Putting our words to work: Rethinking Teacher Talking Time

Part I

Hugh Dellar

Hugh Dellar is a teacher and teacher trainer at the University of Westminster, London. He is also the co-author of the General English coursebook series, INNOVATIONS. His main interests revolve around the implications of new findings on the nature of language for classroom practitioners, trainers and materials writers.

English Language Teaching loves a good acronym. There’s ELT to begin with and then, of course, there’s EFL - English as a Foreign Language - ESL, English as a Second Language and EIL - English as an International Language. There’s OHE - Observe, Hypothesise and Experiment and there’s PPP - Present, Practise, Pray!!! But the acronym in TEFL jargon that has attracted the most hatred and vitriol is undoubtedly the dreaded TTT - Teacher Talking Time.

Since the CLT revolution of the 1970s and 80s, TTT has generally had a pretty hard time of it. On my own 4-week CELTA course back in 1993, I was told the same kinds of things many EFL teachers of my era were told - ‘Keep TTT to a minimum’, ‘Don’t tell your students what they could tell you’ and ‘The less time YOU spend talking, the more time your students will have to talk’. This advice is echoed in a lot of the literature of the field. For instance, in the Jim Scrivener book, ‘Learning Teaching’, recommended on many initial preparatory courses, potential teachers are told to ask questions rather than give explanations’, to ‘increase opportunities for Student Talking Time (STT)’ and to ‘use gestures to replace unnecessary TTT’. The basic thrust of the argument has long been that TTT and STT exist in a kind of see-saw relationship - if the seesaw swings towards one, it will inevitably swing away from the other. TTT and STT are depicted as existing in opposition and any more complex relationship between them is generally glossed over.

Of course, to begin with, in my own teaching, I followed the advice I’d been given. My students were subjected to lots of miming, plenty of elicitation, a fairly relentless barrage of closed Yes / No questions which I believed allowed me to check concepts, questions about texts, questions which allowed me to get at answers and so on. If you envisage classroom interaction as an eternal love triangle between a teacher, some students and material, at this stage of my teaching career, the material was very much the dominant force in the relationship! Most talking that I did was a result of activities in the books I was using and most talking the students did was to practise language - usually grammar - that came up in these books. The materials were the filter through which any Teacher-Student communication tended to occur. I relied on the coursebooks to bring changes of pace to the lesson, to bring interesting texts and interesting people into the classroom and to thus encourage my students to talk and I relied on it to get me through my day’s lessons. I was being, I believed, a student-centred teacher.

Obviously, carried to its logical extreme, this particular construct of what it means to be student-centred leads to some pretty mad situations, three of which I’d like to briefly tell you about. The first, I’m ashamed to say, was brought about by me. Once I was teaching an Upper-Intermediate class and the coursebook had a discussion point on life in big cities. Most of the class were busy chatting away and I was feeling successful. There was, however, one Czech student, who persistently refused to grab this opportunity to engage in STT and sat in stony silence. I rounded up the slot by asking her for her ideas. She resisted. I pushed . . . . she burst into tears and ran out!! One problem with the notion of maximising STT is the underlying assumption that all students WANT to be chatting as often as they can. We need to accept that some students are just naturally quiet, shy or reticent and let them speak as and when they feel like it!

Secondly, a trainee on one of my CELTA courses had read some literature before hand and had come in convinced he shouldn’t tell students what he could get them to tell him. He spent the first ten minutes of a 40-minute lesson eliciting answers to the question ‘What’s the difference between working in a mine and working in a hotel’ before finally giving in and telling students ‘No, the answer I was looking for was THE SERVICE INDUSTRY’.

Thirdly, there’s a hopefully apocryphal story about an EFL luminary who was so keen to let his students be the centre of the class and to avoid intervention that he hid in a cupboard and tried to issue instructions from there. Of course, rather than facilitate mass STT, he simply turned the class into a farcical ‘Find the teacher’ episode!!

For myself, when I look back at my earlier incarnations, I realise that I never really asked my students questions I didn’t know the answer to and I never really found out that much about them - about their lives, their loves, their hates, their experiences, their opinions, their worlds. Nevertheless, students seemed to respond to my youthful enthusiasm and the feedback I got was sufficiently complimentary to keep me in a job. Sometimes, though, I’d have a particularly late night and not have time for much preparation and thus end up in class a bit the worse for wear, lapsing into exactly the kind of TTT I’d been warned against. I’d tell my students all about myself, I’d talk about my life in London and my family and my ex-girlfriends and so on - and amazingly my students seemed even happier than they had done before. I started to realise that TTT could be a force for the good, but I had no idea how to harness it.

