P. Osborne
Pavilion 2005, 216 pp., £14.95
isbn 978 190454903
Learning One-to-One
I. Wisniewska
Cambridge University Press 2010, 207 pp., £23.40
isbn 978 052113458
Having cut my teeth on one-to-one language teaching
more than 30 years ago, I must start off by admitting
that I have not kept abreast of the professional
literature in the field. So, I hoped that reviewing these
two titles would give me an insight into new content
and approaches. I began with a quick Amazon search
to get a feeling for what else I might have missed in
the intervening years. Not much, it appears. Up
popped four titles, the endorsement for one of which
read:
There are very few books available on teaching
English one on one but as most teachers know
private students are the bread and butter of an
English teachers (sic) income, especially in Asia.
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Teaching English One to One
This book proved to be very valuable in helping
me to plan classes and provide a better service
for my students.
So, prima facie, the profession is hardly inundated
with guides to earning one’s daily crust. Good
prospects then for the authors of the two books for
review.
According to the cover, Teaching English One to One
is aimed at the professional English language teacher.
A moment of perplexity. Did this mean language
teachers who are professionals? Or those language
teachers who work with professionals? The
disambiguation came fairly swiftly. Two target groups
are addressed:
In terms of experience, I would assess the content
as appropriate for those teachers who already have an
understanding of language analysis and experience of
language teaching principles and practices.
The contents page shows the book’s division into
13 wide-ranging chapters: from ‘Getting started’ to
‘Visits and project work’. Feeling that I needed more
of a structure, I reclassified the parts into:
1 Introduction: a differentiation between group and
one-to-one teaching, both in terms of observable
course features, for example cost, intensity, pace, as
well as the psychological factors, for example
rapport building and adaptability.
2 The pedagogic cycle from pre-course preparation,
through needs analysis, course design, teaching
techniques, and lesson feedback.
3 Different course types and modes of delivery:
n Business English
n homestays
n children and teenagers.
4 Back to the pedagogic cycle:
n lesson planning
n end-of-course feedback and suggested next steps.
5 Challenges specific to one-to-one teaching and how
to deal with them.
6 Alternatives to classroom activities in terms of visits
and project work.
The book ends with recommended resources,
a glossary of pedagogic terms, and a bibliography.
Reviews
The chapters are clearly laid out with a variety of
inputs: text, tables, forms, and bulleted lists. This
variety makes for interesting reading as well as
diversified content. The author’s style ranges from
gently didactic, telling us what we should (as opposed
to must) do, to descriptive, explaining the options
available to us, to questioning, encouraging us to
reflect on what will best suit our teaching situation.
It avoids the prescriptive approach. Interspersed
throughout the books are lesson ideas and classroom
tips.
In general, the teaching points are easy to follow.
I particularly liked the real-world examples describing
a specific student’s needs, course programme, and
lesson plans. Unfortunately, the chapter on course
reports reflects my own experience: that writing a set
of recommendations after a one-to-one course tends
to drift towards generalities rather than focusing on
truly personalized follow-up. I fear that teachers and
language schools may be missing out on
opportunities by failing to capitalize on the
importance of the ‘what next’ phase of learning.
They need to remember that the individual course
that they have provided is only one small step in
a much longer process, one which I am sure they
would like to be central to.
The chapter towards the end of the book on
challenges highlighted some of the practical issues
that teachers may need to face in the real world.
The suggested answers will certainly help less
experienced teachers to deal with solvable problems
and more experienced teachers to reflect on their own
preferred approach to difficult situations and people.
However, what is left unresolved is how far the
teacher in the one-to-one situation should engage
with personal issues spilling over into the classroom.
Building rapport can indeed be a double-edged
sword.
The final chapter provides a list of recommended
resources. While this list, especially web-based items,
may not stand the test of time, I suspect that the
advice, examples, and forms, given throughout the
book, will.
