teaching english as a foreign language essay

Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Experiences Essay

Teachers hold a critical but significantly undervalued purpose in modern society. With the wider availability of information and developing communication technology, the perception and role of teachers are rapidly changing. There are various challenges as well as rewards that are inherent to the job. In order to grow and improve as a teacher and a person, it is essential to reflect on my personal feelings and education practices that define them as a unique instructor.

Being a teacher is a lot of responsibility and accountability. Those with any experience of education realize that the job requires not only the mastery of the subject being taught but also an understanding of human psychology, necessity to maintain self-control, and upkeeping utmost organization. To be honest, it is overwhelming and exhausting at times. However, the job brings incredible satisfaction and tremendous pride in the profession. There is the excitement of planning and executing projects with your class or taking advantage of a new teaching method that a more experienced educator has shared. The most rewarding moment is seeing a student’s eyes light up after comprehending a complicated topic that they have struggled with and finally understanding how a concept works.

I have had a variety of teaching experiences, ranging from working as a tutor to coaching tennis. In each position, there were nuances and learning curves in the teaching process and approach to students. However, once I became accustomed to the job, it became a passion. The famous maxim attributed to Confucius, “choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” applies to my experience with teaching. The profession fits with my identity of helping people and giving back to the community. Good teaching is more than a simple transfer of information and skill. It is based on empowerment and support for students, as a teacher can provide the opportunity and confidence to apply their knowledge. I believe that teaching fits perfectly with my caring and supportive character that seeks to empower others to achieve their objectives.

Through this course, I have been able to learn about a wide variety of practices for teaching English as a foreign language. Linguistics can be quite difficult, and it requires an approach that would maintain student interest and encourage participation. Some of the sessions in the course that focused on needs analysis and exploiting dialogue are techniques that can be tactically applied in a learning environment. They increase participation and student awareness of the practicality for their knowledge of English. The use of “do-it-yourself” grammar lessons that encourage independent thinking and utilization of learned knowledge is an effective method to support the difficult acquisition of English grammar. Furthermore, I would like to practice certain techniques such as gamification or the “teach-back” approach that would provide some diversification to traditional instruction methods and would be used to reinforce specific concepts.

I believe that there are no wrong teaching methods. In a real-life classroom situation, one can never know what particular approach can be helpful for individual students to understand a concept. However, there are some aspects that I believe would be inappropriate in teaching English as a foreign language. For example, relying on self-learning as the foundation for language learning (as it is commonly done in many college courses) is ineffective since it would discourage the systematic approach necessary in linguistics. Furthermore, I believe that placing students in situations where they would feel forced or uncomfortable to perform dialogues should be done with caution to prevent discouragement. Language acquisition is a long-term process which should occur naturally and supported by the classroom teaching methodology.

Overall, teaching is my passion, and I look forward to being able to practice it on a daily basis. Participation in the Peace Corps teaching program will also provide me with an opportunity to make a difference in the world and empower individuals with knowledge of critical language skills. Despite the possible challenges that come with the position, I remain optimistic as it will help to contribute to my personal growth as well.

• Linguistics: Grammar and Language Teaching
• Teaching Grammar in Writing Context
• Creative Ways of Teaching the Grammar
• Curriculum and Instruction Appraisal Model: Integrative Supervision
• Self-Confidence Survey and Formative & Summative Assessment
• Attitudes and Behaviors in Change Process
• Teacher Evaluation System
• Teaching Practices Observation and Evaluation
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, June 26). Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Experiences. https://ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-english-as-a-foreign-language-experiences/

"Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Experiences." IvyPanda , 26 June 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-english-as-a-foreign-language-experiences/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Experiences'. 26 June.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Experiences." June 26, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-english-as-a-foreign-language-experiences/.

1. IvyPanda . "Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Experiences." June 26, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-english-as-a-foreign-language-experiences/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Experiences." June 26, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-english-as-a-foreign-language-experiences/.

Teaching English As a Foreign Language: Tips and Resources

Teaching English as a second language can be a challenging task. Read here to find out how to get started.

What is English as a Foreign Language (EFL)?

How to become an effective esl teacher, tips for teaching english as a foreign language, helpful resources for esl teachers.

Teaching English as a foreign language can be a difficult task, but it can also be very rewarding. It is important to be patient with your students and make sure that they are following your lessons. It’s also necessary to use different teaching methods, such as games, projects, and activities in order to keep your English learners interested and engaged in the language learning process.

With these guidelines in mind resources at hand, you will be well on your way to becoming an effective English language teacher for non-native speakers. Let's take a closer look at the teacher's journey ahead of you!

But first, try a free short story by clicking this box:

Learn English with Langster

English as a Foreign Language ( EFL ), or English as a Second Language (ESL), are both terms used to describe the teaching and learning of English in contexts where it is not the first language of the students.

In other words, EFL is the teaching and learning of English in countries where English is not the native language, i.e., teaching English to speakers of other languages.

There are many reasons people might want to learn English as a foreign language. For some, it is a requirement for employment or getting a college degree. Others learn English to travel and communicate with people from different cultures. Whatever the reason, learning English as a second language is a noble cause.

Most teachers know that explaining even the most basic rules to non-native English speakers, regardless of whether they're attending an elementary school or secondary education, is different from teaching those who live in an English speaking country.

Here are several essential things you should possess in order to become one of the best language teachers for your future students, whether they are children or adult learners:

Necessary Qualifications

In order to teach English as a second language, you will need to obtain the necessary qualifications. You need a Teacher of English as a Foriegn Language, or TEFL, certificate. There are a number of ways to get it, such as taking an online course or attending a training program. A CELTA, TEFL, TESOL certification will make you a certified ESL teacher, enabling you to teach English abroad to international students. Of the three certificates, CELTA is the most widely accepted.

Furthermore, becoming a certified TEFL teacher will allow you to work with online English schools , which often require previous teaching experience and some kind of a teaching license or at least a bachelor's degree from a university where English is the first language.

Of course, the best way to become an ESL teacher is to have a degree in education. It will come in handy if you want to work in US public schools or private institutes.

Although ESL teachers are not required to hold state certification, many schools insist they do. Some schools even require a master's degree, so you should check the necessary qualifications with the schools you’re applying to.

Also, if you're not a native speaker yourself, you can turn to bilingual education to teach English in two languages to those who speak your own language. Sometimes it helps students when you explain things in a language they can understand.

Patience and Understanding

One of the most important qualities of an effective ESL teacher is patience. It is important to be patient with your students, especially speakers of other languages who are struggling with the material or experience language barriers in the classroom.

Remember that it takes time for some students to learn, and creating a safe and supportive environment where there is no shame in asking for help should be your top priority.

In addition, it is also important to be understanding. Many English language learners come from different cultures and backgrounds. It is important to be aware of cultural differences, be respectful, and make sure that they understand your lessons.

Methodology

There are many different teaching methods that you can use in order to teach your students effectively. While you’ll want to make sure your lessons are compliant with school standards, you should try to use a variety of techniques to keep your students engaged.

Some methods that you may want to consider include:

• classroom discussions,
• games, quizzes, and other activities,

It is also important to make use of different educational materials, such as textbooks, worksheets, and online resources. By using a variety of materials, you will be able to engage all the different types of learners in the classroom.

Classroom Management

While it is important to be patient and understanding, you also need to be consistent in maintaining a productive classroom. . It is crucial to make sure that students follow your lessons and do their homework. Disorganized classrooms can halt the learning process.

Proper classroom management is one of the most crucial parts of the learning process, as it allows you to keep English language learners engaged, organized, attentive, and academically productive. Remember, to effectively manage a classroom, you need to understand the dynamic of the class. You can’t use the same classroom management techniques for children as you do adults.

When teaching English language learners from all over the world, you should make use of different teaching methods, games, and activities to keep your students interested and engaged in the learning process. Here are some practical tips you can use:

Plan and Prepare in Advance

One of the keys to being an effective teacher is planning and preparing your lessons in advance. This will ensure that you are able to cover all the necessary material and that your classes run smoothly.

You should also create a variety of materials, such as handouts, PowerPoint presentations, and games to use in your lessons. Try to create a balance between different activities, such as speaking, listening , reading, and writing.

Some online language schools provide their ESL teachers with a set lesson to teach, but you should also review lessons in advance to always be prepared.

Use a Lot of Visuals

Another helpful tip is to use a lot of visuals in your lessons. This can include gestures, pictures, diagrams, charts, and other visual aids. Visuals are especially helpful when teaching new vocabulary words. You can also use them to review material covered in previous lessons.

Make Your Lessons Fun

One way to keep your students engaged and motivated is to make your lessons fun. There are a variety of ways to do this, such as incorporating games and puzzles into your lessons. You can also use humor and storytelling to make your lessons more enjoyable.

Set Classroom Rules and Enforce Consequences

It is also essential to set some ground rules for your classroom. This will help to create a respectful and positive learning environment. Some things you may want to include in your rules may consist of:

• no talking while the teacher is talking,
• raising your hand if you want to speak,
• no interrupting each other,
• always be polite to others.

If rules are not followed, it is important to enforce consequences, which can range from a warning to being sent out of the classroom. This will help to ensure that your rules are taken seriously and that students know what they need to do to follow them.

Use Interactive Activities

Another great way to teach English as a second language is to use interactive activities. These can include group work, role-playing, and other hands-on activities. Activities that get students talking to each other are a great way to get them involved in the material and to allow them to practice using their new language skills.

Encourage Questions

Finally, it is important for ESL teachers to encourage questions from their students. This shows that you are open to feedback and care about their progress. Asking questions also allows students to clarify anything they may be confused about and deal with any possible issues, whether it's a complex grammar unit or a lack of vocabulary, as they arise.

There are a variety of resources available for English teachers who want to broaden their knowledge, acquire new teaching techniques, and have all the necessary English materials at hand. Here are some of the best ones:

You can find many different websites with handy materials for teaching and learning English. Some of these resources include:

• Ellii (former ESL Library). This website offers a variety of resources for ESL teachers, including lesson plans, worksheets, grammar prompts, flashcards, and more.
• BusyTeacher.org . This website provides a wide range of classroom materials for busy teachers, including worksheets, creative writing prompts, and coloring pages to print.
• TeachingEnglish from the British Council. The British Council offers a variety of resources for ESL teachers' personal development, including podcasts , case studies, webinars, and more.

If you are looking for some good books on teaching and learning English as a second language, here are a few of the best ones:

• How to Teach English by Jeremy Harmer. This book is considered a classic in the field of ESL teaching. It covers everything from planning lessons to using games and activities.
• Teaching English as a Foreign Language For Dummies by Michelle Maxom. This book is an excellent resource for new teachers. It covers topics such as planning lessons, teaching grammar in a logical and accessible way, and coping with different age groups and capabilities.
• Practical English Usage by Michael Swan . This book is a must-have for any ESL teacher. It covers common mistakes that students make and how to address them.

Online Courses

There are also a variety of online courses available for ESL teachers that can help you learn more about English language teaching.

One of the most popular ones is Coursera’s Teach English Now! Teaching Language Online – an online course that helps English teachers understand the basic principles of Second Language Acquisition and how they apply to ESL learners online.

You can also look into TESOL/TEFL or CELTA/DELTA courses that provide professional development for teachers of English or browse platforms like Udemy to hone your skills in different teaching methods.

These are just a few of the many resources available to help you teach English as a foreign language effectively. With a little bit of effort, you can find the materials and courses that will work best for your current teaching skills and help your students succeed.

Generally speaking, teaching English as a foreign language is not an easy task. It can be hard to find suitable materials to teach with, but there are many resources and techniques available that can work for you and your students.

If you're interested in becoming an ESL teacher and teaching English abroad, you should have patience and a desire to also continue your education. Make sure to use interactive activities and encourage your students to be proactive during the learning process. You can become an excellent ESL teacher working for public or private schools or as an online tutor.

You should also consider implementing our Langster app into your lesson plans to diversify your teaching materials. Good luck!

Ellis is a seasoned polyglot and one of the creative minds behind Langster Blog, where she shares effective language learning strategies and insights from her own journey mastering the four languages. Ellis strives to empower learners globally to embrace new languages with confidence and curiosity. Off the blog, she immerses herself in exploring diverse cultures through cinema and contemporary fiction, further fueling her passion for language and connection.

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British Council

Six trends for the new future of english language teaching, by chia suan chong, 27 october 2021 - 08:48.

Poyraz Tütüncü/Pinhole Istanbul, Author MAHMUT CEYLAN

What has inspired your teaching and teacher development this year? Chia Suan Chong, writer, communication skills and intercultural skills trainer, who reported live from the ELTons awards in November 2021, lists her top six.

The announcement of the finalists of the ELTons, a.k.a. the British Council ELTons awards for innovation in English language teaching, has always been an interesting and revealing time. It is a time when teams and individuals are celebrated for their innovation in the courses, books, platforms, apps, projects, and more that they’ve contributed to the world of English language teaching. It is also a time when we get to learn about the current trends of our industry and the directions we are heading in.

As I excitedly clicked through the lists of finalists for the 19th year of the ELTons, here are some of the trends that became apparent.

Using the real world

One exciting thing about language teaching is the flexibility of the content of our materials. Science teachers teach scientific theories and facts and history teachers have historical events and stories as the subject content, but English teachers can use a variety of topics as vehicles to present the English language. We can teach English using fairy tales, workplace rules or quirky homes around the world. Some of the ELTons finalists have discovered the value in using real world events and acquainting learners with real-world scenarios where they might be using English. Sensations English (UK) for example uses news-based video and articles to help students learn about real-world events while improving their language skills. Immerse Virtual Language Experience Platform (Immerse VR, USA) puts students in a 3D world as they experience language and culture in real-world scenarios. And Vlogger Academy (Digital Learning Associates Ltd with The Weirdos and Creatives Collective, UK) uses real-life YouTubers and authentic content to expose learners to the global English used in the world today.

