Ten Guidelines for Successful Teaching

These ten guidelines will help you make communicative language teaching and learner-centered instruction part of your own instructional approach.

Take your learners’ goals, interests, and existing knowledge seriously
Provide appropriate input
Use language in authentic ways
Provide context and make cultural connections
Design activities with a realistic purpose
Encourage collaboration
Use an integrated approach
Address grammar consciously
Adjust feedback/error correction to the situation
Travel with your learners; don’t drag them along behind

1. Take your learners’ goals, interests, and existing knowledge seriously

Why are your learners in your classroom? What do they want or need to be able to do with the language? Find out, and incorporate those goals and interests into your curriculum design and lesson planning. When you encourage your learners to identify for themselves what they want to know and be able to do, and then help them work toward those goals, you give them an answer to the “why” question:

Learner: “I’ve studied Italian for the past two years.”
Teacher: “Why?”
Learner: “So that when I travel to Italy and meet my grandmother for the first time, I’ll be able to talk to her.”

Learner: “I really want to focus on developing my listening and speaking skills in Mandarin.”
Teacher: “Why?”
Learner: “Because I’m majoring in international business and I’m planning a career in U.S.-China trade, so I need to be able to participate in meetings.”

What do your learners already know about the language and the culture? What are they able to do? Teaching is most effective when it builds on the knowledge and strengths that learners already have. View your learners as cups that are half full, not cups that are half empty. Focus on what is already there and seek to increase it, rather than focusing on what is missing and seeking to remedy it.

Make sure your learners understand the learning goals that inform every classroom activity.

2. Provide appropriate input

Input is the language to which learners are exposed: teacher talk, listening activities, pair and group work, reading passages, and the language heard and read outside of class. Input gives learners the material they need to develop the ability to use the language on their own.

The type of input that you provide depends on the learning context. When the context is transmission of specific information that you want learners to know, you provide finely tuned input: Input that is matched to learners’ current comprehension level and connected to what they already know. Finely tuned input

Focuses on conscious learning of a specific point: the pronunciation of a word, the contrast in the uses of two verb tenses, new vocabulary, useful social formulas
Is controlled by the instructor or textbook author
Is used in the presentation stage of a lesson

When the context involves practice with authentic communication situations, you provide roughly tuned input. This type of input

Is more complex than learners’ current proficiency and stretches the boundaries of their current knowledge
Focuses on authentic use of language in listening or reading passages
Is used “as is,” with minimal alteration by the instructor or textbook author
Is used in the activity stage of the lesson

Roughly tuned input challenges learners to use listening and reading strategies to aid comprehension. When selecting authentic materials for use as roughly tuned input, look for listening and reading selections that are one level of proficiency higher than learners’ current level. This will ensure that learners will be challenged by the material without being overwhelmed by its difficulty.

3. Use language in authentic ways

In order to learn a language, instead of merely learning about it, learners need to hear, read, and use the language actively, as proficient speakers do. As the teacher, you can make this happen in two ways.

Teacher talk: Always try to use the language as naturally as possible when you are talking to learners. Slowing down may seem to make the message more comprehensible, but it also distorts the subtle shifts in pronunciation that occur in naturally paced speech.

Speak at a normal rate
Use vocabulary and sentence structures with which learners are familiar
State the same idea in different ways to aid comprehension

Materials: Give learners authentic reading and listening material from online and physical sources. To make these materials accessible,

Review them carefully to ensure that the language level is appropriate
Introduce relevant vocabulary and grammatical structures in advance
Provide context and activate existing knowledge by asking learners what they already know about the topic or what relevant experiences they have had
Facilitate learners’ review of the format for the type of material as a pre-listening or pre-reading preparation activity

Advertisements, travel brochures, packaging, and street signs contain short statements that learners at lower levels can manage. In addition, the internet is a rich resource for authentic materials. Reading and listening to authentic materials motivates learners at all levels because it gives them the sense that they really are able to use the language to communicate.

4. Provide context and make cultural connections

Context includes knowledge of

the topic or content
the vocabulary and language structures in which the content is usually presented
the social and cultural expectations associated with the content

Languages are cognitive systems, but they also express ideas and transmit cultural values. When you are discussing language use with your learners, it is important to include information on the social, cultural, and historical context that certain language forms carry for proficient speakers. Often these explanations include reference to what a proficient speaker would hear or say, and why.

To help learners have an authentic experience of understanding and using the language, prepare them by raising their awareness of the context in which it occurs.

