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Interview with Dr. N.S. Prabhu

by Alan Maley

A.M.

Well Prabhu, its very nice of you to agree to give this interview to The Teacher Trainer and
nice to have you back in Cambridge.

N.S.P. Thank you.

A.M.

Can I ask you, what have been the most significant events in your own teaching life?

N.S.P. Early in my ELT career, I stumbled on Harold Palmers Principles of Language Study. Its a
very small book. I really was greatly moved by what I thought was a pedagogic sense of
intuition and excitement in that book. Its a book Ive read again and again since then. The
other thing was Chomskys Syntactic Structures. Its equally small! These two books had a
great influence on me. In a way, Ive been trying to make sense of language teaching in a way
that is in harmony with those two views. Other than that, its been actual teacher training that I
have learnt a great deal from. And from 1979-1984, every day teaching on the Bangalore
project was a real stimulus to thinking.
A.M.

From my own knowledge of you, I know that trying out ideas on people and getting a
response, even if its disagreement has always been very important to you.

N.S.P. Yes, I see professional progress in those terms. I think thats the source of growth for the
profession; the growth of ideas in different people and the development of these together, the
influencing of one another, gradually, imperceptibly.
A.M.

If we can just pass on to the Bangalore Project as its popularly known. What would you say
were the defining features of that project? What made it different from other classroom
research projects (of which admittedly there had been very few until then)?

N.S.P. I think it came, at least in Southern India, at a time when there was a wearing off of peoples
belief in the structural approach. There was a kind of psychological readiness. In my own
mind, the idea that grammatical competence might best be provided through a preoccupation
with meaning took shape suddenly as a result of earlier tentative thinking. I saw it as taking
Harold Palmers thinking a step further.
Because of the psychological readiness, a few people in the project said, Why dont we go
ahead and do it in the classroom? And also it seemed a good way of stimulating professional
discussion in the light of actual teaching and evidence about teaching made available to
people rather than going on with seminars etc. So, it was one way of getting professional
discussion going and making it more meaningful.
A.M.

Was it ever your feeling that the pilot project could be generalised to national or state level?

N.S.P. I suppose when we started I would have said Yes but Id also have said that we wanted to
work on it for a while before we could say it was something that deserved to be done on a
larger scale. And indeed, within the first year it became clear that the model (of piloting
followed by large scale implementation) wasnt going to do justice to the project. It was
thought best to influence teachers and then teaching gradually.
A.M.

I know youve always been somewhat sceptical of large-scale implementation of other

peoples ideas, partly because the originators understanding and experience arent there.

N.S.P. Yes, and in fact the implementation of the structural approach in India shows that. It became a
fixed set of procedures which teachers carried out with no sense of involvement, and in some
cases actually with a sense of resentment. I cant think of that kind of teaching being beneficial
to learning, whatever the method.
A.M.

Could we pass on to your present work in Singapore at the National University? Are you doing
any work there similar to the work in South India?

N.S.P. Not really. I dont think it would be easy at all in Singapore. First of all the education system is
much more effectively controlled than in India. Secondly, wanting to try out a new method
would imply that the methods already being followed in the schools are less than good. In
Singapore, there are these sensibilities. Being an expatriate I dont think Ill be able to attempt
anything like trying out a new method. Probably thered be more controversy than productive
work. So my teaching is confined to Post Graduate Courses, electives in Applied Linguistics
for students majoring in English on Honours or M.A. courses.
A.M.

But you do still have a number of things that concern you deeply about the processes of
language learning and training teachers?

N.S.P. Im thinking more and more about what it means for a teacher to work with some
understanding of how the teaching leads to learning, with some concept that has credibility to
the teacher himself. Also, about what it means for the teacher to be influenced by other
concepts and how ideas change. To the extent that we can understand this, we can look for
ways to clarify and facilitate the process.

What I want to do when I get back to India is keep an open house for any teacher who wants
to walk in and talk about teaching. It doesnt matter if its only two or four teachers. I want to try
to get the teachers to state on paper what theyve said. Trying to write, clarifies things. It
straightens ones thinking. It reveals and develops new thoughts. This is the process writing
philosophy. So, a small number of teachers trying to state their perceptions, and then other
teachers trying to state their perceptions but taking in the perceptions of the first group - this
can not only help those teachers immediately but it can also reveal to us some of the
processes by which teachers perceptions work and form. Perhaps theres room for something
like a journal not in the sense of learned articles but of teachers statements circulated to
other interested teachers.
A.M.

In a sort of networking mode?

N.S.P. Yes.

A.M.

What youve been talking about, youve given a label to, namely a sense of plausibility?

N.S.P. Yes. I think in teaching, as in any human interaction activity, one needs to work with some
understanding, some concept of what is going on. In teaching,. How the act of teaching
might lead to the act of learning. That conceptualisation of intentions and effects and so on is
a sense of plausibility. I call it that because I dont want to make any claims about its being
the truth. For that teacher however, it is the truth! There is a very real sense in which our
understanding of phenomenon at any one time is the truth for us.
There is also in teaching, as in other recurrent interactions, a need for routinisation. But if the
job becomes over-routinised, there is no sense of plausibility engaged. The sense of
plausibility gets buried or frozen or ossified. From that point of view, the aim of professional
activity should be to keep the teachers sense of plausibility alive and therefore open to
influence by the on-going experience of teaching and interaction with other teachers
perceptions and senses of plausibility. I think that is the process of teacher development.
There has to be some measure of routinisation but there needs to be some room for
something being at stake, some scope for satisfaction and dissatisfaction, so that something is
learned from the act of teaching.
A.M.

Is there anything youd like to say about teacher training in connection with the Bangalore
Project?

N.S.P. We did surprisingly little teacher training on the project actually. Initially it was a group of about
five people who had participated in the seminars and discussions leading to the project. In the
first year we tried out different kinds of lessons jointly so they were a part of the evolution of
the teaching procedure. About 12 teachers came to the project in subsequent years. Mostly
they had attended the Annual Review seminar, got interested and offered to join the project.
The seminar gave them some idea of the philosophy, and as for the practice, all they did was
watch the teaching of other people in the project for about two weeks, teach a couple of
lessons, watched and commented on by one of the existing members of the project and after
that they went ahead and taught.
A.M.

It seems to be based on a sitting with Nellie model. You watch other people doing it, you do
it yourself and reflect on what youve done and discuss it.

N.S.P. Yes, and thereafter you learn in the process of doing it yourself. But, these were people who
found themselves interested in the project and volunteered, so that possibly makes a
difference. There was one teacher, or trainer actually, who was drafted onto the project. He
tried for four or five months but I dont think he ever understood what was going on.
A.M.

Were doing this interview for The Teacher Trainer, a journal which is a little bit along the
lines of the newsletter you were mentioning. The aim is an exchange of an informal kind
between teacher trainers. Would you have any message for teacher trainers? Any perceptions
youd like to share with them?

N.S.P. I think the problem in teacher training is finding a way of influencing teachers thinking without
seeking to replace their existing perceptions. Teachers ought to be able to interact with ideas
from outside and those ideas have to be available to them and, in fact, to be put forcefully so
as to give them full value. But how to do this without psychologically intimidating or cowing
down teachers or demanding acceptance of the ideas is, I think the problem of teacher
training. Its giving value to what teachers think but giving value too to the ideas one puts to
teachers.
A.M.

Thank you very much. Thats very interesting.

Reference
Prabhu, N.S. (1987) Second Language Pedagogy O.U.P.

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LEARNER INDEPENDENCE:
A WEEKEND SEMINAR FOR TEACHERS IN BAVARIA
Bruce Pye
This article gives a brief account of a teacher-training weekend on the subject of learner independence
(LI). I hope there is something in it for those with an interest in LI and also for those interested in the
methodology of teacher-training seminars in general.
After some necessary information about the participants and their teaching situation, and about the aims
of the seminar, the account covers the materials used and the way the seminar developed, from the initial
warm-up to the results produced by the group.
The Participants
The seminar, which was run by myself and a colleague, Jenny Richardson-Schlotter, was held under the
auspices of the Bayerischer Volkschochschulverband (Bavarian Association of Adult Education Institutes)
and had been advertised as offering ideas and materials to encourage learner independence. It ran from
Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime, some 16 contact hours, was residential and had eleven participants.
These were teachers from various Bavarian Volkschochschulen (VHS), teaching extensive courses in
general English to adults, mostly in the evening, mostly for 90 minutes once a week, mostly using a
course book they may not have had much say in choosing.

Our Aims
In preparing the seminar we wanted our methodology to embody at least some of the principles of LI
which we were aiming to introduce our teachers to. This meant giving our participants as much autonomy
as feasible within the restraints imposed by short time, fairly low-tech resources, and above all the
participants own expectations as we were able to anticipate them from our previous experience.
In general, participants on such seminars are a lot more interested in practical classroom ideas than in
theory (which may have been a reason for the relatively low number of participants in our seminar). We
therefore felt that some sort of tangible results should emerge from the mists of consciousness-raising. To
produce concrete results of any kind, the participants would have at some point to set themselves specific
aims. We saw it as our job to help them reach this point with enough time left for their aims to be realized.
Warming Up
The seminar began with small group discussion tasks on various topics related to the general theme of the
seminar. Thus a group could choose between tasks such as:

Make notes about something you have learned recently at home or at work, and how you went
about learning it,

Complete the sentence A good learner is..

Discuss how teachers can promote learner autonomy.

Compile a list of the advantages and disadvantages of self-instruction.

Discuss your own expectations of this seminar.

We aimed to provide a range of discussion impulses varying from the personal and anecdotal to the more
academic and abstract. The most popular topic proved to be the participants own experience as language
learners.
Input: The Library
The core of the seminar comprised a library of some 21 photocopied articles and short extracts from
books. Participants were free to read as much or as little as they wanted, and in any order they chose.
They were also free to read entirely on their own or to work with a partner or partners.
It was our intention that the reading should lead via discussion and negotiation to the participants defining
aims and setting themselves tasks for the rest of the seminar. The articles and extracts provided
information and food for thought on such topics as: learning strategies and learner types, techniques and
ideas for self-assessment and self-monitoring, identifying learner needs and motivation, negotiating
course content, learning to learn, project work. We also included one or two short texts on recent views of
second language acquisition. Overall we were aiming for a selection of materials providing educational,
linguistic and methodological perspectives on LI.
Catalogue, Checklist, Report Form
We deliberately avoided categorizing texts as offering educational perspectives on LI, learner training
materials, or whatever. Apart from the difficulty of the task, we wanted to influence the participants in their
choice of reading as little as possible. We did, however, provide a guide to the bank of texts, giving the
briefest possible information about the content and the number of pages (between 2 and 8). In the case of
extracts from books, the books were also available for further consultation.
In addition to the library catalogue, participants were also provided with a kind of pre-reading checklist,
actually a form of learner contract. Our intention was to try and get the participants to make themselves
firm promises about what they were going to read.

To encourage them to monitor their thoughts while reading we had also prepared a sort of report form for
notes. This emphasized the participants emotional as well as their intellectual responses to their reading,
encouraging them for example to make a note of ideas which they found surprising, or hard to accept, or
which they would like to know more about or discuss with their colleagues later.
As it transpired, the relatively formalized contract and commentary form were quickly abandoned by most
participants in favour of informal individual procedures. Participants made ad hoc decisions about what to
read next, and used their own paper for their individually preferred styles of note-taking.
Plenary Discussion
The bulk of Saturday morning was taken up by individual reading. Saturday afternoon began with a
plenary and provisional reports and feedback about what had been read. The discussion was unusually
interesting and fruitful for a plenary session, precisely because no two people had read exactly the same
things, and whilst one or two participants had skim-read their way through a large part of the material,
others had got immersed in one subject and had read little but in depth. The exchange of tips and
recommendations led to a general desire for further reading time and another hour was allotted for this.
Jenny and I had had some misgivings about basing so much of the seminar on an extended phase of
individual reading. Our Bavarian seminars are usually pretty lively, sometimes even hectic affairs with
everyone interacting as if there were no tomorrow. There is a danger of equating the noise level directly
with the success of the undertaking. It was therefore a relief as well as a source of gratification when our
participants expressed their appreciation of the peace and quiet and freedom to work on their own.
Group work, Group results
From the reading there emerged three main areas of interest, which were now pursued in group work.
These were: 1) progress checks, learner diaries and learner contracts; 2) differentiation and pacing within
a course; 3) self-access learning.
Further concentration of focus and effort led to one group working with a group member to produce a
learner contract. The contract was for an Englishman working in a management capacity in a German
firm. He had learned German with little formal instruction and was particularly keen to improve his written
skills in the language. The group helped him to analyse problems and clarify aims, suggested activities
and offered him information about the availability of materials.
The second group produced a number of recommendations relating to differentiation within a class. This is
a classic VHS issue as courses tend to be either very heterogeneous or so small that they have to be
cancelled.
The third group produced a list of activities which learners can pursue by way of accompaniment to their
VHS course. This ranged from general, and familiar, ideas like watching satellite TV to more specific
suggestions such as corresponding with fellow course participants in English and tips to do with
homework.
Classroom Implications
Following the presentation and discussion of results, the tutors and participants agreed to switch the
focus, in the short amount of time remaining, to classroom activities. Following a presentation by the
trainers of some learning-to-learn activities and learner-created materials, the group split into two halves to
discuss in one case the role of the teacher within a framework of self-directed learning, and in the other to
try and find ways of making a course book unit more negotiable for the students.
Not surprisingly, these discussions proved somewhat inconclusive. We would have needed another
weekend, and by now we were all tired out. This was indeed a pity because, by returning to some central
issues of the classroom situation, we were in a very real sense just beginning. However, I suspect that a
great deal of life is like that, and not only teacher-training.

Acknowledgements
It is only fair to mention the contribution made to our seminar planning by various articles and suggestions
for further reading in, (at the time of publishing), INDEPENDENCE, the newsletter of the IATEFL Learner
Independence special interest group. The group is now called Learner Autonomy. A version of this
article appeared in Issue No. 5, Spring 1989. A special acknowledgement is also due to the account by
Marion Geddes. A teacher training workshop on individualisation in Individualisation, edited by Marion
Geddes and Gill Sturtridge, Modern English Publications, 1982.

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One important part of a trainers job is giving public talks or workshops.

Though as teachers we are very used to working in front of and with groups of people,
somehow doing this with peers or national and international colleagues can seem more frightening.
We have thus included in the journal quite a lot of help over the years on how to run
training sessions. Below, Andrew Wright, an occasional speaker, gives us his tips.

Some notes on giving talks at conferences

By Andrew Wright

Thank goodness the idea of workshops has been developed in recent years. But it would be a great
shame if talks or lectures were rejected out of hand. I have no doubt that lectures will always have a
useful role. The question for me is how to make them as worthwhile as possible.
The way one gives a talk is a reflection of a personal relationship with the receivers and with the
subject; it is also a reflection of how one responds to the context both immediate and more general.
On the whole, my talks have been about the use of games and activities. I dont assume that the forms
I use for this sort of theme would always apply to other people. However, colleagues might like to hear
how a fellow occasional lecturer goes about things. Here are some of the ideas which are important
to me:
The receiver is as important as the subject
So all the normal communicators criteria apply. Who are the receivers? What do they know already of
the general area and of the specific subject you wish to deal with? What is their attitude to it? How do
they value it? What form of communication are they used to? Would a different form please or offend
them? What relationship do they conventionally have with a speaker? Must you mix
authority/credibility with personal understanding? Can the teachers cope with broad perspectives in
abstract terms or do they prefer instances?
The peripatetic speaker
You probably dont know the people you are talking to individually. I feel the need to speak to people I
dont know before the talk so I usually try to get my things set up early and then chat to people as they
come in. It helps me. I sometimes look for something that I can acknowledge in the people there in my
talklike how they have given up time to come..or that the best holiday for a teacher is watching
another teacher working or I may try to comment on a more weighty aspect of what I am told concerns
them, for example, a change in public examinations. Alternatively, I might begin by saying, Ive never
taught in your schools and so cannot possibly advise you how to teach. Please see me as a traveling
tinker who has various ideas and is offering them to see if they are of any use.
Starting with activities
Although I share the same general world of language teaching with the people there I do not share
any specific experience that I can refer to. So I often like to begin with activities of some sort without
explanation and then, after about ten minutes, stop and point out the issues which I think are
important. In this way we have a common experience and a reference point. Dramatically it is
marvelous to begin immediately with activities because the listeners become participators and there is
so much more excitement. If the activities are intriguing, then curiosity is aroused, the listeners
become active as they take part and, at the same time, search for an idea of why you have got that
activity going. At the SPEAQ Conference in Quebec I began by juggling. Then I asked for a volunteer

and taught him to juggle. About half way through I asked people to make a note of the sort of
language we were using and this gave them a hint of the point I was working towards.
The structure
Starting off with the broad structure of the talk does not appeal to me. However, I always try to give it
after about ten minutes. And I do feel that it helps to be following a structure so people feel you know
where you are going. A rigid structure or more particularly, written-out notes or even the full text is
disastrous because people feel they cannot affect things and if they do you may be totally thrown.
Perhaps the feeling of what I want to convey is even more important than the structure of the
presentation I have in mind. The wonderful thing about being guided by feeling is that you are
adaptable and that everything you say and doeven the little thingsis filled with a sense of
unity of purpose. For me the feeling is usually that I want to enjoy myself with everyone there.
Individuals
I need the participation of the people there. For this reason I build into my talks activities all the way
through. And I always try to respond fully to individuals. If there is a very demanding individual, I
usually try to respond but if they seem to be determined to go up an alley (in my view) I will say
something like, thats a very interesting point. I dont think I can cope with it at the moment. Perhaps
we can talk about it afterwards. If someone is being aggressive for some reasons, I sometimes put
the point back to everyone else, inviting a response and then it is normally dealt with to everyones
satisfaction.
Pace
I do think that pace is important. There is room for slow and fast pace. A slow pace should never be
because of muddled notes or inadequate control of the a/v equipment etc. but because that is the
nature of the feeling of the activity. If people feel you are talking slowly and moving slowly for a
significant purpose, they can be on the edge of their seats! But I tend to like a fast pace for at least
some of the time. In this I like to introduce the idea of tantalizing people, perhaps by doing something
nice with them and then stopping it just as they are beginning to drop from the height of their
involvement.
Market Sellers of blankets and cheap crockery have some great techniques. One of them is to
address, with some intensity, a particular person in response to a comment he might have overheard,
or to some gesture or movement he claims to be able to interpret. An intense moment or two with
someone about halfway to the back and slightly to one side is so intriguing for everyone else. Done
too much it might be irritating though!
Jokes
I love to be involved in the subject and in the whole act of trying to communicate. For me the moment
is so important. I am prepared to risk a lot to try to relate to people. This can be done by jokes,
anecdotes and a bit of fun but if the teachers feel that there is nothing more to the talk than fun they
will go off feeling pretty cheated. Obviously they have to feel that you care about the subject, you know
about it and you can see it from their point of view. Jokes just told to warm up the listeners are a
mistake, I believe. The joke should arise out of the concept being developed and should highlight
aspects of it.
There are so many things I dont know about in everything I have a go at, obviously. If one of them
comes up I say so and without shame. I think I may disillusion a few people but I hope this is
outbalanced by the feeling that I am, after all just like them, doing my best but far from infallible.
Take-home ideas
In most of my talks I try to get activities going and some individual responding and thinking going on
too. However, I feel that there is very often an expectation that a lecturer is going to give them
something which can be used on Monday. Many teachers have hardly been to inservice training
before and are more likely to feel positive and helped if they have something positive to take away with
them than if they have simply undergone an unusual experience. I think if one can give the teachers
some things they can actually use and which contain the living yeast of a new way of thinking they

will have a chance of realizing the power of the underlying idea through the act of experiencing its
success in their own classrooms.
Gesture and movement
For me these are important. For large groups of people between 30 and 500 I think gestures and
movement are very important. (Above 500 people and the back rows probably cant see your body
movements! So voice, speech and a big OHP screen become the vehicles.) Body movements help to
emphasise the way you are structuring your talk, and the pace (like a conductor). They help you to
stress detail and they help you convey feeling. They allow you to indicate individuals you may be
talking to.
Big gestures are important for large groups. People used to talking to large groups sometimes find it
difficult to talk to small groups. (Similar to a difference between acting for film and acting in the
theatre?)
Gestures and movements can either be used to support spoken language or to offer contradictory
concepts and feelings or they can be used on their own without speech.
I think you use gestures should be known to the people you are talking to and not gestures from your
home area and not personal mannerisms without any communicative direction.
It is silly but I feel slightly ashamed to talk about gesture and movement. I suppose it is because of the
long history of dominance of the world and the scorning of non-verbal forms. Yet body movement is
one of the most powerful ways of affecting people for better or for worse.. so continuing I think
we would speak of the need for clearly articulated gestures as we would speak of the need for clearly
articulated speech. I believe that gestures should be timed to fit with spoken language ( or the other
way round like Mrs. And Mr. !!!!!!) Gestures should usually only take place with one part of the body at
once..the mimes arm unfolds, the hand unfolds and the finger and then it points! Im sure
theres more to it than that but I havent studied the grammar of body movement.
And, to return to my very first point, whilst believing that we must communicate we must obviously do
so in our own way.
Visuals
OHP visuals are useful in several ways:

if you are nervous, then you can base your whole thing on transparencies and they will
take you through your talk.
they give an alternative way of saying what you are trying to express orally.
they can do some things you cannot do orally particularly giving a holistic view of a
number of different relationships.
some people need to see an idea written down.

Andrew Wright is a teacher, teacher-trainer, author and visual artist as well as being able to juggle and ride a mono-cycle!
Working freelance at the time of writing he had recently given seminars in Italy and South America and written some lively new
readers for EFL students.

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This series publishes original or revised versions of papers given at major conferences.
Our aim here is to make sure that worthwhile contributions informing colleagues of
recent work and thoughts should be available also to those who cant get to the conferences!

Teaching, Teacher Training and Applied Linguistics

by Rod Bolitho

Language teachers, and particularly teachers of English as a second or foreign language, are under
ever-increasing pressure to acquire a masters degree in addition to a post-graduate teaching
certificate. A glance at the appointments columns in the educational press will confirm what many
teachers already know to their cost: that state and private sector employers in many countries are, for
whatever reason, insisting more and more on academic credentials as well as a basic professional
qualification. In a buyers market it is clearly their perfect right to do so, and yet it is a worrying trend
for those of us who value professional know-how at least as highly as academic excellence in a
classroom teacher.
It is my contention that this trend is persuading far too many teachers to set their sights on
professional advancement through academic prowess rather than through a more humanistic
assessment of their own development needs. Add to this the worry shared by many in the field of
language teaching that Applied Linguistics is an ill-defined field of activity a young discipline with a
mild identity crisis, perhaps and some of the very real concerns of this essay begin to crystallise. In
it, I will examine some recent contributions to the discussion of the relationship between theory and
practice, and suggest a basis for a more healthy relationship.
In an article published in 1982 in English Language Teaching Journal, Christopher Brumfit and
Richard Rossner offer their decision pyramid model as a point of departure for their discussion of
teacher training and the structure of the language teaching profession. They postulate four levels of
decision (see Figure 1) and three levels of teacher training.

FIGURE 1
Decision Pyramid Model

1. Approach
Academic courses
(MA upwards)
2. Syllabus design

3. Materials construction
In-service training
4. Classroom decisions
Initial Training

From this it will be seen that they regard pre-service training as being essentially concerned with
classroom-level decisions, and only very marginally concerned with superordinate issues of approach.
In-service training is seen as legitimately concerning itself with all four levels of decision. Academic
courses at M.A. level and beyond, however, are seen as only slightly concerned with the classroom,
and primarily occupied with questions of syllabus design and approach. If, as I suspect, this is a fairly
accurate representation of the status quo in teacher training, or even if it represents an ideal for
Brumfit and Rossner, the implications are worrying for several reasons:
1.

The pyramid model is hierarchical, and it implies the closing-off of avenues of professional
development for all but the privileged few.

2.

Even if the implied dynamic of the model is bottom-up, it is all too easy to see it as topdown (most hierarchies work this way), in which case it places superordinate decisions,
which ultimately affect what goes on in the classroom, in the hands of academics who rarely
if ever see the inside of a classroom. In this sense, the model is also paternalistic; it
encourages teachers to trust in those higher up rather than to seek ways of tackling their
own professional problems. So it is open to abuse as a justification of superiority by
academics and as an excuse for doing nothing by teachers.

3.

It therefore devalues teaching as a lower-order activity.

4.

It is a convergent, academically-oriented model, apparently taking no account of all the other

factors which might contribute to the personal and professional development of a teacher.