Using English to communicate with the world

There is no doubt that English is an indispensable tool for international communication today. Whether our learners are posting on social media, creating videos on video-sharing platforms or working in international project teams, the English language provides them with the opportunity to communicate not just with people who use English as a first language, but also those who use English as a second or foreign language. 

This reality is reflected not just in products like the already-mentioned Vlogger Academy, but also Converse Across the Universe: Managing Cross-Cultural Communication (Yelena Golovatch, Margarita Kochan, Yauheni Radzetski, Belarus), where students develop critical thinking and communication skills in practical everyday situations where they might encounter different cultures and different attitudes and ways of behaving. 

Even in Online English Pronunciation Course (Luke Nicholson, Improve your accent, UK) that is written for learners based in the UK, the emphasis is on intelligibility, i.e. being understood, and not only becoming someone that learners are not. 

As Our Languages (Stand For/FTD Educação, Brazil) very appropriately describes it, English is a tool for our students to express themselves – a tool not unlike the language of art, music or social media – a tool used to communicate with the world. And like these different forms of expression, learners need to feel a sense of ownership of the English language and own their language learning experience. English will serve to express their identities – a theme that is explored in Communicating Identities (Routledge, UK), a teacher’s guide that supports learners in their exploration and reflection of the different aspects of their identities.

Life skills  

As we provide our learners with opportunities to practise communicating in English, there is flexibility not only in the content of the texts we use but also in the tasks that we get learners to perform. Through these tasks, learners not only have the chance to enhance their language skills, but they are also able to develop other life skills. We saw the development of intercultural skills in the already-mentioned Converse Across the Universe: Managing Cross-Cultural Communication. This focus on expanding the learners’ knowledge of the world is also seen in Talk about China with Oxford (OUP China Ltd with Jingban Beijing Education Culture Media Co. Ltd, China), a series of courses that enable young learners to learn about China via the English language.

Other life skills that feature heavily among the finalists are problem-solving skills and collaboration skills – common features of materials that make use of a task-based learning approach to language learning. Escape the Classroom (Perceptia Press, UK/Japan) for example, requires students to work together in teams to figure out ways of solving puzzles and breaking codes in order to escape a room. Oxford Discover Futures (OUP – English language teaching, UK, Egypt, Mexico, Turkey, Spain and the Middle East) promotes critical thinking and collaboration skills through thought-provoking questions. And English Code (Pearson English, UK) uses code-breaking activities and creative tasks to help nurture the spirit of experimentation, collaboration, resilience and curiosity in primary school students. 

Included in life skills are higher-order thinking skills and exam-taking skills, and this can be done in innovative ways. Literatu Scribo for IELTS Writing Success (Literatu Pty Ltd Australia, Australia), for example, uses an online platform to help students improve their core English writing skills. The approach that Fun Skills (CUP and Cambridge Assessment English, UK) takes to this is perhaps reflected in its title, as children prepare for the exams they need to take in the future through songs and entertaining stories. 

The power of stories

Learning through stories is another clear thread that we see in many of the finalists this year. Fiction Express (Fiction Express, Spain/UK) develops literacy skills through well-supported reading texts while BOOKR Class (BOOKR Kids, Hungary) uses a gamified library app to provide interactive books from the classics of world literature and original stories. 

In this age when we have access to an incredible selection of stories in the form of TV shows we watch through online streaming services, Days Crossing (Chasing Time English, New Zealand) provide learners with original TV series that are specifically made for English language learners. 

Inclusion and wellbeing

Perhaps Link Online Learners a.k.a LOL (hundrED, Finland, with volunteers and educators from 13 different countries) is an example of how the trends of life skills, using real world content and helping learners to English to communicate with the world can all be embodied in one product. LOL provides a platform for teachers and students as a way of connecting with a diverse global youth network in order to develop curiosity, empathy for other cultures and an understanding of different perspectives and ways of life. The volunteers and educators involved in this project are from a diverse range of countries, demonstrating the inclusive nature of this project. 

The importance of diversity and inclusion in English language teaching was highlighted at the ELTons 2020 when the British Council created the new judge’s commendation category for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – celebrating finalists whose resources bridge educational inequality, reflect diversity and promote the inclusion of typically underrepresented groups. ( Click here to find out more about last year’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion winners)

This year, we continue to see the importance of this theme as we look at the finalists across the different categories of the ELTons. From English competency courses for Para Powerlifters (World Para Powerlifting, Germany, with International Paralympic Committee) and grammar for the deaf and hard of hearing (General Directorate for special education and continuous education, Ministry of Education in Sultanate of Oman with AI ROYAA NEWSPAPER, Sultanate of Oman), to Helping Matters – an English course for social workers (Perceptia Press, UK/Japan) and guides for volunteers at conversation clubs (Learning and Work Institute with Learning Unlimited, UK), we see products that are catered for learners and teachers with a wide range of needs and backgrounds.

The importance of inclusion can also be seen in CIELL-Comic for Inclusive English language learning (Lancaster University, UK, with AKTO Art & Design College, Greece, Innovation in Learning Institute, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, Language Centre, University of Cyprus, Cyprus) and many of the finalists in the category for Local Innovation awards, such as Mosaik Dogme Toolkit , a toolkit that helps English teachers of refugees make learning communicative and engaging.  Teaching in challenging circumstances (Cambridge University Press, UK) is another example of support provided to teachers involved in formal or informal teaching in areas with a growing number of refugees and displaced people.

Many of these projects focus on including diverse student groups and providing support for both their learning and their wellbeing. But in the process of doing so, we should also remember to look after ourselves. Teacher Wellbeing (Oxford University Press, UK) provides teachers will a variety of practical ideas to support and maintain teacher wellbeing as teachers while nurturing the professional relationships they have.  

Our next normal   

The last couple of years have no doubt presented teachers with new challenges, and so it is no surprise that these new challenges are reflected in several ELTons finalists this year. The Teachers’ Classroom App (PeacheyPublications Ltd, UK) makes the transition to online teaching easier by offering teachers training of common digital tools and ready-made lessons that teachers can launch and deliver from their desktop. LearnCube Homework Application (LearnCube, UK) provides a digital solution to teachers who have to or want to manage homework and give personalised feedback for their online classes. Engaging language learners in contemporary classrooms (Cambridge University Press) recognises the distractions that learners face today and helps teachers consider the aspects of learner engagement that they have power to influence more directly. And the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary App (OUP, UK, with Paragon Software, Germany/Russia) gives learners to autonomy to improve their vocabulary and pronunciation anytime, anywhere as they navigate flipped learning, online learning and blended learning. 

Previous-ELTons winner, The HandsUp Project, also adapted in response to the school closures in 2020/21. Their Facebook Live Team teaching for the Palestinian English Curriculum (The Hands Up Project, UK with UNRWA, Gaza) delivered daily live team-taught classes remotely, led by a Palestinian English teacher and a teacher in another country. This push towards online lessons in the past couple of years has also resulted in us embracing global communication and increased learner autonomy.

As we reflect on the current trends of our industry through the ELTons finalists of 2021, we realise that the events of 2020/21 might have fast-forwarded some of the trends that were already developing in our industry, but none of them come as a surprise. If anything, this serves as confirmation as to where English language teaching and learning is going and will be going in the years to come. 

Watch recordings of the ELTons online  and meet the winners. Chia reported live from the event alongside teacher, writer, editor, and conference speaker Callie Massey.

Chia also guest tweeted live using the username @BCEltons . Join in the Twitter discussion using #ELTons.

Teachers, visit our TeachingEnglish website for lesson plans and activities.

View the discussion thread.

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What Is Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL)?

Krzl light nuñes.

• February 11, 2024

Whether you want to teach in a classroom close to home, work from your home, run your own teaching business , teach abroad , or travel as a digital nomad , teaching English can help make it happen! You may be totally new to the industry and wondering, “What is teaching English as a foreign language?” or you might just need extra help exploring your options. Don’t worry! Let’s delve into what TEFL entails, how to get TEFL certified, and how you can best prepare yourself for teaching English as a foreign language.

Table of Contents

What is TEFL?

TEFL is an acronym that stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Simply put, TEFL involves teaching English students in countries where English is not the first language. A TEFL teacher from South Africa, for instance, might be teaching students in Japan . Typically, the students of TEFL teachers are called EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students.

Another common umbrella term in the English teaching field is TESOL, which means Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. In essence, TESOL covers TEFL as well as TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language), which refers to teaching English to non-native speakers in a native-English speaking country, like the U.K.

TEFL may technically differ from TESOL in meaning, but the two terms are widely used interchangeably when it comes to English teaching and training. For instance, programs for teaching English may be called “TEFL/TESOL courses” or “TEFL/TESOL certification.” When it comes to applying for jobs, it doesn’t matter whether your professional certificate says TEFL, TESOL, or TEFL/TESOL, as long as employers see that it comes from an accredited institution . Certification can also be completed in a brick-and-mortar classroom or online.

Find out more about the differences between TEFL and TESOL.

What qualifications do I need to teach English as a foreign language?

The requirements of schools or ESL companies vary and may include a combination of the following:

• TEFL/TESOL certification (almost always required)
• A bachelor’s degree (often, it can be in any field)
• Teaching experience may be preferred
• For teaching English online , you’ll need to have the proper equipment, which typically includes a working computer, a webcam, and noise-canceling headphones.

Check out the general requirements for teaching English abroad or the requirements for teaching English online .

What is TEFL certification, and what is a TEFL certificate?

Why do i need tefl certification.

Whether you’d like to teach English abroad or online, getting a TEFL/TESOL certificate is one of the essential steps you’ll need to take. Firstly, a teaching English as a foreign language certification course provides you with the foundational knowledge and skills you need to become an English teacher. It also qualifies you for English teaching positions and establishes your credibility in the field.

How do I get a TEFL certificate?

After completing a course, you can download your free digital TEFL certificate to show to potential employers. Rarely, a country may require you to have a notarized copy of your teaching English as a foreign language certificate to be recognized or be used for visa processing.

At Bridge, you can also stack your credentials, as every time you complete a TEFL/TESOL course, your certificate will automatically be updated with the additional course hours.

How do I choose the best TEFL certification institution?

It’s not uncommon for aspiring English teachers to question which TEFL/TESOL course they should take. After all, a lot of certification courses seemingly offer the same features and benefits. So, how can you know if a TEFL/TESOL course will provide quality training and be recognized by schools and companies? Here are the most crucial factors to consider:

• The accreditations and affiliations that your certificate carries
• The course provider or institute’s background and track record in the market
• The number of coursework hours
• Course tutors’ qualifications
• Job placement assistance the company provides

Learn more about choosing the best TEFL/TESOL certification for you.

What types of TEFL courses are there?

When you browse TEFL courses , you may also notice that there are different categories, course titles, and content. This is mainly because every course is created for a particular purpose and is designed to equip you with the skill set you need at a specific stage in your career. Let’s look at the different types of TEFL/TESOL certifications and who they’re for:

• Professional certification. These courses are typically recommended for newcomers to the TEFL field, experienced teachers who are not yet TEFL/TESOL certified, and English teachers who want to refresh their knowledge of teaching concepts and methodologies.
• Specialized certification. Focused on providing targeted training, these courses are best for current TEFL-certified teachers who want to develop their skills in a specific area, such as teaching English online or teaching young learners . These programs also let teachers build a teaching niche and make their resumes stand out.  
• Micro-credential courses. These bite-sized professional development courses are made for English teachers who want to explore new ideas and techniques to teach particular topics or use certain teaching strategies more effectively. For example, topics include teaching English pronunciation and teaching TOEFL test prep .

How many hours of TEFL certification do I need, and how long does it take to get a TEFL certificate?

Though TEFL/TESOL course hours vary, online and in-person English teaching jobs typically look for a professional TEFL/TESOL certification with at least 120 hours to show that you’ve received comprehensive training in the theoretical and practical aspects of English teaching.

Most TEFL/TESOL courses are also self-paced and usually have a time frame within which you’re allowed to finish the course. This is ideal because you can choose to dedicate more time to studying if you’d like to get your certificate faster! Bridge’s 120-hour Master Certificate course , for example, can be completed in up to three months, but it is possible to finish it in just six or eight weeks!

If you decide to work toward a graduate-level degree, the university-affiliated 150-hour Bridge International Diploma in English Language Teaching (IDELT Online ™) Certification allows you to earn credit toward a pathway for a master’s TESOL degree.

Learn more about how much time it takes to get TEFL/TESOL certification.

How does online TEFL certification work?

Most TEFL/TESOL courses take place online nowadays, and the vast majority of employers don’t view any difference between in-person and online certification. Flexibility is the main perk of taking an online TEFL course, as you can study at your preferred place and time!

When you enroll in one of Bridge’s online TEFL courses , you can start on the same day most of the time. The course takes place on an interactive learning platform, where you can read and even download your course materials. Aside from this, you’ll also watch videos, take quizzes, participate in discussion forums, and even interact with and get feedback from your personal tutor.

Get answers to frequently asked questions about online TEFL certification.

What jobs can I get with TEFL certification?

