand on it for appropriate linguistic development, it may not be enough
for successful acquisition.
Lastly, we need to consider the ‘critical period hypothesis’ (CPH). This is the belief (first
proposed by Penfield and Roberts (1959) and popularised by Lennenberg (1967)) that there
is a ‘critical period’ for language learning, which ends sometime around puberty. This belief
would seem to be supported by the observation that older children, and others post-puberty,
generally seem to have greater difficulty in approximating native-speaker pronunciation than
young children do – although this may sometimes be a deliberate (or even subconscious)
retention of their cultural and linguistic identity. But the idea that there is an optimal age
for language learning becomes less tenable when, as we have seen, older children show
themselves to be effective language learners. Nor is there evidence to suggest that post-
pubescent learners in general are necessarily ineffective language learners. Anyway, they
have compensatory mechanisms such as their ability to think about what they are doing and
use their developed intellectual skills to understand how language works – and these have
nothing to do with any critical period.
In what follows, we will consider students at different ages as if all the members of each
age group are the same. Yet each student is an individual, with different experiences both in
and outside the classroom. Comments here about young children, teenagers and adults can
only be generalisations. Much also depends upon individual learner differences (see 5.2) and
upon motivation (see 5.3).
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Despite the obvious difference between these age groups – and the fact that no one single
child will perfectly fit the descriptions we have given – we can make some recommendations
about younger learners in general.
In the first place, good teachers at this level need to provide a rich diet of learning
experiences which encourage their students to get information from a variety of sources.
They need to work with their students individually and in groups, developing strong
relationships (see 6.1.1). They need to plan a range of activities for a given time period,
and should be flexible enough to move on to the next exercise when they see their
students getting bored.
Teachers of young learners need to spend time understanding how their students think
and operate. They need to be able to pick up on their students’ current interests so that
they can use these to motivate the children. And they need good oral skills in English, since
speaking and listening are the skills which will be used most of all at this age. The teacher’s
pronunciation – their level of ‘international intelligibility’ (see 16.1) – will have an important
effect here, too, precisely because, as we have said, children imitate it so well.
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All of this reminds us that once a decision has been taken to teach English to younger
learners, there is a need for highly skilled and dedicated teaching. This may well be the most
difficult (but rewarding) age to teach, but when teachers do it well (and the conditions
are right), there is no reason why students should not defy some of the research results we
mentioned above and be highly successful learners – provided, of course, that this success is
followed up as they move to a new school or grade.
We can also draw some conclusions about what a classroom for young children should look
like and what might be going on in it. First of all, we will want the classroom to be bright
and colourful, with windows the children can see out of, and with enough room for different
activities to be taking place. We might expect the students to be working in groups in
different parts of the classroom, changing their activity every ten minutes or so.
Because children love discovering things, and because they respond well to being asked to
use their imagination, they may well be involved in puzzle-like activities, in making things, in
drawing things, in games, in physical movement or in songs. A good primary classroom mixes
play and learning in an atmosphere of cheerful and supportive harmony. And, in common
with their lives outside the classroom, the young learners will have access to (and use) various
computer and mobile devices (see Chapter 11).
5.1.2 Teenagers
It has become fashionable to call the teenage brain a ‘work in progress’ (Connor 2006).
This is because it seems that many of the outward signs of physical change that adolescents
undergo are mirrored inside the brain, where significant developments are also taking place.
One of the changes that occurs is the (temporary) phenomenon of ‘synaptic pruning’ of
the frontal cortex. This is the part of the brain where rational decision-making takes place.
During the process of readjusting its functions and processes, the adolescent’s limbic system,
where emotions and ‘gut reactions’ occur, appears to have undue prominence. One result
of this, amongst others, is that teenagers experience intense emotion, which overrides the
more rational pre-frontal cortex reasoning. As Simon Pearlman puts it, ‘Some challenging
behaviour from teenagers is understandable, perhaps inevitable and maybe even desirable’
(Pearlman 2009: 34).
Tessa Woodward points out that teenagers get bored by activities that last too long, or by
slow-paced lessons. They may have some problems with authority (especially if they have
problems at home), have a highly developed sense of what is right and fair, and get irritated if
they do not see the reason for activities (Woodward 2011b).
If this all sounds too negative, we need to remind ourselves that adolescents also have
huge reserves of (temporary) energy: they often have passionate attachments to interests
such as music and sport; and they are frequently deeply involved in and with the lives of
their peer group.
This passion can also extend to causes they believe in and stories that interest them. They
can be extremely humorous – teenage classrooms are often full of laughter – and very
creative in their thinking. As they develop, their capacity for abstract thought and intellectual
activity (at whatever level) becomes more pronounced. Far from being problem students
(though they may sometimes cause problems), teenage students may be the most enjoyable
and engaging to work with.
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Successful teachers of teenagers make every effort to be fair, and they deal with disruptive
behaviour calmly and appropriately (see 9.3). Where appropriate, they may want to keep
their activities short and fast-paced. A lot will depend on the teacher’s energy and the
students’ perception of their commitment and engagement with the class.
A key ingredient of successful teaching for this age group is to make what we do relevant
to the students’ lives. They may not understand the importance of studying languages, but
if we can relate what we are doing – and the topics we concentrate on – to their own lives
(and perhaps their view of their ideal L2 self (see 5.3.1), we can hope for their genuine
engagement in what is happening in the classroom. For example, we will want to get them
to respond to texts and situations with their own thoughts and experiences, rather than
just answering questions and doing abstract learning activities. Although adolescents are
perfectly capable of abstract thought, we might want to say that in general ‘if what is being
taught does not have a direct connection to their real lives … they simply switch off’ (Chaves
Gomes 2011: 31).