In conclusion, I feel that Teaching English One to One
is useful for teachers coming from different
backgrounds. Firstly, for those who have classroom
experience working with groups, this book highlights
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1 Language teachers who focus on language,
i.e. four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and
writing) plus general and specialist vocabulary,
grammar, and pronunciation.
2 Communication trainers who focus on business
skills, i.e. presentations, meetings, negotiations,
telephoning, business writing.
As I worked my way through the book, I realized that
I would have preferred to have those chapters which
relate to the pedagogic cycle together to create a kind
of unity: from needs analysis to suggested next steps.
This would have created a more coherent structure.
Maybe others will disagree.
issues specific to the one-to-one classroom.
Secondly, for teachers with limited one-to-one
experience who would like to validate their experience
and expand their knowledge of techniques for
teaching one-to-one, this book provides clear
guidance and practical ideas to improve their
competence.
The first sentence of the Introduction left me in no
doubt: ‘for anyone involved in teaching English or
another language to individual students’. The
contents page showed the book’s organization into
two equal parts: Basic principles (1) and Activities (2).
The Introduction sets the scene, defining the
one-to-one teaching context, before summarizing
advantages and challenges. The author explains
the organizational link between the teacher roles
described in Part 1 and the teaching activities
presented in Part 2. Part 1 starts off with some
logistical pointers (how to set up the study area,
clarifying the business relationship, managing
diversity of communication styles and cultural
backgrounds). All good stuff to prepare the ground,
even if the artwork is, in my opinion, a little cheesy.
I move on to Chapter 2, ‘Teacher roles’, in which
the author identifies five roles that the teacher may
switch between. My first acquaintance with the five
roles is a cursory skim. It is not till later that
I realize how critical these are for an understanding
and appreciation of Part 2. So, because of their
centrality to the coherence of the whole book,
I shall list them. They are:
1
2
3
4
5
Conversation partner
Observer and listener
Feedback provider
Mentor and guide
Learner.
For each, the author:
n raises questions through a reflective task
n explains the role characteristics
n exemplifies classroom practice with
mini-dialogues.
This works well until I get to the section on mentor
and guide, which are bundled together with adviser,
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I move on to Chapter 3. The tables and checklists for
needs analysis, course design, and lesson planning
follow well-trodden paths for any teacher who has
completed their basic training. The photocopiable
forms, which all appear as pdfs on the accompanying
CD, are excellent resources (even though, as pdfs,
they cannot be modified or customized).
Chapter 4 shows how published materials, written for
the multi-participant classroom, can be adapted for
the one-to-one classroom. This seems fine until
I reach the instruction ‘Work in pairs. Compare
notes’. I think some comment by the author is called
for here. In general, this chapter on criteria for
materials selection presents what I would expect
from any professional EF L teacher, selecting
materials for their group. I would like to see more tips
on creating personalized (rather than adapting
commercialized) materials, including those for jobrelated communication activities.
I was looking forward to Chapter 5 on feedback and
reflection, as it mirrors two concerns of mine.
Feedback tells us how well or badly we are doing.
However, the phrase ‘negative feedback’ stops me in
my tracks. I thought we had moved on from ‘negative’
to ‘developmental’ feedback so that we can more easily
and clearly separate performance of the task (that
which needs to be developed) from criticism of the
person (that which, I believe, should be avoided). Of
course, negative feedback is hurtful, as the author
states; it is also not, in my opinion, very useful.
Judiciously balancing constructive and developmental
feedback is critical for positive learning outcomes; and
managing feedback giving in an effective way requires
both a sensitivity to individuals and their personal
differences, as well as an ability to isolate the key
elements in task completion. A starting point for this
process is reflecting on one’s own learning outcomes
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The second title is Learning One-to-One, part of
Cambridge University Press’s series of over
40 titles, offering ‘practical ideas, techniques and
activities for the teaching of English and other
languages, providing inspiration for both teachers
and trainers’. The title left me momentarily
perplexed (or was this a déjà vu from my first
review?). Is this a guide for learners or for teachers?
counsellor, and coach. Lumping these roles together
obscures essential differences between them and
failing to clarify what each is makes it difficult for
the reader to know which are valid roles for the one-toone teacher. If it is appropriate for me to be asked to
mentor, what exactly do I do? The author suggests
that ‘as a mentor, you can also help your student
develop independent learning skills by encouraging
them to find ways to study out of class’. The
traditional understanding of mentoring is a personal
developmental relationship in which a more
experienced or more knowledgeable person helps
a less experienced or less knowledgeable person.