As a TEFL-certified teacher, a lot of work opportunities await you ! Do you want to teach in a physical classroom? No problem. Do you want to become a digital nomad and travel the world while teaching English online? You can find jobs for this too!

Aside from teaching English as a foreign language, you can also embark on other ESL/EFL career paths through your TEFL certification. For example, you can become a teacher trainer, a curriculum developer, or an IELTS test examiner. You can also become a teacherpreneur and run your own ESL teaching business !

With a professional certificate, you can land teaching English as a foreign language jobs in:

• Public schools
• Bilingual and international schools
• Language institutes
• Online ESL companies
• Marketplaces for online English teachers

Check out these tips on landing your first TEFL job.

What does TEFL pay?

There are many types of TEFL jobs, and pay ranges can vary greatly depending on where you teach, how you teach, the requirements of the job, and your experience level. TEFL jobs like those at a university that require an advanced degree and experience will naturally pay more. Tutoring online for a marketplace will have a lower hourly wage but offer the benefits of a flexible schedule. Teachers who specialize in niche subjects like teaching English proficiency test prep can charge more, increasing pay potential.

TEFL salaries also depend on location. Keep in mind that while some countries pay higher salaries, the cost of living may also be higher. And the reverse is true as well. Some jobs also include benefits that should be factored into pay. For example, if you are teaching abroad, a job that includes a housing allowance will help your pay go a lot farther.

Let’s look at some example pay ranges.

Teaching for a public school, bilingual or international school, or language institute also has a wide range of pay impacted by your location, education level, certification, and experience. You may find jobs like these where you live or by teaching English abroad. Here are some examples of potential monthly pay in several countries:

• Portugal: $750-$1,080
• Spain: $1,300-$1,500
• Thailand: $1,000-$2,000
• South Korea: $1,700-$2,200
• Argentina: $700-$1,500
• Colombia: $700-$1,000
• Qatar: $1,650-$4,500
• Morocco: $1,000-$2,100

A typical salary for teaching English online starts at $10-$20 per hour and can increase to up to $40/hour with credentials and experience. If you are just starting out or teaching part-time, you can expect to make between $10-$15 per hour, but finding a niche and gaining experience will quickly boost your salary.

You can also start your own online English teaching business, building your own portfolio of students, choosing the courses you offer, and setting your own rates. Similar to other online English teaching jobs, you may start by offering lower hourly rates, but as your business grows and you can offer niche services, you can charge higher rates.

Interested in learning more about starting an independent online English teaching career? Learn more about training and support with Teacherpreneur Academy.

How do I become a TEFL teacher?

Getting started in English teaching is not difficult at all! Here’s how you can set up your TEFL career.

• Decide where and how you want to teach English. Do you want to teach in person or online? Would you like to begin with a company or as a freelancer ?
• Get professional TEFL certification .
• Create your TEFL resume . Don’t forget to highlight your credentials and skills and include your digital badges !
• Apply to jobs. You can send your resume and other requirements directly to the company through job platforms. Depending on the employer, you may have to wait a few days before moving on to the next step of the application process.
• Start teaching!

Now that you know what TEFL and getting certified are all about, you’re already one step closer to reaching your English teaching goals! By choosing the right TEFL/TESOL certification for you, there’s no doubt that you’ll be able to teach with confidence – wherever that may be!

Not sure what type of English classes you want to teach? Explore 3 English language teaching niches with TEFL insiders!

Back in her hometown in the Philippines, Krzl worked as a writer at a TV station before moving to Chile. After she completed her TESOL certification, she worked for language institutes and then decided to become an independent English teacher to business professionals. When she’s not giving classes, she’s either surfing along Chile’s long stretch of coastline, traveling, or practicing photography by the beach.

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Is english language teaching for you a guide to a new career.

Author: Marie Therese Swabey, English Language Teacher, Teacher Trainer, Assessor and Joint Chief Assessor for a range of teaching qualifications from Cambridge English.

Whether you’re just starting out or thinking of a career change, teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) is one of the most rewarding professional journeys you can embark on.

In English language teaching (ELT), there is a lot of career potential. As you develop your skills and take on more responsibilities, you can enjoy a long-term career. Many ELT professionals become senior teachers or teacher trainers, or move into management or materials writing.

In this blog post, we’ll outline why teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) is such an exciting job and offer advice on how you can get started.

Why become an English language teacher?

There are lots of reasons you might want to become an English language teacher. For a start, you can make a real difference in people’s lives. According to a 2019 survey by Wall Street English , 18% of professionals who have learned English report that they feel happier at work; 12% say they feel happier in general; and half of English speakers earn 25% more because of their language skills.

Moreover, English language teaching is an immensely flexible profession. You can decide whether to take a public or private job, or offer lessons on your own. Your working conditions are flexible too. You might prefer to work in a local school or academy, but many English language teaching jobs also allow you to work online from home. And if you’re feeling adventurous, there are lots of opportunities to live and work abroad, in a new country and culture. If you do travel further afield, you might even learn a new language of your own.

English language teaching is a career that encourages creativity. You’ll become an expert at designing lessons and making learning materials to meet the needs of your students. Best of all ... it’s fun! You spend your day with interesting, engaging people who are keen to learn. What could be better than that?

What do English language teachers do every day?

It probably goes without saying that language educators teach students English on a day-to-day basis. But there are plenty of other aspects to the job as well.

English language teachers assess their learners through quick tests and official exams. They use this information to define learning objectives, and then plan courses and classes that meet their students’ needs.

Language teachers use a range of coursebooks and English language teaching materials, including a variety of audio, visual and digital tools. At the same time, they find and create teaching and learning materials of their own.

In the process of developing learners’ reading, listening, speaking and writing abilities, teachers also help students develop confidence in presenting and communicating ideas. Furthermore, language teachers encourage students to develop important 21st century skills, such as creativity, collaboration, leadership, autonomous learning and adaptability. These skills are transferable and will help learners in many areas throughout their lives.

What do you need to become an English language teacher?

Being a good English teacher requires more than just being able to speak the language fluently. You’ll also need a comprehensive knowledge of English grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary, combined with excellent communication skills. Teachers of young learners will also need to have an understanding of how to teach engaging, effective classes to children.

It helps if you are comfortable speaking in front of other people, managing groups of learners, and able to plan and organise your time. And it’s important to have a friendly, sympathetic nature and a good degree of cultural sensitivity. After all, you’ll be working with people from all over the world and all walks of life. 

You can develop the knowledge and skills you’ll need with an initial TEFL qualification, like CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). Most courses can be done in four to five weeks full-time, or over a couple of months to a year part-time.

Where can you teach?

There are opportunities to teach the English language almost everywhere. For example, you can teach English in an English-speaking country such as the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Ireland. You’ll find many private and public programmes and classes for people who have come to work or study, and who need to improve their English.

Alternatively, you can teach English in schools and universities in countries where English is the official language – but not always how people communicate on a daily basis. Nigeria, Malta, India and Sierra Leone are examples. You might also prefer to teach in non-English-speaking countries, where you’ll have the opportunity to immerse yourself in the local culture and learn a new language too.

In terms of teaching environments, there are opportunities to teach in private academies, public schools, universities, offices, private homes and online.

Who do you teach?

There is an extensive list of people who want to learn to speak English. Many teachers start out with a variety of class types to find out which they like best. Your options include (but are not limited to):

• adults in private groups or one-to-one classes
• adults in language schools, colleges or universities 
• professionals such as business people, medical professionals, pilots, etc. who require English for a specific purpose
• students who are preparing for an official exam like the Cambridge B2 First qualification, for example
• people who have moved to an English-speaking country and need to improve their English 
• young learners in one-to-one classes or groups, or online 
• young learners in private language schools, or in secondary/primary schools.

Find out more about CELTA from Cambridge

The CELTA qualification is an official English language teaching course, recognised by language academies, universities and employers all over the world. Find out more about the CELTA qualification and how it can help you get started on your English teaching journey.

Speck, J (2019) Learning English Boosts Earnings and Happiness. Wall Street English

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Teaching English as a foreign language today integrated approach versus communicative approach

Discovering the methodology that suits your students best is the most important element in the process of teaching especially when it comes to teaching English as a foreign language. With the phenomenal introduction of the communicative approach, the traditional approach has occupied a relatively lower status in most of the language classes. This paper aims at showing that an amalgam of approaches is better than adopting one single approach. Experience and practice have shown that employing both the communicative approach and the traditional approach is more effective and efficient. While the communicative approach provides learners with the cultural context of the target language, the traditional approach introduces the functions of language and its structure mainly grammar. In most of my classrooms, teaching grammar and sentence structure has proved to be fundamental and essential since the grammar and sentence structure of Arabic (the native language) is different from that of English (the target foreign language). Hence, to improve the quality of teaching and to gain better results, the two approaches should be used. The paper also gives a brief overview of the historical background of the two teaching approaches and highlights the most important advantages and disadvantages involved in implementing the communicative and traditional approaches.

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bertaria hutauruk

This study concerns on the teacher’s communicative approach in teaching English as a foreign language which was taken at English department in FKIP UHN Pematangsiantar. The problem of the research is what are teacher’s techniques used in teaching English as a foreign language? The writer used some theories related to the Techniques of Teaching English and communicative approach theory as the following: Allen (1965), Abbot (1981), Billow (1961), Byrne (1976), Lado (1979), Larsen (2000), This research is a qualitative research which based on the reality teaching and learning process in English class at FKIP UHN Pematangsiantar. The methodology covers the research design, instrument, technique of collecting data, data analysis and interpretation. The teacher‘s communicative approach are mostly use direct method, cooperative learning and audio lingual method. To be communicative in teaching English, the teacher also recommended use communicative competence and some variation tech...

Language teaching works as means to provide access to knowledge and consequently to different ways of thinking, creating, feeling, acting, and conceiving reality. To learn a language, the student needs to use the grammatical rules in contexts that show a level of linguistic competence, in other words, it is impossible to learn a language without learning its structure. However, many current grammar classes in Vietnam still adapt the traditional teaching method, which may demotivate the students in learning English grammar and prevent them from improving their communicative skill. On the other hand, there is a widespread belief that Communicative Language Teaching does not include any grammar. In fact, the belief that CLT eclipsed attention to grammar is only partly true, since although CLT syllabuses are organized according to categories of meaning or functions, they still have a strong grammar basis (Thornbury, 1999); that is to say, the functions into which CLT syllabuses are organized are connected with their correspondent grammatical points. This paper shares some points of view on the role of Grammar in English Teaching and the current situation of Grammar Teaching, and then looks briefly at the advantages of implementing the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in the traditional grammar lessons, and the way it makes the students learn a second language in an interactive, creative and communicative classroom environment.

mell kazama Chaniago

Over the years, many language teaching methods have been developed and are still being developed. Grammar Translation Method, Direct Method, Audio lingual Method, Situational Language Teaching, Total Physical Response, Suggestopedia, The Silent Way and Communicative Language Teaching, just to mention a few, are examples of language teaching methods. A careful study reveals that each method results from a critic of a previous method and seeks to propose a better way of teaching a language. It is because the Grammar Translation Method did not meet up with the demands for oral proficiency that The Direct Method and later the Oral Approach came into being. These methods were hailed for their emphasis on oral productions, yet these methods only gave limited opportunities for learners to use language interactively, thus, the shift to the communicative approaches to language teaching. Inevitably, these methods contain features that sometimes overlap or are distinctive. This paper seeks to compare two methods of language teaching: one that targets automatic oral production of basic structures - Situational Language Teaching (henceforth SLT) and the other that targets the development of communicative competence, that is, Communicative Language Teaching (henceforth CLT). The aim of this comparison is not to propagate any language teaching method. The assumption is that there is no best language teaching method, rather a prolific language teacher should be eclectic, that is be properly informed on all the teaching methods, judge them, and appropriately incorporate different language teaching methods that meets the objectives of their lessons. This comparison shall be done at two levels - the level of approach and the level of design

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ETERNAL (English, Teaching, Learning, and Research Journal)

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This paper is theoretically aimed at discussing how to teach communication skills (written and spoken) through a combination between the classic grammar translation and the modern communicative language teaching). The combination not only results in the formation of a new method which is here known as the communicative grammar translation method, but also in the formation of a new methodology in English language pedagogy which might be applied by English teachers to teach communication skills in the classrooms. The methodology of this new method consists of three special procedures i.e. The first is structural procedure which allows the learners to learn grammar rules and vocabulary. The second is transitional procedure which gives opportunity to the students to practice using the rules in translation and pronunciation drills. The third is communicative procedure which also gives the learners opportunity to use their knowledge of grammar and vocabulary in communicative activities. T...

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ESL Speaking

Games + Activities to Try Out Today!

in Activities for Adults · Activities for Kids · ESL Speaking Resources

Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching: CLT, TPR

Teaching a foreign language can be a challenging but rewarding job that opens up entirely new paths of communication to students. It’s beneficial for teachers to have knowledge of the many different language learning techniques including ESL teaching methods so they can be flexible in their instruction methods, adapting them when needed.

Keep on reading for all the details you need to know about the most popular foreign language teaching methods. Some of the ESL pedagogy ideas covered are the communicative approach, total physical response, the direct method, task-based language learning, suggestopedia, grammar-translation, the audio-lingual approach and more.

Language teaching methods

Most Popular Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching

Here’s a helpful rundown of the most common language teaching methods and ESL teaching methods. You may also want to take a look at this: Foreign language teaching philosophies .