Tessa Woodward (2011b) suggests that teachers should take into a teenage class at least
two or three times as many activities as they might need, and that they should have clear
ideas about what early finishers in groupwork can do (see 10.4.4).
Finally, as Fari Greenaway suggests, involving teenagers in decisions about what they are
doing is likely to encourage their engagement (Greenaway 2013) for, as Lindsay Miller and
colleagues in Hong Kong report in their article about establishing a self-access centre in
a secondary school in Hong Kong, ‘the teachers from the school … made the decision to
establish a SAC, but they made another more important decision, that was to include their
students in the development of the SAC. This resulted in a culture of “Self-access Language
Learning” (SALL) being promoted very quickly within the school, and a sense of ownership of
the SAC among the students’ (Miller, Tsang Shuk-Ching and Hopkins 2007: 227).
5.1.3 Adults
Many adults, writes Janet Eyring, ‘go to school even though they may feel embarrassed or
self-conscious being in a language class at an older age’ (Eyring 2014: 572). But this sense of
embarrassment is by no means always present.
It looks as if there are as many myths about adult learners as there are about other age
groups. One thing, however, is certain, and that is that ‘adults are … likely to be more critical
and demanding, and ready to complain to the teacher or the institution if they feel the
teaching is unsatisfactory’ (Ur 2012: 268).
As we shall see, there is a difference between younger adults and older ‘senior’ learners,
who may have specific features which are worth paying attention to. However, as with all
other groups, chronological age is not necessarily the deciding factor since individuals can
vary so dramatically. The following generalisations may help us think more carefully about
adult learners.
Adults have many advantages as language learners:
• They can engage with abstract thought.
• They have a whole range of life experiences to draw on.
• They have expectations about the learning process, and they already have their own set
patterns of learning.
• Adults tend, on the whole, to be more disciplined than other age groups and, crucially,
they are often prepared to struggle on despite boredom.
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• Adults come into classrooms with a rich range of experiences which allow teachers to use
a wide range of activities with them.
• Unlike young children and teenagers, they often have a clear understanding of why
they are learning and what they want to get out of it. Many adults are more able to
sustain a level of motivation by holding on to a distant goal in a way that teenagers find
more difficult.
However, adults are never entirely problem-free learners, and they have a number of
characteristics which can sometimes make learning and teaching problematic:
• They can be critical of teaching methods. Their previous learning experiences may
have predisposed them to one particular methodological style, which makes them
uncomfortable with unfamiliar teaching patterns. Conversely, they may be hostile to
certain teaching and learning activities which replicate the teaching they received earlier
in their educational careers.
• They may have experienced failure or criticism at school, which makes them anxious and
under-confident about learning a language.
• Many older adults worry that their intellectual powers may be diminishing with age. They
are concerned to keep their creative powers alive (Williams and Burden 1997: 32).
• Adults are more likely to miss lessons than younger learners for a variety of reasons.
• Even when adults are successful at learning grammar and vocabulary – and dealing with
language skills – they ‘may still experience significant difficulty mastering pronunciation
and oral fluency’ (Sampson 2010).
Mark McKinnon and Sophie Acomat, discussing students around the age of sixty, suggest
that whilst it is simply not true that ‘senior’ learners cannot work as effectively as younger
learners, nevertheless we do slow down as we age in our response to auditory stimuli, and
older learners sometimes react more slowly than their younger counterparts. They suggest
that senior learners are not especially good at responding to instructions and, crucially, that
in many cases speaking and listening cause them the most stress (McKinnon and Acomat
2010a). They go on to suggest that we should be more accommodating of our older
learners’ preferences for different teaching techniques and approaches, rather than just
pushing our own, perhaps younger, view of what effective learning is. We need, they say, to
include a variety of recycling activities to help our learners’ short-term memory retention, and
use pairwork and groupwork for peer support (McKinnon and Acomat 2010b).
What, then, can be done to maximise the advantages of adult learners and minimise
some of the disadvantages, especially of significantly older students? Herbert Puchta, in
an echo of what we have said about teaching adolescents, argues that we need to build
on (and celebrate) the students’ prior knowledge, but that importantly ‘we need to find
texts that “speak” to our students in terms of being relevant and accessible to them’
(Puchta 2013: 51).
Above all, perhaps, we should guard against thinking that adult classes should always be
serious, for as Lianne Ross found, her adult students enjoyed learning that was ‘spontaneous
and natural’ when she used a children’s ‘Guess who’ game in a lesson (Ross 2009). In
the same vein, Herbert Puchta (see above) recommends the use of ‘lighter’ texts in
adult classrooms.
The concept of ‘adult’ embraces many different stages and realities. Our job as teachers is
to find out how we can use what the students know and have experienced – and who they
are – to make our lessons especially relevant for them.
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differentiated according to learner preference, can be a very supportive tool’ (2013a: Part A).
What, then, are some of the variables that have been suggested?
Perceptual preferences Each of us reacts to a range of sensory input. In the world of NLP
(neuro-linguistic programming) these are described as Visual (relating to what we see),
Auditory (relating to what we hear), Kinaesthetic (relating to movement), Olfactory (relating
to our sense of smell) and Gustatory (relating to our sense of taste). Most people, while using
all these systems to experience the world, nevertheless have one ‘preferred primary system’
(Revell and Norman 1997: 31), or, suggests Marjorie Rosenberg, ‘in stressful situations, we
tend to use a primary and (sometimes) a secondary system in which we perceive, process
and store information’ (Rosenberg 2013a: Part A).