An alternative view, more difficult to realize

graphically, would be to classify syllabus
designers, material writers, teacher trainers and
applied linguists (not to mention publishers and
examining bodies!) as service providers to the
teaching profession: essentially parasites who
depend on the classroom encounter, on the
teaching/learning activity, for their very existence.
This might help teachers to take a more robust
view of their own worth and to increase their selfesteem.
In another article in English Language Teaching Journal, Henry Widdowson argues that teachers
should concern themselves more with theory:
No matter how concerned teachers may be with the immediate practicalities of the classroom,
their techniques are based on some principle or other which is accountable to theory.
and then:
I would wish to argue, then, that language teachers have the responsibility to mediate
changes in pedagogic practice so as to increase the effectiveness of language learning, and
that such mediation depends on understanding the relationship between theoretical principle
and practical technique. To dismiss theory is to undermine the possibility of such an
understanding and to create the very conditions for the bandwagon effect that many who
belong to the practical brass tacks school so vigorously criticize.
(Widdowson 1984)
These are arguments which Widdowson reiterated emphatically in his opening address to this seminar
(Widdowson 1986), and they deserve attention and comment, both in relation to the situation of
schoolteachers in Hong Kong, and with a more global perspective.
Let me state straight away that my own stance is not anti-theoretical, and that I do not belong to the
(largely mythical?) brass tacks school which Widdowson refers to. Operating between the extremes
of the spectrum which extends from an unthinking preoccupation with technique all the way to an
unhealthy concentration on the abstract, there is a population of principled practitioners who, fully

aware of the priority they must accord to the routine demands of the classroom, nevertheless realize
that there are areas of theory which deserve their attention as they work their way towards a better
understanding of the teaching/learning process. These practitioners do not need reminding of the
value of theory, but to suggest that they should be mediators between theory and practice is to
misunderstand the role which theory plays in their professional lives. Applied linguists, like most
people who work in academic institutions, write because publications are expected of them. It is right
that they should put up their views for consideration by a wider public. Teachers, on the whole, do not
need to write. Much of their creative energy goes into the classroom encounter. It is right that it should.
Does that necessarily mean that teachers ought to read what applied linguists write? Most teachers
would prefer to choose what they need to read, basing their decision on a realistic assessment of their
own strengths and weaknesses. Like other professional people, they will need only to have the options
laid out for them.
Theory is often perceived as gratuitous on pre-service courses (rightly or wrongly) since few trainee
teachers have the basis of classroom experience they would need to furnish a proper perspective for
theoretical issues which are dealt with, whether these are drawn from linguistics, psychology or
elsewhere. Teachers in-service are constantly confronted with practical problems and may feel
themselves, particularly in state education, to be too busy mediating between their students and
inadequate textbooks, between their students parents and the institution and between 1,001 other
conflicting demands, to consider any more remote form of mediation. Indeed, they may point, with
some justification, to areas of theory which have contributed more confusion than enlightenment to
their practice in recent years: the communicative revolution with all its half-baked interpretations in
various contexts has led to a great deal of insecurity; conflicting theories of second language
acquisition have also caused uncertainty.
A principled practitioner, however, will continue to glean what he/she can understand and use from
these theories, through careful reading of journals attendance at conferences, etc. He/she will also
pose questions to the theorists along the lines, maybe, of those posted by Richard Rossner to Pit
Corder in a recent interview:
But an implication of this view of language learning* is that there will be great uncertainty in
the teachers mind about what he or she should do precisely. Even if one accepts that
optimum conditions for language learning have to be provided by the teacher, involving
comprehensible input and meaningful tasks, as well as language awareness-raising
activities, some tremendous questions still remain. What kind of comprehensible input does
it matter? What kinds of task does it matter? In what order does that matter? What
guidance, if any can applied linguistics offer to these areas? Is it still the teachers
responsibility to provide a programme of work for his or her learners? What is to go into that
programme?
(Corder 1986)
* In an exchange of views with Dick Allwright, Corder has just expounded on the merits of acquiring language while focusing on
something non-linguistic, allowing learners to make use of their knowledge of the world to help them to learn the structure of
the language.
The answers to these (any many other!) questions will, however, be worked out co-operatively if at all.
It is unreasonable to expect theorists to answer them unless they spend more time in classrooms, and
to expect teachers to answer them unless they have more time to think. Teachers do not take kindly to
imposed decisions, handed down directly or indirectly, from higher up the pyramid, or to guilt-inducing
admonitions to concern themselves more with theory.
It is, of course, to be expected that those who populate the higher slopes of the pyramid will seek to
protect their own positions in the hierarchy (especially if this involves them in teaching only a few
hours per week to small, motivated groups of postgraduate students, leaving abundant time for
thinking, research and work in publications), and even to sell their wares.
Those who run courses at Masters level can be expected to extol the virtues of the content of such
courses, just as a double-glazing salesman might be expected to be vigorous in his attempts to sell his
product. However, double-glazing has some known side-effects which are far from pleasant; in
providing better heat and sound insulation to a building, for example, it often creates problems of
condensation. This is clearly unsatisfactory, as the consumers initial decision to purchase was almost
certainly solution-oriented. Similarly, a teachers decision to take, say, an M.A. in Applied Linguistics,

or in ELT is often solution-oriented, in which case the potential for disappointment is already there.
The analogy had better end here, however, for a double-glazing salesman inhabits a different career
pyramid from most of his customers and wields no power or influence in their respective professional
spheres. Those who run Masters courses in Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, by contrast,
seem to wield considerable power and influence, and it is difficult for those lower down the pyramid to
see other solutions to the dilemma surrounding professional advancement.
It is difficult, too, to go along unreservedly with the elitist position suggested by Brumfit in his otherwise
excellent chapter in this book. He maintains (Brumfit 1986) that in any system there should be a
minority of teachers who have had time off to reflect. What are the criteria for allowing such periods of
time off? What are the options open to a teacher? Most paid time off is granted to teachers who are
prepared to devote it to gaining a higher qualification usually on a taught course. Unpaid leave may be
the only solution for those who really do need time to reflect. All too often, financial support is allocated
on an arbitrary basis, or is available only to a privileged few. Unpaid leave can be contemplated only
by those with considerable private means, and thus almost never by breadwinners in families. Nice as
it may be for those running Diploma or Masters courses to have a steady population of sponsored or
rich postgraduate students on their courses, this is not a solution to the need for professional
development felt by the vast majority of teachers at some time in their careers. As long as a
hierarchical system is seen to operate, there will be those who make progress and those who dont. As
long as applied linguistics remain in universities and express themselves in terms which teachers find
difficult to understand, but somehow feel they ought to understand, as long as the rules for
professional advancement are devised by academics so that training takes place on their territory and
on their terms, teachers will continue to feel inferior. As long as teaching continues to be regarded as a
lower-order activity, involving high stress, large numbers of contact hours and low pay, and as long as
those involved in theory have visibly less of the first two and considerably more of the last-mentioned
commodity, there will be im-balance in the profession. It is unfortunately true that, for every
Widdowson or Brumfit, with their valuable ideas about language and language learning, there are
dozens of academics who provide little or no impetus in the profession, and who nevertheless spend
long years occupying privileged positions in the hierarchy. How many university lecturers go back to
teaching? And it simply will not do, given the impact of their discipline on language teaching and
learning, for applied linguists to assert (as some do!) that they lay no claim to practical relevance on
their courses, and that teachers who come on them have no right to expect any practical orientation.
As the decision pyramid makes clear, it would be wrong to expect applied linguists to concern
themselves much with technique, but the concerns of language learners and teachers must also
remain those of applied linguists, otherwise their very raison detre will surely vanish.
So what ways forward are there for teachers who wish to develop personally and professionally? This
is the current concern of the IATEFL* special interest group on Teacher Development, formed in 1987
in the UK. Conceived resolutely as a bottom-up movement, this group has begun to explore different
ways of breaking with established thinking on professional advancement. It is neither anti-intellectual
nor anti-establishment in its approach. It seeks merely to explore as many different avenues as
possible, thereby widening the choice for teachers. However, given the traditional emphasis on the
acquisition of qualifications (very much part of the having mode identified so clearly by Erich Fromm
(1979)), it is perhaps natural that many of the early contributions to the work of the Teacher
Development group have been concerned with being: being a better teacher, a better listener, a
better colleague, a more balanced and integrated person. Adrian Underhill, the founder of the T.D.
group, put it this way:
What is missing from our thinking about teacher training and teacher development is a real
understanding of precisely how teachers grow and change, based not on armchair theory but
on the vigorous experience of what actually happens and what could happen inside ourselves,
our colleagues and our students. (Underhill 1984)
The central impetus provided by the special interest group and its newsletter Teacher Development
has led to the formation of local and institutional support groups of teachers in many parts of the U.K.,
and this seems to be helping teachers to identify and define their own development priorities, instead
of having them laid out before them by those higher up the hierarchy. It is too early to say what effect
these groups might have, but there must be, at the very least, a move to engage school managements
in both state and private sectors in a discussion of staff development needs. The huge state
investment (in most countries, not just the U.K.) in the pre-service training of teachers leads employers

to expect delivery of batches of well-prepared professionals to their institutions. The realization that all
teachers need professional refreshment after a spell of wrestling with problems thrown up in the daily
classroom encounter is an uncomfortable and potentially expensive one for employers. Yet the need
for both personal development and professional updating remains. If it is articulated clearly and often
enough by those who feel it, pressure will eventually mount for appropriate provision to be made in the
career structure of every teacher, and not just the privileged few. If this involves a major shift of
resources and manpower from pre-service to in-service training, and a consequent re-examination of
the relationship between classroom and practice and theory, between teachers, trainers and applied
linguists, so much the better. We might even see teacher-training relocated in schools and applied
linguists in classrooms, listening to students and teachers, and remembering what it feels like to teach.
By doing this, they will be making themselves available to teachers to co-operate on here and now
problems such as the preparation of suitable tests for communicative teaching programmes, designing
new syllabi and teaching materials, formulating realistic learning objectives for learners at different
stages of development and analyzing learners errors and thereby they will be engaging themselves at
first hand in the real world of language learning. If they were able to take this step, the basis for mutual
respect and genuine interchange would soon be established.
*IATEFL International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language
References
Brumfit, C. A Whole Profession Model of Continuing Teacher Education, 1986 I.L.E. International Seminar Papers (Hong
Kong)
Brumfit, C. & R. Rossner. The Decision Pyramid and Teacher Training for E.L.T. English Language Teaching Journal, 36/4
(1982)
Corder, S.P. Talking Shop: Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. English Language Teaching Journal, 40/3 (1986)
Fromm, E. To Have or To Be, Abacus, 1979.
Underhill, A. A Quest for Permanent Evolution. E.F.L. Gazette, September 1984
Widdowson, H.G. The Incentive Value of Theory in Teacher Education. English Language Teaching Journal, 38/2 (1984)
Widdowson, H.G. The Pragmatics of Language Teacher Education. 1986 I.L.E. International Seminar Papers (Hong Kong).
Note
Teacher Development , the newsletter of the IATEFL special interest group is available from IATEFL.
This article first appeared in Re-exploring C.E.L.T. edited by Verner Bicklay and is reproduced here with permission.

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Some ideas stay with us for years and years and the idea of using
a foreign language lesson as an interactive demonstration on an initial
teacher training course is one of those ideas.
Just a week ago I received a draft article from a trainer using
the foreign language lesson on her course in Japan and wanting to share
a variation with readers of the journal. So when I re-read the article below
reprinted from Volume One Issue Two, and remembered its classic
trainee-centred and realistic rhythm, I knew it was one for the web archive!

The foreign language lesson-trainees prepare

the trainers demonstration
by John Carmichael
Many initial teacher training courses contain an element of demonstration by an experienced teacher in
which trainees are placed in the position of the foreign language learner so that they experience teaching
techniques from the receiving end. They are given a lesson or a micro-lesson in Arabic or Japanese for
example. As has been recognised, this procedure runs the risk of dazzling the relatively inexperienced
trainee with a display of techniques which s/he will find difficult to emulate within the typically short
duration of the training course. S/he may be daunted rather than impressed. It can be very frustrating for
the beginner on the slopes to be expected to admire the performance of a skiing virtuoso. As a result
trainers often make a point of building in to their demonstrations deliberately bad practices that can be
highlighted on the subsequent discussion.
A useful variation on this technique is to get the trainees to think through an appropriate procedure (for a
particular micro-skill such as dialogue building, handling a listening comprehension or teaching a lexical
set for example) before being taught in the foreign language. To take teaching a lexical set as a detailed
example, tell the trainees that you would like to teach them seven or eight words in a foreign language
(e.g. word for different fruits). You, the teacher, would like these words to become part of their active
vocabulary. How would they like to be taught? What procedure do they think would be most effective in
achieving this aim?
Get the trainees to discuss this in small groups and note down a detailed procedure. Monitor the groups
and prompt if all the relevant issues have not been considered (e.g. When do you want to see the written
form? How many times do you want to hear the word before you are asked to say it yourself? How many
times do you want to say each word? What context do you want to practise the words in?). Get members
of different groups to exchange their ideas and then, with the whole class, draw up a consensus
procedure on the whiteboard. Differences of opinion at this stage can serve to highlight the need to
accommodate the different learning strategies to be found in any group of students. Then teach the
vocabulary using the procedure provided by the trainees. Follow the recipe they have given you exactly.
After this, repeat the group/whole class discussion so that the trainees can evaluate the suggested
procedure in the light of their experience and suggest any amendments they wish. This overall process of
planning in the abstract and then assessing and re-evaluating in the light of experience directly parallels
the experience of trainees in their own lesson planning and classroom contact.
Here is an illustration of the before and after procedures that one group of trainees came up with.
Before
Use visual aids to convey meaning.
Teacher gives the model for the first word twice; students listen and then repeat chorally and individually.
Follow this procedure one word at a time.

Write the words on the board and get students to read them off, checking pronunciation.
After
Use visual aids to convey meaning.
Teacher shows visual and says all the word while the students listen.
Teacher gives a model for the first word two or three times; students listed then repeat chorally and
individually. Highlight pronunciation and stress where necessary. Don't dwell too long on students who are
having initial difficulty reproducing the word. They can be given the opportunity to listen to other students
repetitions. Come back to them later.
Build up a lexical set. Reap as you go along and at the end, both in order and in random order.
Practise the words further in a personalised context (e.g. talking about likes or preferences).
Elicit the words again from the students as you write them on the board. Highlight any peculiarities of the
written form.
Matching exercise; students write the words (jumbled at the bottom of the page) next to the appropriate
pictures.

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Towards Reflective Teaching

by Jack C. Richards
Department of English, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong

Most teachers develop their classroom skills

fairly early in their teaching careers. Teachers
entering the profession may find their initial
teaching efforts stressful, but with experience
they acquire a repertoire of teaching
strategies that they draw on throughout their
teaching. The particular configuration of
strategies a teacher uses constitutes his or
her teaching style. While a teachers style of
teaching provides a means of coping with
many of the routine demands of teaching,
there is also a danger that it can hinder a
teachers professional growth. How can
teachers move beyond the level of automatic
or routinised responses to classroom
situations and achieve a higher level of
awareness of how they teach, of the kinds of
decisions they make as they teach, and of the
value and consequences of particular
instructional decisions? One way of doing this
is through observing and reflecting on ones
own teaching, and using observation and
reflection as a way of bringing about change.
This approach to teaching can be described
as Reflective Teaching, and in this paper I
want to explore how a reflective view of
teaching can be developed.
What is reflection?
Reflection or critical reflection, refers to an activity or process in which an experience is recalled,
considered, and evaluated, usually in relation to a broader purpose. It is a response to past
experience and involves conscious recall and examination of the experience as a basis for evaluation
and decision-making and as a source for planning and action. Bartlett (1990) points out that becoming
a reflective teacher involves moving beyond a primary concern with instructional techniques and how
to questions and asking what and why questions that regard instructions and managerial
techniques not as ends in themselves, but as part of broader educational purposes.
Asking what and why questions gives us a certain power over our teaching. We could claim
that the degree of autonomy and responsibility we have in our work as teachers is determined
by the level of control we can exercise over our actions. In reflecting on the above kind of
questions, we begin to exercise control and open up the possibility of transforming our
everyday classroom life.
Bartlett, 1990. 267

How does reflection take place?

Many different approaches can be employed if one wishes to become a critically reflective teacher,
including observation of oneself and others, team teaching, and exploring ones view of teaching
through writing. Central to any approach used however is a three part process which involves:
Stage 1 The event itself
The starting point is an actual teaching episode, such as a lesson or other instructional event. While
the focus of critical reflection is usually the teachers own teaching, self-reflection can also be
stimulated by observation of another persons teaching.
Stage 2 Recollection of the event
The next stage in reflective examination of an experience is an account of what happened, without
explanation or evaluation. Several different procedures are available during the recollection phase,
including written descriptions of an event, a video or audio recording of an event, or the use of check
lists or coding systems to capture details of the event.
Stage 3 Review and response to the event
Following a focus on objective description of the event, the participant returns to the event and reviews
it. The event is now processed at a deeper level, and questions are asked about the experience.
Let us examine approaches to critical reflection which reflect these processes.
Peer Observation
Peer observation can provide opportunities for teachers to view each others teaching in order to
expose them to different teaching styles and to provide opportunities for critical reflection on their own
teaching. In a peer observation project initiated in our own department, the following guidelines were
developed.
1. Each participant would both observe and be observed
Teachers would work in pairs and take turns observing each others classes.
2. Pre-observation orientation session
Prior to each observation, the two teachers would meet to discuss the nature of the class to be
observed, the kind of material being taught, the teachers approach to teaching, the kinds of
students in the class, typical patterns of interaction and class participation, and any problems
that might be expected. The teacher being observed would also assign the observer a goal for
the observation and a task to accomplish.
The task would involve collecting information about some aspect of the lesson, but would not
include any evaluation of the lesson. Observation procedures or instruments to be used would
be agreed upon during this session and a schedule for the observations arranged.
3. The observation
The observer would then visit his or her partners class and complete the observation using
the procedures that both partners had agreed on.
4. Post-observation
The two teachers would meet as soon as possible after the lesson. The observer would report
on the information that had been collected and discuss it with the teacher (Richards and
Lockhart, 1991).
The teachers identified a variety of different aspects of their lessons for their partners to observe and
collect information on. These included organization of the lesson, teachers time management,
students performance on tasks, time-on-task, teacher questions and student responses, student
performance during pair work, classroom interaction, class performance during a new teaching
activity, and students use of the first language or English during group work.
The teachers who participated in the project reported that they gained a number of insights about their
own teaching from their colleagues observations and that they would like to use peer observation on a
regular basis. They obtained new insights into aspects of their teaching. For example:

It provided more detailed information on student performance during specific aspects of the
lesson than I could have gathered on my own.

It revealed unexpected information about interaction between students during a lesson.

I was able to get useful information on the group dynamics that occur during group work.

Some teachers identified aspects of their teaching that they would like to change as a result of the
information their partner collected. For example:

It made me more aware of the limited range of teaching strategies that I have been using.

I need to give students more time to complete some of the activities I use.

I realized that I need to develop better time management strategies.

Longer term benefits to the department were also cited:

It helped me develop a better working relationship with a colleague.

Some useful broader issues about teaching and the programme came up during the postobservation discussions.

Written accounts of experiences

Another useful way of engaging in the reflective process is through the use of written accounts of
experiences. Personal accounts of experiences through writing are common in other disciplines
(Powell 1985) and their potential is increasingly being recognized in teacher education. A number of
different approaches can be used.
Self-Reports
Self-reporting involves completing an inventory or check list in which the teacher indicates which
teaching practices were used within a lesson or within a specified time period and how often they were
employed (Pak, 1985). The inventory may be completed individually or in group sessions. The
accuracy of self-reports is found to increase when teachers focus on the teaching of specific skills in a
particular classroom context and when the self-report instrument is carefully constructed to reflect a
wide range of potential teaching practices and behaviours (Richards, 1990).
Self-reporting allows teachers to make a regular assessment of what they are doing in the classroom.
They can check to see to what extent their assumptions about their own teaching are reflected in their
actual teaching practices. For example a teacher could use self-reporting to find out the kinds of
teaching activities being regularly used, whether all of the programmes goals are being addressed,
the degree to which personal goals for a class are being met, and the kinds of activities which seem to
work well or not to work well.
Autobiographies
Abbs (1974, cited in Powell 1985) discusses the use of autobiographies in teacher preparation. These
consist of small groups of around 12 student teachers who meet
for an hour each week for at least 10 weeks. During this period of time each student works at
creating a written account of his or her educational experience and the weekly meetings are
used to enable each person to read a passage from his or her autobiography so that it can be
supported, commented upon by peers and the teacher (43).
Powell (1985) described the use of reaction-sheets sheets student teachers complete after a
learning activity has been completed in which they are encouraged to stand back from what they
had been doing and think about what it meant for their own learning and what it entailed for their work
as teachers of others (p.46). I have used a similar technique in working with student teachers in a
practicum. Students work in pairs with a co-operating teacher and take turns teaching. One serves as
observer while the other teaches, and completes a reaction sheet during the lesson. The reaction
sheet contains the following questions. What aspects of the lesson were most effective? What

aspects of the lesson were least effective? Would you have taught any aspect of the lesson
differently? Why? The student who teaches also completes his or her own reaction sheet after the
lesson. Then the two compare their reactions to the lesson.
Journal Writing
A procedure which is becoming more widely acknowledged as a valuable tool for developing critical
reflection is the journal or diary. The goal of journal writing is,
1.

to provide a record of the significant learning experiences that have taken place

2.

to help the participant come into touch and keep in touch with the self-development
process that is taking place for them

3.

to provide the participants with an opportunity to express, in a personal and dynamic

way, their self-development

4.

to foster a creative interaction

between the participant and the self-development process that is taking

place

between the participant and other participants who are also in the process
of self-development
between the participant and the facilitator whose role it is to foster such
development

(Powell, 1985, Bailey, 1990)

While procedures for diary keeping vary, the participant usually keeps a regular account of learning or
teaching experiences, recording reflections on what he or she did as well as straightforward
descriptions of events, which may be used as a basis for later reflection. The diary serves as a means
for interaction between the writer, the facilitator, and, sometimes, other participants.
Collaborative Diary Keeping
A group of teachers may also collaborate in journal writing. A group of my colleagues recently
explored the value of collaborative diary-keeping as a way of developing a critically reflective view of
their teaching (Brock, Ju and Wong, 1991). Throughout a 10 week teaching term they kept diaries on
their teaching, read each others diaries, and discussed their teaching and diary keeping experiences
on a weekly basis. They also recorded and later transcribed their group discussions and subsequently
analyzed their diary entries, their written responses to each others entries and the transcripts of their
discussions, in order to determine how these three interacted and what issues occurred most
frequently. They reported that:
Collaborative diary-keeping brought several benefits to our development as second language
teachers. It raised our awareness of classroom processes and prompted us to consider those
processes more deeply than we may otherwise have. Collaborative diary-keeping also
provided encouragement and support; it served as a source of teaching ideas and
suggestions; and in some sense it gave us a way to observe one anothers teaching from a
safe distance
By reading one anothers diary entries, we were able to share our teaching experiences, and
we often felt that we were learning as much from one anothers entries as we were from our
own. Reading and responding to the entries led us back to our own teaching to consider how
and why we taught as we did.
These teachers observed however that
1.

collaborative diary-keeping is more effective if the scope of issues considered is

focused more narrowly.

2.

a large block of time is needed

3.

participants must be comfortable in sharing both pleasant and unpleasant experiences

and be committed to gaining a clearer picture of their teaching and their classrooms.

Recording Lessons
For many aspects of teaching, audio or video recording of lessons can also provide a basis for
reflection. While there are many useful insights to be gained from diaries and self-reports, they cannot
capture the moment to moment processes of teaching. Many things happen simultaneously in a
classroom, and some aspects of a lesson cannot be recalled. It would be of little value for example, to
attempt to recall the proportion of Yes-No Questions to WH-Questions a teacher used during a lesson,
or to estimate the degree to which teacher time was shared among higher and lower ability students.
Many significant classroom events may not have been observed by the teacher, let alone
remembered, hence the need to supplement diaries or self-reports with recordings of actual lessons.
At its simplest, a tape recorder is located in a place where it can capture the exchanges which take
place during a lesson. With the microphone placed on the teachers table, much of the teachers
language can be recorded as well as the exchanges of many of the students in the class. Pak (1985)
recommends recording for a one or two week period and then randomly selecting a cassette for closer
analysis. This recording could be used as the basis for an initial assessment. Where video facilities are
available in a school, the teacher can request to have a lesson recorded, or with access to video
equipment, students themselves can be assigned this responsibility. A 30 minute recording usually
provides more than sufficient data for analysis. The goal is to capture as much of the interaction of the
class as possible, both teacher to class and student to student. Once the initial novelty wears off, both
students and teacher accept the presence of the technician with the camera, and the class proceeds
with minimum disruption.
Conclusions
A reflective approach to teaching involves changes in the way we usually perceive teaching and our
role in the process of teaching. As the examples above illustrate, teachers who explore their own
teaching through critical reflection develop changes in attitudes and awareness which they believe can
benefit their professional growth as teachers, as well as improve the kind of support they provide their
students. Like other forms of self-inquiry, reflective teaching is not without its risks, since journal
writing, self-reporting or making recordings of lessons can be time-consuming. However teachers
engaged in reflective analysis of their own teaching report that it is a valuable tool for self-evaluation
and professional growth. Reflective teaching suggests that experience alone is insufficient for
professional growth, but that experience coupled with reflection can be a powerful impetus for teacher
development.
References
Bailey, K.M. 1990. The use of diary studies in teacher education programmes. In J.C. Richards and D. Nunan (Eds), Second
Language Teacher Education (pp. 215-226). New York: Cambridge University Press
Bartlett, Leo. 1990. Teacher development through reflective teaching. In J.C. Richards and D. Nunan (Eds), Second Language
Teacher Education (pp. 2002-214). New York: Cambridge University Press
Bond, D.R. Keogh and D. Walker (Eds). 1985. Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning. London: Kogan Page.
Brock, Mark N., Bartholomew Yu and Matilda Wong. 1991. Journaling together; collaborative diary-keeping and teacher
development. Paper presented at the International Conference on Second Language Teacher Education, City Polytechnic of
Hong Kong, April 1991.
Pak, J. 1985. Find Out How You Teach. Adelaide, Australia: National Curriculum Resource Centre
Powell, J.P. 1985. Autobiographical learning. In Boud, et al. (pp. 41-51).
Richards, Jack C. 1990. The teacher as self-observer. In Jack C. Richards, The Language Teaching Matrix. New York:
Cambridge University Press (pp. 118-143)
Richards, Jack C. and Charles Lockhart 1991. Teacher development through peer observation. In press. TESOL Journal.
Schn, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Temple Smith

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At the IATEFL Conference, Edinburgh 1988, I had the chance to talk

to two trainers from afar. Ephraim Weinbraub told me of his work with
teacher memories and Jane Revell about her work on video
materials for teaching English through other subjects such as Maths and Biology.

