Issue 56 contains a mini-issue on sustainability. There are articles about professional development, AI feedback, and dealing with stereotypes.
Read the IH Journal (Issue 56) here.
Instruction checking questions (ICQs)
This is a core area of focus in initial teacher training courses. I'm sure a lot of teachers have strong opinions about ICQs and, rightly so, you can imagine that some students may find it patronising to be bombarded by these questions. 'The exercise is self-explanatory. Do you mean I haven't understood how many questions there are?'
Beyond the assessed lessons on teacher training courses, my response to whether ICQs should always be used is, not surprisingly, 'it depends'. The purpose of asking ICQs is to make sure that students have understood the forthcoming task or activity. Ollie, one of my CELTA trainers, put it nicely, 'ICQs are used to guide students towards completing a task or activity successfully.' I've seen confused students because of the lack of ICQs. I've also seen an excessive use of ICQs in assessed DELTA lessons, which feels redundant but which ticks the right boxes to get a Distinction for its own sake.
When should ICQs be used in real teaching? Before I decide whether to use ICQs, I consider both the task or activity itself and the students in my class. For tasks or activities with a straightforward format or type of responses, it may be better to let the students get on with their work. I sometimes anticipate the most likely student errors, in terms of task format or responses, and ask ICQs accordingly. 'Do you need to change the verb form?' This prevents students from copying the given verbs without engaging their brains.
If I'm teaching large groups of teenagers or university students, the use of ICQs helps me to set an appropriate tone in the classroom. For the weaker students, they can either confirm their understanding of my instructions or correct themselves. Most students don't really understand the purpose of ICQs - why would they? That's why I've decided to signpost it clearly with the phrase 'Just checking, ...' before I ask one. In online lessons, I nominate individual students to respond to my ICQs as everybody usually stays silent in order to avoid speaking over one another. This is less of a problem in face-to-face lessons as body language can be more easily read. I've realised that 'nominating for correct answers' does not apply here - it's relevant to checking answers in post-task feedback, not to eliciting responses to ICQs.
If I'm teaching one-to-one courses or small groups of business English students, I will check their understanding of complex tasks or activities such as role-play practice. 'Before we start, let's make sure ...' I've taught business English students who are senior managers of multinational corporations in Italy. You know, people with C-something-O job titles. If one or two students are struggling to understand what to do in a task or activity, they don't shy away from asking me directly. I think this is actually a more natural way of communicating with them. After all, we ask for clarifications and also clarify our messages in everyday life, don't we? The same logic goes for teaching one-to-one courses. Having said that, I still use the imperative structure and consciously keep teacher talk concise in my instructions.
Pairing or grouping of students
In the context of pair or group work, teachers can pair a stronger student with a weaker one, or ask two stronger or weaker students to work together. What is often missing in most discussions is the 'when' - when it would be more effective to use either grouping arrangement.
I find it helpful to consider whether a task or activity is closed and open.
In a closed task, the response to each question is either right or wrong. Most closed tasks are also individual tasks by nature. By pairing a stronger student with a weaker one, the faster finisher can help their pair partner after the individual part of a task. As the teacher, I can intervene and offer further help as needed.
In an open task such as spoken discussion or 'freer' language practice, there is no singular correct response. I've found it more effective to let two stronger or weaker students work with each other. In this arrangement, it's also easier for the teacher to offer the weaker pair(s) targeted support. When I tried the opposite way, the stronger student would often feel dissatisfied and the weaker one stressed because of frequent communication breakdowns.
I also consider other factors, such as rapport and personality. You'll be surprised that some teenagers still struggle to know all of their classmates' names after weeks of learning together in the same class. Unfortunately, this kind of cliquey group dynamics isn't always avoidable as students prefer to stick to their friends in pair or group work. Some of them may initially refuse to work with other classmates. The student-student rapport seems weak, which in turn affects the teacher-student rapport down the line. When I'm confronted with classes like this, I usually mix different students early on in the course so that they learn to work with different classmates. I also create plenty of opportunities for them to mingle with each other in personalised practice activities - beyond the first get-to-know-you (GTKY) lesson.