Personality factors Perhaps we are more extroverted or more introverted. If the former,
the theory goes, we are much more likely to speak out and collaborate with others than
introverted learners who are reluctant to do either.
Multiple intelligences (MI) In his book Frames of Mind, Howard Gardner suggested that
we do not possess a single intelligence, but a range of ‘intelligences’ (Gardner 1983).
Initially, he listed seven of these: musical/rhythmical, verbal/linguistic, visual/spatial, bodily/
kinaesthetic, logical/mathematical, intrapersonal and interpersonal. All people have all of
these intelligences, he said, but in each person one (or more) of them is more pronounced.
This allowed him to predict that a typical occupation (or ‘end state’) for people with a
strength in logical/mathematical intelligence is that of the scientist, whereas a typical
end state for people with strengths in visual/spatial intelligence might well be that of
the navigator – and so on. Gardner has since added an eighth intelligence, which he calls
naturalistic intelligence (Gardner 1993) to account for the ability to recognise and classify
patterns in nature; Daniel Goleman has added a ninth: ‘emotional intelligence’ (Goleman
1996). This includes the ability to empathise, control impulse and self-motivate, and the
term emotional intelligence has entered common usage when describing, especially, people
who appear not to have it, i.e. someone might be said to ‘lack’ emotional intelligence
(though exactly what ‘it’ is, is often not discussed in such descriptions).
How we process things There are many descriptions of the different ways that people
apparently process information. Rosenberg (2013a) makes a difference between ‘global’
learners (those who ‘perceive material in a holistic manner’) and ‘analytic’ learners (those
who ‘tend to remember specifics and work best alone, as groupwork could be perceived
as distracting’). Differences have been suggested, too, between ‘field-sensitive’ learners
(who prefer to get information in context) and ‘field-insensitive’ learners (who are happy to
get information in the abstract). Then there are, apparently, ‘inductive’ learners (who want
examples first) and ‘deductive’ learners (who prefer to start with rules and theories and then
apply them to examples). And so on. More than a decade ago, Frank Coffield, David Moseley,
Elaine Hall and Kathryn Ecclestone took a look at the processing characteristics that were
then available and came up with the following (partial) list of opposites (see Figure 1).
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What all the many researchers who try to identify individual learner characteristics want to
do, of course, is to use what they have found out to help teachers offer appropriate materials
and activities for those different individuals. This is, of course, a laudable aim, but it does
pose significant problems. According to Jim Scrivener, in a discussion about NLP and multiple
intelligences, ‘the descriptions and suppositions of how people differ are all suppositions
(i.e. believed, but not proved) and, at best, only a glimpse of a wider truth’ (Scrivener
2012: 106). This is, perhaps, the nub of the problem. There is little evidence to show any
correlations between individual learner differences and different levels of success. Or rather,
it is impossible to say whether a student with an apparent learner style will do better with one
kind of instruction than another with an apparently different learner style.
All those years ago, Frank Coffield and his colleagues suggested that while discussions of
learner styles may be of considerable interest to theorists, they themselves would ‘advise
against pedagogical intervention based solely on any of the learning style instruments’
(Coffield et al 2004: 140). In part, this is because, as we can see above, there are so many
different models available that it is almost impossible to choose between them, but it is also
because ‘for the amount of attention they [learning style theories] receive, there is very little
evidence of their efficacy’ (Mayne 2012: 66).
John Geake worries that ideas such as multiple intelligences and neuro-linguistic
programming (with its emphasis on VAK – Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic learning styles) are
‘neuromythologies’. It is worth quoting what he has to say at length:
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It would seem, therefore, that in the eyes of many, discussions about learner styles are
valueless; however, this may not be entirely the case. Jim Scrivener, for example, wonders
whether, when considering preferences and personalities, etc. ‘their main value is in offering
us thought experiments along the lines of “what if this were true?” – making us think
about the ideas and, in doing so, reflecting on our own default teaching styles and our own
current understanding of learner differences and responses to them’ (Scrivener 2012: 106).
Here is something that most people can agree on: that many of us have some ‘ingrained
patterns’ in the way we teach (Rosenberg 2013b: 6). If there is a mismatch between these
‘patterns’ and the way our students prefer to study, it may make it more difficult for them to
learn successfully.
There is a strong possibility, therefore, that we may have got things the wrong way round!
Instead of trying to pigeonhole student characteristics (which may, as we have seen, be a
fruitless task anyway), it would be much better to encourage the students themselves to think
about what they respond to successfully so that they can choose the strategies and activities
which best suit them – and which they like most. This is the approach we will consider in
5.5.1 and, indeed, the whole purpose of encouraging our learners to be autonomous is for
the students to discover what ‘works best’ for them. We will, of course, listen to their opinions
and may indeed modify our teaching on the basis of these (see 5.5.4), but that is a far cry
from the suggestion that we can identify different learner types in any scientific way and base
our teaching upon it.
However, because the idea that there might be a clash between teacher style and learner
preference does have a ring of truth about it, thinking about different learners might
provoke us into considering our own teaching habits and, as a result, it might encourage us
to consider carefully, our ‘ingrained patterns’ through the eyes of our students. When that
happens, something will have been achieved.