Trainer Talks

A talk with Ephraim Weintraub, Teacher Trainer at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem
After Ephraims workshop The ghosts behind the blackboard we had a chat over coffee. These are
some of the things Ephraim said:
I see the teacher as rather a lonely person, stranded on the island of the classroom, cut off from
colleagues by walls and corridors and from the students by desks and blackboards. The teacher is
subject to pressures and demands of all sorts. To finish the syllabus, to get exam successes, to
keep the classroom orderly, to help pupils gain jobs, to be both controlling and understanding. I have
an image of the teacher as a tight-rope walker or a juggler.
Teachers are other-person oriented and tend to forget themselves. They are often under stress, burnt
out. There is a great necessity for teachers to face themselves. If they dont, they cant face others.
They have to have a dialogue with themselves before they can converse with their pupils. But there is
a great reluctance in teachers to do this, to face the stress.
rd

In my work in Jerusalem, I take 3 year B.A. Postgraduate students on a TEFL teacher training
programme, and teach English 8 hours a week in a High School. I train teachers at the Hebrew
University too and Im a teacher-counsellor for teachers and students in any subject area. So I see
most sides!
Sometimes I ask people how many teachers they have had in their lives. The answers range from I
cant remember to 75 to one too many. I ask people to write down their memories of positive
experiences and negative experiences as students and to share them in groups. Most people have
strong residual memories and if you classify the memories they share, you find that the clusters of
characteristics around good teachers are:1. The teacher as expert who dazzles the pupils with knowledge.
2. The teacher as parent, warm and accepting.
3. The teacher as a peer or fellow adult.
These characteristics reflect our underlying desires as teachers.
The characteristics clustering around the black ghosts
or bad teachers memories are:1.

The teacher as attacker, punisher,

aggressor, or even

2.

The teacher as sadist.

3.

The teacher as incompetent or just no

good!

Once teachers or students have shared their memories and discussed them, they realise that there is
both a good and bad teacher in all of us, and that its okay to feel anger inside but how we channel it is
a matter of moral responsibility.
What is essential is that we integrate our memories, our experiences into our initial or pre-service
training so that the ghosts of teachers past are acknowledged and faced. Teaching technique is not
unimportant but it is empty unless the ghosts have been dealt with. Once each individuals good and
bad ghosts have been identified they can then be referred to by peers or the trainer throughout the
course. Lets suppose someone has a bad ghost called Mr. Barnaby and a good one called Miss
Martin. As the teacher with these ghosts goes through the course, the group can say That sounds like
something your Mr. Barnaby would say/do! or How would Miss Martin have dealt with that? or
That reminds me of Miss Martin! In this way, the past can be referred to in a non-threatening way, in
an evolutionary way. People can move on.

A Talk with Jane Revell, Author and Teacher Trainer in the Canary Islands
(at the time of interview)
I asked Jane about her recent work in teaching English through another subject, i.e. teaching, say,
photography or crafts or geography in English to non-native speakers wanting to learn English.
Ive recently been involved in compiling a video made up of authentic TV sequences. Its for 11-14
year olds learning English. Its not a normal scripted EFL video, although I did work to a structural
syllabus. Rather Ive found educational programmes on Science, Geography and other subjects.
These programmes were made for native English speakers. They are good quality TV, with good
content in English.
Ive then screened it for linguistic constraints. So,
for example, Ive found some footage for the
Present Simple in sequences such as Why do
elephants have trunks? and How do you cool a
cuppa in the quickest way? Once Id sorted though
the TV programmes to find good films with
interesting content within the linguistic constraints I
had, I took it to some native speaker teachers to
see how they felt they could use it.
The teachers came up with two main questions:1.

How can I use the video when the pupils dont know the subject content, let alone the
English?
How can I use the video when I dont know the subject content myself?

2.

I would answer the first question by saying that pupils often know more than teachers about elephants
or tea or whatever so they can be the knowers for a change. Secondly, its quite okay for people not
to know the content. If you watch the video, then youll know. Its a good reason for both teachers and
students to watch the video! You can learn things!
Its interesting that native English speakers reacted this way. Perhaps it is the case that nativespeaking language teachers go into E.F.L. because its content-secure. They have a natural
competence in the language that gives them security. If asked to branch out into new content areas
like Maths or Geography or Science, they may feel insecure in the subject. On the other hand maybe
some native-speaking teachers will feel the need for more content, for something more to get their
teeth into since the language itself need not present them with challenge. These teachers may
welcome English through content subjects warmly.
Either way, I see some possible solutions for teachers who are native speakers:-

Teachers can do research themselves into the new content.

Teachers can be trained in the new content.

Teachers and students can join together in joint discovery via the material

But for non-native teachers, already struggling with the language they are trying to teach, and often
working with large classes of unmotivated students, we cant really ask more of them. Perhaps the
solution here is to have inter-disciplinary, cross-curriculum contact. One foreign language teacher
could team-teach with one content teacher and they can teach the language and the subject together.
Alternatively, the foreign language teacher could teach some of the content subject but then have a
chance to ask questions to the subject teacher later. Of course this is not a new idea in itself. Primary
School teachers (such as the ones shown in the Old British Council Teaching Observed videos) have
been doing this for years. It does raise some very interesting issues however, such as, can the
publishers provide suitable material for this sort of venture, for example?
We cant train EFL teachers to know 20 different other subjects so our choices are to
a) help them accept their own insecurity in the other subject areas
b) help them to team-teach with subject teachers
c) run cross-curricular teacher training courses. Ideas would be given out and then everyone
would work out the ramifications of the ideas for their subject area. Discussion would
follow on both the content and language details implied.
d) run teacher training courses where the higher order cognitive skills that cut across
language and subject skills, are taught.

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Here is another article from our very popular series:

People who Train People
All the facts in the article were true at the time of writing but
of course may have changed slightly over the last ten years.
Penny Aeberhard runs a medical general practice with two other
doctors in Stoke Poges, England. She has been a doctor for 30 years
and regularly trains apprentices.

Training for general practice

by Penny Aeberhard
General Background
Medical school training in the U.K. is changing slowly. Over the last two decades departments of
General Practice have been set up in Universities and there are now even a couple of professors of
General Practice. There is a greater interest in psychology and behavioural sciences. But it is still quite
possible for a newly qualified doctor to have only had two weeks experience in practice out of five
years of undergraduate study. Most of those five years, focus on medicine as a science: strings of
cause and effect, symptoms and signs, laboratory tests and prescriptive medication the basis of
hospital medicine. However, back in 1966, when the Charter of General Practice was produced, it was
recognised that a good General Practitioner (GP) needed more than that. At that time General
Practice was in the doldrums. Professional respect and job satisfaction was very low. Emigration of
doctors peaked at this time too. But the Charter was a turning point and succeeded not just in
encouraging good practice but also in winning professional respect over a time so that now the
majority of newly qualified doctors aim to enter General Practice. Back in the 1960s too, Balint, a
psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Clinic and his group of GPs were starting to analyse the doctor-patient
relationship. This analysis continues to this day.
From the time of the Charter, the existing training scheme for GPs was expanded until in 1981 it
became compulsory, by law, that all new GP principals*(1) had to have undergone, after initial
qualification and one year preno -Lregistration work, three years of approved further experience. This
is two years in hospital in four approved specialities such as paediatrics, psychiatry, gynaecology or
geriatrics, plus one year in one or two approved practices. The scheme is overseen by a board of
certification. At present, at any one time, there are around 2,000 trainee GPs in their General Practice
year. They are organized into districts and regions to facilitate the group meetings and discussions
that occur half to one day a week. For the rest of the time they work as an apprentice under their
approved trainer.
The Selection of Trainers
Trainers do not as yet have a nationally agreed approval board. In all areas, however, the applicant,
an experienced general practitioner, has to provide evidence of some ability to teach, and to have a
high standard of patient care and good consultation skills, bedside manner, if you like. In the Oxford
region this selection is rigorous and three visiting doctors will spend a whole day interviewing nurses
and receptionists who work in the practice; scrutinizing the patient notes that have to reflect a high
standard of care and organisation; and, furthermore, assessing the trainers suitability of attitudes and
skills. The latter is done by discussion and analysis of a videoed consultation. Trainers are now well
respected members of the profession. They no longer use trainees as just an extra pair of hands in a
busy practice but give thorough teaching.
What is a Good GP?
To select trainers, academic boards have had to start to define what they think good General Practice
is. Quality in practice is a big debating point now and there are attempts to define too, exactly what a

trainer is trying to give to a trainee. The training year is not cheap, as a trainee doctor is paid the
salary of her/his last post by the training practice and yet the training practice is only paid 2,400 p.a.
Of course patients in the lucky practice get a good deal, but the practice and the profession must
justify the expenditure.
What are these criteria at the present time, then, and how are they being taught? Criteria for a good
GP and curriculum for a trainee are one and the same.
Some years ago, vast curriculum checklists were produced of clinical illnesses, emergencies and
procedures. Trainer and trainee would try and collect cases to discuss at their two-hour tutorial. But it
was clear that GPs were just emulating hospital doctors and trying to compete and be specialists in
everything. It is not ever possible to see more than a sample of conditions in a year. The idea was
bound to fail. But what is important for a generalist is to learn that the management of a chronic illness
can be similar whether it is diabetes or arthritis. To be able to recognize that there are medical and
social aspects to these diseases is what counts as well as the long term responsibility to these
patients. In practice one sees illness in early, unformed stages. In hospital the disease process has
crystallized into a more definitive diagnosis. GPs have to learn at times when to be patient and wait,
for so much illness gets better spontaneously, and to tolerate their own anxiety because over
diagnosis and treatment are not appreciated by patients. There are times, of course, when action has
to be prompt and accurate to be safe. A trainee has to gain this discrimination by experience. A fruitful
source of learning here is the discussion, often after a long day, of the trainers surgery*(2).
Alternatively the trainee can sit in on the trainers surgery or vice-versa or the two of them can share a
surgery. This sharing of patient care means a greater spectrum of illnesses can be covered.
Can you teach Communication skills?
Acknowledging, then, that lists of diseases are not necessarily the best curriculum, what should be
covered? Back to the idea of what is good General Practice. Communication has to be an important
skill, until recently undervalued by the profession but instantly recognized by patients. How is it to be
taught? Is it possible to teach a good bedside manner or is it simply intuitive? Analysis of consultation
by different techniques, e.g., Balint-type discussion; listening to tape recordings; interviewing patients
before and after seeing the doctor have all been used so that we now understand the processes better
than ever. Psychologists have helped us analyse non-verbal and bodily communication too. One of
the tools used in General Practice is now the frequent use of a video camera in consultations (with the
patients permission). Trainer and trainee can then look at different aspects of communication and
different styles. One ten minute consultation can be viewed and then ensuing discussion can take an
hour. An example here is observation of behaviour used by a GP to attempt to end a consultation,
e.g., dropping of eye contact, pulling back from desk, writing out prescriptions, shuffling papers,
standing up or helping the patient on with their coat. Trainees can be made aware of abrupt or rude
behaviour. Though intuitive for some, good consultations can be taught and even the good can be
bettered.
Another aspect in the curriculum for good practice is liaison with, and respect for, other professionals
(such as district nurses and health visitors) working in the Primary Health Care Team.
The opportunity to accompany others in their jobs, and, hopefully, seeing a good team meeting and
working together is the best education, and will lead to effective communication within a group.
Management Skills
General practitioners are independent contractors to the Health Service and therefore the business
administration side must also be covered in training. Patients appreciate efficient and kind
receptionists, a good appointment system and pleasant, warm reception areas. The jungle of claim
forms and regulations must mean that by the end of the year the trainee doctor should at least be
equipped with a machete and map!

Some of this can best be taught by a traditional lecturing format in the Day Release scheme with
others, but for the information to be meaningful, the trainee should be present at the partners
business meetings, meet the accountant and understand for example how sick pay is calculated when
a receptionist is ill.
One to One Training Methods
We are aware of how in a one-to-one situation we should be able to offer a training flexible enough to
take into consideration the trainees own perceived needs as well as the professions thoughts on what
is good. Formal assessments are needed therefore to plan the individual curriculum, as well as to
assess progress and avoid collusion between trainer and trainee to miss out a boring or weak area.
Assessments in General Practice training have developed, not just through the professionals skills,
but have also been gleaned from psychologists working in businesses and hospitals, and from the
wider teaching profession.
Teaching assessments often go hand in hand, for instance, with video analysis. To make the best out
of video viewing and discussion there are now many tools available. One example is the map, a form
filled in while watching the video. If the video is of a GP/patient consultation for example the viewer
can jot down notes under headings such as Patients concerns. Patients expectations.
Involvement of patient in management of illness. After the video watching and mapping comes the
rating where the viewer ticks along a scale from, for example, Patient involved in management
adequately and appropriately to Involvement in management inadequate or inappropriate. The
Manchester rating scales can be used following a direct observation (sitting-in, viewing through a
one-way mirror or using audio or audio-visual techniques) or indirect observation (a report or later
discussion of an observation) and again involve ticking along a scale as the following:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Patients are treated with disdain, as little children or

Doctor always tries to build an adult-adult relationship

stupid with no opinions, or no right to voice them.

with patients.
Patients are encouraged to be more self-aware, more
questioning and more self-reliant.

Little boxes are also used:

Never

Sometimes

Usually

Always

Clean, neat and appropriately dressed

Non-authoritarian manner
Shows respect for patients ideas
Etc.

Rating scales can look at simple parameters such as tidiness of the room or at more complex
behaviours or attitudes. The aim is not to rank trainees but to teach them, to encourage them to
develop or change a set of behaviours. In this the content of the rating scale is as important as the
outcome of the assessment.
As well as maps and rating scales there are also quite sophisticated examinations that search for
breadth of experience and lateral thinking and these are indeed part of the examination for the
membership of the Royal College of General Practitioners. These, along with vivas (oral
examinations) and multiple choice questions, are assessments that may be carried out several times
along the course of the year.
The Apprenticeship
I have touched on some aspects of the history of training in General Practice in England and on some
of the perceived priorities of curriculum and assessments as well as on the one to one apprenticeship
relationship between trainer and trainee. Apprenticeship has a bad name in England unlike in the rest

of Europe where tradespeople in general are held in high esteem and the apprentice is also valued
and paid appropriately. Apprentices are taught their craft by practice and example. The General
Practice apprenticeship is a rare and good example of this system in the U.K. The relationship is a
very close and bonds of friendship develop. The trainee can contribute to the ongoing development of
the trainer and the practice. The trainer must, however, be aware of not cloning the trainee! Individual
strengths should be brought out indeed, doing so is one criterion of a successful trainee-ship.
Variety of Training Methods
The personal growth and knowledge of the trainee must be fostered by a variety of training methods.
The two-hour weekly tutorial involving didactic teaching by the trainer (so often perceived as the only
way to teach in hospital) works best if seen as sharing new discoveries with the trainee contributing
and must be supplemented by self-criticism and audit of work. Audit of work means not presuming
you know what your behaviour in a certain area of work is but deciding to log it in some way and
analyse it. An example would be looking at the giving of prescriptions to patients. This could be logged
and then analysed for different features e.g. costs of what you prescribe or types of medication
prescribed. Then you decide what you want to do. You may decide to prescribe lower cost medication.
You then re-log and re-analyse to see if you have changed your behaviour. You can audit your own or
the practices work. Auditing is a tool to keep day to day work fresh. It forces isolated GPs, in the
rather God-like roles they often have, to be down-to-earth and self critical.
It is important too that the personal stress that a GP may feel is recognised and shared and for GPs to
have their own doctor! This way GPs have a better chance of knowing how to help others, allowing
the patients to control their own lives and make independent choices.
Conclusions
To be taught by example, to be stimulated by enthusiasm, and gain confidence in ones skills must be
part of apprenticeship. Part of it too is the ongoing development of the trainer. We hope both trainees
and trainers in the apprenticeship system will stay students for life.

*(1) A principal is a GP partner sharing full responsibility for the running of a practice.
*(2) Surgery in England is the time when people can come to the GP to discuss their symptoms and obtain advice and
prescriptions for medicine which they then take to a chemists.

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USING GAMES IN TEACHER TRAINING

Sarah Walker
In these days of a communicative approach to language teaching, language-learning games are
a standard part of most teachers repertoire of techniques for classroom use. So far, though, less
thought seems to have been given to using games in teacher training and development.
Training courses often cover games for classroom use. But my intention here is to propose
games that do not require the trainee or teacher to pose as a student. The games described will
all be adaptations of fairly standard classroom games. They can be used in the real training
situation, but trainees can be invited to take the format and adapt it back to a game suitable for
target student groups, in the framework of materials design sessions.
For me, there are at least three justifications for the inclusion of games in training sessions. The
first is that intensive training courses are often competitive and therefore create tension. The
trainer, like any other teacher, must be concerned with lowering thresholds of fear and with
channeling positive motivation towards high levels of achievement. A well-timed game can do this
effectively.
My second justification is that the format and style of the ELT teacher training course (TTC)
should in itself provide a model of good classroom practice. Tessa Woodward (1) points out the
need to link content with process in a TTC, in practical ways that will reflect what we hope our
trainees will achieve in their own classrooms. If the aim is to reduce teacher talk and increase
student input in the ELT classroom at the end of the line, the same should be true of the training
course.
My third justification is the necessary devolution of power from teacher to learner and from trainer
to trainee. In this context, I am grateful to Julian Edge, who commented recently that the powerdichotomy for teachers and learners resolves itself when the teacher or trainer provides a
structured space within which the learner or trainee can develop (2). This, in my view, is an
excellent metaphor. In the early stages of this process, the space may need to be clearly and
closely structured. Games normally provide this structure in palatable ways. It is understood that
a game involves rules, but that the rules will be obeyed. But the players themselves administer
and interpret the rules and negotiate variations. Having set the game in motion, the trainer can
really withdraw.
Finally, I would like to take up a comment by Alan Maley (3) about student language learning
materials, which he sees in many cases as either excessively serious or overpoweringly trivial. I
feel that the majority of teacher training materials err on the side of the excessively serious. I
believe that playing with serious ideas can sometimes remove the threat from academic learning
and bring back a lost element of fun.
Here, then, is a series of games for use in training or development sessions.
Game 1: Career Development Snakes and Ladders
Objective: To encourage trainees on an introductory Teacher Training Course to think of ELT as
a career, rather than just a job. It can also be used in in-service or Teacher Development courses
to give teachers a chance to think how far they have got in their career and where they would like
to go.

Materials: One large blank sheet of paper or cardboard and one dice per group of 3-4 trainees. A
ruler is also useful.
Procedure:

1. Arrange trainees/teachers in groups of 3 or 4.

2. Give each group a large sheet of paper, and ask them to divide in into 32 or 64 squares
depending on the size of the sheet of paper. (32 or 64 squares can be produced by folding
the paper). Each square should then be numbered, as in a snakes and ladders game (i.e.:
begin in the bottom left hand corner. Number the first line of squares from left to right, the
second line from right to left, and so on.)
3. Tell each group to arrange about 10 snakes and about 10 ladders anywhere on their
board. They should then write a negative career event (e.g. Burnout: you are unable to
face your beginners class) at the head of each snake, and a positive one (e.g. Your
article is accepted for publication by a teaching journal) at the foot of each ladder.
4. When boards are complete, invite the groups either to play their own game (by throwing
the dice and moving a marker the appropriate number of squares), or to change boards
with another group and play the game prepared by their colleagues.
5. After one round of the game, compare the boards and discuss the different perceptions of
success and failure in an ELT career that they contain.
Comment: I have a feeling that part of the fun of this activity comes from the product, and that
sessions where trainees, teachers, or students, actually work on an end product are usually very
stimulating.
Acknowledgement: The idea of using Snakes and Ladders for student activities comes from
Grammar Games by Mario Rinvolucri (published by Cambridge University Press). This is an
adaptation of much the same idea to Teacher Training/Development
Game 2: Terminology Call my Bluff
Objective: To take a light-hearted look at some of the terminology trainees may come across and
have to deal with in their reading.
Materials:
List of words to be defined. Copy of The Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics or other
source of ELT terminology definitions.
Method:
1. Trainer arranges class in groups of 3 or 4.
2. Each group is given about 4 key words (or phrases or acronyms) to define. (Alternatively,
trainees can select their own words.)
3. For each word, 3 definitions are prepared (one true definition and two false ones).
4. After a reasonable period (10-15 minutes) for preparation, two teams are formed. Each
team should contain the same number of groups.
5. Each team presents one word at a time, reading out the 3 definitions. The other team must
try to identify the correct definition.

Example: INTERLANGUAGE (possible definitions)

a) a language used as a means of international communication (False)
b) the type of language patterns that occur in interviews (False)
c) the type of language produced by students who are in the process of learning a language
(True)
List of 20 possible terms for definition:
phoneme
contrastive
analysis
overgeneralization
salience
illocutionary force
proxemics
CALL
dyad
RP
chain drill
construct validity
homophone
IPA
TPR
monitoring
code switching
fricative

SLA

Acknowledgement:
The idea of using EFL/Linguistics terminology for Call My Bluff comes from my colleague, David
Coles, who also suggests Terminology Charades (in which each syllable of a term would be acted
out and then the whole word.)
References:
(1) Woodward, Tessa: Process Options 2: Loop Input in The Teacher Trainer, No. 0 Autumn 1986
(2) Edge, Julian: Communication during a session on Cooperative Development at the University of Brasilia,
November 1989 (unpublished so far)
(3) Maley, Alan: Exquisite Corpses, Men of Glass and Oullpo: harnessing the irrational to language learning in
Humanistic Approaches: and Empirical View ELT Documents 113, the British Council, 1982

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Writing as a Learning Process in

