100 Teaching Tips: two tips on teacher talk

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

Talk a lot

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

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

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

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