5.3 Motivation
All teachers know that it is easier to teach students who are motivated than students who
aren’t, but what is motivation and where does it come from?
Marion Williams and Robert Burden suggest that motivation is a ‘state of cognitive arousal’
which provokes a ‘decision to act’, as a result of which there is ‘sustained intellectual and/
or physical effort’ so that the person can achieve some ‘previously set goal’ (Williams and
Burden 1997: 120). Jane Arnold adds an affective element to her definition: ‘the basic idea
can generally be reduced to the state of wanting to do something enough to put out the
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effort necessary to achieve it. There tends to be a mixture of the cognitive (setting goals) and
the affective (mobilizing the energy to reach them)’ (Arnold 2013: 36). Whereas Williams
and Burden suggest that the strength of any motivation will depend on how much value
the individual places on the outcome he or she wishes to achieve, for Jane Arnold, the
student’s self-esteem will have a powerful effect on the depth of their motivational drive,
for ‘a student who believes he can’t learn the language is right. He can’t unless he changes
this belief’ (2013: 30). Zoltán Dörnyei says that ‘the human mind being a highly integrated
neural network, motivation constantly interacts with cognitive and emotional issues and
… complex motivational constructs usually include cognitive and affective components’
(Dörnyei 2014: 519).
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If all our students were highly motivated, life would be considerably easier – at least at
the start of a new course (see 5.3.3). But frequently they are not. Keiko Sakui and Neil
Cowie (2012) discuss the feelings of Japanese university students of English and find that
the ‘dark side’ of motivation – ‘unmotivation’– is sometimes present in that situation,
whether this manifests itself as a kind of aggressive negativity or simply as a lack of interest in
language learning.
How is students’ motivation (or ‘unmotivation’) affected by the people and places around
them? This is what we will consider in the next section.
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Affect Clearly, based on what we have said so far, feelings and emotions have a lot to
do with how motivated or unmotivated a student is. This is why it is so important to help
students create the ‘vision’ of their ideal L2 self, and to remind them of this as often as
appropriate. Jane Arnold believes that frequently ‘using language activities which foster
self-esteem is one way to change limiting beliefs that students may have’ (2013: 34), and
that the teacher has the double task of ensuring that the ability to speak the language is
attractive and, importantly, ‘explaining that if they are willing to work, they can reach their
goals’ (2013: 37).
The really important thing to remember is that if and when our students become
motivated, this feeling does not necessarily last, unless we do our best to sustain it through
activities and encouragement, through clear goal and task-setting, and through activities
which maintain our students’ self-esteem. This ongoing process is, of course, greatly helped
by the establishment of good classroom rapport (see 6.1.1) and by teachers taking a
personal interest in their students and personalising lessons so that the lives of the students
are reflected in what happens in the lessons (Neale 2011).
One of the ways of provoking excitement and self-esteem is by increasing the students’
expectation of success. However, if this expectation is not met, students may well become
demotivated since continual failure has an extremely negative effect on self-belief.
Achievement One of the most important tasks a teacher has is to try to match what the
students are asked to do with the possibility that they can actually achieve it. Such goal-
setting is a vital skill. It is complex because doing something which is too easy is not an
achievement. On the contrary, an appropriate learning goal is one where the students
manage to do something which was, before they started, just outside their reach. The
focus on the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD – see 5.1.1) in much thinking about
teaching reflects this. We believe that students learn best when they are in the zone, ready
(and more importantly, able) to learn something new. But achievement which motivates
comes through effort, and so our task is to be sure our students can achieve the short- and
long-term goals we place before them (or which they, themselves have identified), while
providing them with a reasonable level of challenge.
Achievement is most commonly measured through grades of one sort or another, but
these can have a baleful effect on student motivation if they are carelessly awarded, or
if the students are frequently failing to achieve the grades they desire. One of the ways
of improving the situation, suggests Dörnyei (2014) is to make the grades transparent,
with clear success criteria, so the students know what they are aiming at. Grades need to
reflect effort and improvement as well as just numerical achievement. The whole grading
environment will be greatly improved (in motivational terms) when there is continuous
assessment (perhaps portfolio assessment) as well as the more usual tests and exams. We will
return to these issues in Chapter 22.
Activities What we actually ask the students to do will have a considerable effect on their
intrinsic motivation. All too often, however, the materials and activities that students are
asked to be involved in are, at best, unengaging and, at worst, monotonous. Some official
coursebooks – and the exam preparation that goes with them – can have a deadening effect
on student motivation (though this does not need to be the case – see 4.9.2 and 22.2).
There have to be ways of changing this unsatisfactory situation.
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One of the keys to sustaining student motivation is to make the materials and activities
we are using relevant to our students’ lives and interests. As we shall see in Chapter 11, this
will involve using the kinds of devices they (and we) are familiar with, such as mobile phones
and tablets. But it is not just this. We also want to try to make what we offer and talk about
relevant to the world the students live in and, where possible, to the students’ ideal L2 self.
This suggests that even if we are obliged to use materials that are themselves not especially
interesting, we need to find ways of relating what is in them to the students themselves
(see 4.9.2). We can ask them what they think of the material. We can ask them to change
the information in a text, for example, so that it is relevant to their lives, or change the
characters in a dialogue so that they recognise the kind of people who are talking.