#1: The Direct Method

In the direct method ESL, all teaching occurs in the target language, encouraging the learner to think in that language. The learner does not practice translation or use their native language in the classroom. Practitioners of this method believe that learners should experience a second language without any interference from their native tongue.

Instructors do not stress rigid grammar rules but teach it indirectly through induction. This means that learners figure out grammar rules on their own by practicing the language. The goal for students is to develop connections between experience and language. They do this by concentrating on good pronunciation and the development of oral skills.

This method improves understanding, fluency , reading, and listening skills in our students. Standard techniques are question and answer, conversation, reading aloud, writing, and student self-correction for this language learning method. Learn more about this method of foreign language teaching in this video: 

#2: Grammar-Translation

With this method, the student learns primarily by translating to and from the target language. Instructors encourage the learner to memorize grammar rules and vocabulary lists. There is little or no focus on speaking and listening. Teachers conduct classes in the student’s native language with this ESL teaching method.

This method’s two primary goals are to progress the learner’s reading ability to understand literature in the second language and promote the learner’s overall intellectual development. Grammar drills are a common approach. Another popular activity is translation exercises that emphasize the form of the writing instead of the content.

Although the grammar-translation approach was one of the most popular language teaching methods in the past, it has significant drawbacks that have caused it to fall out of favour in modern schools . Principally, students often have trouble conversing in the second language because they receive no instruction in oral skills.

#3: Audio-Lingual

The audio-lingual approach encourages students to develop habits that support language learning. Students learn primarily through pattern drills, particularly dialogues, which the teacher uses to help students practice and memorize the language. These dialogues follow standard configurations of communication.

There are four types of dialogues utilized in this method:

• Repetition, in which the student repeats the teacher’s statement exactly
• Inflection, where one of the words appears in a different form from the previous sentence (for example, a word may change from the singular to the plural)
• Replacement, which involves one word being replaced with another while the sentence construction remains the same
• Restatement, where the learner rephrases the teacher’s statement

This technique’s name comes from the order it uses to teach language skills. It starts with listening and speaking, followed by reading and writing, meaning that it emphasizes hearing and speaking the language before experiencing its written form. Because of this, teachers use only the target language in the classroom with this TESOL method.

Many of the current online language learning apps and programs closely follow the audio-lingual language teaching approach. It is a nice option for language learning remotely and/or alone, even though it’s an older ESL teaching method.

#4: Structural Approach

Proponents of the structural approach understand language as a set of grammatical rules that should be learned one at a time in a specific order. It focuses on mastering these structures, building one skill on top of another, instead of memorizing vocabulary. This is similar to how young children learn a new language naturally.

An example of the structural approach is teaching the present tense of a verb, like “to be,” before progressing to more advanced verb tenses, like the present continuous tense that uses “to be” as an auxiliary.

The structural approach teaches all four central language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It’s a technique that teachers can implement with many other language teaching methods.

Most ESL textbooks take this approach into account. The easier-to-grasp grammatical concepts are taught before the more difficult ones. This is one of the modern language teaching methods.

Most popular methods and approaches and language teaching

#5: Total Physical Response (TPR)

The total physical response method highlights aural comprehension by allowing the learner to respond to basic commands, like “open the door” or “sit down.” It combines language and physical movements for a comprehensive learning experience.

In an ordinary TPR class, the teacher would give verbal commands in the target language with a physical movement. The student would respond by following the command with a physical action of their own. It helps students actively connect meaning to the language and passively recognize the language’s structure.

Many instructors use TPR alongside other methods of language learning. While TPR can help learners of all ages, it is used most often with young students and beginners. It’s a nice option for an English teaching method to use alongside some of the other ones on this list. 

An example of a game that could fall under TPR is Simon Says. Or, do the following as a simple review activity. After teaching classroom vocabulary, or prepositions, instruct students to do the following:

• Pick up your pencil.
• Stand behind someone.
• Put your water bottle under your chair.

Are you on your feet all day teaching young learners? Consider picking up some of these teacher shoes .

#6: Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

These days, CLT is by far one of the most popular approaches and methods in language teaching. Keep reading to find out more about it.

This method stresses interaction and communication to teach a second language effectively. Students participate in everyday situations they are likely to encounter in the target language. For example, learners may practice introductory conversations, offering suggestions, making invitations, complaining, or expressing time or location.

Instructors also incorporate learning topics outside of conventional grammar so that students develop the ability to respond in diverse situations.

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CLT teachers focus on being facilitators rather than straightforward instructors. Doing so helps students achieve CLT’s primary goal, learning to communicate in the target language instead of emphasizing the mastery of grammar.

Role-play , interviews, group work, and opinion sharing are popular activities practiced in communicative language teaching, along with games like scavenger hunts and information gap exercises that promote student interaction.

Most modern-day ESL teaching textbooks like Four Corners, Smart Choice, or Touchstone are heavy on communicative activities.

#7: Natural Approach

This approach aims to mimic natural language learning with a focus on communication and instruction through exposure. It de-emphasizes formal grammar training. Instead, instructors concentrate on creating a stress-free environment and avoiding forced language production from students.

Teachers also do not explicitly correct student mistakes. The goal is to reduce student anxiety and encourage them to engage with the second language spontaneously.

Classroom procedures commonly used in the natural approach are problem-solving activities, learning games , affective-humanistic tasks that involve the students’ own ideas, and content practices that synthesize various subject matter, like culture.

#8: Task-Based Language Teaching (TBL)

With this method, students complete real-world tasks using their target language. This technique encourages fluency by boosting the learner’s confidence with each task accomplished and reducing direct mistake correction.

Tasks fall under three categories:

• Information gap, or activities that involve the transfer of information from one person, place, or form to another.
• Reasoning gap tasks that ask a student to discover new knowledge from a given set of information using inference, reasoning, perception, and deduction.
• Opinion gap activities, in which students react to a particular situation by expressing their feelings or opinions.

Popular classroom tasks practiced in task-based learning include presentations on an assigned topic and conducting interviews with peers or adults in the target language. Or, having students work together to make a poster and then do a short presentation about a current event. These are just a couple of examples and there are literally thousands of things you can do in the classroom. In terms of ESL pedagogy, this is one of the most popular modern language teaching methods. 

It’s considered to be a modern method of teaching English. I personally try to do at least 1-2 task-based projects in all my classes each semester. It’s a nice change of pace from my usually very communicative-focused activities.

One huge advantage of TBL is that students have some degree of freedom to learn the language they want to learn. Also, they can learn some self-reflection and teamwork skills as well. 

#9: Suggestopedia Language Learning Method

This approach and method in language teaching was developed in the 1970s by psychotherapist Georgi Lozanov. It is sometimes also known as the positive suggestion method but it later became sometimes known as desuggestopedia.

Apart from using physical surroundings and a good classroom atmosphere to make students feel comfortable, here are some of the main tenants of this second language teaching method:

• Deciphering, where the teacher introduces new grammar and vocabulary.
• Concert sessions, where the teacher reads a text and the students follow along with music in the background. This can be both active and passive.
• Elaboration where students finish what they’ve learned with dramas, songs, or games.
• Introduction in which the teacher introduces new things in a playful manner.
• Production, where students speak and interact without correction or interruption.

TESOL methods and approaches

#10: The Silent Way

The silent way is an interesting ESL teaching method that isn’t that common but it does have some solid footing. After all, the goal in most language classes is to make them as student-centred as possible.

In the Silent Way, the teacher talks as little as possible, with the idea that students learn best when discovering things on their own. Learners are encouraged to be independent and to discover and figure out language on their own.

Instead of talking, the teacher uses gestures and facial expressions to communicate, as well as props, including the famous Cuisenaire Rods. These are rods of different colours and lengths.

Although it’s not practical to teach an entire course using the silent way, it does certainly have some value as a language teaching approach to remind teachers to talk less and get students talking more!

#11: Functional-Notional Approach

This English teaching method first of all recognizes that language is purposeful communication. The reason people talk is that they want to communicate something to someone else.

Parts of speech like nouns and verbs exist to express language functions and notions. People speak to inform, agree, question, persuade, evaluate, and perform various other functions. Language is also used to talk about concepts or notions like time, events, places, etc.

The role of the teacher in this second language teaching method is to evaluate how students will use the language. This will serve as a guide for what should be taught in class. Teaching specific grammar patterns or vocabulary sets does play a role but the purpose for which students need to know these things should always be kept in mind with the functional-notional Approach to English teaching.

#12: The Bilingual Method

The bilingual method uses two languages in the classroom, the mother tongue and the target language. The mother tongue is briefly used for grammar and vocabulary explanations. Then, the rest of the class is conducted in English. Check out this video for some of the pros and cons of this method:

#13: The Test Teach Test Approach (TTT)

This style of language teaching is ideal for directly targeting students’ needs. It’s best for intermediate and advanced learners. Definitely don’t use it for total beginners!

There are three stages:

• A test or task of some kind that requires students to use the target language.
• Explicit teaching or focus on accuracy with controlled practice exercises.
• Another test or task is to see if students have improved in their use of the target language.

Want to give it a try? Find out what you need to know here:

Test Teach Test TTT .

#14: Community Language Learning

In Community Language Learning, the class is considered to be one unit. They learn together. In this style of class, the teacher is not a lecturer but is more of a counsellor or guide.

In general, there is no set lesson for the day. Instead, students decide what they want to talk about. They sit in the a circle, and decide on what they want to talk about. They may ask the teacher for a translation or for advice on pronunciation or how to say something.

The conversations are recorded, and then transcribed. Students and teacher can analyze the grammar and vocabulary, as well as subject related content.

While community language learning may not comprehensively cover the English language, students will be learning what they want to learn. It’s also student-centred to the max. It’s perhaps a nice change of pace from the usual teacher-led classes, but it’s not often seen these days as the only method of teaching a class.M

#15: The Situational Approach

This approach loosely falls under the behaviourism view of language as habit formation. The situational approach to teaching English was popular in England, starting in the 1930s. Find out more about it:

Language Teaching Approaches FAQs

There are a number of common questions that people have about second or foreign language teaching and learning. Here are the answers to some of the most popular ones.

What is language teaching approaches?

A language teaching approach is a way of thinking about teaching and learning. An approach produces methods, which is the way of teaching something, in this case, a second or foreign language using techniques or activities.

What are method and approach?

Method and approach are similar but there are some key differences. An approach is the way of dealing with something while a method involves the process or steps taken to handle the issue or task.

What is presentation practice production?

How many approaches are there in language learning?

Throughout history, there have been just over 30 popular approaches to language learning. However, there are around 10 that are most widely known including task-based learning, the communicative approach, grammar-translation and the audio-lingual approach. These days, the communicative approach is all the rage.

What is the best method of English language teaching?

It’s difficult to choose the best single approach or method for English language teaching as the one used depends on the age and level of the students as well as the material being taught. Most teachers find that a mix of the communicative approach, audio-lingual approach and task-based teaching works well in most cases.

What is micro teaching?

What are the most effective methods of learning a language?

The most effective methods for learning a language really depends on the person, but in general, here are some of the best options: total immersion, the communicative approach, extensive reading, extensive listening, and spaced repetition.

The Modern Methods of Teaching English

There are several modern methods of teaching English that focus on engaging students and making learning more interactive and effective. Some of these methods include:

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

This approach emphasizes communication and interaction as the main goals of language learning. It focuses on real-life situations and encourages students to use English in meaningful contexts.

Task-Based Learning (TBL)

TBL involves designing activities or tasks that require students to use English to complete a specific goal or objective. This approach helps students develop language skills while focusing on the task at hand.

Technology-Enhanced Learning

Using technology such as computers, tablets, and smartphones can make learning more engaging and interactive. Online resources, apps, and educational games can be used to supplement traditional teaching methods.

Flipped Classroom

In a flipped classroom, students learn new material at home through videos or online resources, and then use class time for activities, discussions, and practice exercises. This approach allows for more individualized learning and interaction in the classroom.

Project-Based Learning (PBL)

PBL involves students working on projects or tasks that require them to use English in a real-world context. This approach helps students develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills while improving their language abilities.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)

CLIL involves teaching subjects such as science or history in English, rather than teaching English as a separate subject. This approach helps students learn English while also learning about other subjects.

Gamification

Using game elements such as points, badges, and leaderboards can make learning English more fun and engaging. Educational games can help students practice language skills in a playful and interactive way.

These modern methods of teaching English focus on making learning more student-centered, interactive, and engaging, leading to better outcomes for students.

Have your say about Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching

What’s your top pick for a language teaching method? Is it one of the options from this list or do you have another one that you’d like to mention? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think. We’d love to hear from you. And whatever approach or method you use, you’ll want to check out these top 1o tips for new English teachers .

Also, be sure to give this article a share on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter. It’ll help other busy teachers, like yourself, find this useful information about approaches and methods in language teaching and learning.

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About Jackie

Jackie Bolen has been teaching English for more than 15 years to students in South Korea and Canada. She's taught all ages, levels and kinds of TEFL classes. She holds an MA degree, along with the Celta and Delta English teaching certifications.

Jackie is the author of more than 100 books for English teachers and English learners, including 101 ESL Activities for Teenagers and Adults and 1001 English Expressions and Phrases . She loves to share her ESL games, activities, teaching tips, and more with other teachers throughout the world.

You can find her on social media at: YouTube Facebook TikTok Pinterest Instagram

This is wonderful, I have learned a lot!

You’re welcome!

What year did you publish this please?

Recently! Only a few months ago.

Wonderful! Thank you for sharing such useful information. I have learned a lot from them. Thank you!

I am so grateful. Thanks for sharing your kmowledge.