Now, before anyone points out the bleeding obvious, I’d be the first to admit that in many many classrooms, TTT still prevails. Far too many teachers either indulge in the kind of back-packer chit-chat I’ve just confessed to myself or else fall back on the school ma’am approach and lecture at great - and often tedious - length about the beauty of the English grammar, the complexities of its grammar system and the derivation and etymology of its lexicon. It’d be foolish to deny that TTT is alive and well and either boring many students to death or else simply entertaining them without even remotely educating them. My point today is certainly not simply that more TTT is good and I think it’s worth spending a minute or two making it clear what I’m NOT suggesting today before I move on. I’m NOT suggesting that simply chatting to our students is a desirable end in itself and I’m certainly NOT suggesting that we return to the classrooms of the past where teachers simply pour forth in a stream of one-way conversational traffic.

To illustrate where I DON’T think we should be going, a couple of shameful stories. Sadly, in the first, I was the villain of the piece: a year or so into my own teaching career, and with the help of numerous grammar books, I thought I’d finally cracked The Present Simple. Enthused by this revelation, I came into class early one day, wrote fourteen sentences up on the board - all of them exemplifying different uses of said tense. When my class came in, I proceeded to talk them through them all, explaining as I went. Fifteen minutes went past and rapture turned to boredom turned to a glazing of the eyes. Finally, I finished and an Italian student raised his hand. "Yes, Francisco?" I enquired. "This is all very interesting", he said, before delivering the killer blow. "But what exactly are we supposed to do with all of this?". A brilliant question and one we all need to bear in mind before launching into yet another lengthy, tedious grammar explanation. I realised in a flash my only answer was a ridiculous one - Umm . . . well, remember it, learn it - and dont make mistakes with this structure ever again!!". The second was one passed onto me unwittingly by someone who once attended a session I gave. The teacher told me how hed been teaching an Elementary coursebook and had hit a text about dolphins. Now, for some crazed reason, this text contained the lexical item search and destroy. Said teacher, apparently, was asked about this and proceeded to explain - I quote - heat-seeking missiles and scuds and commando missions and the like. God knows how many minutes - or hours - this took or what the class went away from this, but this seems to me a TTT-fest way too far!

So, I hope that makes it clear that I’m certainly NOT advocating more TTT at any costs! However, what I AM saying is that talking is something that language teachers spend a large proportion of their working lives doing and is also something that has a profound impact on both the classroom dynamics we teach in and also on the kind of learning experiences we provide for our students. Eleven years after my initial teacher training experience, I now find myself believing that actually, far from being something best avoided, TTT - and, more particularly, WHAT we say during it - is really at the heart of good teaching. I also believe that if we are serious about improving the quality - and, I’d venture, QUANTITY of our students’ talking - then TTT has a central role to play. OK, now I’d like to go on to consider some different kinds of good TTT in more detail -

Those of you who attend a lot of conferences may well have come across the legendary story of the BAD TEACHER who has a student whose mother has broken her leg. I’ve seen this story presented in several very similar ways as an example of how NOT to teach and - by extension - how not to TALK to our students. The offending conversation goes something like this:

Ss: Sorry I no come class. My mum she breaked the leg.

T: Breaked?

Ss: Yes, breaked.

T: No, it’s broke. It’s irregular.

Ss: Oh, yes. My mum, she broke the leg.

T: Good.

This delightful little exchange is presumably followed by ‘Now open your books at Page 41 and try Exercise Two". Now, obviously this kind of teaching is mad, bad and sad and is not something to be encouraged. However, the problem I’ve always had when I’ve heard this story told is that very little alternative is ever offered. It seems that to many of the CLT / touchy-feely generation, the solution is simply this:

Ss: Sorry I no come class. My mum she breaked the leg.

T: Oh no! That’s awful. I’m so sorry to hear that. Anyway, open your books at page forty-one. Let’s look at some grammar, shall we?

It seems to me that simply being nice to our students doesn’t really get us that much further. Sure, it might make those in our classrooms less likely to hate us, but it certainly doesn’t mean we’re teaching them anything. I’ve had my own bad experience of being on the end of pleasant teacher chat. I took some Advanced Indonesian classes a long long time ago and much of our time was spent chatting in small groups about topics we’d been set by our teacher - a very personable young guy who came round, chipped in, helped out and sometimes even corrected on the spot. However, nothing was ever put up on the board and we were left with no record either of the kinds of mistakes we were making or of the language we’d been edging our way towards and that our teacher had sometimes offered us on the spot. The new language and the corrections came - and went - on the wind!

