‘100 Teaching Tips’ by Penny Ur

Penny Ur, a professor and a teacher with more than 30 years of experience, is familiar to almost every teacher of English. Well, if not Penny Ur herself, then her books for sure. She has written a number of them including ‘100 Teaching Tips’, ‘Discussions and More’, ‘Five-Minute Activities’ (co-authored with Andrew Wright),  and ‘A Course in English Language Teaching’. Most of them are highly practical and packed with ready-to-go activities which require little or no preparation.

Today we will talk about the book ‘100 Teaching Tips’ that is one-size-fits-all. Novice and experienced teachers working in a variety of contexts will find there something to catch their attention and answer a question or two. 

The book provides a set of 100 hands-on tips on 18 different aspects of teaching, such as teacher talk, using a coursebook, giving and checking homework, discipline, games, testing and assessment etc. Ms Ur says that she has written it as a collection of experience-based insights which might prevent other teachers from ‘re-inventing the wheel’. 

Each piece of advice out of 100 takes just a page. The author recommends her readers not to ‘try to read straight through the book, but rather browse through it, looking for headings that interest you’. You’ll find the headings that seemed thought-provoking, a bit controversial or just interesting for me below.

Don’t give homework at the end

Unexpected, right? We are used to the fact that the final 2-3 minutes of each class are for assigning and writing down homework. Why change it? Well, for a number of reasons. First, attention is generally lower at the end of the lesson and students are more relaxed and more likely to miss something important. They may be packing up, answering some messages or talking to groupmates. Second, the homework you are giving can relate to some particular component of the lesson. This component does not necessarily come at the end of the class. By giving homework earlier, you:

•  make sure that students notice that;
• can explain better if there is a problem or some misunderstanding;
• are able to link the homework to the lesson component it relates to.

Allow lots of right answers

Although most of the coursebooks opt for ‘closed-ended’ tasks with just one right answer, it’s a good idea to change such tasks to allow for more right answers. For example, if the task asks learners to put a verb in the right form like ‘She … her husband’ (leave), you can get rid of the verb and ask students to come up with their own ideas. She kissed her husband? Fed him? Taught? Everything is right — and every answer can lead to a nice story. The same can be done with matching exercises. If students are asked to match the halves of sentences, just cover the column with the endings and tell them to create their own endings first. 

This can boost students’ creative thinking skills a lot. Also, such tasks  cater for mixed-ability classes because to complete them, students will base their answers on the language they know.  And the best is that they provide more opportunities for using the language. 

Correct (something) during the speech

We know a dozen ways of correcting mistakes without interrupting our students too much. We do delayed correction after they’ve finished speaking, use silent finger correction to show that something is wrong or even don’t correct at all not to break their fluency. What Penny Ur says is that, first, letting a mistake go can lead to its fossilization. In this case, it will be harder for a student to get rid of that in future. Second, lots of students want to be corrected as they are speaking. I bet you’ve met them not once. So, sometimes correction on spot can be really helpful. There is nothing wrong about it.

Use mother tongue to explain

Shock. Confusion. Disbelief. Do you mean that we can really use our L1 to get something across to the students?! Ms Ur’s answer is yes. She says that ‘it can take ages to explain in English a relatively simple point’, that is why it’s better to keep it short sometimes. Students can find the contrastive analysis useful as well. When they compare their mother tongue with English, it can boost their understanding. All in all, ‘the fact that students have a mother tongue is an asset, not a hindrance’.

Get students to learn by heart

Another shock, especially for those who work for language schools. We hardly ever make students learn texts by heart and always try to come up with a creative way of memorising all irregular verbs without rote-learning. However, learning by heart can help students memorise lots of natural grammar chunks, collocations, idioms and other frequent phrases that occur in conversation. Penny Ur suggests using poems, songs, rhyming chants and dialogues for this purpose.

Have a good reason to use group work

Varied interaction patterns in a lesson are a sign of good classroom management. Lots of communicative activities imply working in groups. To what extent is it necessary? Let’s listen to Penny Ur:

‘In some lessons, group work involves only ‘busy work’ or ‘sharing the ignorance’, with little learning. Sometimes group activities can be difficult to control in classes where students are easily distracted and tend to go off-task. Students vary a lot in the way they like to learn. Although some enjoy working in groups, others prefer to do things on their own, or in teacher-led full-class activity.’ (from ‘100 Teaching Tips’ by Penny Ur)

All in all, don’t feel guilty if you opt for individual work at times and remember about balancing interaction patterns to students’ benefit. 

Teach ‘international’ pronunciation

Torn between British or American pronunciation, we sometimes forget that most of our students don’t just need English to have a cup of tea with the Queen one day or to ask their favourite American rapper for an autograph. They are much more likely to meet and talk to people from all walks of life, whose English will not be their mother tongue, too. The criterion for good pronunciation is ‘How easily will it be understood by most English speakers today?’. So, if your students end up speaking with any kind of accent, this is fine unless it is understandable. 

Some can say that this book is just a compilation of conventional wisdom. Start your lesson with a smile, make it interesting, learn students’ names, use your coursebook selectively… Well, it might be true. But after all, it covers lots of topics which we, English teachers, do discuss again and again. Not to mention the ones that can lead to really heated debates. 

If you want to find out why it’s a good idea to minimize guessing from context; how come that a teacher should talk a lot increasing their TTT; and when teaching out of context can be beneficial, get yourself a copy of ‘100 Teaching Tips’. I promise you won’t regret it.