Hi thank you so much for this amazing article. I just wanted to confirm/ask is PPP one of the methods of teaching ESL if so was there a reason it wasn’t included in the article(outdated, not effective etc.?).

PPP is more of a subset of these other ones and not an approach or method in itself.

Good explanation, understandable and clear. Congratulations

That’s good, very short but clear…👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

I meant the naturalistic approach

This is amazing! Thank you for writing this article, it helped me a lot. I hoped this will reach more people so I will definitely recommend this to others.

Thank you, sir! I just used this article in my PPT presentation at my Post Grad School. More articles from you!

I think this useful because it is teaching me a lot about english. Thank you bro! 😀👍

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Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Prerequisites, assessment and feedback.

The aim of the module is to introduce students to teaching English as a Foreign Language, covering:

• language learning methods used in TEFL, including theories of second language acquisition and psychological approaches
• controversial topics such as the spread of World Englishes, the development of a Lingua Franca Core and the appropriate model of English to be used in the classroom
• learner profiles and the aspects of English that pose difficulties

At the end of this module, students will typically have a sound knowledge of       

• TEFL methods and approaches throughout the 20th century to the present day
• the political controversies arising from English as a world language, including language death and linguistic imperialism
• World Englishes – which model(s) of English are / should be taught.
• models of language learning
• theories of language acquisition as relevant to the language classroom, including sociocultural and psychological considerations
• the language system, i.e. be able to describe features of English and so explain mistakes 
• the typical linguistic problems that learners experience 

In addition, you will gain experience in creating a written ‘ learner profile ’. This task (which is part of the summative assessment) mirrors an assessment task required for the University of Cambridge’s Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA), an internationally-recognised teaching qualification. 

NOTE: this module does not provide a qualification in teaching English as a foreign language. However, it is excellent preparation for professional TEFL qualifications.

There are no prerequisites for this module.

Contact hours

Typically, 2 contact hours per week over the whole teaching period: 1 hour lecture and 1 hour seminar.

Teaching programme

The module covers:

• the history of TEFL from 1880 to the present day
• the political controversies arising from English as a world language, including language death and linguistic imperialism
• World Englishes - which model(s) of English are/should be taught
• theories of language acquisition as relevant to the language classroom
• sociocultural considerations in the EFL classroom
• the language system, i.e. be able to describe features of English and so explain mistakes

Teaching materials

The following is a sample reading list:

• Brown, H. D. (2006). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching . 5th ed. New York: Longman.
• Crystal, D. (2003). English as a Global Language . 2nd ed. Cambridge: CUP.
• Dörnyei, Z. (2002). Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom . Cambridge: CUP.
• Harmer, J. (2007). The Practice of English Language Teaching . 4th ed. Harlow: Pearson Longman.
• Jenkins, J. (2003). World Englishes: a resource book for students . London: Routledge.
• Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic Imperialism . Oxford: OUP.
• Richards, J. C. & T. S. Rodgers (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching . 2nd ed. Cambridge: CUP.
• Scrivener, J. (2005) Learning Teaching . Oxford: Macmillan Heinemann.
• Schneider, E.W. (2011) English Around The World - An Introduction . Cambridge: CUP.
• Wardhaugh, R. (2006) An Introduction to Sociolinguistics . 5th ed. Malden, MA; London: Blackwell

Suggestions for reading before the module starts

Harmer (2007) and Scrivener (2011) in the list above are particularly approachable, if you want to do some preparatory reading.

Feedback on formative work

• Formative exercises to be assigned during the teaching period.
• Feedback will be provided within two weeks of submission.

Summative assessment and feedback

• Essay (learner profile) worth 30% of module mark, due at noon on Thursday of Summer Term week 1.  
• Two-hour closed examination worth 70% of module mark, in Summer Term weeks 5-7.
• Feedback on essay to be provided within four weeks of submission date. Overall module mark on University scale available by the end of the summer term. Sight of examination scripts by appointment by the end of the summer term.

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7 Reasons Why I Love Teaching English

Why do you want to be an English teacher? Why teach English in the first place? Let me share with you 7 reasons why I teach English and why it matters to me. Hopefully, you'll get inspired along the way!

Written By: Allen Tunstall | Updated: June 29, 2023

Written By: Allen Tunstall

Updated: June 29, 2023

Why do you want to be an English teacher?

Teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) is thrilling, challenging, and rewarding. I love teaching English because it provides unique perks, including building bonds with my students and opening the doors to life-changing experiences of teaching English in another country.

Here are 7 reasons why I love teaching English and why I wanted to be an English teacher:

1. The Relationship with Students  

Whether you are teaching adults or children, a bond is formed when you teach your students. Meeting weekly getting to know your students is like welcoming a new friend into your life. After a year or even months, your relationship status will most likely be that as 'part of the family.' There is a hospitable and cozy environment when your students or the parents graciously welcome you into their homes or workplaces offering refreshments, food, and peace of mind. As an overseas English teacher, my students are my family abroad.

I’ve never been invited to so many Christmas dinners, birthday parties, summer homes, and trips. In my experience, the most important part of 'the bond' is when parents tell me they are happy with the progress their children are making. They always joke that they don't want me to go back to the U.S. or they will never be able to understand someone speaking in English. At the end of every class, I receive big hugs and sad faces because I have to leave to teach my next lesson. The bond can be seen in many ways and every day I am glad to have work I love.

2. The English Language

Well, the English language and I have a love/hate relationship. (You can see our relationship status as complicated on Facebook). Yes, English is my maternal language. Yes, I was born and raised in the United States. Yes, I am a certified English Teacher. However; I don't know everything about the English language. (Raise your hand if you agree... or don't).

The English love relationship: Teaching English abroad has broadened my vocabulary. It allows me to see different perspectives of topics and conversations with my students, answer weird questions, and see the bigger picture about current events at home and abroad. English is a common language that allows me to communicate with students and locals alike.

The English hate relationship: Teaching English abroad has made my tongue twist way too many times by the end of the day (really my English-speaking friends don't consider me an English speaker anymore). I have been behind in my slang language. My students know more than I do in many cases! Everyone wants their English to be corrected (there just simply isn't enough time in the world to correct everyone). This has made me realize grammar and rules suck, keeping track of British vs. American English word spelling is a pain, and the ability to speak fast is ofter more of a curse than a blessing.

At the end of the day, the English language is one of the most popular languages to learn now, and this high demand enables me to gain employment and live virtually anywhere in the world. Moltes Gracias English.

Demand for English language instruction is so high both in native English-speaking nations and around the world, that one can virtually always find paying opportunities just about anywhere from Tokyo to Toronto. When I chose to teach English in Europe, I was expecting to break even financially . 

After arriving in Spain , I soon started teaching private lessons and it was exactly the experience I wanted. Now with 20 students, my schedule is full and arranged to my liking. I make around €800-1,300 ($930 - $1500 USD) a month living comfortably in Barcelona, Spain, and I am able to choose my lifestyle. You can do this too!

I don't have job security or a 401k. It is a risky lifestyle that is not meant for everyone, but I am happy and experiencing life as it comes. Others may choose to pursue more stable or high-paying options teaching in their local public school back in the U.S. or wherever their home country is. The point is that you have options and it's a vocation you can take anywhere.  In fact, you can teach English online and teach students from halfway around the world from just about any country on the planet.

4. Travel Opportunities

Demand for English instructors is global. I teach English because I can live abroad and travel the world, and get paid along the way. Most of the countries in Europe are well connected, which allows you to travel around very easily. Whether your goal is just to know that travel is key — take a solo trip throughout Europe, explore world-renowned museums and restaurants, travel locally, relax by the beach, or go hiking. In my three years abroad, I have had the opportunity to live in France , Italy , and Spain. I’ve also been able to travel to many other European countries. I never could’ve predicted all of the places I’ve been able to go so far.

5. Opportunities to Learn New Languages  

As an English teacher, you tend to think more about all aspects of languages. When you are an English teacher abroad like me, it is vital to learn the local language, and that in turn, helps you learn more about English itself. It also makes your daily life much easier. I never thought I could learn two languages at once, but living in Barcelona, Spain, the languages Catalan and Spanish are the heavy influencers. I am currently taking Catalan lessons for free at Consorci Per A La Normalització Lingüística while learning Spanish from friends, picking up words and phrases on the street or when traveling other parts of Spain.

It is a headache learning another language in general and confusing to say the least but it is worth the investment. You may not be a master at the language you want to learn right away, it simply takes time. So keep calm, join a language exchange, practice when you can, immerse yourself in the culture, and drink some liquid encouragement so you can let your barriers down. For more tips on learning a foreign language while teaching English abroad, check out 16 Tips for Learning a Foreign Language while Teaching English Abroad .

6. Making Friends  

As a teacher, you become a member of a very special community. As an international English teacher, I came to Europe alone and along the way, I have met: fellow teachers, students, parents, locals, cabbies, roommates, ITA Alumni , and many other like-minded people who share the same passions in many different ways. All of their personalities give me the strength to continue pursuing my dreams. It is amazing how we all came from such different backgrounds and parts of the world yet we share so many similarities in life. There is something about the people I hold dear here in Barcelona. Kaci, Lindsey, Àlex, Jimmy 1, Jimmy 2, Sheila, Kyle, Gavo, Max, and many others, thank you!

7. Making an Impact on People's Lives

Whether you teach English or any other subject, the satisfaction of knowing you can make a meaningful impact on the lives of your students is one of the great feelings you can have. People need and want to learn English for various reasons. Learning English can help people greatly enhance their educational and professional opportunities, and make meaningful improvements to their lives. They can also enjoy much more in the way of music, film and popular culture. The internet is mostly in English. Also, immigrants in countries like the U.S., U.K., and other English-speaking nations also need to learn English to better assimilate and take advantage of economic and educational opportunities in their new countries. 

Finally, if I had to choose another thing to treasure while traveling and working as an English teacher besides my passport, it would be my TEFL certification. Because I invested the time and money to get TEFL certified and become a professional English teacher, I’ve been able to make my lifestyle of traveling and learning a reality. The ability to live in a new location every year or six months if I wanted to is just phenomenal.

Where to next? Asia maybe! Now let me ask you the same questions: Why do you want to be an English teacher? Why do you want to teach English? 

Read further: Why you should teach English abroad .

Posted In: Teach English in Spain , Teach English in Europe , Diversity Abroad , Teach English Abroad

Allen Tunstall

About as Midwest as they get, Omaha, Nebraska, Allen always dreamed of visiting new countries, learning new languages, experiencing cultures, and living a simple life while doing so. After graduating from University in 2014, Allen sold all he had and bought a one-way ticket to live those dreams and share his experiences along the way. He taught English in Italy and then Spain for several years, before backpacking through Asia for 3-months. Allen now teaches English exclusively online and will spend the vast majority of 2020-2021 traveling around Asia while teaching online English lessons.

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My career teaching English as a foreign language: the love of a linguist

How did you get into teaching.

I started my teaching career in Barcelona in 1990 working for a few privately-owned language schools. I taught a number of hours in each school, so spent most of my day on the metro or bus getting from one side of the city to the other. Getting your foot in the door was how it worked back then, and to be honest, little has changed there regarding working in big European cities. If this is where you are currently at stick with it, it will get easier.

After a year, I went to The Lewis School where I trained journalists for the 1992 Olympics. After six years I was still living in Barcelona, but had become restless and wanted to move into a role with more responsibility and a higher salary. Teaching English as a foreign language (Tefl) isn't what anyone would call a lucrative profession, but hourly pay is very different for teachers with a diploma-level qualification.

Did you do any training?

After saving for a year, I studied for a Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults (Delta). I enjoy intensive courses as I like working under pressure, but they aren't for everybody. These days you don't always need to head back to school full time; most diploma-level courses can be done with some element of part-time or online study.

With the diploma under my belt, I was offered roles with more responsibility. These positions have brought me personal and professional learning, as well as the opportunity to work and train with people from all over the world.

My career path in Tefl was always going to lead me to teacher training. I think I knew this right from the beginning. So in 1999 I trained up as a Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults trainer in America, and started my training career delivering courses in Florida and Virginia.

Since then I have trained in several countries on a variety of courses. It's what I love to do and I can think of nothing more fulfilling. Aside from this I am also a writer. I write short fiction pieces, some based on the experiences I've had travelling and working in different cultures. I'm currently working on a collection of short stories. Whether this becomes my career I am yet to find out, but if that's the case I think I'll always keep my hand in the training circle.

What did you consider as a career path before teaching?

Before Tefl I lived and worked as an au-pair in Belgium and France. I did this to perfect my French (I'm really a linguist at heart). It worked in as far as learning French, but being an au-pair has its age limitations, and knowing that I wanted to travel and learn more languages led me to Tefl. My only other work experiences involved bar work and selling advertising on the phone for a Cambridge newspaper.

So what eventually drew you to Tefl?

I wanted to learn languages. I thought that I would stay in one country for around six months and then move on to the next place. I think I saw myself as a wandering linguist, soaking up culture wherever I went – a good self-image for an 18 year old. It didn't quite work out that way as I stayed in Barcelona (the first time round) for eight years.

What are your most valued observations drawn from your experiences?

There's often someone who has a sorry tale to tell about another culture and it's never helpful for people thinking of going to an unknown place. My advice is steer clear of negative gossip about a place or people you don't know, and if in doubt look for a realistic source of information. My one and only negative experience in more than 23 years in Tefl happened in the UK in Wales.

