100 Teaching Tips: two tips on teacher talk

All this week, we’ve been celebrating the publication of Penny Ur’s new book 100 Teaching Tips, the latest in our Cambridge Handbook for Language Teachers series. Today, in the final post in the series, we’re sharing with you two of the book’s 100 hands-on tips across 19 different areas of classroom teaching, based on Penny’s comprehensive teaching experience in ELT over the past 40 years.

Talk a lot
Contrary to some opinions you might have heard, lots of teacher talk in English is actually a good thing. It’s an excellent source of English language comprehensible input.

The idea of the learner-centred classroom does not mean that students should be talking most of the time and the teacher keeping quiet, acting only as a facilitator. Of course, you want your students to be active language users for much of the lesson time; but you also want to give them opportunities to hear lots of comprehensible English, and learn from it. And the best such opportunities are provided by your own speech.

It’s likely to be better than recorded or filmed input, because it’s directly addressed to your students, you can design and adapt it to suit their levels and needs, and it’s ‘live’, taking place in real time.

Your spoken input is particularly important if your students hear little or no English outside your classroom – which is true for most teaching situations in the world today. In such cases, you are the only source of good spoken English your students will have. Listening to each other is not a substitute for listening to you. They need to have opportunities to listen to and understand input that is slightly more difficult and a lot more fluent than that which they can produce themselves.

Teacher talk can take the form of explicit language teaching: explanations of grammar or vocabulary, for example. Or it can be instructions on how to do an activity or what the homework is. Or feedback on student activity: corrections, comments on how something went, a summary of a discussion. Or initiatives of your own to let them hear you talk: stories (see Tip 79 in the book), or short presentations or talks (on the importance of learning English, for example!).

So don’t feel guilty that you’re talking too much, or that your classroom is too teacher-centred!

Use mother tongue occasionally
In most English teaching situations, students share a mother tongue (L1) which is known also to the teacher. There are still some teachers and teacher educators who claim that the L1 should never be used in the English classroom: but I don’t agree.

Although obviously we want to maximize the amount of English that students hear during the lesson – as I’ve stressed above – this does not necessarily mean that we should never use the L1. If we insist on speaking exclusively in English when students are not understanding, we are conveying the messages that English is incomprehensible, or that it’s OK not to understand – messages which surely we don’t want our students to get. And a lot of students get frustrated and demoralised by their lack of comprehension: it makes them feel stupid.

A more positive argument is that the fact that students already know one language can be used to help learning. Occasional use of the L1 in our own speech can add clarity, provide useful insights into how the language works, and save time which can then be used for further engagement with English. So use L1 in, for example, the following situations:

• If there’s an explanation of grammar or vocabulary which would be too difficult for the students in English, explain quickly in the L1 and then use the time saved to provide, or elicit from students, examples of the target items in use.
• If students are commonly making a mistake based on L1 interference, show them what the difference is between the two languages that produces the mistake: it will help them avoid it.
• If students can understand most of the content of what you are talking about – for example, when you’re telling a story – allow yourself to translate an unknown word here and there, to help students follow.