Another key to sustaining motivation is to vary the activities we use with our classes. This
is partly so that we can cater for different learner preferences and strategies (see 5.2.1), but
also so that our lessons do not become predictable, and thus uninteresting. Good teachers
balance their students’ need for routine (which engenders feelings of comfort and security)
with a more apparently anarchic mix of unexpected activities.
Attitude However ‘nice’ teachers are, the students are unlikely to follow them willingly (and
do what is asked of them) unless they have confidence in their professional abilities. Students
need to believe that we know what we are doing.
This confidence in a teacher may start the moment we walk into the classroom for the
first time – because of the students’ perception of our attitude to the job. Aspects such as
the way we dress, where we stand and the way we talk to the class all have a bearing here.
Students also need to feel that we know about the subject we are teaching. Consciously or
unconsciously they need to feel that we are prepared to teach English in general and that
we are prepared to teach this lesson in particular. One of the chief reasons (but not the only
one, of course) why classes occasionally become undisciplined is because teachers do not
have enough for the students to do – or seem not to be quite sure what to do next.
When students have confidence in the teacher, they are likely to remain engaged with
what is going on. If they lose that confidence, it becomes difficult for them to sustain the
motivation they might have started with.
Agency Philosophers have always tried to evaluate the individual’s power to act, whether
from a Descartes perspective (I think, therefore I am) or a Nietzschean view (we make
choices based on our selfish desires). Agency describes our ability to have control in our lives
and, through our own thinking and will, to effect change in the way we live.
A lot of the time students have things done to them and, as a result, risk being passive
recipients of whatever is being handed down. We should be equally interested, however, in
things done by the students, so that they become, like the agent of a passive sentence ‘the
thing or person that does’.
When students have agency, they get to make some of the decisions about what is going
on, and, as a consequence, they take some responsibility for their learning. For example,
we might allow our students to tell us when and if they want to be corrected in a fluency
activity, rather than always deciding ourselves when correction is appropriate and when it is
not. We might have the students tell us what words they find difficult to pronounce, rather
than assuming they all have the same difficulties.
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We might summarise this discussion by saying that ‘the brain needs positive emotions,
experiences of success, and a sense of ownership in order to be fully engaged in the learner
process’ (Puchta 2013: 58). The sense of ownership that Herbert Puchta refers to has a lot
to do with the students’ agency and their ability to be autonomous learners. These are issues
that we will discuss in 5.5.
5.4 Levels
It is not difficult to see (and hear) the difference between a student who is a complete
beginner, and one who is very advanced. Whereas the former will struggle to understand
what is said and will find it difficult to say anything very much, the latter may well find
themselves almost indistinguishable (except perhaps in terms of accent) from someone
who grew up with English as a mother tongue. However, if we are to select appropriate
strategies, activities and materials for our students, we need to be able to identify
their level of proficiency in a significantly more sophisticated way than merely saying
beginner and advanced.
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(the levels are equally applicable to any language), the CEFR has become widely referenced in
many different parts of the world.
The six levels of the CEFR are A1 (breakthrough or beginner), A2 (waystage or elementary),
B1 (threshold or intermediate), B2 (vantage or upper-intermediate), C1 (effective operational
proficiency or advanced), and C2 (mastery or proficiency). They do not all describe equally
long stretches of ability (which has led some to come up with labels such as B1+, etc.) but
what makes them special is that they are described not in terms of linguistic elements, but
instead in terms of ‘can do’ statements, which describe what people are able to do with the
language. Thus at the A1 level, a speaker ‘can introduce himself/herself and others and can
ask and answer questions about personal details such as where he/she lives, people he/she
knows and things he/she has’. At the B1 level, students ‘can deal with most situations likely to
arise while travelling in an area where the language is spoken’ whilst at the C1 level, they can
‘express ideas fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions’
and ‘can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes’.
When students have reached ‘mastery or proficiency’ (that is the C2 level) they can ‘express
themselves spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning
even in the most complex situations’.
It is immediately clear that the ‘can do’ statements, however finely worked out, are
descriptors that some people might wish to moderate or change. But what gives them their
power – and the reason that they have become so widely used – is the fact that the students
themselves can work out their own levels based on these ‘can do’ statements (written in
their mother tongue, but referring to the language they are learning), and they can use
these statements (and many other ‘can do’ statements which have found their way into
coursebooks and learning programmes) to see what they have learnt and what still remains to
be done. The ‘can do’ statements offer the exciting prospect of the students being in charge
of their own progress – a key feature of learner autonomy (see 5.5).
Since the arrival of the CEFR, publishers, in particular, have tried to peg the six levels to the
more traditional categories of beginner, intermediate, etc. (see Figure 3).
A1 A2 B1 B2 C1 C2
False Elementary Pre- Upper-
beginners intermediate intermediate
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Cambridge exams a more sophisticated reading of their results and their language abilities
than previous level descriptors.
Although the CEFR is widely accepted as a benchmark by many course designers, it has
some limitations. In the first place, the majority of the ‘can do’ statements refer to spoken
English so that the coverage of the other skills is patchy. Secondly, these ‘can do’ statements
are concentrated, for the most part, in the A2–B2 levels.
The Global Scale of English, produced by Pearson, aims to avoid these limitations by
creating a 90-point scale aligned to the original CEFR research data. This not only includes
many more ‘can do’ descriptors for different language skills, but it also has new ‘can do’
statements at a level below A1 (for example: ‘Can recognise numbers up to ten’).
GSE 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Because the Global Scale of English has many more levels than the CEFR and recognises
the importance of age and context in describing language proficiency, it may help course
designers and students appreciate small but important progress steps in a way that less
sophisticated descriptors may not.