Has E LT developed a new model of mentoring?
Notwithstanding our differences, the list is an
interesting and original starting point for exploring
the diversity of teacher roles.
and feedback experiences. Help yourself in order to
help others.
Having covered the basic principles (Part 1), I move on
to Part 2: Activities. In order to understand the internal
organization of this part of the book, I need to remind
myself of the different teacher roles presented in Part 1.
The author proceeds to use the five-part classification
to present a range of activities. This is a very neat and
original idea. And it works well . . . up to a point.
Having now understood how this part of the book
works, I move on to Role 2: the teacher as observer
and listener. Here, we find a series of teacherdesigned, but student-led activities, allowing the
teacher to identify learning needs and preferred
learning styles. While the tasks are (again) varied and
creative, I am not sure if they are clearly different in
content from the Role 1 tasks. Or is it simply a change
of role focus? However, I again appreciate the balance
between activities to develop fluency (without
correction) and those to improve accuracy (with
correction).
Role 3 is the teacher as feedback provider. The author
presents us with a range of speaking and listening
tasks and then explains procedures and areas for
feedback. In the suggested procedure, positive
(constructive) feedback precedes developmental.
But what does the learner do with the feedback
provided? This is surely an area that needs
exploration in the one-to-one classroom.
And then, without further ceremony, the book comes
to end (except for four pages of references, further
reading, and website).
Both titles cover enough of the core issues around
one-to-one teaching to make them excellent sources
of support for teachers with some ELT experience. Of
the two, I found Osborne’s Teaching English One to
One. easier to follow and more predictable in its
scope and content. Wisniewska’s Learning One-toOne, despite our differences of position, is a more
challenging book, and ultimately one that
encouraged more reflection on my own one-to-one
teaching practices. Both books certainly deserve
reading; for the intending or experienced one-to-one
teacher, the question is which one to start with.
The reviewer
Nick Brieger, after a first degree in law, a postgraduate
teacher training qualification in T EFL , and an M A in
Applied Linguistics, has added language teaching
and teacher training throughout Europe and Asia to
his career. In recent years, he has specialized in
professional language and communication training,
especially in the field of Business English, and teacher
training in Business English.
Email: nickbrieger@hotmail.com
doi:10.1093/elt/ccr039
Role 4 is the teacher as mentor. The author advised
me to go back to its first mention, where I refreshed my
memory of mentoring as ‘helping my students develop
independent learning skills by encouraging them to
find ways to study out of class’. I found the tasks here
less convincing partly because of differences in our
understanding of mentoring and partly because I do
not see how the activities lead to learning or learner
independence. That they contribute to the learning
process, in general, I have no doubt.
The final role is the teacher as learner. Here, we find
a collection of student-led activities, typically in
explanatory mode, where the learner ‘exploits the
natural information gap that exists between the
expert and the non-expert’. The activities are all
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The first set of activities presents the teacher as
conversation partner ‘in order to build confidence by
encouraging participation’. The tasks are varied and
creative, ideal for fluency development. For the
reader, it would have been useful if the author had
explained why there is no language feedback in these
activities. Obvious to me, but what about to less
experienced teachers?
open-ended information gap activities. As such,
they exploit the gap in order to give a reason/need for
communication. However, I am not sure whether they
demonstrate the teacher as learner. Perhaps, to
demonstrate true learning, it should be the teacher
who gives the follow-up product description
presentation to show just how much learning has
taken place.