For students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), I've tried pairing them with their 'study buddy' in pair or group work. This is an idea I learnt from Dagmara Tanska's session on inclusive teaching (2025), in which she shared some strategies for teaching students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The way I identify study buddies is by observing which classmates a SEND student tends to get on with and work well with.
Demonstration and modelling
In my first few years of teaching, I relied on giving instructions verbally and underestimated the power of modelling a task or activity. Of course, it depends on task complexity and my students' familiarity with the task format. Most textbook activities are self-explanatory, but anything that involves visual or kinaesthetic elements lends themselves to task demonstration. Students are generally able to follow suit when they're shown a clear example of the target responses. In my experience, task demonstration works particularly well in Young Learner classes and with students at lower language levels as verbal explanation is likely to confuse matters.
I've also asked strong students to demonstrate communicative activities. Some students don't like being in the spotlight, whereas others may volunteer to model a task or activity with the teacher but struggle a bit 'on stage'. To prevent this from happening, I usually plan ahead and find an opportunity to talk to a strong student in the previous activity. 'Are you happy to demonstrate the next activity in front of the class with me?' I tell them what to do or say briefly. I also ask them whether they'd like to practise the task demonstration with me before the real thing.
Attention grabbing
My initial thoughts about attention grabbing were largely negative as I associated it with student misbehaviour. Why would the teacher need to grab their attention if they were already paying attention?
The longer I teach, the more I realise that attention grabbing is also related to turn taking. We cannot assume that students understand automatically it's the teacher's turn to speak. Attention grabbing is, therefore, an integral part of classroom-wide discourse management, if you like.
What attention grabbing signal works best? I think it's very much a personal choice. My go-to signal is the phrase 'thank you, everyone'. Please don't ask me why I keep thanking my students - this must have something to do with sociolinguistics. I've briefly tried using a desk bell, but some teachers find it patronising. In Young Learner classes, students may run to the bell and ring it for fun, which is actually counterproductive in terms of classroom management.
Chris Roland suggests using a mascot or toy animal with teenage learners - I'd say it works very well and saves the teacher's voice too. The louder the teacher shouts, the louder the students talk. His attention grabbing signal involves the teacher raising the mascot so that students know by the visual cue it's the teacher's turn to speak.
Issue 54 makes interesting reading with articles dealing with multilingual/plural-lingual approaches and 'pull-out' English as an Additional Language (EAL) support in British international schools.
For IELTS preparation teachers, there is a treasure trove of lesson activities for all four language skills.
Read the IH Journal (Issue 54) here.
This post stems from a conversation I had with my colleague over a pint a few months ago. We were talking about ways of giving feedback on students' writing that are considered sufficient for large classes.
When teachers have a small class of learners to work with, it is relatively easy to give each individual detailed feedback. Some teachers use correction codes, whereas others may provide comments along the lines of 'good points' and 'things to work on'.
In large classes, however, this approach is time-consuming at best and impractical at worst. What I usually do is to read through each student's written work first - it usually takes me a minute or two to read a 250-word essay or article. This gives me a brief idea of a student's strengths and weaknesses. Then I spend another few minutes or so writing my overall comments. In a class of 15 students, it usually takes less than two hours.
To deal with language errors, I select sentences from various students' written work - both good examples and sentences with errors - and compile them in a single Word document. In the next lesson, my students discuss these sentences; they often recognise their own writing! This discussion task is a form of delayed error correction with peer correction in the feedback stage.
I was teaching several week-long English immersion courses at a local high school in outer Milan last month. The students and I met for three hours every morning, and there were more or less than 20 teenagers in each class. Their level was on average early B2 Upper-Intermediate.
In our lessons, the students explored teamwork, collaboration and communication through listening, reading and spoken discussions in English. For the final lesson, the students needed to complete a mini-project.
While spoken presentation is obviously the go-to option for the mini-project, I decided to experiment with something different in my final week. Adding to their spoken presentations, the students needed to design an activity, which involves teamwork, collaboration and communication (in English), for their classmates. Not only did they have to talk about the above three topics, but each group of students also took turns to be the 'teacher' in planning and running their own activity. The rest of the class, of course, had the opportunity to put theory into practice.