Teacher Education and Development
by Alison Haill

Abstract
The article describes a teacher-training experiment in which the trainees, who were experienced
teachers, were required to react in writing to their course as it progressed, that is to process the
information as they received it. This writing formed the basis of a valuable tool of communication
between the trainer and the trainee. The experiment is evaluated and a detailed description given so
that the experiment can be copied or modified for use elsewhere.
Introduction
I first encountered journals when I came into contact with the US National Writing Project in S.E. Asia
in 1983, by attending a course for teachers on teaching writing. By then, I was told, it was common
practice for teachers of English as a first language to encourage their students to keep a journal: in
this notebook the student would jot down ideas and observations, and write to unwind and reflect
(Blanton 1987; cf also Walshe 1981 and Fulwiler 1980), sometimes writing in class at the teachers
suggestion, sometimes not.
The Experiment
In training teachers of EFL/ESL, I encouraged the use of the journal as a learning log, a place for the
trainees to write their own personal reactions to, and thoughts about, the subject matter of the course.
The trainees knew their journals would not be marked, but read and responded to by me, so the
journal served as a tool for both communication and personal reflection or processing. I had used a
journal in this way myself on the teachers course in 1983 and again in 1986 and found it useful.
The teachers I trained were experienced Singaporean primary teachers and the compulsory course
they were attending, on which I taught, was on teaching English at primary level; it was held at and run
by the British Council in Singapore. Education in Singapore is through the medium of English and the
teachers standard of English was very high. The course lasted two 10-week terms, and as an
experiment I used journals with my two classes of trainees, 10 in each group, for the 20 week period.
Each week the trainees attended 2 two-and-a-half hour theory/methodology sessions or workshops at
the British Council (referred to henceforth as the sessions); they were observed teaching their own
classes at their own schools and continued to teach alongside their attendance of the course. I taught
each group for one session per week.
Rationale
I wanted my trainees to get involved in the course to a satisfying level (Torbe and Medway 1981, 345) as I had done through my journal writing in 1983 and 1981. As well, I wanted to give them the time
and encouragement to reflect on the course as it progressed: to further process the ideas they
encountered in it. I also hoped to discover how they were reacting to and interpreting the activities,
ideas and materials they encountered during the course; this was particularly important as the course

was compulsory and some of the teachers were mature, experienced teachers, reluctant to attend it at
all. Moreover I wanted feedback on the experiments they made with their own classes as a result of
the ideas set in the sessions.
The setting up of journal writing with two classes of trainees
I asked each of my trainees to provide an exercise book to use as their journal or learning log. In it
they were to write what they felt about the course material as the course progressed, ask questions,
voice doubts, make comments. When I took the books in after each session, I commented in the
margin, on the opposite page or below the entry in answer to their queries and observations, or merely
voiced a reaction to what they had said, sometimes at length, sometimes with a word. I never
indicated or commented on language errors, focusing only on
content. (Some trainees might request that errors be indicated or corrected though mine did not. The
trainer would then have to decide whether to agree to this change of focus in the exercise.)
In his article on letter writing with students, Rinvolucri (1983) describes the build up of trust and a
personal relationship between teacher and each individual student which are similar to the objectives
of the experiment I describe here. However, among the primary aims of my exercise was to allow the
trainees time to reflect on the issues of the course as well as to exchange information about their
teaching problems, needs, their reactions to new methodology etc. In other words although the written
communication between me and my trainees in the journals was very similar to letters, the subject
matter was largely restricted by my prompts. Although trainees did feel free to write on other matters
(e.g. illness which made it hard to keep up with the course) it was clear from the prompts I gave that
the journals were not an invitation to bare the soul on any topic at all. In addition it would be odd to
write a letter in the presence of the recipient. It seems in my case wisest therefore not to call the
writing a letter however much the styles may be similar.
How they knew what to write
On the first two occasions with each group when I asked them to write in their journals, I gave full
instructions so that they knew what kind of writing was wanted: viz,
Write down your thoughts in response to the following prompts. You need not answer them all
or answer them in order. Try to write continuously for 10 minutes. If you dry up, re-read the
prompts to find something else to write about. Instead of thinking before you write, try, thinking
on paper WHILE you write. Dont worry about mistakes in your English as this writing will not
be marked, only read for its content. It will only be read by me.
I followed this with prompts. I always gave prompts to start off the journal entries, though with a longer
or more intensive course this could become unnecessary.
On one occasion the prompt was
Describe your feeling about the lesson I observed you give last week. Was my presence
useful? Scary? Unhelpful? As a result of the lesson could you make any resolutions for your
teaching in the future? Is there anything different I could do next time?
Another prompt was
Review in note-form what you have learnt in the course so far. Has anything been particularly
eye-opening? Why? Were any sessions unhelpful to you: say which and why. What areas are
you particularly interested in so far? What specific plans have you got for modifying your
teaching as a result of the sessions so far? Is there any area we have covered or touched on
that you would like more information about?
These prompts all include a variety of suggestions or questions because I aimed to throw out enough
ideas for each person to find not only one idea sufficiently motivating to start writing on, but other ideas
for when the writer dried up. Although I made it clear to the trainees that they could choose which
questions to answer, I felt it important that the prompts for the first few entries should be both plentiful
and precise, remembering my own first experiences with writing a learning log when I had been
unsure what kind of writing was expected of me and had found it helpful to be directed towards the
specific. However, by the seventh or eighth journal entry my prompts had become much briefer. A

further point is that the trainees soon came to realize that the prompts did not have to constrain them:
if they had some concern other than those elicited in the prompts they wrote about that instead.
The trainees understood that where they asked a question in their journal I would try to answer it,
writing in their books when I read them at home or speaking to them privately. It was also understood
that the time allotted to journal writing was an opportunity to reflect on the subject matter and
methodology of the course, and that they should use this writing as a tool with which to think, as well
as a channel of communication. Both the process and the product were valuable.
When I used journals
I asked my trainees to write in their journals for about 10 minutes each time I met them (once a week).
This worked satisfactorily as I had a week in which to read and respond to them.
Sometimes I asked the trainees to do the writing at the start of a session. For example, at the
beginning of a session on group work I gave this prompt on the OHP:
How do your students sit in class: in single rows, in pairs, in groups? Write down how you
view the benefits and drawbacks of group work for your class.
Sometimes I asked them to write midway through the sessions, or at the end of the session, viz:
Jot down the main points you feel were made in this session. What was the most important
issue for you? Was anything new?
On other occasions they recorded their ideas both at the beginning and end of a session, to compare
the two. One trainee suggested taking the journal home to write at more length and I gave out prompts
to stick in the back of the book (e.g. most interesting aspects of the course so far for them and why;
problems with their own class; doubts about any aspect covered in the course; new ideas tried out with
their own class since the start of the course; ideas for future lessons; etc). Trainees could be asked to
take their journals home for a more extended entry, say once a month.
I did feel, however, that the fact that class time was allowed for this activity was important. It showed
that the trainer valued the activity; it allowed processing time for new ideas during input sessions; it
helped the trainees to establish the habit of regular writing, whether they felt the aim was to
communicate with the trainer or to process the information encountered, or both. At the beginning of a
session, it also had the function of allowing the trainees to reactivate the relevant schemata before
receiving input: much research has revealed the importance of this as a prerequisite for the retention
and comprehension of new information (cf Rumelhart 1984, Carrel 1987, et al).
How I responded
I felt it was important to be both honest and encouraging in my response to the journal entries as
without this the relationship of trust which I wanted to build up with each trainee would be impossible.
Thus I felt free to indicate whether I agreed with the views expressed or not. I enjoyed reading this,
Interesting views or You seem to have found this session useful were sometimes as much as I
could say. On other occasions I gave suggestions: Have you thought of arranging the chairs
differently? or Could you ask the children to pretend their classroom is England, so they will only be
understood if they speak English? I encouraged the trainees to respond to my comments too in their
next entry.
One trainee reported in her log that she was offering sweets and other gifts as prizes to the children in
her class to motivate them to participate actively in communicative activities. In the response I wrote in
her journal I expressed doubts about this and suggested other ways of motivating the children without
using prizes. Another trainee wrote that after trying our communicative methodology in her classroom
she found
that the children were not interested in participating. Some of them left it to the few in the
group to discuss. They were just sitting there doing nothing they tend to be more lazy.
Incidentally this last trainee was extremely positive about communicative methodology during the
sessions. Without the journal I would have been unaware of, and unable to help with, the doubts and

difficulties which she was obviously reluctant to air in the sessions. Her first observation might then
have been much more traumatic for her than they were.
The trainees had often made themselves vulnerable to considerable loss of face by writing honestly in
their journals, especially when they had expressed feelings of anxiety or inadequacy either as learners
or teachers. Thus I tried always to respond in such a way that they lost as little face as possible, for
instance I was often able to comment (honestly) that I had experienced a similar doubt or failure in my
own classroom experiments. Knowing that they were not alone in making mistakes, I feel, lessened
the feelings of despondency and vulnerability.
Feedback
Comments from my trainees about the journals were positive. All seemed to find them a useful way of
communicating privately with their trainer. Although only a few were conscious of the benefits of
private reflection time which the journal writing provided, the majority showed in their writing that they
were indeed processing the course input through it. In addition, as one wrote,
In writing I can sometimes express myself better. While in speaking, I need to look
out for pronunciation, phonics etc. which I may stumble (over) and thus make myself
misunderstood. Writing also helps to break down the shyness barrier. It may encourage an
introvert to say what she has in mind.
Largely as a result of my experiment, several of my trainer colleagues also started to use journals with
their trainees so that journal books are now provided as a matter of course. I noticed that those
trainers who used journals on a regular basis as I did, were much more convinced of their positive use
than those who only used them occasionally. Writing journals in class has both the advantage of
helping to establish the habit but also the disadvantage of making it easy for journal writing time to be
elbowed out where it is not considered a priority.
Another colleague who has used journals in this way but in England with native English-speaking
trainees on a full-time 5 week UCLES/RSA Certificate course, gave prompts and class time for journal
writing only for the first two or three sessions, thereafter allowing trainees to choose what they wrote
about and write or not as they wished. This trainer reported that the writing without prompts tended to
ramble, be in very general terms or merely a diary-like chronicle of events, some trainees deciding to
abandon journal writing altogether. He repeated the experiment on his next 5-week course, giving
specific prompts for each entry similar to those described in this article and in most cases allowing
class time for the writing. This time he felt the journals were more successful both in that trainees
writing was more focused and in the fact that most of the trainees felt the journals a useful
communication tool, invaluable for the trainer to wire into the individual responses of the class. Again
trainee feedback centered on the practical advantages to both sides of private communication
between trainer-trainee or teacher-student, seeming unaware of the advantage of the opportunity to
process and reflect which the writing gave. However, the journals once again revealed that trainees
were in fact using their writing for reflection, albeit unconsciously.
Problems
An initial problem was that the trainees sometimes responded to the prompts with short, even one
word, answers which made no sense unless I referred back to the prompts when responding; these
minimal responses had the added function of revealing almost nothing about the trainees thoughts
and reactions. This problem disappeared when I explained in the session that I read the entries almost
as if they were letters to me and thus did not want to refer back to the original prompts to understand
them.
Although I did not encounter the problem of entries being no more than a list of events in the session
(partly perhaps because of the prompts given), I did find that some entries were extremely short for the
amount of writing time allowed. To these minimal entries I responded by asking interested questions
(written in their journals) which I encouraged them to answer in their next journal writing slot when I
returned the books.
The extra time needed for responding fully to the journals on top of the marking of course assignments
was undeniable but I found this drawback easily balanced by the information I gained from them and
their usefulness in enabling me to relate to each trainee as an individual.

A slight problem for me was the contradiction between the diary aspect of the journal which needed
privacy and the sharing of it with me. However this did not seem to worry the trainees and possibly by
avoiding referring to the journals as diaries, the problem came to nothing.
There are two other difficulties that could arise but did not in my experiment that I feel it would be
appropriate to mention them here. One is the sycophantic journal entry, where trainees might write
only fulsome praise of the course. That this did not occur may have been due to the use of prompts
which avoided asking whether the session had been useful, instead asking WHAT had been useful
and WHY, or what they would have like included. I found I was more often dealing with real classroom
concerns than with praise of the course and when there was a positive response it was refreshing and
encouraging to read. Positive as well as negative feedback was encouraged.
Another possible danger, and one that Rinvolucri mentions (op cit) is that the relationship between
journal writer and responder could get out of control in the sense that a trainee might expect more
emotional involvement and support from the trainer than the latter can give. In this case I can only
stress first the need for honesty on the part of the trainer so that s/he admits it when faced with a
problem s/he is not qualified to deal with, and secondly, that if the trainer starts this exercise with the
awareness of the dependency that could be set up s/he is in no more danger than in the setting up of
any other personal relationship, whether conducted in writing or in person.
Evaluation
The exercise was useful in more ways than I expected, both for me and for those of my colleagues
who conducted experiments on similar lines. The following is a summary of the benefits that I feel
were derived.
The Journals
1. Allowed the trainees a tool for thinking and the chance to reflect on and process the ideas
encountered in the course as it progressed.
2. Provided a private channel of communication between trainer and trainee which helped to build up
a relationship of trust, through which I was able to discover which people were nervous or lacking
in confidence, rather than assuming this from classroom behaviour. (See also Lowe, 1987, p.92)
3. Gave me information about the constraints and conditions in my trainees different schools: I could
then offer specific help.
4. Revealed valuable facts about the trainees teaching during the 20-week course, only a portion of
which was observed. Some of the quietest trainees in the sessions were doing wonderful things in
their own classrooms.
5. Gave me further insights into the views and attitudes of my trainees towards methodology,
motivation etc. I could also follow the development and change of attitudes.
6. Gave me the chance to add emphasis, encouragement, or an additional point, to the points they
made, agree with their views or suggest alternative ones for consideration. Moreover, I could
better angle and pace the sessions to suit the needs and interests of my particular group.
7. Allowed the trainers to remember, and be aware of, how learners feel (see Lowe, p.95).
However, there are certain flaws which I would hope to remedy in future. Firstly, I asked the trainees to
consider only the new ideas and methodology presented. I now feel it would be useful to ask them too,
to consider what aspects of their own teaching they feel are valuable and useful. Also to consider
whether the insights gained on the course helped them in any way to understand better why certain
techniques they already used were effective on ineffective. Secondly, although I wrote in my journal for
the first two or three entries as a further proof that I felt the exercise was valuable, I did not continue to
do so and neither did I share what I wrote with them. Blanton (1987) wrote with her students when
they wrote journals but not when they wrote logs, but she makes a distinction between the two types of
writing which I do not make, one (for sharing) about the course subject, the other (private) is about any

subject at all. As well as an individual response to the logs she hands out her own written collective
response to her classs logs once a week.
Conclusion
For myself, I have used journal writing as a tool for reflection for the last five years. I clarify my
thoughts as I write, consolidate them and progress farther in them. By using journals in the teacher
training course, as described above, the trainees were given the chance to discover this use for
writing. In addition I hoped that they could use them or perhaps modify them for use with their own
students. Several trainees did start to use journals or diaries with their classes during the course and
at least one is still doing so, three years later.
The following quote was written about secondary school pupils of non-language subjects at school but
in my view it is relevant to all teaching and training situations:
What pupils say and write can be particularly revealing at the stage where a new idea has
been encountered but not yet completely married into the students existing system of ideas; it
is at this point that the perceptive teacher can find the clues which will enable him or her to
help clear the remaining obstacles out of the way.
(Torbe and Medway, op cit)
If this is so, journals can provide a place for this kind of writing, as well as a way in for the
perspective teacher or trainer.
References
Blanton, L.L. 1987 Reshaping in ESL student perceptions in writing in ELTJ 41, 2.
Carrel, P.L. 1983 Some issues in studying the role of schemata or background knowledge in second language comprehension.
Paper presented at the TESOL convention, Toronto, March 1983.
Fulwiler, T. 1980 Journals across the disciplines in English Journal, Dec.
Lowe, T. 1987 An experiment in role reversal in ELTJ 41, 2
Rinvolucri, M. 1983 Writing to your students in ELTJ 37, 1
Rumelhart, D.E. 1984 Understanding understanding in Understanding Reading Comprehension by J. Flood (ed)
Torbe, P. and Medway, P. 1981 The climate for learning Wardlock Educational, UK., and Boynton Cook, U.S.A.
Walshe, R.D. 1980 Every child can write. PETA Rozelle, NSW, Australia

At the time of writing, Alison Haill was an EFL/ESP teacher and teacher trainer who has taught in S. America, S.E. Asia and the
Middle East, as well as in Europe. She then lived in the UK and completed an MA in Applied English Linguistics at Birmingham
University.

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A very long time ago in the Teacher Trainer we had a spoof page. I loved it. It was
iconoclastic and poked fun at our terminology and habits and more excessive theories.
Unfortunately the world of ELT Teacher Training seems to have got more serious
these days and it is very rare that someone sends me a humorous article to edit!
But here from the funny old days is one from Chris Sion.

Zen and the art of classroom management

by Chris Sion

Having devised English for Special Purposes programmes on subjects as diverse as hospital
administration and sandpaper I was scarcely surprised when I was approached to set up a special
course for Zen Masters.
Planning the first days activities came in a flash of inspiration. The students would need to learn
Roman letters the first activity would be to Re-write the alphabet.
This would be followed by a group dynamics exercise in which the class would be told to Agree on an
object and then describe the differences. The day would close with a memory training session. Tell
your partner a joke you cant remember.
Having got off to a good start, my next task would be to bring the course to a satisfactory conclusion.
To warm the group up, the second (and final) day would begin with something physical: List and then
move all the parts of the body in the correct order. This would be followed by something to tax the
intellect: Do the Rubik cube backwards.
The course would finish with an activity involving the whole person, a humanistic exercise in personal
growth: Role-play yourself.
A deep gong sounded at 9 oclock as I opened the door and entered the room. Four hundred
meditating Masters were sitting round the table, close but not touching, quiet and unhuddled.
I looked at the group apprehensively and uttered the one Japanese word I know in a gesture to put
them at their ease. Sayonara! I proclaimed loudly, Sayonara!
The four hundred faces simultaneously lit up with the deep glow of recognition and insight. They knew
I understood! I was one of them!
Goodbye! they chorused, Goodbye! and as mysteriously as they had arrived they silently departed,
leaving me alone with my lesson.

Reprinted from Human Potential Resources Vol. 10 No 2 Summer 1986 with their permission

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A Fresh Look at Team Teaching

by Bill Johnston and Bartek Madejski
Introduction
The notion of team teaching has been bandied about for some time now it has enjoyed brief periods
of interest since the nineteen sixties in various teaching situations and yet few, if any, of the
handbooks currently used in EFL make any but passing reference to it, and the present authors have
been unable to find virtually any articles or parts of books dealing with team teaching in any depth.
This article then, considers what for the practicing teacher can only be described as an oral tradition,
and offers what for us have become new possibilities within this framework.
One thing should be said before we begin: although all the ideas and comments concerning team
teaching refer to two teachers only, there is no reason why three or perhaps even more teachers could
not participate in a team teaching project both at the planning stage and during the lesson itself.
Running a team-taught lesson
1. The planning stage
The planning stage of a team-taught lesson can, and we would argue should, be as important,
enjoyable and rewarding as the lesson itself.
If team teaching is to be true to its name, rather than just an extra teacher being present in the
classroom, then the teamwork should begin with the joint planning of the lesson. And in our
experience at least, pedagogical advantages aside, this planning offers tremendous opportunities to
the teachers. Firstly, one has the chance to talk through the preparation of a lesson to voice the
doubts, alternatives and tentative ideas that teachers must always go through alone, in their heads.
This in itself can be a huge source of relief, and a great builder of confidence. And secondly, as
anyone knows who has tried it, for all but inveterate lone wolves, the creative energies released when
two minds collaborate on a joint project often far exceed those that either of the participants would
have been capable of when working alone. It could even be argued that, in some cases at least, to do
the planning in collaboration is in itself a form of team teaching.
2. The team teaching lesson
Though, as we have said, we cannot offer written sources to back up this notion, we believe most
teachers would agree that a traditional team-taught lesson might well involve the following:
The two (or more) teachers taking part, plan the structure of the lesson. Let us be a little simplistic and
take a classic presentation-controlled practice-free practice format. Teacher A offers to present the
new material, while teacher B sits in the back row. Teachers A and B then change places, and
Teacher B leads the drill, exercise or whatever of the controlled practice. The group is then divided
into two, and each teacher leads one half of the class in free practice.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with this arrangement. It offers several of the advantages of team
teaching mentioned elsewhere in this article. However, we and some of the other teachers at our
Centre felt that, given that two teachers have decided to work together on the planning and execution
of a lesson, there are whole vistas of potential that the format described above fails to perceive, let
alone utilise; and we should like to indicate directions in which new thinking on team teaching might
lead.
3. Some new ideas
At the outset, we must acknowledge the work of our colleagues Magda Kaczmarek and Tom Randolph
in developing and realizing many of the ideas described in this section.

The basic notion that we have worked from in our thinking on team teaching was that mentioned
above: that, if two teachers are to be present in the classroom, there must be ways of using that fact to
the full, rather than have them just take turns at teaching. We strongly recommend that you consider
this question seriously yourselves; in the meantime we offer the following specific ideas, which have
been used successfully in our Centre.
a)

The two teachers present a dialogue, or more ambitiously a sketch, on which work is to be
done later. This may be a straightforward dialogue, an interview, an interrogation, doctor and
patient, teacher and pupil or whatever.

Further, it need not be fully scripted a spontaneous exchange on a given topic, or one based
on minimal prompts rather than a script , is an exciting alternative. The point is that, unlike
material recorded on tape, or even worse written in a book, the language has a physical form
and real-life speakers, and is thus brought much closer to the learners experience; this is
even more the case if the language used is partially or wholly spontaneously produced.
b)

If the learners are going to be asked to divide into pairs/groups to write and perform a sketch
on a particular theme, the teachers could first offer an example along the same theme. This
may seem an obvious idea; but how often do you as a teacher ask your students to do
something like this without first showing them an example? For us the answer is very often, at
the least. We have found that, when we first actually demonstrate what we want done, the
response from the learners is greatly enlivened and improved. The reason for doing this is not
to provide a model either in terms of language or of format but just to get imaginations going
and to show that we teachers are not afraid to have fun or even to make fools of ourselves.
And the performance doesnt need to be perfect were not professional actors any more
than our learners are, and if our performance has a few rough edges, so much the better!

c)

One teacher prepares a mime, to which the learners are going to be asked to compose a
commentary (we used the example of a mimed advert to which words were to be added). The
other teacher leads the class in eliciting this commentary and in speaking it in time to the
mime. In this way, both teachers are active simultaneously, but one can concentrate on
miming without worrying about teaching, the other is free to deal with the class and doesnt
have to think about performing. And again the use of a real teacher provides much more
personal investment for the learners, and much more flexibility for the teachers.

d)

A variant on this is for one teacher to mime an action, or perhaps a message (as in the nowlegendary Hotel Receptionist game from Drama Techniques in Language Learning (Maley &
Duff 1978: 125-8)) and for the other teacher to elicit the action or message from the class.
Here again, the two roles that the teacher must normally take on single-handed are divided,
and each teacher is free to concentrate on only one.

e)

A joke-telling session: this was done as part of a topic on health, though obviously it can easily
be adapted: the two teachers read out a series of doctor, doctor! jokes; the learners are then
asked to present a set of similar jokes in the same fashion.

4. Feedback
By its nature, team teaching provides an unforced basis for informal feedback. Two teachers who have
planned and taught a lesson together are going to find it entirely natural to sit down after the lesson
and discuss it in some detail. We do recommend, however, that you make sure that there is at least an

informal chat afterwards, since putting your feelings, impressions etc. into words often helps to
crystallize what your have learnt from the shared experience. It is also important to round off that
experience; we should remember that team teaching can affect the professional and personal
relationships between teachers as much as the teaching of any one teacher.
We would, however, suggest that from time to time a more formal approach is taken in feedback
sessions. Amongst many possibilities, the following might be mentioned:
a)

b)
c)
d)

Make a point of sitting down with your colleague and taking twenty or thirty minutes to go over
the lesson in detail. If you like, concentrate on one aspect of the lesson: learners behaviour,
materials used, interactions between the teachers, or whatever seems most pertinent.
Choose a mutual third colleague who was not involved in the project; each of you talk to this
colleague separately about the lesson, then all three of you have a discussion together.
hold a five/ten-minute feedback session about the lesson in front of the class, with all present
taking part.
Each of you independently write up notes about the lesson, then swap notes and discuss (an
interesting example of this is in Plumb and Davis (1987)).

Finally, we may refer you to Chapter 7 of David Hopkins excellent A Teachers Guide to Classroom
Research (Hopkins 1985:85-104), which offers techniques which are aimed at observation in the
context of Action Research but which can successfully be adapted to one-off team teaching feedback
sessions.
Why Bother?
All this may (or may not) sound very well; but whats the point of team teaching?
Some of the many advantages of team teaching have been mentioned already; the confidence boost
that one can feel by talking through a lesson beforehand and then teaching it with a colleague; and the
sometimes improbable amount of creative energy released when two minds set about a task together
instead of separately.
Other advantages are not all obvious, but are none the less important for that. One is the effect on the
learners.: we have found that seeing teachers work together has a positive effect on the learners, who,
seeing teachers collaborating together, are encouraged to follow suit, to open up and thus to cooperate in building an atmosphere of mutual trust and understanding, which considerably contributes
to breaking the isolation of the individual in the classroom and that means the individual teacher as
well as the individual learner.
Secondly, the starting point of the whole business, for us, was the question of observation, and this
remains an important factor. Just as team teaching allows the teacher to talk about a lesson to
someone who is not a passive listener but is just as involved in the lesson, so it offers the chance for
teachers to see their peers at work without there being inactive observers in the classroom: in other
words, it offers many of the advantages of observation while avoiding many of the most unpleasant
disadvantages.
Finally, one advantage has been discovered in what would at first appear to be a disadvantage: it
might be thought that team teaching, in both planning and actual teaching, is more time-consuming
than solo teaching, but we have found that two teachers working together can prepare more material
in less time than if they had been working on their own!
Some words of advice
Here we should like to mention a few points which we have learnt, from experience, to watch out for.
Firstly, its much better to work with someone you know well and like. Team teaching requires a high
level of co-operation and of trust, and working with the wrong person can prove a discouraging
experience, as conflicts of teaching style or, worse, personality may be exposed.
Secondly, though team teaching is a great experience we dont suggest you do it all the time! Its not a
universal remedy to teaching problems, but if used from time to time it can be an exhilarating
experience which can bring teachers closer together and can shed new light on ones own teaching.

We have found that it is better for intensive residential courses than for regular in-town lessons,
though the latter are of course not ruled out.
It may be that only part of the lesson the introduction, perhaps, or a rounding-off activity really
benefits from the presence of more than one teacher in the classroom. If this is so, dont be afraid to
admit it, and have the extra teacher in only for that part of the lesson. This is preferable to having an
extraneous presence in for an extended period.
And lastly be prepared to compromise! This is an essential part of any collaboration that is going to
work, so be prepared to give up some of your brilliant ideas if your partner doesnt like them she or
he may even turn out to be right!
Conclusion
In this article we have attempted to take a new look at the practice of team teaching. Placing the
emphasis on the great rewards to be reaped from creative collaboration at all stages of the lesson
from planning, through the lesson itself to feedback, we have pointed to new possibilities towards
which thinking on team teaching might usefully be directed. We feel that we have only just scratched
the surface of the potential to be found in collaborative work of this kind, and we are very excited
about what we have started to explore. We hope that we have conveyed some of that excitement
and that you will be encouraged to do some exploring yourselves and to get your trainees to do the
same!
References
Hopkins, D. (1985) A Teachers Guide to Classroom Research. Milton Keynes: Open University Press
Maley, A. and A. Duff (1978) Drama Techniques in Language Learning. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Plumb, K. and P. Davis (1987) Team Teaching. In Teacher Development (The newsletter of the Teacher Development Special
Interest Group of IATEFL)

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Have You Read..?
John Fanselow set out the background to his book Breaking Rules in our
Authors Corner series (Volume 3, Number 2). Below Mario Rinvolucri gives a readers point of view.
This system of author explanation followed by reader reaction gives, we feel,
a balanced and fair picture of an authors work.
Breaking Rules
Generating and Exploring Alternatives in Language Teaching
by John F. Fanselow, Longman, 1987
I was lucky to first meet the breaking rules ideas in the form of an inspired lecture given by John Fanselow
at one of the European TESOL conferences. He happens to be an excellent, flamboyant, plenary speaker
and the hall hummed with excitement. Many of us agreed that teaching is a routinising job and that most
of us slump into ruts we are sometimes not even aware of.
The ways he suggested we break rules were simple:

If you normally ask students to underline words they dont know, reverse the procedure and ask
them to blank out such words and ignore them. Notice your normal practice and do the opposite.

Notice the difference between the way people do an activity in a classroom and outside in
ordinary life. In classrooms people sit at desks to read there is silence. At home people
sometimes lounge on cushions and listen to music while reading. Have reading happen this way
in class.

Take a traditional practice like reading aloud in class and change some detail about the way it is
done. Ask the student to read silently, to look up from the page and then to say what she has read
to somebody in the room. The change in detail radically changes the whole.