Ask them what they know about the topic
Ask what they can predict from the title or heading of a reading selection or the opening line of a listening selection
Review the vocabulary (including idiomatic expressions) and sentence structures that are usually found in that type of material
Review relevant social and cultural expectations

Culture is expressed and transmitted through magazines and newspapers, radio and television programs, movies, and the internet. Using media as authentic materials in the classroom can expand learners’ perspectives and generate interesting discussions about the relationships between language and culture.

5. Design activities with a realistic purpose

In many activities that occur in language classrooms, learner communication has just one purpose: to demonstrate mastery of some aspect of language use to the teacher. This is a valid use of language in contexts where such demonstrations are needed, such as assessment. However, this purpose for communicating exists nowhere in the world outside of the language classroom. If learners are to become able to use the language in real world situations, they must have real world purposes—preferably purposes that they themselves have identified—for using it in classroom activities.

Ordinarily, communication has a purpose: to convey information. In life, people use language to perform tasks such as solving problems, developing plans, and working together to complete projects. The use of similar task-based activities in the classroom is an excellent way to encourage learners to use the language. Tasks may involve solving a word problem, making a set of instructions, creating a video, preparing a presentation, or developing an action plan. In these classroom activities, learners use the language to fill an information gap by giving and obtaining answers or expanding a partial understanding.

6. Encourage collaboration

Whenever possible, ask learners to work in pairs or small groups. Give learners structure in the form of a defined task and outcome. This structure will allow learners to collaborate as they develop a work plan, discuss the substance of the task, and report the outcome. They will thus use language in a variety of ways and learn from each other.

Effective collaborative activities have three characteristics.

Communication gap: Each learner has relevant information that the others don’t have
Task orientation: The activity has a defined outcome, such as a presentation that learners will then make to others or a video for others to view and comment on.
Time limit: Learners have a pre-set amount of time to complete the task

7. Use an integrated approach

Integration has two forms. Mode integration is the combination of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in an activity. By asking learners to use two or more modes, instructors create activities that imitate real world language use.

Content integration is bringing content from learners’ fields of study into the language curriculum. University students often find it instructive to read, discuss, and write about material whose content they already know, because their knowledge of the topic helps them understand and use the language. They are able to scaffold: to build on existing knowledge as they increase their language proficiency. For learners who plan to study and/or work in a field that will require them to use the language they are learning, integration of content can be a powerful motivator.

8. Address grammar consciously

Older learners in particular may need and appreciate direct instruction in points of grammar that are related to classroom activities. These learners often have knowledge of the rules associated with standard use of the language(s) they already know (metalinguistic knowledge) and can benefit from developing similar knowledge in the language they are learning and discussing similarities and differences.

Discuss points of grammar in the contexts where they arise. Asking learners to think through a rule in the context of an effort to express themselves clearly is a more effective way of helping them internalize the rule than teaching the rule in isolation.

There are two types of grammar rules to address when using authentic materials:

Prescriptive rules: State how the language “should” or “must” be used; define what is “correct.” These are the rules that are taught in language textbooks.
Descriptive rules: State how the language is actually used by fluent speakers. The degree to which descriptive rules differ from prescriptive rules depends on the setting (casual/formal use of language), the topic, and the backgrounds of the speakers.

9. Adjust feedback and error correction to situation

In the parts of a lesson that focus on form, direct and immediate feedback is needed and expected. Encourage learners to self-correct by waiting after they have spoken or by asking them to try again.

Feedback techniques:

Paraphrase a learner’s utterances, modeling the correct forms
Ask learners to clarify their utterances, providing paraphrases of their own

Avoid giving learners the correct forms every time. Gradually teaching them to depend less on you and more on themselves is what language teaching is all about.

In the parts of a lesson that focus on communication activities, allow talk to flow without interrupting to make corrections. When learners address you, react to the content of their utterances, not just the form. Your response is a useful comprehension check for learners, and on the affective level it shows that you are listening to what they say. Make note of recurring errors you hear so that you can address them with the whole group in the feedback session later.

10. Travel with your learners; don’t drag them along behind

It takes a long time, and a lot of repetition, to learn a language. Be prepared to cycle back to give learners repeated practice with aspects of language and culture as needed. Use observation and informal assessment frequently so you know how your learners are doing and when they need repetition or review. Build regular learner self-assessment into your plans, so that learners themselves can tell you of their needs.