The Global Scale of English includes ‘can do’ statements for general English, but there are
separate inventories, too, for academic English, professional English and young learners, as
the following examples show:
Academic English:
[Listening] Can distinguish facts from opinions in a simple, straightforward lecture.
(GSE 57; high B1)
[Reading] Can recognise organisational patterns within a complex academic text. (GSE 78; C1)
[Speaking] Can use basic markers to structure a short presentation. (GSE 47; B1)
[Writing] Can begin an essay with a strong thesis statement. (GSE 74; high B2)
Professional English:
[Listening] Can understand who a telephone call is intended for. (GSE 37; high A2)
[Reading] Can understand the main information in the agenda for a work-related meeting.
(GSE 46; B1)
[Speaking] Can hold a work-related telephone conversation, using standard expressions.
(GSE 46; B1)
[Writing] Can write a simple work-related email to colleagues. (GSE 39; high A2)
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Young Learners:
[Listening] Can follow short, basic classroom instructions, if supported by gestures. (GSE 23; A1)
[Reading] Can find relevant Internet texts on specific topics and extract the most important
information, e.g. for school projects. (GSE 51; B1)
[Speaking] Can briefly say what they think will happen next in a simple story or play.
(GSE 41; high A2)
[Writing] Can write basic factual descriptions of animals (e.g. habitat, abilities), with support.
(GSE 36; A2)
What the Global Scale of English and other measuring schemes show is that there is a huge
appetite (also evident in labels like beginner and intermediate and in the CEFR levels) to try
to quantify knowledge and ability so that course designers, coursebook writers and, most
importantly, students have a benchmark against which level can be assessed.
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Such reflection is just as important for students as it is for teachers (see 6.3.1) because it gets
them to engage with thinking about what they are doing. In this instance, we can get them
to compare their sentence completions with their colleagues; the discussion that ensues will
help everyone become aware not only of different ways of doing things, but also of the fact
that individuals have different reactions to how things are experienced. It may well be, too,
that in such discussions, the students will help each other overcome some of their difficulties.
Learner training can involve much more than Littlewood’s student reflection, of course, as
the following examples clearly show.
Learner journals Reflection is a key component in learner and strategy training and having
students write journals is one way to provoke such reflection. For example, Yiching Chen
asked her college students in Taiwan to keep journals while they were experiencing strategy
training. The students were asked to record ‘comments about their learning progress, the
use of strategies they were learning, their reflections and feelings related to the learning
process, or any other comments and observations’ (Chen 2007: 22).
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Gareth Humphreys and Mark Wyatt had their Vietnamese students keep ‘interactive learning
journals’ whilst they too underwent strategy training, and their teachers reported that those
students who used these journals effectively ‘appeared to demonstrate an ability to manage
themselves and plan their learning using a variety of resources’ (Humphreys and Wyatt 2014:
60), although there was some initial confusion and lack of motivation. Journal keeping is a
powerful reflective tool, but not everyone enjoys it or finds it useful.
Strategy training Chen’s students in Taiwan and the Vietnamese students in the study
by Humphreys and Wyatt were offered different learning strategies (and discussions about
learner autonomy) to help them become better learners. Examples of the strategies
offered included how to listen and read in different ways, using contextual clues, the value
of organising and grouping words, prediction, self-monitoring, etc. Such strategies are
regularly advocated by teachers who give time to learner training because it is thought
that if students think about how they do things, and then choose appropriate strategies
to do them, they will be more successful. The whole process of strategy training, together
with reflective journal keeping was highly beneficial, Yiching Chen reports, with some
students transferring the strategies they learnt to other language tasks. More than this, some
reported an improvement in their English listening comprehension skills and (an important
by-product, perhaps) some had developed a ‘liking for learning the target foreign language’
(Chen 2007: 25). For Adrian Underhill, the teacher’s job is to activate the learners’ ‘inner
workbench’ where they reflect on how they do things (Underhill 2013).
Before we get too excited about the efficacy of strategy training, however, we might want
to agree with Scott Thornbury, who worried about how generalisable learning strategies
may be. ‘What may work for one learner may not be effective for another. A less prescriptive
approach might be to offer the learners a “menu” of learner strategies and invite them to
experiment until they find the ones that best suit them’ (2006: 116). Thus, for example, we
might show our students a range of recording/note-taking techniques (see Figure 5), and
these could then be a springboard for a
discussion about what works best for Spidergram
individual students in the class. the internet newspapers
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Goals and processes Some teachers go further than encouraging their students to choose
strategies (and reflect on their choices). Their aim is to get their students to think about
their learning processes and plan their ‘learning campaign’ accordingly. Daniel Barber and
Duncan Foord suggest a ‘SMART goals evaluator’ (Barber and Foord 2014a). The acronym
stands for Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic and Time-bound goals, and the suggestion
is that if the students set themselves goals that have these characteristics, they will have a
chance of success. Moreover, because the goal is measurable, they will be able to see if they
have achieved it.
Brian Morrison wants to encourage ‘self-directed language learning’ in much the same
way (Morrison 2014). In his scheme (and see also Morrison and Navarro 2014), successful
learning involves Planning, Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation. Students need to
plan their own learning goals (for example, working on a language skill within a specific
genre – see 20.2.2) and work out how to implement them (e.g. what they are going to do).