It's also very important to find out as much as possible before entering into any work position. Regardless of the historic or expected kudos of an establishment, there may still be an unprofessional set-up. Investigating a future workplace can be done in several ways, even if simply requesting the opportunity to talk with current teachers.

Can you describe a typical day in your working life?

When training I might be observing lessons, helping people in their planning, marking essays and even teaching myself – as well as answering emails from previous trainees with their eclectic questions.

What are the main challenges involved in your work?

I manage groups of people from different backgrounds, learning styles and cultures who have to work together constructively over short, intense periods of time. This can get sticky, so a sense of calm and humour is essential. Listening and providing a pastoral ear is also key, as well as being 100% open and objective to what may come up.

My least favourite is probably chasing forgotten assignments, reminding about missing paperwork, or requesting illegible work be rewritten. Intensive courses are exactly that, and part of my job is to lookout for ways to motivate and encourage very tired people.

What qualities are necessary to succeed in your industry?

A liking of people – including people who think, behave and learn differently from you. An ability to wear the many different hats required in any teaching profession, especially when teaching adults. Empathy, patience, sensitivity and a clear grasp of the fact that making mistakes is the only way to improve, for the teacher as well as the student. All else is a bonus.

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Learning English as a Foreign Language Writing Skills in Collaborative Settings: A Cognitive Load Perspective

1 School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

Slava Kalyuga

2 School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Associated Data

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Learning to write in a foreign language is a complex cognitive process. The process-genre approach is a common instructional practice adopted by language teachers to develop learners’ writing abilities. However, the interacting elements of procedural knowledge, linguistic knowledge, and generic knowledge in this approach may exceed the capacity of an individual learner’s working memory, thus actually hindering the acquisition of writing skills. According to the collective working memory effect, it was hypothesized that teaching writing skills of English as a foreign language by adopting a process-genre approach in collaborative conditions could lead to better writing performance, lower cognitive load, and higher instructional efficiency. The reported experiment compared learning writing skills of English as a foreign language in individual and collaborative instructional conditions from a cognitive load perspective, a rarely adopted approach in this field. The results indicated that the collaborative instructional condition was more effective and efficient than the individual instructional condition in improving the quality of written products as well as in optimizing the cognitive (working memory) load experienced by the learners. Measures of cognitive load were used to support the cognitive load theory’s interpretation of the results, which is the unique contribution of this research study to the field.

Introduction

Learning to write in a foreign language is a complex problem-solving process, requiring not only a range of skills from writing English letters to composing complete essays but also the ability to make claims and provide appropriate supporting details ( Kirkland and Saunders, 1991 ; Bruning and Horn, 2010 ; Howell et al., 2018 ). Students need to develop the skills of generating, organizing, and refining ideas by being involved in complex activities, such as brainstorming, discussing, outlining, drafting, monitoring, and revising ( Raimes, 1992 ; Hyland, 2003a ). Cognitive load theory aims at designing effective instructional materials and procedures to facilitate learners’ acquisition of complex knowledge and skills based on the mechanisms of human cognitive architecture ( Van Merriënboer and Sweller, 2005 ; Sweller et al., 2011 ). According to this theory, learners can build new knowledge about writing processes not only with the help of explicit formal instruction or through personal reading but also using problem solving via individual or collaborative efforts (through personal introspection or pair/group discussions).

The collective working memory effect in cognitive load theory refers to the working memory space created by communicating and coordinating knowledge by each collaborator ( Kirschner et al., 2011 , 2018 ; Sweller et al., 2011 ). An individual who studies alone processes all the interacting elements of the instructional material in his or her working memory. By contrast, under a collaborative learning condition, all the interactive elements can be distributed among the working memories of group members. This effect allows a better understanding of cognitive processes in collaborative learning environments and the conditions under which such environments provide more efficient instructional options.

However, to our best knowledge, differences between the effectiveness of individual and collaborative instructional approaches in learning writing skills of English as a foreign language from a cognitive load perspective have never been investigated ( Kirschner et al., 2011 , 2018 ). Moreover, despite that collaborative writing as a teaching strategy has been actively implemented in foreign language classrooms since the 1990s ( McDonough, 2004 ; Shehadeh, 2011 ), the issue of how developing writing skills in collaborative settings impact learners’ cognitive characteristics has not been investigated extensively. In addition, more empirical research should be done to examine how learners in collaborative learning conditions would perform on individual writing tasks rather than on co-authoring tasks in the post-intervention phase ( Storch, 2005 ; Chen, 2019 ). Accordingly, the experimental study reported in this paper was conducted in an attempt to fill these gaps.

Models and Approaches to Teaching Writing Skills

Cognitive model of writing processes.

Writing involves a range of cognitive activities. Flower and Hayes (1981) proposed a cognitive model of writing processes, which regarded writing as a decision-making process, consisting of a range of cognitive activities orchestrated in cyclical or recursive rather than linear orders ( Racelis and Matsuda, 2013 ). Flower and Hayes (1981) argued that a writing process “involves three major elements which are reflected in the three units of the model: the task environment, the writer’s long-term memory, and the writing process” (p. 369). This cognitive model generally corresponds to the three phases of writing: planning, translating, and revising phases. The three cognitive processes do not necessarily appear in a linear order but can happen at any moment in the writing process ( Berninger et al., 1996 ; Baaijen and Galbraith, 2018 , p. 196). Jones (2014) highlighted that the cognitive model of writing processes emphasized the functions of planning (i.e., generating ideas) and translating ideas into texts. Even though Flower and Hayes (1981) stressed that the three types of cognitive activities were recursive, they did not identify the “distinctions involving the temporal dimensions (before, during, or after translation) and spatial dimensions on which the planning and reviewing/revising processes operate (whole text or a portion of it)” ( Berninger et al., 1996 , p. 198). The distinctions are of great significance to instructions as an awareness of stages or phases in writing could help learners internalize the phases of writing, which was evidenced in Jones’ (2014) study that some of the participants were not fully aware of making distinctions between planning and translating while others were struggled with how to organize ideas in the writing process. It can be assumed that explicit instruction in planning and organizing ideas in the pre-writing stage could improve writing quality. Orchestrating the cognitive activities into stages or phases in this study attempted to actualize these abstract activities for instructional purposes. However, as Bizzell (1982) and Atkinson (2003) noted, this post-cognitivist approach to writing may neglect the genre nature of writings—shared features of texts shaped through social conventions. Therefore, it is of equal significance to teach genre knowledge when adopting the cognitive model of writing processes in teaching writing skills.

Approaches to Teaching Writing Skills

The genre approach and process approach to teaching writing skills have been used extensively to promote learners’ abilities to write in English ( Hyland, 2003a , b ; Muncie, 2009 ; Keen, 2020 ). The process-based approach in writing instruction, which was introduced in the 1980s, usually consists of four stages: prewriting, writing, revising, and editing ( Tribble, 1996 ). Participants in Keen’s (2020) study adopted a process approach to learning skills: discussing topics in small groups, writing ideas about the topic, writing first drafts, carrying out peer reviews, writing second drafts, and sharing their accounts with the whole class. It was found that the participants developed a sense of ownership and learned how to write more effectively. Even though Keen (2020) used young learners of English as a first language as research subjects, he identified the beneficial role of procedural learning in cultivating students’ writing abilities. However, it should be noted that such approaches demonstrate “how some writers write, they do not reveal why they make certain linguistic and rhetorical choices” ( Hyland, 2003b , p. 19), as the process-based approach “is seen as predominantly to do with linguistic skills such as planning and drafting, and there is much less emphasis on linguistic knowledge” ( Badger and White, 2000 , p. 154). In a response, ( Hyland, 2003b , 2008 ) put forward a genre-based approach to teach writing skills, in which genre is conceptualized as “a term for grouping texts together, representing how writers typically use language to respond to recurring situations” (p. 544). The genre-based approach emphasizes explicit instructions for communicative purposes, key language features, and structural patterns.

Graham and Sandmel (2011) advised that “advocates of process writing instruction integrate other effective writing practices into this approach” (p. 405). Researchers (e.g., Flowerdew, 1993 ; Badger and White, 2000 ) have endeavored to integrate the process-approach and genre-based approach in teaching writing skills of English as a foreign language as the two approaches could be mutually complementary ( Raimes, 1991 ; Badger and White, 2000 ; Racelis and Matsuda, 2013 ; Deng et al., 2014 ; Huang and Zhang, 2020 ; Jiang et al., 2021 ; Rahimi and Zhang, 2021 ). For example, Flowerdew (1993) introduced a process consisting of six types of activities to explicitly teach the process of learning specific genres. Badger and White (2000) proposed the process-genre approach to teaching writing skills, which consists of several stages starting from understanding a situation to completing a draft. By process-genre approach, Badger and White (2000) emphasized the significant roles of language skills, situational knowledge, and processes in cultivating writing abilities. Learning to write also means learning the techniques of self-regulating cognitive activities and procedures. Students who learn how to regulate the writing procedures collaboratively could transfer the knowledge when writing independently ( Teng, 2020 ).

Learning English Writing Skills Through Collaboration

Taking a social stance, a process-genre approach to teaching writing skills encourages interactions and collaborations, which involves some kinds of collaborative activities such as “modeling, eliciting, supporting, probing, and suggesting alternatives or extension” to a learner’s initial attempts ( Wette, 2017 , p. 72). Dillenbourg (1999) and Prince (2004) defined collaborative learning as an instructional method through which students work together in small groups to pursue common learning or writing goals. Although collaborative learning, in general, has a long history of research, learning writing skills through collaboration was not actively implemented in foreign language classrooms until the late 1990s ( McDonough, 2004 ). Learning writing skills through collaboration, with a primary aim of learning curricular content, focuses on both deconstruction and construction processes ( Karnes et al., 1997 ). Granado-Peinado et al. (2019) found that participants who received collaborative practice and explicit instructions about writing synthesis identified more proportions of arguments and higher levels of integration of different sources than those in the collaborative practice conditions without instructions about writing synthesis. However, their research showed that providing collaboration opportunities does not sufficiently warrant effective learning, which also needs not only guides about how to collaborate but also explicit instructions about learning tasks. Accordingly, Teng (2020) investigated the effect of collaboratively modeling text structure and explicitly teaching self-regulated strategies on younger English learners’ abilities to write summarizations and essays. After 1-month intervention, it was found that participants who adopted self-regulated strategies and collaboratively modeled text structures demonstrated better performance than the participants in the control group in terms of the three measurements. It should be noted that the available research studies have reported mixed results about whether learning writing skills through collaborations could effectively improve the quality of written products or not ( McDonough, 2004 ; McDonough and De Vleeschauwer, 2019 ; Matos, 2021 ). For example, some studies (e.g., Storch, 2005 ; Fernández Dobao, 2012 ; Hsu and Lo, 2018 ) indicated that texts written by collaborative learners were more grammatically accurate than those by individual ones. However, it has also been reported that learners in the individual learning conditions produced more syntactically complex text than collaborative learners ( McDonough et al., 2018 ). The divergent findings in the collaborative learning of writing skills can be related to the following three issues: the lack of explicit collaborative tasks in the learning phases, not considering cognitive aspects in the experimental designs, and not evaluating individual writing outcomes. Accordingly, Kirschner et al. (2009) recommended that research in collaborative learning should directly measure learning outcomes in a test condition, focus on one aspect of the learning goals at a time, and investigate the performance of individual learners instead of the group as a whole. They also advocated that research studies need to consider human cognitive architecture to better understand and compare individual and collaborative learning. In addition, ( Berninger et al., 1996 ) noted that “working memory, and not only long-term memory, is involved in writing development” (p. 199), as the cognitive activities in relation to the task environment and writing process should be carried out in working memory.

Cognitive Load Theory

Cognitive load theory aims at designing effective instructional materials and procedures to optimize learner cognitive resources in the process of acquiring complex knowledge structures ( Sweller, 2010 ; Sweller et al., 2011 ). Cognitive load refers to the working memory resources needed for completing a particular learning task. Theoretically, learners may experience two types of cognitive load: intrinsic cognitive load and extraneous cognitive load ( Van Merriënboer and Sweller, 2005 ; Sweller et al., 2011 ). Intrinsic cognitive load is defined as the working memory resources demanded by the innate complexity of information that a learner must learn ( Sweller, 2010 ). Extraneous cognitive load, conceptualized as the working memory load that is unnecessary and extrinsic to instructional goals, is generated by the presentation manner and structure of the instructional material ( Van Merriënboer and Sweller, 2005 ; Sweller et al., 2011 ).

The level of cognitive load experienced by the learners is determined by the level of element interactivity which refers to the degree to which information elements or components of a learning task should be processed simultaneously for meaningful learning ( Sweller et al., 2011 ). For example, learning new vocabularies in a list can be considered as low in element interactivity, as individual vocabularies can be acquired without reference to other information in the list. By contrast, most writing tasks have high levels of element interactivity, as the writing process involves a relatively large number of interconnected elements of information, as well as cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-affective activities ( Negari, 2011 ).

The levels of cognitive load that learners experience can be measured by subjective rating scales of effort, a simple and reliable instrument first adopted by Paas (1992) . In this type of rating method, learners were asked to recall, reflect, and report the level of mental effort during their previous learning after they completed instructional activities. Even though subjective rating scales were capable of measuring the overall cognitive load, researchers also needed information about the levels of particular types of cognitive load that learners experience ( Paas et al., 2003 ; DeLeeuw and Mayer, 2008 ). Leppink et al. (2013) proposed a more recent version of subjective rating scales: three items on intrinsic cognitive load, three items on extraneous cognitive load, and four items on germane cognitive load. However, the results of confirmatory factor analysis in Jiang and Kalyuga’s (2020) study showed that the two-factor (intrinsic and extraneous) model was an acceptable fit. Therefore, the cognitive load rating questionnaire in this study, which was developed on the basis of Leppink et al.’s (2013) version, adopted the two-factor model.