Fanselows message in that lecture was For goodness sake do something different next Monday
morning. Instinctively many of us knew that this was brilliant advice.
The book under review carries the same message but sadly it is a hard read if you work through it the way
he suggests you do. He sets out to provide the reader with a system for analyzing classroom and other
communication. Part of his system is a framework for identifying the rules that govern a particular
classroom situation. The table below gives you a brief and unfair glimpse of what he is proposing:

Table 2 4
Five Characteristics of Communications1
What is Being Done?
SOURCE/TARGET

MOVE TYPE

How is it Being Done?

MEDIUM

USE

CONTENT

Attend
Teacher/*

Linguistic
Structure

----------------

Life

Characterize
Nonlinguistic

Solicit

Present

Respond

Relate

Student (sgc)2 /*

Procedure
Paralinguistic
React

Other/*

Reproduce
Silence

-------------

Study

Set

1
2

The target in each case indicated by an asterix can be any one of the sources
s = individual student; g = group of students; c = class

The table quoted above is unfair because it is out of context and in fact summarises 20 pages of fairly
dense explanation.
My problem as a reader of the book is that I do not feel motivated to learn the language of the
communication description he is proposing. This is not just because of its length and complexity but
because these things are good, clear and simple in themselves and do not need such glossing or
translating.
They do not really need all the conceptual framework that Fanselow has found helpful for himself.
Fanselow is capable not only of being an inspiring lecturer but can also translate concepts dressed up in
the jargon of his system into clear language. In the chapter on feedback and mistakes, the author presents
six major ways a teacher can respond to learner error. Here are the six ways in Fanselowese and
Clear.

Fanselowese
you can attend
(see table above)
you can relate
you can reproduce
you can characterize-evaluate
you can set or reproduce

Clear
You listen, you say nothing, you give the student time to think
you give the student the grammar etc. rule
you comment on the error, maybe making a comparison
you imitate the error
you praise or blame the student
you model the correct utterance

I suspect I will not be the only reader unmotivated to learn the Fanselowese. Can I get juice from Breaking
Rules while side-stepping its intellectual framework?
The book is 450 pages long and packed with exciting ways of questioning what you do with your students.
It is therefore well worth getting hold of and hopping about in. Let me share two practical ideas I could
immediately use:
The class dictionary
When new words are met, the students pop them on cards with a definition, a mother tongue translation, a
contextualising sentence, a feeling-about-the-word sentence etc. The cards are filed in a class box and
are available for later consultation. Simple, do-able, useable tomorrow. A computerized version of this
idea is now being tested in Danish schools.
Substituting observation for testing
In the authors own words: During the five to twenty minutes needed to develop one multiple choice item
without pre-testing it five to twenty student communications can be written on note cards. If the
communications are made during a break by students to each other, or are made as students are actually
engaged in the solution of a real problem, such as putting together a jigsaw puzzle, or in a conversation of
their own, the communication is likely to be more similar to those they ordinarily make than responses to
questions in tests. They may be less inhibited as well, and as a result a more valid picture of capability
may result.
My regret is that the thinking in this book has had to be presented via the jargon of a system that has
clearly been inspirational for the author but which is too much of a mouthful for any but the most
passionate reader to digest in the few hours one normally gives to this type of reading. It annoys me to
have to read with my head bent forward battling in the teeth of a jargonistic wind. Oh, that this book were
as joyful a read as the first part of Stevicks Images and Options: the two books in their messages are
cousins if not sisters.
It is right that the last words of a review should be the authors:
Both during and after the reading of a novel, a newspaper, or a textbook, often all that is required
is memory work or thinking. Both during and after the reading of Breaking Rules, I ask you for
much more than memory and thinking. Generating and exploring alternatives requires activitywriting comments, transcribing and recording communications and also action substituting
alternatives in communications you control. This book is ready to be your companion for
life.

The Teacher Trainer Back Articles

Saved from: http://www.tttjournal.co.uk
It was the early summer of 1983 when attendance on a two-week British Council
Specialist Course for teacher trainers brought me into contact with the work of
Bernard and Marie Dufeu. I was spellbound for a day as I watched people
learning French in a way I had never even dreamed of. There were masks
and people moving together, breathing in rhythm, mirroring each other.
There was the echoing of voices, repeating snatches of language and
there was nothing I had ever seen before in a language class.
It is hard to bring across the power and magic of the Dufeus work without showing it,
without letting people participate in it, but in the following article, written by
Bernard Dufeu, and kindly translated by Mario Rinvolucri, I hope a glimpse, a scent,
of the depth of the Dufeu work, at training level this time, will come across to you too.
If you have not previously come across the terms or ideas of mirroring and doubling
you may like to read either
Blatner, H.A. (1973) Practical Applications of Psychodramatic Methods
or Leveton, E. (1977) Psychodrama for the Timid Clinician (both by Springer Pubs.).

Britta and Rolf or the Unfaithful Mirror

by Bernard Dufeu
University of Mainz, West Germany
Outline
I open this article with an example drawn from a training session with language teachers, and go on
from there to try and show the relationship between what a teacher in the session experienced in a
mirroring exercise and some of the roots of this experience in her life. Britta, the teacher in question, in
her teacher role, was moved and disappointed that, Rolf, a student, had not fulfilled her expectations
in his role as student. It becomes clear that Brittas demands on him and her attitude stem from her
personal life.
The problem faced by Britta links in with the expectations and demands of many teachers. The
example of Britta leads me to question the bearing of exercises used in language classes and to
stress the importance of personal development as the foundation for methodological and technical
training.
Britta and Rolf are, by the way, fictitious names for real people.
The Training Session The Mirroring Exercise
It is the second week-end of a training programme for teachers who want to use the
psychodramaturgic approach to languages. Teachers of English, French, Italian and German are at
work in sub-groups on a mirroring exercise.
This is the way the exercise goes: the animator/teacher focuses inwards on herself; she is wearing a
blind (eyeless) half-mask over her face and this helps her concentration and withdrawal into herself. A
group member is sitting opposite her; he takes on the same posture as her so as to try, at least
physically, to tune in to her rhythm. This may help him to listen more deeply to what she is going to
say. The teacher/animator starts putting into words the things that come into her head in this situation.
She then repeats the initially spontaneous text to herself to grasp its shape. When she speaks it
through for the third time, the student echoes the text after her.
Work on the text continues with the two people swapping places; the student takes the teachers place
and vice versa. He goes on echoing her text but this time tries to enter into her body language and
gestures so as to feel the speech she is offering him from the inside. He will then be much more ready
to respond to it once he is back in his own role.

In the third phase each goes back to their original place. The teacher/animator picks up her own
monologue again, this time trying to draw the student into reacting personally to what she is saying.
They move into a semi-dialogue or a real one depending on the students communication level. The
teacher/animator in this phase should help the student express his own thoughts and feelings, if
necessary at the expense of her original text.
In the psychodramaturgic approach this mirroring exercise takes place on the second day of an
intensive course (of usually five hours per day). This exercise follows the doubling exercise which
takes up the first day and which symbolically brings back to participants the fused phase lived through
by the baby in the womb and in the first weeks after its birth. On the first day the teacher/animator
works to the rhythm of the student, while on the second day we ask the student to try and listen to the
animator and what she has to say, and to enter as fully as he can into the monologue which she runs
through several times. He attempts to grasp what she is expressing by entering into her speech
before reacting as best he can.

The mirroring exercise allows the group member to move symbolically from a symbiotic relationship to
a differentiated one. In this exercise the group member should begin to find his own voice and his way
in the foreign language. So the animator/teacher should serve the students speech with her
knowledge of the language and her expressive ability. Just as in the doubling exercise, she should be
aware of the differences between her production and what the student echoes and be aware of the
rhythmic and methodological variations that the student consciously or otherwise introduces, as well
as of significant omissions. Her speech should be a springboard for the student.
The mirroring exercise is the crucial moment in becoming aware of the difference between the other
and self: the student goes from speech based on we or the fused I to speech in the personalised I
and you. It is therefore vital that the students desire for expression should be satisfied in the
exercise.
Discussion After the Exercise
Lets go back to our training group. Once the exercise is over, the group say how they felt. Britta has
just worked in role as a teacher/animator with Rolf as student/protagonist. She is very disappointed at
what has happened. She is in a state of high emotion and expresses her disappointment in a
depressive voice. It becomes clear that Rolf did little with what she offered him (and wanted to force
on him, if the disappointment she expresses is a reliable guide to her feelings). She adds I felt
distanced from myself. As she speaks she is half stretched out on the carpet and says she has fierce
back pains. (Classes in psychodramturgy take place on the floor).
As she goes deeper into her thoughts she remembers that when she was a little girl she fell down, with
a pot of jam in her hands. She hurt herself badly. Though she was hurt, she proudly handed her
mother the pot of jam. It was still in one piece! (She was able to give back in one piece what she had
to transmit. It could be that she had already learnt that it is better to suffer than to fail in her duty).
The memory of her relationship with her mother sharpens. Given the degree of her personal
involvement in what she is saying and the way the group is listening actively (which makes me think
she has put her finger on a problem that concerns many people present) I ask her if she wants to try to
get a better understanding of what is going on inside her. She agrees. So I invite her to look for some
one who could act the part of her mother. She looks round the group and then her eye falls on a dark
coloured mask which is hanging on the wall. (This mask was made by Marie co-animator of the group
and here, the groups symbolic mother).

She takes the mask and hangs it from the knob of one of the two doors. After a dialogue with her
mother, including role reversals, it becomes clear that the mother exerts strong emotional pressure on
Britta: she gets her to come and see her frequently and to listen to her in recognition (in the deep
meaning of the term) of everything the mother has done for her. Britta is trying, but with strong feelings
of remorse, to distance herself from her mother and not be sucked into a fused relationship. She wants
to space out her visits so as to be able to live her own life despite the emotional blackmail that
demands recognition and which weighs her down.
It is obvious that there is a close fit between the symbolic function of the previous mirroring exercise
and the personal problems it brings up in Britta. She becomes aware that she has interiorised her
mothers requirement that she listen and her mothers need to fuse with her: and in turn she expects
Rolf to listen to her and to make her speech his. She requires from Rolf, what her mother requires
from her. Probably she demands the same from her normal students. By trying to hold Rolf in a fused
relationship, which at one and the same time offers security and alienation, she puts her own freedom
as animator at risk.
She also uses the session to express the conflict between what she wants to be the good animator
who gives without requiring anything in return (the good mother, by analogy with the symbolic function
she fulfils in this phase of the mirroring) and the maternal fusional needs that she has interiorised
and which she does not accept as her own. She is confronted by Rolf mirroring her attitudes, a mirror
that throws back an image different from the one she would like to have and to give of herself.
In a more classical training situation Britta would have gone home feeling that the lesson had not
worked, and it certainly didnt work the way she hoped. On the other hand it was just right for Rolf.
Had the exercise felt successful to Britta it would have failed for Rolf, because he would then have
fitted in with her expectations; to please her he would have fused with her and would have lost himself
in a text which did not rhyme with his needs. He would have alienated himself in speech which was
personally foreign to his. He would have been a gifted child in the sense given to the term by Alice
Miller: (Alice Miller The Drama of Being a Child), that is to say, a child who fits in with the desires and
expectations of his parents to the detriment of his own needs and desires and to the point where he
can no longer feel these needs.)
It is Rolfs desire to express himself and not to express her that gives rise to the necessary
separateness and which allows each person to be themselves just where and as they are. A real
dialogue can only be born from this separateness.
Such a dialogue will only come about if each person internally listens to the other, not only to what is
actually said but to what the other is trying to express. This is why the second day in a
psychodramaturgy course offers the students and the animator/teachers training in listening to the
other, and to the self differentiated from the other.
It is no accident that Britta should have come across this problem in a mirroring exercise since the
exercise symbolises what is often a hidden, underlying agenda in teaching; moulding the other in
ones own image. The exercise throws light on the desire, which is not necessarily conscious, that the
other should respond to and correspond with what I, the teacher, expect from him. He reflects my
desire to breathe into him my knowledge, my way of feeling things, my mode of thought, my
convictions and my needs and desires as well.
In this echoing, mirroring game one wants to achieve recognition of self in the other and a resonance
in the other. (There are good reasons for Narcissus meeting Echo in Greek mythology.) This is also
the myth of the original creator, of the solitary God who shapes the other in his image.
Teaching as Gentle Violence
It is with varying degrees of gentle violence that, as a teacher, I impose not just my method, my
progression, my rhythm, my contents, my style of relating to others, my way of thinking about
language and communication, but my way of being and becoming as well.

These expectations of the other often go beyond what I am as a teacher. They include what I would
like to be: the student must not just correspond to what I think I am, to the idealised image I have of
myself (good at the language I teach, flexible, creative, witty..), he must also correspond with what I
would like to be. The other becomes an idealised construct; I make him carry my hopes of going
beyond myself (like Pygmalion, who, refusing reality, sculpts his ideal complement, falls in love with
the statue and expects it to come to life), and at the same time I fear that all this can really happen.
(c.f. the teachers desire and fear that his students will go further than him).
My disappointment as a teacher is, in part, cut to the cloth of my illusions. Because I too often identify
with what I want to get across (I am the subject I teach) and the way I get it across (I am my
teaching), I find it hard to accept that my message should be transformed or deformed, because then
the students are transforming or deforming me, not just what I say. My disappointment, parallel to
Brittas, rests on a confusion between doing and being, a confusion that reduces the individual to his
acts, exactly like a child who is not loved for who he is but for what he does. So Britta does not see
Rolf facing her but sees instead the author statements he has deformed, transformed or silenced,,,,,,,,,
The disappointment expressed by Britta reflects the difficulty of any teacher in reaching a harsh
understanding of her limits and of her basic powerlessness. Rolf makes Britta cruelly aware of the
sundering felt by any teacher at the crossroads of her demands. He makes her aware not only of her
demands for perfection but also of her limits. He makes it clear to her that her statements do not move
him so deeply as to draw him ineluctably into repeating them.
He makes her realise that she is not the profoundly empathetic, sensitive animator that she would like
to be, certainly not sufficiently so to reach him in speech that he will make irresistibly his own. He
establishes the limits of her power of seduction: she was unable to find the words that would please
him and to draw him into her voice. He does not give in to the desire for narcissistic fusion that she
tries to share with him, he is not the happy echo of her text. She cannot see herself in what she wants
to teach him. He makes her realise that there will always be a deformation in the look and words of the
other and that this deformation is the necessary condition for recognition of the other as other. The
deformation is a reflection of the difference which allows them each to stay themselves. He will only be
able to get on the same wave length as her if she agrees to be herself and nothing but herself she
must give up attempting to obtain a fused relationship.
I have here summarised some of the essential things that came up during Brittas meeting with herself
and her past, via her meeting with Rolf, as it seems to me that what happened here to Britta is what
happens to each of us more or less obviously and perceptibly in our teaching life.
Questions about language classroom activities
Brittas example leads me to ask a number of questions about the activities done in language classes:

What kind of relationships are implied by the activity I decide on at a manifest and at a latent
level (insofar as I can perceive the latter)?

What type of involvement does the activity require?

What is the activitys symbolism? This is not always as clear as in the doubling and mirroring
exercises, and even here we are only beginning to decode some of the symbolism.

What are my pedagogical aims, both the declared and the underlying ones?

What is my training construct? This begs the question of my concept of human beings and
their becoming within a pedagogical frame and beyond it.

Are my ways of doing and of being in harmony? Suppose I am authoritarian by temperament

and I use an open exercise which does not fit my relational structures and my deep
understanding of my teacher role. How is this contradiction expressed in the running of the
exercise? Do my attitudes short-circuit the activity? Here we see the importance of working
towards not only a knowledge of the ideal of self) what I would like to be as a teacher, and
what I am aware of not being) but also a knowledge of the ideal self (what I believe I am),

which can lead to a sometimes unhappy awareness of the gap between the image I have of
myself and what I really am.
Conclusions
In a pedagogy which is not simply one of action but also takes relationships into account, teacher
training cannot simply put across a methodology or offer techniques that will strengthen the
pedagogical power of the teacher. The training must also sensitise the teacher to her own attitudes,
behaviour, projections, transference, ways of relating to others, fears, anxieties and expectations. All
these factors influence her methodological understanding and the use she may make of the
techniques suggested. Of much greater importance, though, is the deep impact they have on the
person of the student and therefore on the act of learning.
Mainz August 20th 1986
Bernard Dufeu was born in 1941, teachers French at the University of Mainz and is also a psychodramatist. Since 1977 he has
been developing psychodramaturgy. It connects psychodrama, dramaturgy and pedagogy. He is also a teacher trainer and
focuses his work in aspects of teacher development and on the relationship between teacher and students.

The Teacher Trainer Back Articles

Saved from: http://www.tttjournal.co.uk

This article exemplifies two important features of many articles in The Teacher Trainer.
First, it shows a teacher trainer working hard in prescribed circumstances and
experimenting and learning from that work. Secondly, it engages us with the
very nitty-gritty of teaching and training. Right down to the nuts and bolts!

A syllabus for the interactive stage?

PART ONE.

Ray Brown of the Curriculum Development Centre, Colombo, Sri Lanka

at the time of receipt of this article.

Classroom Pedagogics
Summary
This article describes a procedure used in a Sri Lankan programme to develop and increase the
awareness and skills of English teacher trainees in classroom floor decision-making. It attempts to
define the kinds of awareness and skills that may be required in the inter-active phase of teaching
and to evolve procedures for developing them using a combination of lesson transcript study and
micro-teaching.
The programme in which these procedures are used is a two year long weekends-only course
leading to teacher certification for untrained serving teachers. About 1,500 teachers in training follow
the course in 6 regional Centres throughout the island.
Introduction: A Neglected Purpose
Classroom pedagogics? you mean teaching? people ask. Yes, of course, the term means
teaching but in our work in Sri Lanka, in the context of a two year long week-end teacher training
programme, the term classroom pedagogics, even if pretentious, has come to mean for us something
more precise and more relevant to our purposes than the word teaching alone would suggest. We
are using it to refer to a kind of syllabus for what some have called the interactive phase of the
teaching process (cf. Jackson 1968; Wallace 1980), the phase when the teacher has to interact on the
classroom floor with 20-40 pupils, when the decisions have to be made on the spur of the moment,
and a previously formulated plan does not help, and when lots of smaller goals than the grander aims
of the lesson may press themselves upon her (e.g. how to involve that weaker learner on the right
hand side, how to silence but not discourage the over-zealous fellow in the front row who always has
an immediate answer to every question, how to get inter-learner discussion going in a last lesson of
the day, how to get them to know what I am expecting of them, NOW, AT THIS MOMENT?). It had
become clear to us that this classroom floor decision-making, perhaps THE basic teaching skill (cf.
Shavelson 1973) was a neglected area of our teacher training programme and that something needed
to be done to deal with it. We needed a syllabus of some sort, yet it had to be a rather special kind of
syllabus for we could see that this kind of skill was not something that could be transmitted by mouth
or the printed word. It depended on the development of an awareness and this could only take place
through experience. In other words, our syllabus would be referring to skills that are mostly
untrainable and only a small number that could be classified as trainable.
The Dilemma of the Micro vs Macro Approach
Richards (1986) draws attention to the Teacher Training Dilemma in which there seem to be
approaches to teacher training that lead in different directions: the micro-approach (of low-inference
skills such as distinguishing between display and referential questions, or using wait-time) and the
macro-approach (of the development of higher level general principles or concepts).We feel that these
are not the incompatible approaches that they seem to be. While we do not underestimate the
potential trainability, and its value, of the low-inference skills (which trainability, we maintain, should be
exploited), we feel inclined to argue that ultimately an awareness of the value of these low inference
skills depends on an awareness of higher level principles, or concepts. For example, wait-time is

linked to concepts of difficulty, challenge, mind-engagement, inferential questions are linked to

concepts of form vs meaning, and so on.
Ends in View: An Attempt to Define Objectives
Reasoning in this way, we thought that if our aim was to raise awareness of concepts and principles
then our approach had to be largely a process approach. But we also thought it would be valuable to
have some kind of idea of our ends-in-view (Sockett 1976, p.67). By ends-in-view I mean not
objective goals to be attained at all costs, but rather a direction, a list of potential goals. In Socketts
words:
Our ends-in-view are simply pro tem indications of where we want to get.
However, social situations being what they are, during the course of proceedings
to those ends, things crop up to alter the ends-in-view. As we take means to
those ends-in view, so the means affect and alter what we have in mind. There is
a constant interaction. For Dewey that is not just a matter of fact: we ought to
change our minds, we ought to be flexible and adaptive. We ought not to be
under some kind of tyranny of ends as he puts it. So an end-in-view is not a
target, for Dewey, but a sign-post.
(Sockett, op. cit. p.67)

The problem was to find the process and the ends-in-view. Our solution was to return to the study of
the set of local lesson transcripts which had first drawn our attention to the need for training of this
kind. We had been following Ramani (personal communications, and see Ramani 1986; 1987) in
using real lesson data, in our case lesson transcripts, to try to develop the trainees awareness of
points of theoretical generality. In other words we were encouraging teachers in training to read
transcripts without any pre-imposed criteria (or check-lists) but using their personal judgement and
experience to decide on the effective and ineffective teaching in a particular transcript. And so through
a process roughly corresponding to Ramanis Articulation Confrontation Examination
Reformulation (Ramani 1986), the trainees over a number of transcripts (four to six) would jointly
refine their perceptions and understanding of good teaching. We were satisfied with this approach but
felt two needs, one of which has already been expressed:
1)

a clearer idea for teacher trainers of the ends-in-view. In essence we had to be sure
that the teacher trainers jointly agreed on where we were trying to head, a direction
which in terms of emphasis was in tune with the materials in use in the classrooms
of the country:

2)

a way of linking this side of the work with an existing micro-teaching programme.

I realize that there is here a certain degree of tension between flexibility and
prescriptiveness. Our greatest concern has been in fact to try to avoid prescriptiveness.
We had therefore to persuade ourselves and the trainers that not everyone will express
things in the same words or perceive them in the same way, and that not everyone will
move at the same rate or in the same direction, and also that there may well be other
important things not expressed in our ends-in-view. Our ends-in-view had therefore to be
no more than a guide: everything that comes out of the lesson transcript discussion would
be classroom pedagogics.
The list of ends-in-view eventually arrived at after a period of some ten months of trying
various versions is to be found below. They are not, then, ends to be imposed upon the
teachers in training, or even made available to them in this form. The aim is to use the
trainees spontaneous reactions, their articulations of their personal theory, to move in the
general direction of the features listed.
Classroom Pedagogics
Notes for Teacher Trainers: Ends-in-View, Year 1
1) Asking Questions: This involves the trainees skill in asking the RIGHT kind of questions and
asking them in an effective way.
The Right Kind of Questions: Questions can be divided into two types, REFERENTIAL and
DISPLAY. When a teacher asks a referential question it is a question to which he does not know the
answer (Do you like fish? What time did you get up this morning?) On the other hand, a DISPLAY

question is one to which the teacher knows the answer, and the pupils know that he knows the answer
(What is this? holding up an exercise book). While display questions have their uses, it seems that
teachers seem to use many more of them than they use of referential questions. So the trainees
should be encouraged not to DROP display questions but to INCREASE the proportion of referential
questions.
Another useful way of classifying questions is to classify them as OPEN or CLOSED questions. OPEN
questions have an unlimited number of answers while CLOSED questions have a limited number of
possible answers.
Examples of CLOSED questions:
Are you afraid of snakes?
Where are you from?
Examples of OPEN questions:
If you could talk to an elephant, what would you talk about?
What kind of tricks would you teach a dog?
While one CANNOT say ask only OPEN questions, it is important that the trainee makes sure that he
does not ask ONLY closed questions, but includes OPEN questions also.
Essentially the RIGHT kind of questions are those that make learners think and allow the teacher to
extend the interaction by further questioning. For example, instead of just accepting a learners reply
the teacher can ask a further related question and so extend the dialogue e.g.
Teacher:
Learner:
T:
L:
T:

Whats your favourite sport, Sunil?

Cricket, Sir.
Have you ever played any other sports?
Football.
Why do you prefer cricket?

(e.g. instead of immediately after Sunils first response going on to ask another learner what his
favourite sport is.)
The trainer must also bear in mind that while it is NOT wrong to ask YES/NO question, they produce
limited responses. WH questions always produce longer responses (especially WHY and HOW
questions). Quite a good strategy is to start with YES/NO questions and extend it using WH-QQ.
T:
P:
T:

Have you ever been to Fort Railway Station?

Yes
When.?
Why..?
How..?
Who.with?

(Some examples adapted from Long & Crookes, 1986)

Asking questions in the right kind of way: The teacher in training should realize the importance of
avoiding thin air questions. These are questions that a trainee asks of the whole class but they
appear directed to thin air because the trainee does not nominate people to reply or does not call on
volunteers. Questions must be DIRECTED: that is, they may first be asked of the whole class and then
a respondent may be nominated either from among volunteers or from the whole class (it is important
not to use ONLY volunteers).
2)

Responding to Learners Responses

Withholding feedback. Not immediately saying that a response is right or wrong. Asking other
learners for agreement/disagreement.
2.1 Controlling para-linguistic signs.
Making sure that facial expression, gesture, intonation, body movement etc. do not give away the
correct answers. John Holt in HOW CHILDREN FAIL reports the case of a teacher who was

asking her class to classify words in three columns on blackboard as nouns, verbs and
adjectives. Totally unconsciously, at each word she tended to move slightly closer to the column
that the words should be put in. After a few items the learners got all the answers right not through
knowledge of grammar BUT BECAUSE THEY HAD ALL SEEN THAT THE TEACHER WAS
UNCONCIOUSLY INDICATING THE CORRECT ANSWER. This kind of thing is much more
common than many teachers think, and we have found a number of examples of it in our own
programmes. We have seen an example of a trainee saying to a class Which is the left side of the
blackboard? while placing her hand on the very left side of the blackboard. We have also seen a
trainee asking YES/NO questions on a text using a particular intonation pattern for the NO-QQ,
but quite unconsciously to the observer, or the learners though, it was very obvious.
2.2 Wait-time. The trainee should give learners time to reply and not press on if there is not an
immediate reply. This time to reply is called wait-time and more use of wait-time appears to
produce more complex learner responses (Long et al. 1984). The trainee must therefore avoid (a)
immediately and automatically repeating the question, (b) immediately passing the question to
another learner, and (c) answering her own question.
2.3 Rephrasing for simplicity.
It happens that the trainee asks a question which receives either a wrong answer or silence
because the learners have not understood the question. The trainee must be practiced in
simplifying the question by rephrasing it. This is actually a fairly natural, in-built human ability (cf
mother-child talk; foreigner talk) but often the trainee may not exploit it to advantage.
2.4 Rephrasing a learners error.
Instead of overt correction, the trainee gently rephrases the mistake without drawing attention to
the learner or putting him down.
3)

Repairing Breakdowns. How teachers can get through breakdowns, and states of
confusion.

