Guidelines on giving effective explanations and instructions

Prepare

You may feel perfectly clear in your own mind about what needs clarifying, ai therefore think that you can improvise a clear explanation. But experience shows that teachers' explanations are often not as clear to their students as they are to themselves! It is worth preparing: thinking for a while about the words you will use, the illustrations you will provide, and so on; possibly even writing these out.

2. Make sure you have the class's full attention

In ongoing language practice learners' attention may sometimes stray; they car usually make up what they have lost later. But if you are explaining something essential, they must attend. This may be the only chance they have to get some vital information; if they miss bits, they may find themselves in difficulties later. One of the implications of this when giving instructions for a group-work task is that it is advisable to give the instructionsbefore you divide the class into groups or give out materials, not after! Once they are in groups, learners' attention will be naturally directed to each other rather than to you; and if they have written or pictorial material in their hands, the temptation will be to look at it, which may also distract.

3. Present the information more than once

A repetition or paraphrase of the necessary information may make all the difference: learners' attention wanders occasionally, and it is important to give them more than one chance to understand what they have to do. Also, it helps to re-present the information in a different mode: for example, say it and also write it up on the board.

4. Be brief

Learners - in fact, all of us - have only a limited attention span; they cannot listen to you for very long at maximum concentration. Make your explanation as brief as you can, compatible with clarity. This means thinking fairly carefully about what you can, or should,omit, as much as about what you should include! In some situations it may also mean using the learners' mother tongue as a more accessible and cost-effective alternative to the sometimes lengthy and difficult target-language explanation.

5. Illustrate with examples

Very often a careful theoretical explanation only 'comes together' for an audience when made real through an example, or preferably several. You may explain, for instance, the meaning of a word, illustrating your explanation wit examples of its use in various contexts, relating these as far as possible to the learners' own lives and experiences. Similarly, when giving instructions for an activity, it often helps to do a ‘dry run’: an actual demonstration of the activity yourself with the full class or with a volunteer student before inviting learners to tackle the task on their own.

6. Get feedback

When you have finished explaining, check with your class that they have understood. It is not enough just to ask ‘Do you understand?’; learners will sometimes say they did even if they in fact did not, out of politeness or unwillingness to lose face, or because they think they know what they have to do, but have in fact completely misunderstood! It is better to ask them to do something that will show their understanding: to paraphrase in their own words, or provide further illustrations of their own.

Practice Activities

Practice can be roughly defined as the rehearsal of certain behaviours with the objective of consolidating learning and improving performance. Language learners can benefit from being told, and understanding, facts about the language only up to a point: ultimately, they have to acquire an intuitive, automatized knowledge which will enable ready and fluent comprehension and self-expression. And such knowledge is normally brought about through consolidation of learning through practice. This is true of first language acquisition as well as of second language learning in either 'immersion' or formal classroom situations. Language learning has much in common with the learning of other skills, and it may be helpful at this point to think about what learning a skill entails.

Learning a skill

The process of learning a skill by means of a course of instruction has been defined as a three-stage process: verbalization, automatization and autonomy.

At the first stage the bit of the skill to be learned may be focused on and defined in words -'verbalized' - as well as demonstrated. Thus in swimming the instructor will probably both describe and show correct arm and leg movements; in language, the teacher may explain the meaning of a word or the rules about a grammatical structure as well as using them in context. Note that the verbalization may be elicited from learners rather than done by the teacher, and it may follow trial attempts at performance which serve to pinpoint aspect of the skill that need learning. It roughly corresponds to ‘presentation’, as discussed above.

The teacher then gets the learners to demonstrate the target behaviour, while monitoring their performance. At first they may do things wrong and need correcting in the form of further telling and/or demonstration; later they may d it right as long as they are thinking about it. At this point they start practising: performing the skilful behaviour again and again, usually in exercises suggests by the teacher, until they can get it right without thinking. At this point they may be said to have'automatized' the behaviour, and are likely to forget how it was described verbally in the first place.

Finally they take the set of behaviours they have mastered and begin to improve on their own, through further practice activity. They start to speed up performance, to perceive or create new combinations, to ‘do their own thing’: they are‘autonomous’. Some people have called this stage 'production', but this I think is a misnomer for it involves reception as much as production, and is in fact simply a more advanced form of practice, as defined at the beginning of the unit. Learners now have little need of a teacher except perhaps as a supportive or challenging colleague and are ready, or nearly ready, to perform as masters the skill - or as teachers themselves.

Much language practice falls within the skill-development model described above. But some of it does not: even where information has not been » consciously verbalized or presented, learners may absorb and acquire language skills and content through direct interaction with texts or communicative task. In other words, their learning starts at the automatization and autonomy stage in unstructured fluency practice. But this is still practice, and essential for successful learning.

Summary

Practice, then, is the activity through which language skills and knowledge and consolidated and thoroughly mastered. As such, it is arguably the most important of all the stages of learning; hence the most important classroom activity of the teacher is to initiate and manage activities that provide students with opportunities for effective practice.

Characteristics of a good practice activity

Whether or not you think that organizing language practice is the most important thing the teacher does in the classroom, you will, I hope, agree that it does contribute significantly to successful language learning, and therefore it is worth devoting some thought to what factors contribute to the effectiveness of classroom practice.

Practice is usually carried out through procedures called 'exercises' or 'activities'. The latter term usually implies rather more learner activity and initiative than the former, but there is a large area of overlap: many procedures could be defined by either. Exercises and activities may, of course, relate to any aspect of language: their goal may be the consolidation of the learning of a grammatical structure, for example, or the improvement of listening, speak reading or writing fluency, or the memorization of vocabulary.