Cognitive load ratings are frequently combined with learning performance measures to calculate the relative instructional efficiency for different learning environments. Instructional efficiency in this study was calculated using Paas and van Merriënboer’s (1993) formula E = ( P-R )/√ 2 , in which E stands for efficiency, P for performance z-score, and R for cognitive load rating z-score. In this study, the average of intrinsic cognitive load and extraneous cognitive load ratings were used to calculate the cognitive load z-score. According to this formula, higher values of instructional efficiency are achieved in situations where learning performance is high and cognitive load is low; lower values of instructional efficiency occur under conditions where learning performance is low and cognitive load is high.

Collective Working Memory Effect

Cognitive load theory considers a social interaction situation as a collective working memory system and extends the instructional focus from individual learning to collaborative learning. A collective working memory system can be developed from individual cognitive systems through collaboration, coordination, and communication. The collective working memory effect happens when learners acquire knowledge more effectively and efficiently through collaborating with others than through learning individually ( Sweller et al., 2011 ). The collective working memory space constituted by multiple working memories has a larger capacity and longer duration than any of the constituents in individual working memories. This concept was supported by Dillenbourg (1999) who argued that in the collaborative conditions, “the horizontal division of labor into, for instance, task-level and strategy-level tasks, reduces the amounts of processing performed by each individual” (p. 10). Villarreal and Gil-Sarratea (2019) found that the texts produced by pairs were more accurate and grammatically complex than those by individual learners. They attributed the difference partially to collective scaffolding.

Collective working memory refers to the working memory space created by communicating and coordinating knowledge by each collaborator ( Kirschner et al., 2018 ). An individual who studies alone processes all the interacting elements of the instructional material in his or her working memory. By contrast, under a collaborative learning condition, all the interactive elements can be distributed among the working memories of group members. The multiple working memories constitute a collective working memory space that has a larger capacity and longer duration than individual working memory. As a result, an individual learner in the collaborative instructional condition may experience lower levels of the cognitive load than a learner who studies alone. The collective working memory effect, a recently developed cognitive load theory effect, occurs when learners learn better through collaborating with other learners than through learning alone ( Sweller et al., 2011 ). This effect assumes that “students working in groups have more processing capacity than students working individually” ( Janssen et al., 2010 , p. 139). Even though interacting with group members in the collaborative learning condition may generate extraneous cognitive load, the interactive process should be beneficial as elaborating and eliciting could result in forming more advanced knowledge ( Dillenbourg, 1999 ).

Under the individual learning condition, all the interacting elements of the learning task are processed in the individual learner’s working memory. By contrast, learners who collaborate with others in their learning distribute all the interactive elements among the working memories of group members. Consequently, a collaborator would experience lower levels of the cognitive load than an individual learner. This assumption was supported by Zhang et al. (2011) , who compared the effectiveness of collaborative and individual instructional approaches in learning the complex tasks of designing web pages. They found that the participants in the collaborative learning condition demonstrated better performance and experienced a lower level of the cognitive load than the individual learners.

Task complexity or element interactivity can influence the effectiveness of collaborative learning. For simple learning tasks, individual learning is expected to be more effective and efficient, as the transaction costs associated with sharing knowledge and coordinating communication will nullify the benefits offered by collaborative learning. By contrast, for complex tasks, the benefits offered by the collective working memory could be higher than the transaction costs, thus fostering efficient learning. Kirschner et al. (2009) found that individual learners performed better in remembering biological knowledge (simple tasks) than learners in collaborative conditions, whereas collaborative learners performed better in transferring the skills to solving similar problems (complex tasks) than individual learners. Similar findings were reported by Kirschner et al. (2011) who found that learning low-complexity biological tasks individually was more effective and efficient while learning high-complexity tasks benefited more from the collaborative approach.

Experimental Study

Learning writing skills of English as a foreign language has long been regarded as a complex process that usually generates a heavy cognitive load ( Vanderberg and Swanson, 2007 ; Kellogg, 2008 ). Based on the review of literature on cognitive load theory and writing learning, the study was conducted to examine the following research hypotheses:

• (1) Participants taught through the process-genre approach in the collaborative learning condition would demonstrate better individual writing performances than participants in the individual learning condition.
• (2) Participants taught through the process-genre approach in the collaborative learning condition would experience lower levels of the cognitive load than participants in the individual learning condition.

The reported experiment focused on the effect of collaboration in creating a collective working memory among the members of a group. Previous research studies seldom included controlled randomized experiments and assessed learners’ writing products as a means to evaluate the effectiveness of collaborative learning. Therefore, according to the collective working memory effect, the reported experiment was designed to test the hypotheses that learners of English as a foreign language in the collaborative process-genre instructional condition would achieve better individual learning outcomes in terms of writing skills, experience lower levels of cognitive load, and have higher instructional efficiency than learners in the individual process-genre instructional condition.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

The study adopted a purposive convenience sampling method; 64 undergraduate students (29 females) voluntarily participated in this experiment after reading the recruitment notice. They studied at a technological university in Shandong Province, China. They were also briefed about the aims, the procedures, their rights through the study, and their rights to access the research results. They were requested to return the signed consent form if they determined to participate. These college students were on average 21.5 years old and had spent 11 years learning English as a foreign language at the time of the experiment, so they could be regarded as having an intermediate level of English proficiency. They were randomly allocated into the individual learning condition (IL) ( n = 32) and the collaborative learning condition (CL) ( n = 32). The participants in the collaborative learning condition were further randomly allocated into eight groups with four members in each. This arrangement was based on the rationale that groups consisting of no more than six members could maximize participation by all group members ( Herner et al., 2002 ).

The participants were required to write an essay as a pretest. The design of the pretest was based on Task 2 of the writing section in International English Language Test System (IELTS): General Training . Two independent raters examined their writings by complying with the IELTS writing band descriptors . These raters were proficient IELTS tutors with experience in applying the band descriptors in evaluating IELTS essays. An independent samples t -test indicated that the pre-test scores of the IL group ( M = 5.16, SD = 0.91) were not significantly different from the CL group ( M = 5.00, SD = 1.02), t (58) = 0.61, p > 0.05.

The instructional material was about how to write complaint letters. The development of the teaching material was based on the book The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS authored by Cullen et al. (2014) . The experimental materials included four teaching components (structural features teaching, language features teaching, model essay teaching, and essay planning teaching), one essay planning phase, one testing phase (essay writing), and one subjective cognitive load rating phase ( Appendix ).

The instruction was delivered in seven phases (see Figure 1 ). The participants in the individual learning condition were allocated to a lecture room. Each participant sat with at least 1-m distance from other participants to prevent collaboration and interference. The 84-member CL instructional groups were put in one lecture room. Each group kept a distance of at least 5 m from other groups to prevent collaboration and interference between groups, if any. The participants in the IL condition were required to complete all the seven phases individually; on the other hand, the participants in the CL condition completed the first five learning phases collaboratively, but the last two phases were completed independently. Associated questions were provided for thinking (for individual learners) and discussing (for collaborative learners) as Proske and Kapp (2013) argued that “learning questions might also be suitable to support the construction of a richly interconnected situation model of a writing topic which in turn may allow writers to produce better text products” (p. 1340). As it was generally believed that cognitive activities involved in writing procedures were recursive and dynamic ( Flower and Hayes, 1981 ), the participants were reminded that they did not necessarily treat the phases as absolute linear orders and had the freedom to revisit the previous phase or skip to next one when they feel necessary.

Seven phases of the research study.

The first part of the instructional materials (10 min) introduced the purposes and structural features of complaint letters, as well as the functions of each structural component. The structural features of complaint letters covered in this study include the following: the introductory paragraph elicits the purpose of complaint letters; the body paragraphs elaborate on the problems that letters are about and the suggested solutions; and the conclusion paragraph generally states the expectations and closes the letter. The associated questions for thinking (for individual learners) and discussion (for collaborative learners) were: How do structural features reflect communicative purposes? and Are there alternative structures for this genre? The second part (10 min) elaborated on the common language features of complaint letters, such as phrases and sentence structures for specifying the problem, outlining the consequences, making and justifying a specific claim, and so on, with the questions for thinking and discussion being: Are there alternative ways to give reasons and solutions? By using graphic organizers, the third part (10 min) showed the essential steps in planning writing. The question for introspection and discussion in this phase was: If there exist alternative structures, how can these steps in essay planning be adapted to suit those structures? The fourth part (15 min) introduced a model letter, in which the participants were required to identify the structural features, explain the functions of each feature, and the language features that were used for achieving the purposes. The associated questions in this phase were: What tenses have been used mainly in each paragraph? and Why tenses were used in these ways? The fifth instructional phase (10 min) required the participants to plan a letter on a given topic and scenario. In these five phases, the participants in the collaborative instructional conditions were encouraged to learn the materials through collaboration, share their understandings, ask questions, and provide responses, while the individual learners were encouraged to talk to themselves or engage in an internal conversation. In the sixth phase (15 min), the participants were required to individually write a letter on the topic they discussed in the fifth phase by using the skills learned in the first four phases. The last phase of the experiment (5 min) was a subjective cognitive load rating questionnaire ( Appendix ).

Traditionally, subjective ratings of working memory load have proven to be able to collect reliable and valid estimations of mental load in a non-intrusive way ( Jiang and Kalyuga, 2020 ). The cognitive load rating questionnaire was developed from the questionnaires designed by Leppink et al. (2013) , with the first six items on intrinsic cognitive load and the last six items on extraneous cognitive load. The questionnaire was written in Chinese, the research participants’ first language. The participants were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of a certain aspect of the instructional design that could orchestrate their mental resources to facilitate learning by choosing a number on a Likert-type scale, ranging from 0 (not at all the case) to 10 (completely the case). In addition, the instructor was available to clarify and explain puzzles and queries, if any.

The quality of the letters was assessed according to the IELTS General Training Writing Task 1: Writing band descriptors published by the British Council. The band descriptors cover four categories: task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammatical range and accuracy. Each category has the 9-point scale, ranging from one to nine. Each letter was given one score for each category, and the sum of the scores in the four categories was the rater’s score for the letter. The highest mark for a letter was 36. Two independent raters assessed students’ letters. The average value of two raters’ markings was used as the final score of the letter. The inter-rater reliability was calculated using a Person intra-class correlation (ICC). The ICC measure of 0.92 indicated a high degree of inter-rater reliability.

Table 1 shows means and standard deviations of the letter scores, the scores of each category, the ratings of intrinsic, extraneous, and overall cognitive load, and the instructional efficiency for the two instructional conditions. The reliability of the subjective cognitive load rating scale as measured by Cronbach’s alpha was 0.76.

Means and standard deviations for essay writing performance scores, individual category score, subjective ratings of cognitive load, and instructional efficiency for two instructional groups.

An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was conducted to compare the two instructional groups’ letter scores, scores of each subcategory, the ratings of intrinsic cognitive load, extraneous cognitive load, and overall cognitive load, as well as the indicators of instructional efficiency. Levene’s test was conducted ( p > 0.05) and the assumptions were satisfied. After controlling for the effect of pretest, it was found that the participants in the CL instructional condition demonstrated significantly better letter writing performance [ F (1, 61) = 27.40, p = 0.001, partialη 2 = 0.31] and significantly higher instructional efficiency [ F (1, 61) = 31.97, p = 0.001, partialη 2 = 0.34] than those in the IL instructional condition. In terms of category scores, the learners in the CL teaching condition significantly outperformed those learners in the IL teaching condition in all the four subscales: task achievement [ F (1, 61) = 15.72, p = 0.001, partialη 2 = 0.21], coherence and cohesion [ F (1, 61) = 30.64, p = 0.001, partialη 2 = 0.33], lexical resource [ F (1, 61) = 17.86, p = 0.001, partialη 2 = 0.23], as well as grammatical range and accuracy [ F (1, 61) = 41.76, p = 0.001, d = 0.41]. The participants in the IL instructional condition experienced significantly higher levels of intrinsic cognitive load [ F (1, 61) = 7.68, p = 0.007, partialη 2 = 0.11], significantly higher levels of extraneous cognitive load [ F (1, 61) = 5.83, p = 0.020, partialη 2 = 0.09], and significantly higher levels of overall cognitive load [ F (1, 61) = 12.02, p = 0.001, partialη 2 = 0.17] than the participants in the CL condition.

The covariate, which is pretest in the study, was significantly related to the letter writing performance, which means that the participants in the CL condition had significantly better performance than the students in the IL condition in terms of the overall scores [ F (1, 61) = 143.44, p = 0.001, r = 0.84] as well as the four subscales: task achievement [ F (1, 61) = 127.86, p = 0.001, r = 0.81], coherence and cohesion [ F (1, 61) = 128.09, p = 0.001, r = 0.82], lexical resource [ F (1, 61) = 125.52, p = 0.001, r = 0.82], and grammatical range and accuracy [ F (1,61) = 146.29, p = 0.001, r = 0.84]. In addition, cognitive load ratings and instructional efficiency were related to the covariate, pretest. The correlation to the covariate, pretests, was also observed in intrinsic cognitive load, overall cognitive load, and instructional efficiency. Students in the CL instructional condition had lower cognitive load ratings and higher instructional efficiency than the participants in the IL condition: intrinsic cognitive load [ F (1, 61) = 5.49, p = 0.02, r = 0.28], overall cognitive load [ F (1, 61) = 4.58, p = 0.036, r = 0.07], and instructional efficiency [ F (1, 61) = 62.88, p = 0.001, r = 0.51]. However, it should be noted that the covariate, pretest, was not significantly related to extraneous cognitive load [ F (1, 61) = 0.42, p > 0.05], which indicates that the differences in participants’ perception of extraneous cognitive load could be largely attributed to the dependent variable, instructional conditions.