One major reason for breakdowns in communication between learners and the teacher is
that the learners may not be clear about the teachers AIMS. Aims is a possibly fuzzy
word. It is useful for us to distinguish three kinds of aims:
(i)

(ii)

(iii)

Pedagogic goals: these are the syllabus aims of (a) (in the short term) the
immediate unit of work in terms of weeks or semester etc. and (b) the long
term aims of the whole course.
Language learning aims: these are the reasons why a teacher does some
given thing at a given point in time. Why does the teacher ask this question?
Why does the teacher want us to do this activity? Somehow or other these
immediate aims must be clear to the learners.
Social aims: these refer to the kind of social climate the teacher aims at
developing in the classroom, how he wishes his role and the learners role to
be. Especially when one is introducing more learner participation and
pair/group work in a context of traditional teacher-power the social aims must
be clear to the learners.

Now while aims (i) above are generally perceived by learners in a way that is acceptable
to them, though differently framed by different learners, and while aims (iii) are a
seasonal business rather than an everyday one, it seems that our major problem is in
getting teachers in training to appreciate the importance of making clear the aims (ii):
these are constant, everyday occurrences at almost every phase or sub-phase of a
lesson.
Another major area for breakdown of communication is when the trainee does not take
care to make clear to her learners on what basis she evaluates the learners responses.
In one of our lesson transcripts, for example, the teacher is showing a map of a town to a
class of learners. On the map are a number of buildings school, post-office, hospital,
houses etc. represented pictorially. The teacher wishes to review some vocabulary
before doing a listening activity based on the map. One of the words he wishes to review

is building. He asks what have you seen in the map? and wants the answer
buildings. When learners reply post-office, hospital, houses (all perfectly correct
answers to the question) they are not accepted as the required response BUT NO
REASON IS GIVEN, so the learners become confused.
4)

Varying the Input. Planning for variety of activity in the lesson. But the trainee must be aware
that variety also implies variety of movement and of use of classroom space, and variety of voice,
e.g. tone.

5)

Setting the Challenge. Ensuring that the level of difficulty is appropriate. If ALL the learners can
do an activity correctly then it must be below their appropriate level of difficulty. The degree of
challenge of any given activity can be increased or decreased in two simple ways:
a) The trainee can speak faster or more slowly; b) she can use more complex or less complex
language (more complex language tending towards natural native speaker talk with no
concessions made by way of simplified vocabulary or structure, and less complex language
tending towards simpler foreigner talk)

Challenge is a GOOD thing in the language classroom; it keeps the learners minds alert and
occupied. The trainee must be alert to certain indicators of challenge which, if they are present among
1/4 or 1/3 of the class, are a good sign but if they are observable in the majority of the class would
indicate that the level of difficulty is too high. These indicators are:
1.(i)

A learner looking sideways at his neighbours work before writing himself (if he quickly writes
and then looks at his neighbours work it would be an indicator of easiness).

2.(ii)

Wait-time before response (silence).

3.(iii)

First respondent does not get correct answer.

6)

(a) Establishing Rapport. How to establish a good atmosphere for work and co-operation at
beginning of the lesson.
(b) Maintaining Rapport. Keeping this atmosphere going throughout the lesson. Involving all
learners. Showing individual interest; taking an interest in the learners as individuals; knowing
their names is a first step in this direction. Perceiving the lesson from the learners point of
view.

7) Providing Feedback or Follow-up. Feedback is a very important factor in learning. It is very

important that the learner should know how good or effective his utterances are, or that he should
know that they are lacking in effectiveness. Feedback is not JUST encouragement: in fact, empty
and automatic encouragement is pointless (but some teachers appear to indulge in it). Feedback
must be GENUINE and PERSONAL: it is an opportunity for the teacher to establish that she is
aware of the personal efforts of pupils. It is also an opportunity for the teacher to demonstrate to
weaker learners by not discouraging them or criticising them, that she cares also for the efforts
they are making. Feedback means listening carefully to what learners say (it causes confusion for
the teacher to say Good to a wrong answer.). It means allowing learners to experience the
effect of what they produce, as a guide to them in their future efforts.

8) Getting Attention:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)

beginning of lesson
when moving from group to whole-class activity
when changing the type of activity in the lesson

Part Two of this article will be available on this site later on.

References
Jackson, P.W. (1968) Life in Classrooms, Holt Rinehart Winston, p.52
Holt, John (1969) How Children Fail, Penguin Books
Long, M.H. and G. Crookes (1986) Intervention points in second language classroom processes. Paper presented at the RELC
Conference, Singapore 21-25 April, 1986. Reprinted in RELC Anthology Series 17, Patterns of Classroom Interaction in
Southeast Asia!, SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, Singapore, 1987.
Pica T. and Doughty C. (1986) Information gap tasks: do they facilitate 2nd language acquisition? TESOL Quarterly, June 1986.
Ramani, E. (1986) The Role of Classroom Interaction in the Integration of Theory and Practice. Paper presented at the RELC
Conference Singapore, 21-25 April, 1986.
Ramani, E. (1987) Theorising from the Classroom, ELT Journal April 1987.
Richards, J.C. (1986) The Teacher Training Dilemma, Keynote Address at 2nd National TESOL Teacher Training Conference,
Melbourne, Australia, 20-23 November 1986. (Forthcoming in TESOL QUARTERLY, June 1987).
Shavelson, R.J. (1973) What is THE basic teaching skill? Journal of Teacher Education, 24, 00. 144-151
Sockett, H. (1976) Designing the Curricultum, Open Books Ltd.
Wallace, J.J. (1980) Micro-Teaching and the Teaching of English as a Second or Foreign Language, Moray House College of
Education, Edinburgh.

The Teacher Trainer Back Articles

Saved from: http://www.tttjournal.co.uk
In the back articles archive on this website you will find a jargon generator.
It appeared originally in the Spoof Page in Volume One Number Two and poked fun
at the amount of jargon used in EFL. For people entering the field it is less of a joke!
In the following article Sara Walker showed how she gets round the problem in Brazil.

Dealing with EFL Terminology

By Sara Walker
A practical exercise in negotiating meanings for Teacher Training Courses (TTC).
Trainees embarking on their first-ever TTC may well feel threatened by the professional jargon of ELT.
The problem is likely to become acute if the trainee-group includes more experienced teachers as well
as novices. Clearly, time spent on negotiating the meaning of key terms will be a good investment for
trainees and their trainers. The activity described here produced excellent results.
Diana Fried-Booth (1986) presents a simple idea for exploiting vocabulary through what she terms a
vocabulary monitor. This is a display board, made by the students, containing cards with a key word or
phrase on one side and a definition on the other. The board can be displayed on the classroom wall
for students to consult for as long as required. We decided to use this idea for ELT terms.
Since our trainees had been selected a month before the TTC began, it was possible to give them a
fairly demanding list of pre-course reading. When the bibliography was issued, a four-page list
containing around 60 ELT terms was also handed out. Trainees were asked to write down a brief
definition of each term before the beginning of the 4-week intensive TTC. They could arrive at their
definitions by any means they liked, including discussions with experienced teachers, although we
assumed that most meanings could be gleaned from intelligent reading of the bibliography.
On the second morning of the TTC, trainees received the following instructions:
Independent British Institute
1987 TTC Making a Terminology Board
1)

Divide into 4 approximately equal groups. Each group will be assigned ONE page of the
Terminology Chart in the TTC Bibliography file.

2)

Decide among you which definition or definitions you want to use for each term. If
necessary, check the definitions given by other groups or use dictionaries. DONT run to
your Friendly Teacher Trainers until all other options have been exhausted!

3)

Decide how you are going to make your terminology Board (by adapting the diagram
below.) Then assign the work to different members of the group (those who will make the
board, those who will make out the definition cards it will contain, who (if anyone) will
check spelling, English etc.

REMEMBER: WORK FAST. YOUR AIM IS TO FINISH YOUR BOARD BY THE END OF THE CLASS.

Model Board
Thick card

Cut vertical slits into the

card at regular intervals (2-3 long).
Two slits for each pocket.
Slot each end of transparent
material into the two slits. (Each
piece of transparent material needs
to be slightly wider than the two
vertical slits). Sellotape the
transparent material to the back of
the card along the slits. Sellotape
along the bottom of the transparent
material and the card, at the front, to
form a pocket.

Thinner card with new vocabulary

written on, which students slip into
one of the pockets, making sure the
word is in context

Model Board from:

Diana L.Fried-Booth
Project Work (OUP, 1986)

Paste
-------------------------------------

Lets sleep on it
------------------------------------

O.A.P.
-------------------------------------

Nincompoop
------------------------------------

Camber
------------------------------------

Twit
------------------------------------

Crock
-------------------------------------

Solicitor
------------------------------------

Yobs
-------------------------------------

To bungle something
------------------------------------

Oaf
------------------------------------

To badger
------------------------------------

On the dole
-------------------------------------

To pester
------------------------------------

Freaked out
-------------------------------------

Blight
------------------------------------

Wangled
-------------------------------------

------------------------------------

Dont rock the boat

-------------------------------------

Fritter
------------------------------------

Chuffed
------------------------------------

Squander
------------------------------------

The power behind the throne

Each group of trainees was given two large sheets of cardboard, scissors, coloured felt-tipped pens,
glue, polythene bags, sheet of stiff card of a smaller size, sellotape and crepe tape. With this
equipment, some adaptation of the Fried-Booth model had to be devised. Dictionaries were freely
available, including the invaluable Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics (Longman, 1985), which
none of the trainees had seen before. The four groups worked in separate rooms on the design of
their boards, but consultations between groups on the meanings of terms were positively encouraged.
Three trainers were in the background, to be called on in moments of crisis.
At the end of a 90-minute session, three out of the four groups had already designed and largely made
their terminology boards. The fourth group, who had been given the psychology section of the
terminology list and had had greater difficulty in reaching agreed definitions, were a little behind the
others. All four groups were asked to finish their boards in their own time, so that they would be ready
for presentation to the class the following morning.
On the next two days, the 90-minute theory input sessions were fully taken up with the presentation by
the trainees of their terminology boards, which differed widely in design and showed considerable

creativity. Meanings were re-negotiated by the whole class and where necessary, definitions were
corrected or amended, by general consent.
The activity produced a range of benefits. The trainees (and the trainers) rapidly discovered where to
look for practical skills (design, and accurate eye for visual detail, nice handwriting, etc.) and where
the intellectual strengths of the trainee-group lay. Both types of skill were called into regular use as the
course developed. In addition, the trainees had worked out for themselves the meanings of a whole
series of ELT terms, ranging from the basic to the more abstruse.
As always, when an activity can be seen to lead to a relevant end-product, motivation and the sense
of achievement among participants were extremely high. The trainers, meanwhile, had been given a
valuable opportunity, over three trainee-centred sessions, to make preliminary observations about the
skills and personalities of all those involved in the TTC.

Biographical note
Sara Walker had been involved in ELT in Brazil for the last twenty years. She began her career as a French teacher, but
subsequently took an M.A. in Latin American Studies and decided to work in Brazil. In 1972 she became a co-founder of the
Independent British Institute, Brasilia, together with a group of Teacher-Directors who believe that educational aims should take
precedence over administrative considerations in the running of an ELT Institute. IBI now has a teaching staff of 62 and over
5000 students.
(1)

The list of terms issued with the pre-course reading:

TERMINOLOGY CHART
As you read the articles, complete this chart with a brief definition of the terms on the list. Use a
dictionary, talk to experienced teachers en use any resource at your disposal to produce your
definitions.
(On the I.B.I. worksheet a space is left after each word for teachers to fill in definitions. For space considerations the chart is
here represented as a simple list.)

Terminology chart page 1

A. Language/linguistics
1. language
2. a language
3. L1
4. L2
5. lexis
6. morphology

7. syntax
8. semantics
9. phonology
10. phonetics
11. discourse
12. register

13. appropriacy
14. structures
15. functions
16. notions

Terminology chart page 2

B. Psychological concepts
1. behaviourism
2. deep structure
3. learning
4. acquisition
5. affective factors

6. cognitive factors
7. monitoring
8. learning strategies
9. motivation
10. alienation

11. humanistic principles

12. awareness techniques
13. communicative competence
14. communicative performance
15. feedback

Terminology chart page 3

C. General methodology
1. a method
2. an approach
3. a technique
4. the four skills
5. receptive skills
6. productive skills

7. needs analysis
8. assessment/evaluation
9. self-assessment
10. an error
11. a mistake
12. interference (from L1 to L2)

13. peer correction

14. contextualisation
15. (in) lockstep
16. authentic materials

Terminology chart page 4

D. Specific methodology
1. drilling
2. choral work
3. pair work
4. group work
5. a substitution drill
6. a transformation drill

7. role play
8. a simulation
9. an information gap exercise
10. intensive reading
11. extensive reading
12. skimming/reading for gist

13. EFL
14. TEFL
15. TESL
16. TESOL
17. T
18. S1, S2, /SS

The Teacher Trainer Back Articles

Saved from: http://www.tttjournal.co.uk

IN LANGUAGE TEACHING, WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT:

LANGUAGE OR TEACHING?
Penny Urr
Linguistics including applied linguistics is said to be the parent academic discipline of TEFL (see, for
example, Johnson, 1986, Brown, 1989): it deals not only with the subject-matter of our teaching
pronunciation, grammar, semantics, discourse structure and so on but also with aspects of language
learning and use. Pedagogy, on the other hand, is about the nature of effective classroom teaching (not
necessarily EFL): what kinds things children perceive, understand, remember better, and under what
circumstances; what the teacher can do to motivate learning; classroom management and control;
teacher-student relationships; and so on.
Both the study of language (linguistics) and that of teaching (pedagogy) are obviously essential to the
teacher of English as a foreign language. But if both are essential, why should we concern ourselves with
the question of which of them is more important?
The answer is, I think that in professional practice there is often an apparent conflict between the two
which is not so easily resolved and which forces the teacher whether she is aware of it or not to make
decisions about which has the priority.
An example. Supposing I am designing a first-year syllabus for ten-year olds learning English as a foreign
language. Frequency studies might indicate that words like crocodile, elephant, and butterfly are far less
commonly used than words like engine, wheel, seat, (West, 1953). If we design our syllabus according to
linguistic considerations, we will naturally prefer to teach the more common words earlier. But crocodile
etc. appeal to children both because of their meaning and because they are fun to (try to) say: and a
reliable pedagogical principle is that children tend to learn more easily, words that appeal to them. As a
teacher, I am interested in my students motivation and rapid acquisition of new vocabulary which they can
use to say things, as much as in the usefulness of that vocabulary. So I may well prioritize the less
common words.
Another example from methodology this time. There is some fairly convincing evidence (described in
Dulay, Burt and Krashen, 1982) that shows that children learning a second language in natural
immersion conditions have a long silent period before they start to speak. Applying this in the
classroom, one would need to spend the first few weeks, at least, doing all the talking oneself, or not
necessarily demanding verbal response from the students. But classroom teaching cannot afford the
luxury of immersion conditions. We have four lessons a week instead of the learners entire interaction
time, and we cannot wait for natural processes: we have to speed things up by getting the learners to
speak as soon as they can. Also, active performance by the learners allows us to give encouraging
feedback, which reinforces learning and raises motivation and self-image again, pedagogical principles.
In these examples, I have made it fairly clear that I would prioritize the pedagogical argument, and why.
Here is a third example, where I would not. Frequency studies again. It has been shown that the present
progressive tense is far less frequent than the present simple (Duskanova and Urbanova, 1967; or you
can test this out for yourself by taking a random selection of written and spoken texts and counting!). But
the present progressive is far more teachable: its structure does not entail the difficult do/does
interrogative and negative forms, and its meaning can be easily demonstrated in the classroom and lends
itself to interesting mime and picture-based practice. The temptation is to teach the present progressive
first, and to spent more time on it a temptation, I think, which should be resisted.
In other words, when deciding what to teach and how to put it across, I have to consider both linguistic
and pedagogical arguments, and then decide which has the priority, or how to combine them. In deciding,
I need to use all the knowledge I have gained about TEFL through courses, experience, reading,
discussion and reflection.

Teachers who have been through TEFL or Applied Linguistics courses as a preparation for their job may
often find that they have been taught to rely mainly on linguistics as a basis for teaching. Most of their
theoretical courses and reading will have been on linguistic subjects; relatively little on pedagogy or
education as such. The section of the course devoted to teaching experience cannot help but relate to
pedagogy but usually on a strictly practical level: classroom techniques and teaching behaviour. So that
trainees come out with a lot of theoretical linguistic knowledge, but little idea how to integrate it with
practical classroom pedagogy; for example, they may know a lot about the phonology of English, but have
no idea about how to teach pronunciation. On the other hand they may have some good teaching ideas,
but little awareness of relevant principles of pedagogy or how the linguistics can be best utilized within
them. For instance, they may have been taught that group work is desirable; but may have failed to learn
to distinguish between situations where group work is pedagogically valid and where it is not; or may have
no awareness of the role of group or pair work in the development of communication strategies.
And you see the results in the classroom. Trained EFL teachers may try uneasily at first to apply some of
the (applied) linguistics research-based knowledge in the classroom, but most swiftly abandon it, and
base their teaching on techniques they learned through practice or observation. Thus a lot of teaching is
opportunistic and unprincipled (that procedure works so Ill use it, never mind the theory). This is
unfortunately often reflected in the literature; you get on one hand, articles giving practical tips with no
reasoned rationale accompanying them, or on the other, descriptions of research-based or purely
speculative theory, with only very dubious links with professional action.
So what do I want?
First, I wish training courses would devote more time to discussing the principles of good pedagogy we
need more courses on things like classroom climate and motivation, lesson design, activity design,
classroom management. And it wouldnt hurt to look seriously at the teaching/learning methods of other
subjects: science, history, art.
Secondly, I wish there were more integration of theory with practice. Theoretical coursework has its place
in the learning of the principles of both pedagogy and linguistics but these principles spring from and
ultimately express themselves in human action, so this, surely, is how they should be learned. The
principles of student-teacher relationships or of classroom discourse for example: these manifest
themselves through real-time classroom interaction, and should be learned primarily, I think, by critical
reflection and analysis of how trainees interacted with students in their practice teaching, or how their own
teachers interacted with them these reflections, of course, filled out and enriched by insights gained
from books or lectures. One obvious implication of this model is that practice teaching becomes an
essential part of a methodology course, rather than a separate component; recent classroom events (such
as teacher-student exchanges) are discussed (in methodology sessions) and conclusions slotted into an
overall conceptual framework of how language teaching/learning works.
Third, I wish there were more integration of linguistics and pedagogy. A methodology course should teach
professional know-how based on both linguistics and pedagogical information. Such a course might be
called (as the president of IATEFL, at the time of writing this article, Denis Girard, suggested years ago).
The ultimate aim of such a course would be to get trainees to develop a rationale of language teaching,
which enables them to make informed and principled choices between the conflicting claims of different
theories.
References:
Brown, G. (1989) (interview) Sitting on a rocket ELT Journal 43/3, 167-72
Dulay, H., Burt, M. and Krashan, S. (1982) Languate Two, New York: Oxford University Press
Duskanova, L. and Urbanova, V. (1967) A frequency count of English tenses with applications to TEFL, Prague Studies in
Mathematical Linguistics 2
Girard, D. (1972) Linguistics and Language Teaching, London: Longman
Johnson, K. (1986) ESL teacher training: the case for the prosecution in Bickley, V. (ed) Future Directions in ELT Education, Asian
and Pacific Perspectives, Hong Kong University Education Department
West, M. (ed) (1953) A General Service List of English Words, London: Longman.

The informal index of articles

printed in The Teacher Trainer Journal
Volumes One (1987) to Twenty Six (2012)

"Aha!" Column
Aha! moment in teacher education

Natalie Hess & Jean

Zukowski- Faust

Vol 16

No 3

Images & Options in the Language Classroom

Breaking Rules
Words in the Mind
The Pilgrims/Longman Teachers Resource Books
Grammar Practice Activities
Lets Talk
Tasks for Language Teachers
Lexical Phrases & Language Teaching
Psychology for Language Teachers
Teachers understanding teaching
Teachers as course developers
Bright Splinters

Earl Stevick
John Fanselow
Jean Aitchison
Seth Lindstromberg
Penny Ur
Aleksandra Golebiowska
Martin Parrott
Prof J de Carrico
M Williams & R Burden
Karen Johnson
K Graves
Beate Hermelin

Vol 1
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 6
Vol 8
Vol 11
Vol 11
Vol 13
Vol 13
Vol 15

No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 2
No 2
No 1
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 1

Book and Video Reviews

Reviewed by:

EFL Teacher Training Manuals

FEU Pick up Staff Development programme
Loop Input
Teach English
Tasks for Language Teachers
Classroom Observation Tasks
New ways in Teacher Education
Inside Teaching
Learning Teaching
Towards Teaching
Looking at Language Classrooms (video)
Teacher learning in LT
A Course in LT
Psychology for language teachers
Language Teacher Supervision
Trainer Development
Understanding Expertise in Teaching
The TKT Course

(S Lindstromberg)
(R Baudains)
(R Wajnryb)
(A Doff)
(Donard Britten)
(Kate Evans)
(Michaela Tilinc)
}
} (G Grigoriou/C Nedelcu)
}
(Seth Lindstromberg)
(G Matei)
(Donald Britten)
(Alun Rees)
T. Woodward
M. Rinvolucri
T. Woodward
D.L. Banegas

Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 9
Vol 9
Vol 9

No 2
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3

Vol 11

No 2

Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 13
Vol 21
Vol 22
Vol 22
vol 26

No 3
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 2

Article Watch
In every issue from Vol 20 onward

Authors Corner

Classroom Practice
Helping Teachers to Mark Student Writing less
Subjectively
Teacher Echoing
Concept Questions
Classroom Pedagogics Pt 1
Classroom Pedagogics Pt 2
Teacher Echoing and More
The Use of Lesson Transcripts in TD
"Double TP" - Trainees repeating Practice Lessons

G Willems

Vol 1

No 1

Seth Lindstromberg
Tessa Woodward
Ray Brown
Ray Brown
Virginia Locastro
Richard Cullen
David Bell

Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 9
Vol 10

No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2

Conferences and Workshops: Presenting, organizing, reporting back

SEAL 1987
Some notes on giving talks at conferences
IST - Is it worth the risk?
Teaching, Teacher Training and Applied
Linguistics
British Council Seminar, Paris
Learner Independence
Thoughts after NELLE
The Management of Change
UCLES/CTEFLA November 1993
SEAL Brighton 1995
TT Symposium Edinburgh 1995
Welcome Back ! Sharing Ideas after a Conference
TDTR3
Peace in the Gulf
EFL teachers solving their own dilemmas
IALS 7th symposium 1999
2nd mentor conference Romania 2000
Workshop ideas for the reluctant
IATEFL SIG TT, Leeds, UK 2001
A checklist for organizing conferences
From Workshop to Metaphor & Metaphor to Workshop
One way to do a closing plenary
The 33rd International LAUD Symposium
Checklist for organizing and running a teachers Workshop
Organising a Pecha Kucha Event
Making effective use of the TT classroom

Tessa Woodward
Andrew Wright
Brian Tomlinson
Rod Bolitho

Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 2

No 2
No 2
No 2
No 3

S Inkster & B Moxon

Bruce Pye
P Philpott
Tom Hutchinson
Tessa Woodward
Marcial Bo
Tessa Woodward
Isabella Hearn

Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 8
Vol 9
Vol 10
Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 13
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 15
Vol 19
Vol 20
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 23

No 1
No 2
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 2

Vol 20
Vol 24

No 1
No 1

B. Brinzei
Thomas Farrel

Amy Paton
M. Rosenberg
Bryan Robinson
M. Rinvolucri
S. Lindstromberg
The January trainers
Lindsay Clandfield
Padmini Bhuyan (Boruah)

Content & Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)

Loes Coleman on CLIL
Learning to Integrate Science & Language at primary level

Current Research
Investigating the Role of Temporal Variables in
Listening Comprehension
Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning & the Pace
of Instruction
The Effects of Consciously Applied Empathy in Situations of Potential
Conflict
A New TT Research Database
The Adult Learner and Self-Narrative in the Management of Personal
Change
Getting to the Heart of the Matter The Marginal Teacher
Learner Difficulty
Trainer language in post observation feedback
Novice teachers in the staffroom