It might be a bold move, but the students did very well. One group came up with a problem-solving puzzle that involves moving a wolf, a sheep and cabbage across the river; another group designed a revision task (with material!) modelled on what the class had done on good and bad teamwork. Finally, a tech-savvy group of students designed a Kahoot quiz to revise what they had learnt about teamwork, collaboration and communication.
What better way to learn something than by doing (and teaching) it?
When something doesn't go 'as planned' in a lesson, it becomes a creative learning moment for the teacher. This couldn't be closer to the truth when I said hello again to teaching YLs (under 11s) after a whole school year.
Back-up activity format/arrangement
The original GTKY idea was having my students stand in two circles. Either the outer or inner circle was going to rotate left or right, so that the students could say hello to each other and repeat several sentences about basic personal information.
While it'd worked magically well with a CEFR A1/A2 group last year, there was confusion among this particular group of students at level A1. After another attempt, I had to come up with a different arrangement - asking my students to stand in two rows and move like a conveyor belt. It worked very well this time round.
What have I learnt from this?
The effectiveness of a YL lesson isn't necessarily measured against how closely an activity follows the plan, but how flexible a teacher can be when making decisions. I think there lies a delicate balance between when to insist on trying and when to use a back-up arrangement. In any case, the aim of my GTKY activity was achieved regardless. (So I knew what to do next time if things didn't work!)
Listen to the teacher
Some YLs (at levels A1/A2) can be talkative and although they're using a lot of L1 to socialise, I think it would be unrealistic to demand such students to use English for that purpose. There's often little point in either forcing the use of English or discouraging YLs from socialising with each other. It only becomes an issue when YL students keep talking during critical moments of a lesson, such as task setting or instructions.
Based on my observations, I'd like to outline three probable causes as to why this happens in a YL classroom:
As you can see, points 1 to 3 are interconnected with each other.
Concept Checking Questions (CCQs) are undoubtedly a term familiar to any teacher who has completed a TEFL training course. We ask CCQs to make sure our students have fully understood a lesson's target language, so that they won't fossilise erroneous assumptions which may later contribute to all sorts of errors (e.g. interpretative, strategic, stylistic, etc.) in their language production.
I believe, however, CCQs aren't limited to the domain of EFL teachers. Our students can make good use of them too.
I was tapping into my personal experience of learning German noun, adjective and article endings. Like many German learners who use English as the referential anchor, I always joked we had it much simpler than the 'infinite' number of German cases and endings. Nevertheless, it is my German teacher, Beate, who I have to thank for helping me attain mastery of this system. (I'm still making loads of mistakes because of noun gender, but that's another story.) She explained how it works by giving me four self-checking questions.
For those of you interested in the self-checking questions, here they are:
1. What gender is the singular/plural noun?
2. Is there an article in the sentence? (Do we need one?)
3. If there is an article, does it already carry the gender ending?
4. What case is the object noun in the sentence?
Gestern habe ich ein blaues Fahrrad gekauft. [I bought a blue bicycle yesterday.]
1. Fahrrad is a neutral noun. It is singular in this sentence.
2. We need an article because Fahrrad is singular countable.
3. The indefinite article ein is not inflected; it can signal either the masculine or neutral gender.
4. Fahrrad is in the akkusativ, not dativ, case because of the verb gekauft. The indefinite article ein is sufficient (eines is in the genetive case), but we have the adjective blaues, which carries the -es netural gender ending.
After using these self-checking questions for a gazillion times, I have internalised the entire system to the point of reducing my formulation ('thinking') time down to less than a mere second! In other words, it has become an automatised process for me in speaking and writing.
If we transfer the above learning experience to the English language, teachers may be able to go a step further by giving their students self-checking questions where appropriate. In turn, the students can ask such questions outside the classroom, which would enable them to move closer towards internalising the use of a target language. To this end, collaborative 'guided discovery' tasks with checking questions (CCQs) are a great teaching tool.
Look at the bottom of your screen. Do you see the menu bar? Click on 'Chat'.
If you're on a smartphone, click on 'Participants'. Then you'll see 'Chat'.
I'm going to share my screen with you.
In a moment, you'll see three photos on your screen.