Personally, I think we need to work far more on finding a balance between a humanistic focusing on our learners as real people and a pragmatic language-oriented TEACHING focus and below you can see how I think this can be realised in the classroom through TTT.

S: Sorry I no come class. My mum she breaked the leg.

T: Oh no! Your mum BROKE her leg!

S: Yes.

T: Is she all right?

S: Mmm . . . er . . . no good. They put . . . er . . . er . . . band . . .

T: They put a bandage on?

S: Yes, bandage.

T: Is it hard, like this?

S: Yes, yes.

T: Oh right, so that’s not a bandage, then. They PUT IT IN PLASTER. How long has she got to have it on for?

S: Sorry?

T: How long has she got to have it on for? (writes this question on the board). Two weeks? Three weeks? What?

S: Six weeks.

T: Six weeks! What a pain! Can she walk?

S: Now no. Two weeks in bed.

T: Oh, right. She’s GOT TO SPEND TWO WEEKS IN BED! What a drag. Well, if you need to take more time off, don’t worry, yeah?

S: OK, thank you. What did you say this was? (demonstrates)

T: Plaster. THEY PUT IT IN PLASTER. SHE HAS TO HAVE IT IN PLASTER FOR SIX WEEKS. (writes this on the board).

S2: And the other - bandage?

T: BANdage (T drills this). And what’s the difference between a bandage and in plaster?

S2: Hard.

T: Yeah, OK. Which one?

S: Plaster.

T: So why would you put on a bandage?

S3: Cut.

T: Yeah, OK. THAT’S A REALLY NASTY CUT - YOU’D BETTER PUT A BANDAGE ON IT. (Writes both sentences on the board). Any other reasons?

S4: Play football (points to knee)

T: Oh, yeah. That’s happened to me, actually. I injured my knee a few years ago, so now I wear a bandage on my knee when I play - just to support it.

S5: My dictionary says plaster is this (points to a picture of a band-aid in the dictionary)

T: Oh right, yeah, OK. Well, if you PUT A PLASTER ON, then you mean that kind of plaster, but if they PUT IT IN PLASTER - not A plaster - then it means you broke a bone. (T points to the expression written on the board). In this sentence here, who’s THEY?

S7: Doctors

T: Exactly. Actually, with plaster, you’re most likely to say ‘HAVE YOU GOT A PLASTER? I’VE CUT MYSELF.’ (writes this on the board). What would the other person say?

I think there are several interesting things going on in this extract. Firstly, the teacher is working from chatting and empathy towards language teaching - and back again. The teacher repeatedly switches from asking about the student’s mother to looking at language. Secondly, the teacher just doesn’t TELL the student - or the class - information about the language looked at. Rather, the teacher manages to work outwards from one student’s concerns into areas which reap rewards for all the students in the class. By asking questions like ‘What’s the difference between a bandage and in plaster? and ‘Why would you put on a bandage?’ the teacher is not only getting at connected language and other useful expressions around the subject, but is also bringing the whole group into the conversation and pooling their knowledge. There are other things going on here too - having elicited language from the students, the teacher expertly reformulates their utterances - thus covertly correcting and encouraging the students to keep listening as they’ll get to hear how to say what they’re trying to say in better English. So, for instance, right at the beginning of the exchange, when the student reveals "My mum she breaked the leg", the teacher responds in a very humane, sympathetic way, but also - through stressing the voice - makes it clear that while the message has been received and responded to, the linguistic wrapper has been retouched and given a make-over. On top of all this, the teacher is also using the board to give students a record of how they can use these lexical items in future, how they’re commonly used.

I realise it’s probably a deeply unfashionable time to be quoting from the Koran, but there’s a profound line in it which has serious implications for language teaching; Allah says ‘We have created you male and female and made you nations and tribes that you may know one another!! When I first started language teaching, I was young - 23 - and had always previously believed that I could never have a conversation with anyone who owned a Phil Collins LP!! Teaching has been a real education for me in this respect as Ive come to realise that I can actually talk to anyone about almost anything. Being a nosy sod like me also has real advantages in the language classroom and means that while my classes are filling up in the mornings or during coffee breaks or simply when things come up, Im comfortable chatting and asking questions and learning about my learners lives and loves and interests, but am now also able to turn these conversations inwards towards language. So the first kind of useful TTT I think we can all benefit from is this chatting with a purpose. Ideally, Id like to see teacher training and development courses taking this on board more and encouraging those on the courses to travel without the map of materials more often, to teach some new language that they hadnt planned to, but which arises organically from their conversations with their learners.