Janet Higgins

Vol 4

No 2

Peter Preece

Vol 5

No 2

Paul Bress
T. Daguelli

Vol 6
Vol 7

No 2
No 1

M Lea and L West

Vol 8

No 3

Judith Kennedy
Akira Tajino
K Oglu
M Pisova

Vol 9
Vol 11
Vol 13
Vol 13

No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3

Varies in cross-cultural contact

Classroom interrogations
3-Way Observation including Language Learner Feedback
Scaffolding teacher research and writing
Methodological landscapes in FLTT
Promoting contact with learners in an introductory TESL methods course
The Role of individual differences on the effect of synchronous coaching of
trainees
Becoming an ELT teacher trainer
Examining the role of the ESL teacher in North American
public schools
A Study of the washback effect of exams And associated teacher burnout

A.J. Meier
Fiona Farr
B. Yurtseven
T. Murphey
Ann Barnes
S.G. Kouritzin

Vol 15
Vol 16
Vol 17
Vol 19
Vol 20
Vol 21

No 2
No 1
No 3
No 2
No 2
No 1

R.W. Hoorman et al
Briony Beaven

Vol 22
Vol 22

No 1
No 3

S. Featro
K.S. Ozmen

Vol 24
Vol 26

No 3
No 3

Mario Rinvolucri
Dr C Gattegno
James Asher
Mike Lavery
Bernard Dufeu
Chris Sion
A Bloomer et al
John Thomson

Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 3

No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 2

Bernard Dufeu
Tessa Woodward
N Jones & L Phillips
Tim Murphy

Vol 6
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 8
Vol 9
Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol 13
Vol 13
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 15
Vol 15
Vol 15
Vol 22
Vol 24

No 2
No 1
No 2
No 2/3
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 2

M. Rasulo
Peter Andrews

Vol 16
Vol 16
Vol 19
Vol 19

No 1
No 1
No 2
No 2

M. Janopoulos
Lynda Beagle
Nicky Hockly
Wayne Rimmer
David Coniam
Jeremy Harmer
R. Cooper
Nicky Hockly
Nicky Hockly
Nicky Hockly
Nicky Hockly
Nicky Hockly
E.O. Kufi & J. Eldridge
Nicky Hockly
T. Woodward
T. Woodward
J. Eldridge et al

Vol 19
Vol 19
Vol 20
Vol 20
Vol 20
Vol 20
Vol 21
Vol 21
Vol 21
Vol 21
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 23
Vol 23
Vol 23
Vol 23
Vol 24

No 3
No 3
No
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 1

Different Schools of Thought and Feeder Fields

Psychodrama
Silent Way Workshops
Total Physical Response
Human Resources Development
Psychodrama
Zen & the Art of Classroom Management
On Course with VSO EL Teachers
Teacher Training for Steiner Schools
Psychodrama, Human Relations and Language
Training
Training for Medical General Practice
Transacting TEFL (TA)
NLP Parts 1, 2 and 3
What is NLP?
An application of NLP
The proxemics of lesson planning
Cognitive dissonance on assessed TT courses
EFL and conflict resolution
Teaching English through art
(Existentialism) Having prepared & being prepared
Working with multiple intelligence theory in TT
Working with metaphors in TT or TTT
Role-playing language teaching/methodology
The differing intelligences profiles of in-service EFL teachers
and their students

David Bowker
H Hughes
Paul Bress
Elliott Swift
Bonnie Tsai
Simon Marshall
Linda Taylor
Tessa Woodward
Denny Packard
A. Ankan-Cemy

E-matters and Its a wired world

Sites of interest for trainers
The IATEFL SIG TT/Ed discussion forum
Is e-learning changing the LTT profession?
Providing effective on line professional development for novice EFL
teachers
Distance learning & Teacher training in ESOL
Lesson planning and email
Its a wired world
Past and future uses of corpora in TT
Enhanced multimedia support for ELT education
10 things I hate about PowerPoint
Podcast teacher observation
Second Life
Webquests
Podcasts
Videos for training and self-development
E-Networks
Voices from the wilderness
Training the Trainers
Using large internet images
Website review
Corpus, concordancing and teacher education

Teaching practice on-line: creating a resource bank of authentic EFL

teaching video materials
A checklist of digital skills for teachers
Working with words on the web
New technology revolutionizes trainer/trainee reflection
Working the right way round

H. Emery

Vol 24

No 3

Nick Peachy
John Eldrisge et al
Russell Stannard
Tessa Woodward

Vol 25
Vol 25
Vol 26
Vol 26

No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3

}
}
} Sara Walker
}
}
}

Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 6
Vol 6

No 3
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2

A Oliveira
Ali S.M. Al-Issa

Vol 6
Vol 17
Vol 21

No 3
No 1
No 1

Sylvia Ashton Warner

Earl Stevick
John Fanselow
Michael Wallace
L Porcher/B Sapin-Lignires
Tessa Woodward
Griff Foley
Steven Pinker
D Vale/AFeunteun
M. Randall & B. Thornton

Issue 0
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 6
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 9
Vol 9
Vol 11
Vol 16

No 2
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 2

Games for Use in Teacher Training

Career Development Snakes & Ladders
Terminology "Call My Bluff"
Balance & Variety - pair cards
Found your own EFL Institute - mini-simulation
Teacher Talk - board game
Teacher/Student Rles - rle play
Language Bridge
Language Dominoes
What is Language?
Educating Beginner Teachers, the Teaching Game
Teachers like to play too!

}
}

Have you read...?

Teacher
Images and Options
Breaking Rules
Training Foreign Language Teachers
Quel professeur tes-vous ?
Ways of Training
Going Deeper
The Language Instinct
Teaching Children English
Advising & supporting teachers

In-Service Training and Development

Why do People attend In-Service TT Courses ?
An IST Programme in a Private Language School
Training Between the Lines
IST - is it Worth the Risk ?
Preparing IST Trainees for Return
Nitty Gritty
On Transforming Language Teachers
Teacher Echoing
MA's and Post-Graduate Qualifications
In Language Teaching, which is more important:
Language or Teaching?
Preparing Second Language Teachers for the
21st Century
The Changing Face of Materials Production
Towards Reflective Teaching
The Supermarket - a Frame for Short, Intensive
IST Courses
How Trainees can Provide a Resource for Staff Development
Maximising Learning in an Intensive TT Course
Practical Reflections on Teacher IST
The Psychological Risks of Methodological Change
Albanian Babies and Bathwater
Splitting the Atom
Individual Tutorials in IST
The Use of Humanisers
The Use of Lesson Transcripts in TD
Breaking down Barriers
Career Pathways
Making the workshop work

Mario Rinvolucri
Rob MacAndrew
Peter Maingay
Brian Tomlinson
Mario Rinvolucri
I Wilkinson
Andrew Thomas
V Locastro
Marion Williams

Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3

No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 2

Penny Ur

Vol 4

No 3

Dr F Gomes de Matos
Dee Uprichard
Jack Richards

Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 5

No 1
No 2
No 3

Bryan Robinson

Vol 5

No 3

A Peck
Lou Spaventa
Anne Burns
T Luxon
B Hyde
Tessa Woodward
L Towersey & M Leiria
Dr F Gomes de Matos
Richard Cullen
Ephraim Weintraub
Rod Bolitho

Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 9
Vol 10
Vol 10

No 1
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 3

Building structures of support for teachers

PIGATE, Affecting EFL teacher change from the grassroots
In Japan
An alternative way for teachers to develop
The Training Effect of Teachers Returning from Refresher Courses
When teachers write coursebooks
Teacher development - a worms eye view
Reflections on the transition from teacher to manager
Models of professional development

Paul Knight
Miriam Black
Nobuyuki Takaki
Naoko Aoki
Tessa Woodward
Harsh Kadepurkar
Amol Padwad
Robert Feather
C. Hadfield

Vol 14
Vol 16
Vol 16
Vol 16
Vol 17
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 23
Vol 26

No 1
No 2
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 1

Interviews With:
John Trim
Tony Buzan
Brian Tomlinson
Ephraim Weintraub and Jane Revell
Roger Bowers
Dr N S Prabhu
Ewa Krysakowska-Budny, Malgosia Szwaj, Mariola Bogucka
Melanie Ellis on Action Research
Gaie Houston on Supervision
John Morgan
David Nunan
Deborah Cameron
Jill Florent
Angela Johnson
Donald Freeman
Ted Rodgers
David Graddol
President of TESOL Kathi Bailey
Robert Dilts
Judith Kennedy
Jill Cosh Vol
Sarah Emsch
Loes Coleman on CLIL
Jill Hadfield
Vreni Matter
Peter Grundy
The Trento Group
George Pickering on inspecting schools
Chris Lima on Critical Literacy
James Keddie
Alan Waters
Phil Beadle

Issue 0
Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 6
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 10
Vol 11
Vol 11
Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol 13
Vol 16
Vol 17
Vol 17
Vol 19
Vol 20
Vol 20
Vol 21
Vol 21
Vol 22
Vol 23
Vol 23
Vol 24
Vol 24
Vol 25

No 3
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 2
No 2

Maggie Farrar

Vol 11
Vol 14
Vol 15
Vol 16
Vol 17
Vol 22

No 3
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 2

Sylvia Chalker
David Crystal
John Ayto
Tessa Woodward
Govert Schilling
Sylvia Chalker
D Graddol
S Bullon
H Cory
T Woodward

Vol 9
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 11
Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol 13
Vol 13
Vol 14

No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 3

Just for Interest

How to Procrastinate & Still Get Things Done
Gina, Sam and Hassan
Idiots Savants
Carrot Ice Cream
India Calling- How may I help you?
Dealers in hope - inspiring leaders, changing childrens lives

J Perry
B Lasserre
Beate Hermelin
Tessa Woodward

Language Matters
The Name of the Game
Reflecting Linguistic Change
"Sleaze"
Professional Language : Useful or Censorship ?
Naming Things in Space
How Grammar-aware are you ?
English 2000
COBUILD project
Pre teaching vocab for a writing task
Brain-clever word choice

Using Speech-Digitising Software..English Stress Timing

Chunks in the classroom
The language component and the native speaker teacher
Pronouncing on the right side of the brain
Anglo-EU translation guide
My English in Mangalammas World

David Coniam
Michael Swan
Ilana Salem
Helen Fraser
Deephti S.

Vol 17
Vol 20
Vol 21
Vol 22
Vol 26
Vol 26

No 3
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 2
No 3

Derek Straange
Gary Harfitt
Stella Smyth

Vol 12
Vol 22
Vol 21

No 1
No 2
No 3

Yvonne Pratt-Johnston
Chris Lima
G. Harfitt

Vol 21
Vol 22
Vol 23

No 3
No 3
No 3

G. Harfitt
Raya Stolyar

Vol 24
Vol 25

No 3
No 3

Guy Richeux
L. Porcher/B. Japin-Ligniers
Beatrice Davies
M. Hall & H. Sales
Rodney Mantle

Vol 3
Vol 7
Vol 10
Vol 15
Vol 19

No 3
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 1

Literature Matters
Using graded readers in the classroom
And hast thou slain the fear of poetry?
Working with teachers on literature in Bhutan
Preparing teachers for linguistic and cultural sensitivity using childrens
literature
Enouraging teachers and students to read more in the target language
Helping teachers to use short stories and films in tandem
Exploring and exploiting fractured fairy tales though book
and film
Inspirational Dictation

Languages other than English (LOTE)

What sort of modern language teachers do we need?
Quel professeur etes-vous?
UK PGCE Course
3 perspectives on an F.L. lesson
Some refelction MFL & EFL

Meet a Colleague/A Trainer Like Me

Alexandra Papadopoulos
Natalie Hess
Valeria Shadrova
Margit Szesztay
Carlota Gamarra
Deniz Kurtoglu Eken
Mary Tane Abrahams
Monica Marasescu
Nguyen Thi Hoai An
Hania Bociek
D. Thorburn & L. Bangura

Vol 1
Vol 3
Vol 5
Vol 10
Vol 13
Vol 15
Vol 15
Vol 16
Vol 16
Vol 23
Vol 26

No 1
No 3
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3

John Carmichael
Melanie Ellis
Clement Laroy
Sara Walker
Anthony Hall
Andy Baxter
Rowena Palser
Philip Dahl
Roger Woodham
Jenny Vanderplank
Dr F Gomes de Matos

Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 4

No 2
No 3
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1

Alison Haill
D Britten
R Lenzuen & V R de A Couto

Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 6

No 1
No 2
No 2

M Parrott

Vol 6

No 2

Tim Murphey

Vol 6

No 2

Turkey
Chile
Romania
Vietnam
Switzerland

Miscellaneous
The Foreign Language Lesson
An EFL Career? A Dilemma
A Relational Approach to TT
Dealing with EFL Terminology
Taking Risks
Teaching Lemon as a Foreign Language
Women & Training: a UK National Organisation
Advisory Perspectives
The Potential for Teacher Development in Poland
Two Short Training Ideas
Training Teachers as Explainers
Writing as a Learning Process in Teacher
Education & Development
Peer Teaching
The Administrator's Rle in Action Research
The Use of Foreign Languages in Training
Teachers of English
Action Logging: Letting Students in on
Teacher Reflection Processes

Teaching is Teacher Training

Lesson Planning - Focusing on the Learner
We need more Different Flags
Dealing with Time-tabling on L2 TT Courses
The Hidden History of a Lesson
On "Control" in L2 Classrooms
A Human Rights Approach to TT
Sensory Channels in ESL Instruction
Constructing 3-D pyramids
Writing training notes: process writing
Inside team teaching
When were you last in the primary classroom?
A web of trust
Reality testing: Teachers pass, board of education fails
Making the transition from TEFL to teaching ESOL
learners resident in Britain
A new concept the traveling conference
Metaphors in action
The role of teacher talk in task based learning
Teacher beliefs and teacher training
Understanding what teachers think about research
Yearn to learn: A case for self-directed learning
Is distance education for teacher education second best?
Preparing teachers for linguistic and cultural sensitivity using childrens
literature
Exploring the realtionship between teachers beliefs and their classroom
practice
Hidden perks of a roving teacer trainer
Helping teachers evaluate the authenticity of materials containing spoken
English
The fruit of elaborative mental processing
Using dialogue journals in an inter-disciplinary University course
Alls well that begins well
Foreign language teachers living abroad
All call for clear professional standards

Jim Wingate
R V Skuja-Steele & M Gibbs
Jean Ruediger
Craig Thaine
Mario Rinvolucri
Zuo Biao
Dr F Gomes de Matos
Michael E Rudder
J Parrot
P Mac Laughlin
Y Altaas & D Palfreyman
P Bodycott et al
Clyde Fowle
Tim Murphey & K. Sato

Vol 7
Vol 9
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol 13
Vol 13
Vol 13
Vol 14
vol 20

No 2
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1

Robert Feather
Zalia Sarwar, Jane Willis,
Pauline Ernest
Teresa Thiel
Linda Taylor
Helen Basturkmen
Simon Borg
D. Knezic
S. Garton & K, Richards

Vol 20

No 2

Vol 20
Vol 20
Vol 20
Vol 21
Vol 21
Vol 21
Vol 21

No 2
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3

Y. Prat-Johnson

Vol 21

No 3

S. Phipps & S. Borg

Mario Rinvolucri

Vol 21
Vol 23

No 3
No 2

C.S.C. Chan
David Coniam
N. Vojtkova & R. Collins
N. Pfanna
Sharon de Hinojosa
G. Chin-Wen Chien

Vol 24
Vol 25
Vol 26
Vol 26
Vol 26
Vol 26

No 3
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3

News in our Field

Susan Barduhn
Briony Beaven

Vol 20-22
Vol 23
onwards

NS and NNS teachers and trainers

Perspectives on the IST Needs of NNS
The Attitudes of French Nationals on a
UK PGCE Course
Norwegian Teachers in Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Debate on regional teacher trainers:
Soap bubble fairies
Outsiders inside
Collaboration between NS & NNS teachers
in Slovenia
Empowering non-native speakers for ELT
The language component and the native speaker teacher
NESTS in elementary schools in Taiwan

Jenny Jarvis

Vol 5

No 1

Beatrice Davies
Margaret Bautz
Jean Ruediger
Bonnie Tsai & M. de B

Vol 10
Vol 2
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 14

K Pizorn & CB
Icy Lee
Ilana Salem
G. Chin-Wen Chien

Vol 14
Vol 19
Vol 21
Vol 25

No 3
No 3
Nos
1/2
No 1
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2

Observation and Feedback

Observing and Being Observed
Feedback - some possible solutions

Sheelagh Deller
Judith Haigh

Vol 1
Vol 1

No 1
No 1

Little Boxes Observation Sheet

Non-judgemental, no directive
Observation and Feedback
Enhancing Classroom Skills
(Radio Assisted Practice)
Observation Tasks for Pre-service Trainees
Taking the Stress out of Discussing Lessons
The Case for Delayed Feedback
Watching Yourself, Watching Others
Being Seen - in defence of demo lessons
Teaching Practice Feedback :
Advantages of Splitting up the Group
Observation Charts
Getting "Mileage" out of Delayed Feedback
In-service Observation
Exorcism and the Observed Lesson
The case for no "T P" Points
Observing a Reading Activity
Don't Go and See for Yourself
Models of Teaching Practice & Feedback
A Task-based Approach to Feedback
Video - Fear and Loathing
Improving T P in situ
A Framework for Feedback
Observation from the Other Side
Using Discussions of Technique Sequences
Trainee Feedback
Peering at your Peers
Using a Counselling Approach in Teacher Supervision
Using Unseen Observations in IST Development
Haiku Idea
The use of Metaphor in Post-lesson Feedback
"The Look"
Micro-teaching Feedback Styles
Using the In-service Feedback Session to Promote
Teacher Self-Development Actively
How to avoid being a fly on the wall
Using classroom data as the basis for feedback
sessions
Developing skills in obs' and feedback
Using a SWOT Analysis in TP
Immediate and Delayed Intra-personal Feedback
A New Focus for Peer Observation
Delayed and immediate debriefing
Evolving a feedback style
Podcast teacher observation
A new role for trainees
Giving feedback on failed lessons
Stress-free observations
Some theoretical essentials for an effective observer training course
Classroom observations tools for trainers
Tasks for teaching practice

Lynn Rushton

Vol 1

No 2

Peter Maingay

Vol 1

No 3

Peter Tomlinson
Tessa Woodward
Tessa Woodward
Richard Denman
Greg Acker
R Wajnryb & R Bolitho

Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 4

No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1

Anne Paton
Patrick Philpott
Ray Parker
Bill Johnston
Martin Parrott
B Garside
Flavia Vieira
Judith Wilson
G Barker & S Hamilton
F Fitzpatrick & R Kerr
Richard Cooper
Teh Pick Ching
Ruth Wajnryb
Brok, Yu Tam
M Moreira
Gloria Vasconcelos
Frank Fitzpatrick
Dominic Cogan
Phil Quirke
Tim Hahn
Simon Marshall
Tom Farrel
Jill Cadorath

Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 6
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 9
Vol 9
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 10

No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3

Henny Burke
Garry Powell

Vol 11
Vol 13

No 1
No 1

R Watson Todd
D. Lubelska et al
Marie McArdle
Simon Marshall
Jill Cosh Vol
M. Williams & A. Waton
Steve Roberts
R. Cooper
Jane Blacknell
Paul Bress
K. Lackman
S. Baleghizadeh
Phil Keegan
Kati Somogyi-Toth

Vol 13
Vol 14
Vol 17
Vol 17
Vol 17
Vol 19
Vol 20
Vol 21
Vol 23
Vol 23
Vol 24
Vol 24
Vol 26
Vol 26

No 3
No 2
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 3

People who Train People

Gerlinde Wilberg
Margaret Elderson
Penny Aeberhard
Penny Turner
Richard Cooke
John Collier
Mario Rinvolucri
Sarah Andrews
Rachel Bodle

Monty Roberts
Rena Subotnik
Lucy Tano
Robin White
Graham OConnel

Midwife Trainer
Secretary Trainer
G.P.Trainer
Horse, rider & riding teacher trainer
Conductor and Orchestra Trainer
Medical Education
Training bus drivers
Training Nurses
Business Consultant

Best-selling Author
Gifted education specialist
Consultant anaesthesist
Florist trainer
Civil Service College

Issue 0
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 7
Vol 9
Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 11
Vol 14
Vol 15
Vol 15
Vol 16

No 1
No 2
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 2
No 1

Vanessa Ling
Lesley MacDonald
Training safety instructors on UK railways
Jennifer Creek
Sir John Lister-Kaye
Chris Balfour
Roger Goldfinch
John Harle
Rob Lewis
Russell Stannard
Tessa Woodward
Catalyst for kindness
Magistrate Mentor

Postgraduate Medical &

Dental Education Deanery
University Staff Developer
M. Rinvolucri
Occupational Therapist trainer
Ranger Trainer
Dance Trainer
Electrician trainer
Saxophonist
Website Manager
ICT Trainer
Ballroom dance training
F. Moran
Marian Nicholson

Vol 16
Vol 17
Vol 19
Vol 20
Vol 20
Vol 21
Vol 22
vol 23
Vol 24
Vol 25
Vol 25
Vol 26
Vol 26

No 3
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 2

Possible TT Course Models and Syllabuses

(see also Training Around the World & Pre-Service Training)
MA's & PG Qualifications
Critique of Pre-Service TT Pts 1 & 2
An "Up-side Down" TT Course
Internship: Partnership in Initial Teacher Education
The Supermarket: a Frame for Short Intensive
First Courses
From Behind the Barricades
Trainee Interaction on Participant-Centred Courses
Finding the Centre
Sustainable Methodologies in ELT Projects
Initial Reflections
Making a course your own
Grammar in MA TESOL course
Redesigning the LA component
Wider exposure to classroom reality
Making the workshop work
Start with the strong
On-line TT
Making mirrors in primary course design
Lets Begin from Mutual Understanding
The Innsbruck model of Fremdsprachendidaktik
Student teacher co-operation in syllabus design

Marion Williams
Peter Grundy
B Garside
T Allsop & I Scott

Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 4

Bryan Robinson
K Morrow
Simon Borg
Alan Maley
V Ainscough
P Kerr
K Lutz
A Meier
A Foster & P Mercieca
R Lo
P Knight
Zhu Xiaomei
David Mallows
Pam Aboshiha
C.Franson & Q.Gu
Hinger et al
Feyza Doyran

Vol 5
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 15
Vol 16
Vol 18
Vol 19
Vol 23

No 2
Nos
2/3
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 3

Natalie Hess
Ruth Wajnryb
Tessa Woodward

Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 3

No 3
No 3
No 1

Peter Grundy
Peter Grundy

Vol 3
Vol 3

No 2
No 3

Guy Richeux
Tessa Woodward
Seth Lindstromberg
Mario Rinvolucri
Kate Pearce
Vic Richardson
Gary Chambers
Jim Scrivener
Jane Willis
Simon LeFort
Tessa Woodward
Peter Grundy
Clive Lovelock
Tony Penston
Scott Thornbury

Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 6
Vol 7
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 9
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 10

No 3
No 2
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 2
No 2
No 3

Pre-Service Training
The Interview as a TT Tool
Hurdles and Histories
Observation Tasks for Pre-Service Trainees
A Critique of Pre-Service Teacher Training
Part 1
Part 2
What Sort of Modern Language Teachers do
we Need ?
The First Time a Teacher Teaches
An Entrance Test
Letter to a Trainee from a ex-Stammerer
The Cost of Failure
Are our Trainees Employable ?
Reflection & Feedback on a PGCE Course
PPP and After
Task-based Language Learning
Why the Sky .
Thoughts on School Placements
Is it a Joke?
The Post-PPP Debate : an Alternative Model
A Reply to P Grundy on Pragmatics
ARC : does it have restricted use?
A Taxonomic Perspective of EFL/ESL Teacher Preparation Programmes

Pioneering EFL TT
Redesigning the LA component
Training for reflective practice
Trainee teachers learning from experienced teachers
Generic instruction modules in initial TT
Who controls the interaction in the teacher education
classrooms
Preparing Language Teachers but how?
Educating Beginner Teachers, the Teaching Game
Lesson Planning for Real World TP
Encouraging professional development among pre-service trainers
Teaching practice as a motivational factor
Lesson planning & email on part-time teacher training courses
Collaboration among student teachers during teaching practice in Kenya
Managing the change
Assessing the practicum

Lynn E Henrichson
B Haycraft
A Foster & P Mercieca
John Gray
C Simpson
Peter Grundy
Leslie Bobb Wolff
J Norrish & N Pachler
A Oliveira
Hilary Smith
Julie Damron
Lucie Betakova
Lynda Beagle
C.O. Ongondo
Nick Baguley
M.G. San Martin & G. Helale

Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 15
Vol 16
Vol 17
Vol 17
Vol 17
Vol 19
Vol 19
Vol 19
Vol 24
Vol 25
Vol 25

No 2
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 3

Gerry Kenny
Tessa Woodward
Jim Wingate
Tessa Woodward
Gill Sturtridge
Tessa Woodward
Tessa Woodward
Mario Rinvolucri
Tessa Woodward
Tessa Woodward
Ian McGrath
Tessa Woodward
Natalie Hess
Tessa Woodward
Jonathan Marks
Alan Matthews
Mario Rinvolucri
Tim Murphey
Les Embleton
Les Embleton
Mario Rinvolucri
Mario Rinvolucri
Nick Shaw
Mario Rinvolucri
Sheila Estaire
David Spencer
Tony Penston
Ephraim Weintraub
J Chadwick
Natalie Hess
Mihaela Tilinca
Rod Bolitho
Monika Gedicke
Mario Rinvolucri
Tessa Woodward
Andrew O'Sullivan
Kathy Bird
Tessa Woodward
Mario Rinvolucri
Katie Plums
Julietta Schoenmann
Tessa Woodward et al
C.Simpson et al
Tessa Woodward
M. Rinvolucri & P. Williams
T. Woodward
The Trento Group
T. Woodward
Mario Rinvolucri
Jon Philips
Sarah Conway
A. Underhill

Issue 0
Issue 0
Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 8
Vol 8
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 12
Vol 13
Vol 13
Vol 13
Vol 14
Vol 15
Vol 15
Vol 15
Vol 16
Vol 17
Vol 18
Vol 19
Vol 20
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 23
Vol 23
Vol 24
Vol 25

No 1
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 1
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No 1
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No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 1
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No 3
No 1
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No 3
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No 1
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No 3
No 1
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No 1
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No 1
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 1

Process Options
The Teacher Homework Technique
Loop Input
Interactive Books
Lecture Discussion Scales
Using Posters in Teacher Education
"Curran-style" lectures
The Buzz-group lecture
Sideways Learning
The Starter Question Circle
Mind Maps
An Exercise in Autonomy
The Backwards Lecture
The Flexible List
Mapping the Day
Poster Presentations
Participant-Centred Activities in TT
Paradoxical Interventions
Insearch
Nominal Group Technique
Nine-Card Diamond Technique
Do Unto Them as They are to Do Unto Others
Fishbowl
Metaplan
Things to do After TT Input
The Action Plan Cycle
Reading Mazes
TEFL Auction
The Ghost Instrument
Grids for Recording TT Sessions
Using an Idea File
Micro-planning in IST
Suitcases: a training idea
Action Plans for ending a TT course
Adding group process to the TT agenda
From classroom tactics to beliefs & values
The AAR technique
Crosswords
One way of working + participants issues
Plenary speaker techniques
Case study envelopes
Feeding back to 5,000
Ideas for Livening up Conferences
Modifying tasks in Teacher Education
One of three a workshop energizer
End of course feedback
Using case studies
Ways of forming pairs and groups
The fridge
A thank you to my teachers
Ice breaker for train the trainer peer mentoring
Welcome letters
Open Space Technology for conferencing

10

Experiential activities for trainee teachers

Assessing with mind maps

Sarah Mercer
Justin Scoggin

Vol 25
Vol 25

No 1
No 2

What is EFLTED ?
LTP, How did you become a Trainer, Multiple
Intelligences
What is NLP ?
What is BIELT?
What cant you be without when you travel away? Pt 1
What cant you be without when you travel away? Pt 2
Travelling Training Vol 17
Who is Reading What?