They have to monitor their own progress and, as with the ‘smart’ alternative, they have to
be able to evaluate (or measure) how well their goals have been achieved. They need to
think about what they can use to help them achieve their goals and what activities they will
take part in. They also need to review what they are doing and what they have done. Such
reflection, as we have seen, is an important element in becoming more self-aware and thus
in becoming more autonomous.
Such goal-setting is readily achievable when we are teaching one-to-one (see 7.1.2), but
less easy to achieve with large classes of students. In such situations, we may find that we
want to develop goals for the whole class – or at least discuss this (see 5.5.4). However, if
we can encourage our students to develop their own plans of study in this way, we will have
gone some of the way towards helping them to become genuinely autonomous.
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finished product. That’s why blogging and other public online postings work; when students
know that anyone can see their work, they often make a special effort to make it acceptable
(see 11.3 and 20.3).
Valerie Sartor would agree. She wants to move away from a ‘banking model’ of education
where teachers deposit their knowledge, and instead ‘help our students to create and
strengthen their own voices’ (Sartor 2014: 19). In her case, the students had to choose a
topic that interested them and then put together a portfolio of texts within different genres
– from web articles to plays, from poetry to rap, for example. When they had finished, they
presented their topics to the class in whatever way suited them – using presentation software
or through written accounts, etc. They ‘not only gained higher levels of English literacy, but
also learnt to take responsibility for their own learning and to explore a variety of texts and
media’ (Sartor 2014: 20).
A lot will depend on who our students are – both in terms of their age and level – and also
on how big our classes are. But the examples we have quoted here can justifiably be said to
have contributed to learner autonomy by getting the students to invest themselves in the
learning tasks, rather than having everything done for them by a teacher.
Open learning
Laura Bergmann used open learning with young learners and teenagers in government
schools in Austria because ‘open-learning approaches are characterised by self-determination,
independence and the following of the learners’ own interests. They give the learners some
degree of choice in what, when, where, with whom and how they learn’ (Bergmann and
Ruffino 2011a: 4). In open learning, the students are given a number of tasks to choose
from and they can evaluate their own success in these tasks. They do the tasks on their own
(although the teacher is on hand to help if and when necessary) and they do as many as they
think they need.
One way of organising open learning is to give the students a collection of exercises and
activities, all of which they have to do, but in any order they choose. But this is not real open
learning and ‘soon the students realise how little freedom they have and become frustrated’
(Bergmann and Ruffino 2011a: 5). Laura Bergmann gave her students a wide range of
activities which they could select from in order to be able to meet – to their own satisfaction
– a variety of ‘can do’ statements (see, for example, 5.4.2). Such ‘can do’ statements could be
tied to linguistic items or functions (e.g. ‘I can ask about when to meet and understand the
replies’) so that the students themselves decide when they have reached their goal, and keep
going until they are satisfied that they can do these things. For Bergmann and Ruffino, ‘as the
students cease relying on the teacher to drive their learning forward, they experience their
own agency, sometimes for the first time in their lives’ (Bergmann and Ruffino 2011b: 20).
Open learning – as is the case with a lot of primary teaching around the world – relies on
the classroom having a number of different areas for different learning activities. Thus, for
example, there might be a computer corner, a speaking area, a listening area, etc. The main
thing is that the students should be able to move around and change places, depending on
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what they want to do because ‘open learning also means open classrooms. There’s no reason
why your students can’t use the corridor, the library, the canteen or the playground to work’
(Bergmann and Ruffino 2011a: 6). Not all teachers can allow their students to ‘disappear’
in this way, of course, but getting the students to be genuinely responsible for their own
learning is greatly enhanced if they can move from area to area.
Self-access centres
When open learning becomes institutionalised, learning institutions often create self-access
centres (SACs). These are places where the students can go to study on their own. They can
read books, do grammar exercises, listen to audio material or watch videos.
The design of self-access centres – and the ways they are administered – will have a direct
bearing on their success or failure. We need to make sure that the physical environment is
appropriate for our students. We have to decide if we want to provide areas where they can
work (and talk) together, for example. We have to think about how people will move around
the centre, and predict which will be the most popular sites. We will want to provide lighting
and decoration which is conducive to relaxed study, without making the area so relaxing that
the students fall asleep.
Another important consideration will be the systems we use for classifying material and
getting the students to navigate through the different possibilities on offer. This applies to
computer sites (such as coursebook companion sites, etc.) which offer self-directed learning
material just as it does to the kind of physical learning centres we have been talking about.
Material should be clearly signposted – what it is, what it is for, what level it caters for, how
it will help the students, etc. The centre or website should offer ‘pathways’ that the students
might want to follow so that when a student finishes an activity, they might read: Now you
have done this scanning exercise, you might want to try X, which asks you to read a text in a
different way. You can then compare your reactions to both reading approaches.
In order to make sure that SACs or computer sites are fulfilling their functions of allowing
the students to work and study on their own, we need some process of evaluation, some way
of measuring whether or not they are effective.
Hayo Reinders and Marilyn Lewis designed a checklist for self-access materials which was
‘an attempt to strike a balance between the ideal, lengthy survey which would leave no
question unasked and a shorter one which had more chance of being used’ (Reinders and
Lewis 2006: 277). In their case, the concern has been with self-access material in book form
(see Figure 6). It is clear that for them, selection, ease of access, clear learning goals and
procedures, and learner training are key characteristics for book-based self-access materials.
The authors have included a comment column so that users can say how useful the checklist
is and what they might want added to it (or amended).