The reported experiment was conducted to test the hypotheses generated by cognitive load theory that learners of English as a foreign language in a collaborative instructional condition would show better writing performance, lower levels of cognitive load, and higher instructional efficiency than learners in an individual learning condition. Even though relations to the covariate, pretest, were observed, the results of the study generally supported the hypotheses. As for the first hypothesis, this randomized experimental study found that the students in the collaborative learning condition demonstrated higher overall post-test letter writing scores and higher subcategory scores (task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, as well as grammatical range and accuracy) than the participants in the individual learning condition. The second research hypothesis was also supported as the participants in the collaborative learning condition indicated lower overall cognitive load ratings than the participants in the individual learning condition. It was also found that the collaborative learning condition generated higher instructional efficiency in terms of developing writing skills than the individual learning condition. Moderate and significant negative correlations were found between the ratings of intrinsic cognitive load and the letter-writing performance scores for both instructional conditions. The results demonstrated the collective working memory effect ( Kirschner et al., 2009 , 2018 ; Sweller et al., 2011 ) in the domain of learning writing skills by learners of English as a foreign language. As predicted by cognitive load theory, in the case of complex learning tasks such as writing in a foreign language, the benefits of collective working memory exceeded the possible disadvantages of dealing with transaction costs involved in coordinating individual working memories.

First, the study contributed to the research area of writing in a foreign language by conceptualizing the research and interpreting the findings from the perspective of cognitive load theory. In an attempt to account for the role of specific cognitive mechanisms in improving writing performance, it is possible to assume that the collaborative instructional approach had created an effective pool of knowledge about language and a pool of cognitive resources that beneficially influenced the quality of written products ( Storch, 2005 ; Strobl, 2014 ). The interactions in collaborative instructional conditions could trigger more learning-relevant cognitive mechanisms, for example, knowledge elaboration and internalization which are essential for meaningful and effective learning. These learning mechanisms could enable learners to organize information into ordered structures and integrate new information with prior knowledge structures ( Dillenbourg, 1999 ; Kalyuga, 2009 ). In the process of collaborative learning, theme-related knowledge structures would be retrieved from learners’ long-term memory and function collectively as distributed cognition including “internal minds, external representations, and interactions among individuals” ( Klein and Leacock, 2011 , p. 133). The distributed cognition could evolve through members’ contributions using stating claims, supporting or challenging others’ opinions, providing supporting details, and so on. The mental activities in sharing, understanding, and negotiating meaning involve expressive or introspective elaborations, resulting in conceptual changes in group members ( Dillenbourg, 1999 ). As more sources of information come to the group memory, learners would exercise more knowledge elaborations to establish links between new information and the existing knowledge structures, leading to better performance measures. The multiple learning phases in the collaborative conditions offered collaborators more opportunities to use the language-related episodes (LRE) and task-related episodes, which were supposed to benefit their writing.

Second, the findings are consistent with the collective working memory effect, in that learning English as a foreign language writing skills in the collaborative instructional condition is more effective and efficient than in the individual learning condition ( Kirschner et al., 2009 ; Retnowati et al., 2018 ). As learning tasks used for teaching English as a foreign language writing skills are high in element interactivity, and multiple factors (such as linguistic and situational knowledge, understanding of audience and purposes, etc.) affect the learning process, it can be assumed that the participants in each collaborative group would provide collective scaffolding, resulting in learning more sophisticated writing skills in terms of lexical accuracy, grammatical complexity, logic organization, and so on, in the learning phases and consequently in the better performance of these learners in the testing phase than the participants in the individual learning condition.

In addition, this study also indicates that adopting a process-genre approach in a collaborative condition could lead to significantly better writing performance than in an individual learning condition, which is particularly consistent with research studies on developing self-regulation of writing processes and generic knowledge through collaborations (e.g., Graham and Sandmel, 2011 ; Jones, 2014 ; Wette, 2017 ; Villarreal and Gil-Sarratea, 2019 ; Teng, 2020 ). According to the genre approach to teaching writing skills, effective instructional practices should “offer writers an explicit understanding of how texts in target genres are structured,” teach “the lexico-grammatical patterns which typically occur in its different stages,” and cultivate writers to command “an awareness of target genres and an explicit grammar of linguistic choices” ( Hyland, 2003b , p. 26). However, if all lexical, syntactical, structural, and logical contents were taught without appropriate sequencing and prioritizing, high levels of cognitive load could be generated. Therefore, segmenting a learning task into several phases can ameliorate the complexity of information as the number of interacting elements would be reduced. For example, in a controlled randomized experiment, Klein and Ehrhardt (2015) found that organizing instructional tasks into manageable parts helped learners generate more balanced claims and reduced high-achieving students’ cognitive load in writing persuasion texts as measured by the perceived difficulty of their learning.

Furthermore, the results of the reported study are also consistent with previous research in the field of collaborative learning of writing skills (e.g., Shehadeh, 2011 ; McDonough et al., 2018 ), in that the learners in the collaborative instructional condition had better qualities of prewriting/writing performance than the learners in the individual instructional condition. Still, this study contributed to the area of collaborative writing research in two novel ways. First, differently from most of the previous research which required all learners in a collaborative group to write a common single text, this study required every member in a collaborative condition to write a separate text, and the quality of individual texts was assessed to compare the effectiveness of individual and collaborative learning conditions on the same grounds. This method of measuring learning gains by assessing the quality of individual writing products is more valid and reliable according to Kirschner et al. (2009) , as it better fits the learning goals. Second, the use of subjective ratings of participants’ cognitive load in learning and the calculation of instructional efficiency provided additional evidence to support a cognitive load interpretation of the results as the case of the collective working memory effect.

The reported study still has some limitations that require further research. First, this study did not consider the foreign language proficiency of the participants as a variable in collaborative teaching of English as a foreign language writing skill. According to the expertise reversal effect in cognitive load theory, the effectiveness of specific instructional techniques and procedures depends on the levels of the learner’s prior knowledge in the domain ( Kalyuga et al., 2003 ; Kalyuga, 2007 ; Sweller et al., 2011 ). This effect has been demonstrated with all other instructional methods developed by cognitive load theory. It is likely that this effect also applies to the collective working memory effect. For example, Storch (2011) claimed that second language proficiency should be taken into consideration in implementing collaborative learning of writing skills. Therefore, future research studies may need to recruit learners at different proficiency (prior knowledge) levels to investigate possible interactions between levels of learner expertise in the area of English as a foreign language writing skills and the effectiveness of individual versus collaborative learning conditions. Second, this study examined the effectiveness of learning approaches (individual or collaborative) by primarily assessing the quality of learning products (i.e., essay). Future studies need to consider and measure other possible contributing factors and performance indicators, such as interactions in the writing processes, the quality of jointly drafted essays, and learners’ perceptions. In addition, as a way to manifest how collaborative learning affects the development of collective memory, future research should record and analyze learners’ interactions during the collaborative learning phases. Furthermore, more research should be done to investigate how learners develop their writing skills in other genres (such as argumentative, informative, and descriptive ones) in individual and collaborative instructional conditions.

In conclusion, the results of the reported experimental study supported the hypothesis generated by cognitive load theory. Learning English as a foreign language writing skills through a process-genre approach in the collaborative instructional condition was more effective and efficient than in the individual instructional condition. Subjective ratings of the cognitive load supported the interpretation of results within a cognitive load framework. The findings have implications for the innovations of teaching approaches, the developments of course materials, and curriculum designs in the field of teaching foreign language writing skills.

Data Availability Statement

Ethics statement.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

DJ: conceptualization, methodology, resources, data curation, writing – original draft, and review and editing. SK: supervision and writing – review and editing. Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Subjective Rating of Cognitive Load

All of the following questions refer to the learning activity that you just finished. Please respond to each of the questions on the following scale (0 meaning not at all the case and 10 meaning completely the case).

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Essay About Teaching English As A Foreign Language

This sample essay on Essay About Teaching English As A Foreign Language provides important aspects of the issue and arguments for and against as well as the needed facts. Read on this essay’s introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

TEFL Assignment Name: Una Burns Student No: 40024517 Course Director: Paul Anthony Assignment Title: Outline the problems faced by both the teacher and the student on a TEFL course.

(1000 words approx. ) Outline the problems faced by both the teacher and the student on a TEFL course. (1000 words approx. ) The acquisition of a new language can pose many difficulties to both the student, in learning the language, and to the teacher in communicating and teaching the language. The following essay attempts to outline some of these difficulties.

One of the major factors affecting all students attempting to acquire a foreign language is the correlation of the new language and their native tongue. The degree of variation between the student’s native tongue and the English language can cause all kinds of problems with grammar, spelling, and pronunciation, alongside other factors such as the age of the student, available resources, time, and how long it has been since they have last undergone study.

The age of a student can have a considerable effect on the ability of that student to acquire knowledge of the English language.

Essay About Teaching English

Adult learners rarely acquire new language due to their extensive knowledge and skills developed over their lifetime, where as younger learners, such as those still in school, will be accustomed to acquiring new language skill on a daily basis.

Proficient in: Communication

“ Ok, let me say I’m extremely satisfy with the result while it was a last minute thing. I really enjoy the effort put in. ”

For these younger learners, acquiring a new language is a more natural process than it is for older students who may have not had to study for many years. Secondly, another problem which may arise is a lack of motivation and enthusiasm shown by the students.

Students may skip class, and when they do show up may find it difficult to maintain attention and become easily distracted. They may lack any semblance of attention during class, chatting with classmates, doodling in their note books or misbehaving. Therefore the challenge for the teacher on the TEFL course is one of increasing motivation of the students. This can be done in a variety of ways such as using activities matched to the personalities, learning styles and characteristics of the learners as often and as practically as possible.

Furthermore insufficient time, resources and materials can be a huge underlying problem for teachers and students alike on a TEFLcourse. In many cases, English may only be given one or two hours a week in a classroom timetable. Add too little time to a decided lack of resources and virtually zero other resources in many third-world classrooms and you have a critical teaching / learning situation. There are ways, even on the lowest budget, however of producing virtually free or very inexpensive English language teaching and learning aids.

The role of the teacher on the TEFL course therefore is one of sourcing these and using these to optimum use. Moreover, a very common problem faced is one of overcrowded classrooms. The number of learners in a class room can range from one, for those who teach individual private learners, of fifteen or twenty learners in a typical classroom up to multitudes of thirty-five, forty or even fifty or more learners packed into a language leaning situation. Therefore, in such situations, “individual attention” may play little or no role in classroom life.

The teacher must set up a classroom which caters for all the individual needs in the classroom while also not ignoring the abilities of each individual child. While English is no more complex than other languages like Portuguese, it has several features which may create difficulties for learners. It is important to remember that learning a second language involves much more than learning the words and the sounds of a language. Communication breakdowns occur not only due to the more commonly understood syntax and pronunciation difficulties but because when we learn a language we also learn a culture.

What is perceived as right, normal and correct in one language and culture does not always “translate” into a second language even when the vocabulary is understood. Communication breakdowns may occur as a result of cultural assumptions regarding age, forms of address, authority and respect, touching, eye contact and other body language, greetings, invitations, and punctuality to name just a few. In particular, some students may have very different cultural perceptions in the classroom as far as learning a second language is concerned. Also, cultural differences in communication styles and preferences are significant.

For example, a study looked at Chinese ESL students and British teachers and found that the Chinese learners did not see classroom discussion and interaction as important but placed a heavy emphasis on teacher-directed lectures. Pronunciation can also prove a major problem both to the learner and the teacher. Language learners will often produce errors of pronunciation as a result of the influence of their native language, such as mapping its grammatical patterns inappropriately onto the new language being learnt. Speakers of Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Thai may have difficulty distinguishing [r] and [l].

The distinction between [b] and [v] can cause difficulty for native speakers of Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Additionally, grammar can pose a difficulty for many English speaking people and so can prove very challenging for those learning English as a foreign language. English has a relatively large number of tenses with some quite subtle differences, such as the difference between the simple past “I ate” and the present perfect “I have eaten. ” Progressive and perfect progressive forms add complexity. These students may find difficulties incorporating the rules of English tenses into their new language.

Additionally, the spelling system causes problems in both directions – a learner may know a word by sound but not be able to write it correctly, indeed find a word in a dictionary, or they may see a word written but not know how to pronounce it, mis-learning the pronunciation. Words such as “photo” and “photographer” “economist” and “economical” are all written very similar however are pronounced slightly different. This can be a very difficult concept for a teacher to communicate but also for a learner to understand and implement.

To conclude, while it would be virtually impossible to provide a detailed list of all the problems which will be faced to both a teacher and student on a TEFL course, this essay has summarized some of the limitations and constraints. The role of the TEFL teacher however, is not to see these as “problems” but as “challenges. ” The teacher must create a learning environment which is based on trust, confidence building and fundamental to the classroom, fun! In creating the right classroom and learning environment, many of these problems will lessen greatly.

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