Gordon Slaven

Vol 3

No 1

What is ACTDEC?
What is cognitive linguistics

Brian Winn-Smith
Jeannette Littlemore

Vol 10
Vol 11
Vol 14
Vol 17
Vol 17
V ol 17
{ Vol 18
{
{
{ Vol 19
Vol 20
Vol 23

No 3
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 1

M de Moraes Menti
Seth Lindstromberg
Tammy Gregersen
Nathalie Hess
Eleni Pithis
Joseph Edward Price
Betka Pislar
D. McLachlan Jeffrey
C. Sani

Vol 9
Vol 11
Vol 19
Vol 19
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 23
Vol 25
Vol 26

No 2
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2

Neil Williams
Ingrid Wisniewska
J R A Williams
I Wisniewska
Tim Murphey
I Wisniewska
C Simpson
Ewen Arnold
Miljen Matijasevic
N. Gurbuz
M.K. Smith & M. Lewis
M. Lewis & T.K. Bamon

Vol 8
Vol 13
Vol 10
Vol 12
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 19
Vol 20
Vol 23
Vol 23
Vol 24

No 2
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 1
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 2

Publications received
In every issue

Questions & Answers

Andrew Brown

Readings for Trainees

Pitfalls of Inexperienced Teachers
Lesson Planning & Teaching by Threads
Watch what your language students are not saying
Creating a sense of inclusion: the use of literature
enhancing learning through positivity
Reconsidering the participation grade
How to stay motivated as a teacher
The Art of War
Teaching older students

Specifically on Mentoring
Peer Mentoring
Problem-solving strategies for mentors
Mentorship
What's your mentoring style?
The indirect to direct peer mentoring continuum
Creating congruence in mentoring styles
University and school based mentors
Improving mentee lesson planning through mentor modeling
Putting mentoring energy to good use
challenges of mentoring pre-set teachers in Turkey
The language teacher practicum: perspectives from mentors
Mentoring the teacher trainer

11

Teacher Selection and Evaluation

Teacher Selection
An Entrance Test
The Use of Self-Evaluation in TT
A Final Anti-Exam for IST Programme
Portfolio Assessment and the L2 Methods Course
Using trainee diaries for assessment
Using actionresearch for evaluation on TT courses
Putting the Learning into Assessment
Interviewing candidates for pre-service training courses
Using class time for learning
Student evaluation of faculty

Peter Duppenthaler
Seth Lindstromberg
Kari Smith
Steven Brown
B Paltridge
Ana Halbach
S. Piai & K. Threadgold
David Carless
Rebecca Belchamber
Penny Ur
Eleni Pithis

Vol 1
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 6
Vol 8
Vol 13
Vol 15
Vol 17
Vol 20
Vol 22
Vol 23

No 3
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 2
No 3

The Spoof Page

Mail Order Catalogue
The Jargon Generator
New Approaches to Language Teaching
Mr and Mrs - and their daughter
Trainer Odour
Trainer Ad-speak
Crossword by Mog
Solution by Mog
Crossword by Mog
Solution by Mog
Brief Abstracts
The Parable of the Good Language Learner
The story of Trainerella
Rhubarb Bingo
Faking it
Jargon Generator

Tessa Woodward

Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 6
Vol 11
Vol 14
Vol 17
Vol 18
vol 20

No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 3

P. Beresford
Rodney Mantle

Vol 18
Vol 19

No 1
No 1

Mario Rinvolucri
Kate Pearce
Fran Byrnes
D Tendler, J Cotton &
J Wilson
Jackie Smith
Mario Rinvolucri
Simon Borg

Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 6

No 1
No 3
No 1

Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 8
Vol 9
Vol 9
Vol 9
Vol 10
Vol 11
Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol 12

No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 3

Vol 13
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 14

No 2
No 1
No 3
No 3

Michael Swan
Mike Church
G. Gregoroiu
Paul Bress

The Teachers Page

Field Notes from Brazil
Dogs and Tricks

Trainee Voices
RSA Trainees Speak Out
The Cost of Failure
Resistance to Change in TT Courses
Three Trainee Voices
Honesty
Language Awareness & Professional Hierarchy
Conflict in Process-Oriented Training
A Teacher in Training for Primary School Work
At SEAL, Brighton 1995
One Way of Hearing Trainee Voices
Trainee Voices
Trainee Voices
Diary writing for self reflection
Reflection on training
The stress factor in short assessed TT course
Outsiders inside
Peer tutoring as co-operative learning
Lily and writers' block

Marcial Bo
Tessa Woodward
Bonnie Tsai
Maria Dessaux-Barberio
Ng Jueh Hiang
Bettinelle, Monticol &
Tropea
Tsai & Dessaux-Barberio
""
J Spiro & K Basich
Mario Rinvolucri

12

Varies in cross-cultural contact

3 Perspectives on a F.L. lesson
Using email during the practicum
Being a Modern Language Student Teacher
Trainee Feedback
Teaching practice as a motivational factor
Challenges facing beginning EFL teachers/trainers
Danie Monaghan
Standing up for tutors

A.J. Meier
M. Hall & H. Sales
Thomas Farrell
J. Laird
Diana Lane
Lucie Betakova
WenHsing Luo
Anon

Vol 15
Vol 15
Vol 15
Vol 18
Vol 18
Vol 19
Vol 19
Vol 22
vol 26

No 2
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 3

Penny Ur
G Willems
Ruth Wajnryb
B Johnston & B Madejski
John Laycock
Jenny Pugsley
Bill Reed
Linda Taylor

Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 5

No 3
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3

Hana Raz

Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 7
Vol 8
Vol 9
Vol 9
Vol 11

No 1
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 3

Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 13
Vol 15
Vol 16
Vol 16
Vol 16
Vol 17

No 1
No 2
No 1
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1

Hiromi Hadley
Jasmine Little

Vol 17
Vol 17

No 1
No 2

Hiromi Hadley
Meagan McCue
David Leat
Chris Lima
Sari Poyhonen
Anita Pincas
S. Lindstromberg
Jack R. Gibb
Sezgi Yalin
G. Hall
Iain McGee

Vol 17
Vol 21
Vol 21
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 23
Vol 24
Vol 24
Vol 24
Vol 25

No 3
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 1

T. Woodward

Vol 26

No 1

Vol 1
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 5
Vol 6
Vol 7

No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 1

Trainer Background
Teaching Heterogeneous Classes Pt 1
Phonetics Re-visited
A Last Lesson - Ending Courses
A Fresh Look at Team Teaching
Pre-reading Quizzes - a Framework
Language and Gender
Training Teachers of Business English
The Communicative Teaching of Vocab.
The Crucial Role of Feedback and Evaluation in
Language Classes
Information on CILT
Explanations & Explaining
Forms & Charts
Computers, Corpora & Language Teaching
Pair and Group Work : Confessions of Ignorance
Total Quality Management
Collaborative Language Teaching
Chaos theory and the PDSA cycle
What is a teacher?
Introduction to NELLE
The nightmare of reading difficulty
Emotional Literacy
Towards a classification of the internet
Debating
The Teaching of English in Difficult circumstances
Power distance: Cross-Cultural Implications for
ELT Pt 1
The True Tale of a Classroom Assistant
Power distance: Cross-Cultural Implications for
ELT Pt 2
Texts on HIV/AIDS for use in TT
Critical thinking
Encouraging teachers and students to read more in the target language
Thoughts on teachers professional identity
Late age language learning
Lexical phases
Is help helpful?
A mirror for self-reflection?
Exploring values in ELT
What teachers need to know about lexical inferencing
Teaching for thinking

A Moore-Flossie & L Glynn

Tony Skevington
P Robinson
Tessa Woodward
Tessa Woodward
E Edmundson &
S Fitzpatrick
David King
Jenny Pugsley
Kit Batten
Mario Rinvolucri
Harriet Goodman
Huw Jarvis
Alina Gutauskiene
Alan Maley

Trainer Materials and Resources (see also the TT Games series)

Making the Most of TT Materials
From a Garage to a Teachers Centre
Stop-Go : AV Aids for the Trainer
Using Substitution tables for Language Analysis
A Jazz-Chant
The Use of Algorithms in TT
Another Flipping Training Aid
Using Activity Cards
Monitoring & Evaluating the Production of

P Ahrens & A Ghodiwale

Centre Members
I McGrath
Tessa Woodward
G Acker
Mick Randall
I McGrath
Martin Cortazzi

13

Materials on a Trainer-Training Workshop

A teachers essay on criticism
Support materials for CEELT course
Using experienced teacher accounts
Using coursebooks to train teachers
Flip chart magic
Tasks for helping teachers get better at defining and eliciting vocabulary

R Williams et al
R Watson Todd
I Forth
C Simpson
Jeremy Harmer
Robert Lucas
S. Lindstromberg

Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol13
Vol 14
Vol 16
Vol 21
Vol 21

No 1
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2

Tessa Woodward
Mario Escobar & B. Lee La
Madeleine
Mario Rinvolucri
Robert Chambers
M. Rinvolucri
R.Chambers

Vol 9

No 1

Vol 15
Vol 15
Vol 17
Vol 18
Vol 18

No 1
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 1

R. Cooper

Vol 18

No 3

Penny Ur
Sara Walker
Fiona Kalinowski
Rosie Tanner
Kathy Bird
P Philpott
Briony Beaven
R Turk-Iskandarani/
G Mason-Jabbour
Tessa Woodward
Jane Cadorath &
Simon Harris
Jenny Leonard
Grigoroiu & Popescu
Katy Salisbury
Andrew Morris
Mark Wilson
Martha Lengeling & Emily
Thrush
Andy Caswell
Andy Caswell
Deniz Salli-Copur
Andy Caswell
Stella Smyth
Andy Caswell
Andy Caswell
Andy Caswell
Patricia Laurai de Gentile
Chris Lima
V. Odenyi & G. Lazar
Sezgi Yalin
Jon Philips
L. Skopinskaja & S. Liv
Seth Lindstromberg

Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 7
Vol 9
Vol 11

No 1
No 3
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 1

Vol 11
Vol 12

No 3
No 1

Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 15
Vol 16
Vol 16

No 2
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 2
No 3

Vol 20
Vol 21
Vol 21
Vol 21
Vol 21
Vol 22
Vol 22
Vol 23
Vol 23
Vol 24
Vol 25
Vol 25
Vol 25
Vol 26
Vol 26

No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2

J Parker & A Millican

David Cranmer
Tessa Woodward

Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 2

No 3
No2
No 3

Trainer Mistakes
Pair and Group Work
Trainer mistakes
My blind spots
21 Mistakes I make in Workshops
A Teacher Training Dream
21 Horrors in Participatory Workshops
When Flows No Go

Trainer Session Plan (includes Practical training sessions)

Teaching Heterogeneous Classes Pt 2
What are your theories ?
One Way of Running an In-House TT Session
Erroroleplay
A Teaching Speaking Session
A Fear Clinic
Training for Primary School English
Ideas for a Workshop on Pre-writing Strategies
Working with Teachers Interested in Different Methods
Task based learning
Fear and the classroom
Simulation & role play for training class management
Observation in the round
Investigating learning
Is my map to scale?
A lesson in lesson planning
Ways of reviewing and recycling vocabulary
Ways of developing oral fluency
Developing autonomy
Integrating drama with your classes, Part One
Working with teachers on literature in Bhutan
Ways of integrating drama into language classes Pt. 2
Ways of working with grammar Part 1
Ways of working with grammar Part 2
Classroom management
The role of extensive reading in teacher education
Cross-cultural awareness workshop
Encouraging teachers to fulfill their potential
Dealing with participant behaviors
Raising intercultural awareness in PRESETT
Benefits of short, in-class writing exercises

Trainer Training
A Way of "Training-in" Trainers
Learner, Teacher or Trainer ?
Short Practical Ideas

14

Would You Like to Give a Training Course?

Self-Access Teacher Training
Training Inside and Outside Your School
Trainers Giving Instructions
More Hurdles - Becoming a Teacher Trainer
Exploring the Rle of the Teacher Trainer
What it's like to be a Travelling Trainer
Reflections of a Beginning Trainer
Grids as Reflective Tools on TT Courses
Why Train ?
Collective Management
Suggestions for a Short Trainer Course
Helping NNS Trainers with Questions for
Leading Discussions
TT Symposium report
Who trains the Trainers ?
Train Ourselves First ?
Training Practice as a Component of an MA Course
Monitoring & Evaluating the Production of Materials
on a Trainer-Training Workshop
In-service TESOL Workshops: Suggestions for
Novice Trainers
Are you honest?
The good teacher trainer
Is anybody listening to me?
A trainer's attempt at change
Debate about regional trainers
Developing obs' and feedback skills
Trainer training under difficult circs
Becoming a teacher educator
Training TrainingRoom Skills
Is e-learning changing the language teacher trainer profession?
Am I ready to be a teacher trainer?
Moving into teacher training
Active Listening: giving trainers a voice
Four perspectives in teaching teachers
My first seminar: reflections
Being trained as a trainer of primary teachers
Becoming a CELTA trainer

Jordi Roca
Ruth Wajnryb
Sue Leather
Leslie Bobb-Wolff
Ruth Wajnryb
Ann Rossiter
Jim Wingate
Julie Thomson
R Bolitho & T Wright
Saxon Menne
H Traore & D Britten
Anne Burns

Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 6
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 8
Vol 8

No 1
No 2
No 2
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 3
No 2
No 2
No 1
No 2

Richard Cullen
Tessa Woodward
School-based
Wu Xin
J A Harthill & J E Kendrick

Vol 9
Vol 10

No 3
No 1

Vol 10
Vol 11

No 3
No 1

R Williams et al

Vol 11

No 1

Maureen Andrade
E Adams
S Borg
P Dexter
S Bharati

Vol 11
Vol 12
Vol 12
Vol 13
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 15
Vol 17
Vol 19
Vol 20
vol 20
Vol 25
vol 25
Vol 26
Vol 26
Vol 26

No 2
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1/2
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 1
No 2
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 2
No 3

D Lubelska et al
Anne Wiseman
Jo Durham
Alan Waters & Marlu Vilches
Margaret Rasulo
Tessa Woodward
Tanya Skrypnyk
Stephen Louw
Gabriel Diaz Maggioli
E. Oncevska
Vu Mai Trang
A. Bailey

Training Around the World

Brazil
Yugoslavia
Australia
Sri Lanka
China
Poland
Spain
G.D.R.
Finland
Spain
Hungary
China
The Netherlands
Israel
Poland
The North Americas
Indian Problems & Indian Solutions
China
Brazil
The Czech Republic
China
Peru
Slovenia
Bangladesh. Apraisel & development for long-term consultants
China
INTED at the College of St Mark & St John
India

Anna Szabo & Mike Stimson

David Hill
Jane Lockwood
Andrew Thomas
Bruce Morrison
Roger Woodham et al
L Bobb-Wolff & J L Vera
Ewald Festag
A Ronka, T Wiik, S Tella
D Casas, G Gibson &
M L Martinez de Ritverto
A Malderes & C Bodacsky
Tony Luxon
Wout de Jong
Ephraim Weintraub
Melanie Ellis
C Shields & M Janopoulos
M N K Bose
Wu Xin
Regina Guimaraes
Lin Dawson & Carol Berezai
Xhu Xiaomei
Anne Wiseman
K. Pizorn & CB
Tom Hunter
Ding Suping
Rod Bolitho
Maya Manon

Vol 1
Vol 2
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 6

No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2

Vol 6
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 7
Vol 9
Vol 10
Vol 10
Vol 11
Vol 11
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 14
Vol 15
Vol 16
Vol 17
Vol 19

No 3
No 1
No 2
No 2
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 2
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 1

15

Italy
Rural/East Africa
EFL teachers at Chinese universities
The revival of BELTA, Bangladesh
Bhutan
Certification - a must for English TT programmes in China
Mentoring pre-services teachers in Turkey
Taking it to the teachers Thailand Part one
Taking it to the teachers Thailand Part two
China a view of ELTT from the British Council Beijing
China Intercultural professional Development in a minority region
The Curious case of the Indian teacher
English reforms in Uzbekistan

Maria Bortoluzzi
Eleni Pithis
Rodney Mantle & Lousa Li
Rubina Khan & Steve Cornwell
Stella Smyth
Chun Mei Yan
Nurdan Gurbuz
W. Srimavin, U. Wall, J. Hull
K. OHare
T. Rui & T. Bleistein
Shaheen Subhan
J. Gulyamova & N.
Isamukhamedova

Vol 19
Vol 19
Vol 20
Vol 20
Vol 21
Vol 22
Vol 23
Vol 23
Vol 23
Vol 24
Vol 24
Vol 25

Vol 2
No 3
No 1
No 3
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 2
No 3
No 1
No 1
No 3

Vol 26

No 1

Training Teachers for Primary

When were you last in the primary classroom
Professional development for ELT: helping learners to write

P. Bodycott et al
T. Thiel

Vol 13
Vol 24

No 2
No 2

16

The Teacher Trainer Back Articles

Saved from: http://www.tttjournal.co.uk

For those trainers too busy to write books, giving papers at conferences is a
good way to keep colleagues informed of recent work and to start discussion.
The series Conference Report publishes original or revised versions
of papers given at major conferences.

In-Service TEFL Is it Worth the Risk?

by Brian Tomlinson

1. Assumption
It seems to be universally taken for granted that it is necessary and worthwhile to run short, intensive
courses to bring teachers of TEFL up to date. It is assumed that teachers cannot independently cope
with the incessant flood of new theories, ideas and materials in TEFL and that the best way to help
them is to bring them together in a lecture room or classroom to receive new information. This is the
assumption behind the short refresher courses run by universities and language schools, by
ministries of education and by British Council spec tourists all over the world. For twenty years I have
been helping to run such courses and have been fairly confident that I have been successful in
providing positive stimulus to most of the teachers I have worked with. Now I am not so sure. Many of
them might have gone back to their schools feeling refreshed and possibly even inspired; but how
many of them really gained anything of any lasting value from the courses? And how much did they
lose?
My growing fears that short in-service courses are potentially dangerous have been reinforced by
meetings and correspondence with ex-participants of such courses who feel guilty and inadequate
because they have not been able to do what their courses inspired them to try, and in particular, by my
current experience on the PKG Project in Indonesia. For the first time in my career I have had the
opportunity to really find out the effects of in-service courses I have run or observed. Three times a
year I run in service workshops for the same group of teacher trainers from all over the country.
Twice a year these teacher trainers run 16 week in-on service courses for experienced teachers in
their provinces. For two weeks the teachers do a very intensive course in the provincial capital and
then they return to their schools for six weeks. During these six weeks they attend weekly meetings
with their teacher trainers in their provincial capital and they are observed by them at least five times in
their schools. Then they return for another two weeks intensive courses and finally they spend another
six weeks teaching in their schools, being observed and attending weekly meetings. A lot has been
achieved using this system but I am absolutely convinced that it would have been disastrous for the
teacher trainers or the teachers to have just done one in-service course. The motivation and stimulus
they had gained would soon have been negated by the confusion and frustration they would have
suffered in trying to apply all that they had learned and the guilt and inadequacy they would have felt
as a result of their almost inevitable failure to accommodate a new approach within the existing
parameters of syllabus, examinations, materials, official expectations and class size. Yet this is what
teachers all over the world are expected to do after leaving in-service courses. At least on the PKG
Project we have a chance to make the confusion positive by using feedback on real teaching to
increase understanding and to encourage gradual independence of thought and application.
2. The Dangers of Short In-Service Courses
The result of attending a short, in-service course for many participants is that they:a)

resist the new ideas because they feel they have been unfairly attacked for using oldfashioned methods and materials; OR

b)

fear and reject the new ideas because they see them as a threat to the self-esteem and
security they have built up over many years; OR

c)

dissociate themselves from the new ideas for fear of being seen as radical and subversive by
the authorities in their system; OR

d)
e)

f)

are persuaded to try the new ideas and then feel guilty when they abandon them after their
initial failures to apply them successfully in the classroom; OR
are so convinced of the value of their new wisdom that they rush back to their schools with
revolutionary zeal and unthinkingly impose methods and materials from their in-service course
on their bewildered students before having to revert to their old approach when the received
supply of materials and ideas runs out; OR
become total converts to the new approach and fail to see the inappropriacy of some of its
aspects to the realities of their teaching situation.

3. Causes of the Damage

a)
The tutors are academics who have considerable theoretical knowledge of their field but have
little or no experience of teaching in situations similar to those faced by the participants.
b)

The tutors are outsiders who have no experience or knowledge of the specific local situation.

c)

The tutors alienate the participants by assuming superiority.

d)

The tutors do not acknowledge or make use of the experience of the teachers.

e)

The tutors reply on charismatic performance to entertain, stimulate and persuade without
involving the participants in thinking for themselves.

f)

The tutors are so evangelical that they gain some over-zealous converts whilst alienating the
rest of the participants.

g)

The objectives are content-orientated (e.g. To give the participants information about TPR)
rather than behavioral (e.g. To help the participants to work out ways of using the principles of
TPR when teaching Class SMP 1 in Indonesia).

h)

The course provides only, theoretical information without helping the participants to apply
it.

i)

The course provides theoretical information plus a few examples of materials which become
inflexible models in the minds of the participants.

j)

The course provides lots of recipes for the participants to follow but does not help them to
develop ideas and materials of their own.

k)

The course gives the impression that there is only one right way to do things and does not
provide options to choose from and develop.

l)

The course only gives and the participants only receive.

m)

There is no focus or cohesion to the course and it moves from topic to topic without
connection.

n)

There are too many tutors providing separate specialist bits.

o)

Too much new information is presented in the course.

p)

Too much new information is presented in each session without any attempt to reinforce,
recycle or relate information.

q)

The course is far too ambitious and attempts to effect a radical change in teacher behaviour in
a few short weeks.

r)

The authorities wish to give the appearance of keeping up to date but make sure no radical
change results by not providing adequate time, incentive or resources.

s)

The course contradicts the principles of humanism, interaction, self

access, relaxation and independence which it is recommending to the participants.

t)

There is no follow up to the course. the teachers receive no further support or encouragement.
the teachers are not helped to actually apply the ideas they have been given.

4. Conclusions
Running any short in-service course is a risk. There is a very good chance that many of the
participants will lose more than they will gain. In order to minimize the risk of loss of morale,
confidence and competence it is important to ensure that:
a)

the objectives are specific, limited and behavioral;

b)

the course is designed to achieve continuity and coherence;

c)

the content of the course is limited and has a specific focus;

d)

the tutors have up-to-date knowledge of developments in the field AND experience of
teaching in similar situations to those of the participants AND experience or awareness of
the specific local situations of the participants;

e)

the experience and expertise of the participants is acknowledged and made use of;

f)

the course applies the principles of inter-active and humanistic learning theories;

g)

the course is EXPERIENTIAL and not just informative;

In order to ensure that the course actually benefits many of the participants it is also
important to ensure that:

h)

the course is followed up by a monitoring and guidance service to the participants.

This can be achieved by:-

i)

running on-service courses which involve individual classroom observation and

constructive feedback plus group discussion and planning;

ii)

setting up a correspondence support service which enables teachers to receive feedback

on lesson plans, materials, problems, ideas and recordings and/or descriptions of
lessons;

iii)

holding regular regional self-help meetings of the in-service participants to which the inservice tutors are sometimes invited;

iv)

setting up correspondence and telephone self-help groups among the participants;

v)

setting up small regional teams to monitor each others lessons and materials;

vi)

inviting the same participants back for a follow up course the following year.

Whatever happens, the in-service course must be seen as the BEGINNING of a process of teacher
development and not the end.