A checklist for computer-based self-access materials would look somewhat different
from this, of course. We would be unlikely to talk about chapters and indexes or tables of
contents. Instead, we would be concerned with issues such as menus, ease of navigation,
interactivity and whether or not (and in what form) answers or hints were provided on the
screen. But whatever kind of checklist we make, we will want to design a questionnaire,
list or table which allows us to measure whether the material we are asking our students to
access is navigable.
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Figure 6 An evaluative checklist for self-access material (Reinders and Lewis 2006: 277)
However, if we really want ‘buy-in’ from the students – and if we need help with designing
the content and appearance of a self-access centre – by far the best thing we can do is solicit
their opinions both during the design stage (Miller, Tsang Shuk-Ching and Hopkins 2007) and
also when they are using it so that we can make appropriate changes.
Many of the things that students can do in open learning or in self-access centres can be
done by the students working alone and online. As a result, it might be tempting to think that
there is no value in special centres, for example. But what open learning organisation and
self-access centres offer, when they work well, is a teacher or learning coach to offer advice
and give help when needed. More than that, the fact that the students go to a different
(special) place may provide motivation that working on their own sometimes fails to provoke.
Student ‘helpers’
The ‘different place’ that students can go to in Cory McMillen and Kara Boyer’s classes is
a ‘student help desk’. They create an ‘expert’s corner’, where different students (not the
teacher) dispense advice about writing and reading tasks. This allows us as teachers to
‘challenge our own authority by giving some of it away’ (McMillen and Boyer 2012: 43).
Not all the students in their groups are keen on consulting their peers in this way and so the
teacher (whose time has been freed up by the ‘experts’) can work with the reluctant ones.
Nevertheless, overall, the effects have been highly beneficial and, especially, ‘the number of
incidents of misbehaviour has been reduced’.
Michelle Worgan uses students as teachers for short periods of time at the beginning of
lessons. The individual student chooses how to present material to the class and ‘the other
students actually feel less intimidated about speaking out when the teacher is their classmate
… it makes a nice refreshing change of style and dynamics’ (Worgan 2010: 25). She uses
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groups, too, to explain things to the rest of the class (after they have had a chance to discuss
solutions amongst themselves).
The intention of open learning, self-access centres and even student ‘experts’ and student
‘teachers’ is to encourage the learners to adopt agency willingly. When we are in charge of
what we do, the argument goes, we do it more willingly and more intensely.
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Students are far more likely to be motivated when they feel they have agency. One way of
giving them such agency is to allow them to choose (in smaller or bigger ways) what they will
do, whether this is in terms of methodology, syllabus or topics to be used in the classroom.
But there are other choices they can make, too, such as what homework to do (see 5.5.6),
what books to read, or what ‘outside the class’ activities (see 5.5.5) they want to take part in.
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5.5.6 Homework
One of the most common types of ‘outside-the-class’ activity is homework. Many teachers
think it is a good idea because it gives the students a chance to do more study and practice
than the limited hours of face-to-face classwork provide.
Homework can give students opportunities for revising classwork, practising language
items, preparing for the next lesson, working on written assignments, doing investigative
work or just about anything else that teachers or they themselves might want. Nevertheless,
it is often thought to be unpopular with students. Joanna Stirling, however, gave a class of
learners a questionnaire on the subject and reported that ‘a gratifying 56 percent thought
that homework was “very important”’. This led her to the conclusion that this response
‘lent credence to a sneaking suspicion that although students often groan when homework
is set, many secretly like it, or perhaps they just see it as a necessary evil’ (Stirling 2005:
37). Perhaps she was right, though Luke Prodromou and Lindsay Clandfield worried that,
amongst other things, for students, homework was seen as a punishment and, worse still,
was very boring (Prodromou and Clandfield 2007: 88). This is unfortunate, since at its best,
homework is an activity in which students rely on themselves, and it can promote and build
up learner autonomy.
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classroom activities because the students ‘had to collaborate, but also think of arguments and
counter arguments to make their case and rebut others’ (Yang and Gamble 2013: 409).
Tessa Woodward, however, suggests that ‘there are many more types of thinking than just
creative and critical’ (Woodward 2012: 17). For her, having the students use their brains has
many advantages and can take many forms. Talking about thinking in lessons in itself is ‘inherently
interesting’ and intellectually stimulating, and it encourages the students to want to communicate
and express themselves. We can ask our students to analyse texts, but we can also offer texts
about thinking. Woodward goes on to say that simple changes to the way we teach – such as
allowing wait time for the students to think about what they want to say and not automatically
echoing their utterances, but rather asking probing follow-up questions, are all devices to provoke
student thinking. John Field (2007) suggests student introspection and rehearsal for conversations
they have had and may want to improve on. Éva Illés wants her students to ‘effectively exploit
their linguistic resources in online negotiation of meaning’ (Illés 2012: 505) and suggests literary
texts and engagement with the internet to develop such resources and skills.
When we ask our students ‘why’ and encourage them to question the texts and topics they
come across – not to mention the materials they use and the activities they are involved
in – we are not only promoting greater autonomy of thought and action, but actively
encouraging ‘critical thinking’. This offers the potential for enhancing students’ learning
experiences and increasing academic achievement, as well as providing indispensable skills
for an ever-changing world (Yang and Gamble 2013: 409).
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Teaching teenagers
Adult learners
Multiple intelligences
Levels
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Student feedback
Learner autonomy
Self-access
Negotiation
Homework
(Critical) thinking
Video resource
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