Review
The Practice of English Language Teaching, 5th edition
J. Harmer
Pearson Education Limited 2015, 446 pp., plus DVD and
additional online material, £32.10
isbn 978 1 4479 8025 4
Harmer’s The Practice of English Language Teaching
is aimed primarily at teachers working in the British
ELT tradition. It is appropriate for practising teachers
who wish to recapitulate and update their professional
knowledge, or who find themselves engaged in
English-language teaching without having undergone
normal vocational training. It is also widely used on
training courses for the Cambridge CELTA and DELTA
exams. It would have less to offer to, say, a qualified
secondary-school teacher of English in Europe or
elsewhere, though this is not to say that it would have
no value for such readers. It has very wide scope,
addressing not only the methodology of Englishlanguage teaching and the supporting theories, but
also a range of more general pedagogic questions.
This new edition covers much the same ground as
its successful predecessors, but includes additional
material dealing with such issues as the growing
attention to English as a lingua franca, the renewed
interest in translation and mother-tongue use,
the current advocacy of ‘teaching unplugged’, and
the increased use of digital approaches to testing.
Harmer’s characteristically extensive coverage of the
literature has been updated by an impressive range
of references to recent professional writing. Besides
a DVD containing authentic lesson extracts and
discussions with teachers, the book is accompanied
by new online material including worksheets designed
‘to put the theory into practice’.
In what follows I will give an outline of the book for
those who are unfamiliar with it, along with comments
and suggestions which I hope may prove helpful
for the sixth edition that will no doubt follow in due
course.
The Practice of English Language Teaching is well
structured, moving from discussions of more general
questions relating to pedagogy and instructed
second-language acquisition (Chapters 1–12), to
treatments of specific aspects of English teaching
(Chapters 13–22). Chapters are followed by useful
notes for further reading.
The first four chapters have an introductory role.
Chapter 1 contains clear and informative notes on
native-speaker and other varieties, English as a
lingua franca, the ESL/EFL distinction, ESP, and CLIL,
before closing with an admirably balanced look at the
question of native-speaking versus
non-native-speaking teachers. Chapters 3 and 4
provide well-documented summary accounts of
the principal theories of acquisition and teaching
methodology. Harmer makes clear the strengths and
weaknesses of the various theoretical frameworks and
outlines the contrasts and contradictions between
them, without committing himself strongly to any
specific view. He is good on the recent history of
teaching methods, and has valuable things to say
about formal instruction and drilling, the use of the
mother tongue, and the constructive exploitation
of coursebooks, along with a wise note on the need
for cultural sensitivity in one’s choice of teaching
approaches. He offers refreshingly sensible
arm’s-length accounts of the more extreme varieties
of communicative language teaching such as the
lexical approach, task-based teaching and ‘teaching
unplugged’.
The one disappointing part of this section is
Chapter 2, which offers an introductory overview of the
English language. Unfortunately this falls between two
stools. The sketchy background notes on appropriacy,
register, discourse organization, genre and so forth are
mostly clear and interesting, and perhaps have some
value. But it is hard to see the focus of the fragmentary
information that follows on grammar, vocabulary and
pronunciation. English teachers need a good deal
of knowledge about the structure of the language,
and Harmer’s brief hors d’oeuvres will do nothing
ELT Journal
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for them. (And any language teacher or trainee who
needs to be told the difference between adjectives and
adverbs (p. 24) is in, or is contemplating, the wrong
profession.) In a future edition, it might be better to
scrap this section and simply direct readers to works
that can deal properly with those aspects of language
teachers need to know about. (Some of these are
listed at the end of the chapter, though with the rather
low-key suggestion that they ‘should be of interest’.)
about where teachers can find information about
these. In his treatment of pronunciation teaching
in Chapter 16, on the other hand, Harmer does
talk about first-language-specific difficulties, and
provides some references for guidance. Among the
other matters explored in this chapter, it is good to
see examples of ear-training exercises, as well as a
discussion of priorities in pronunciation teaching, and
the notion of a ‘lingua franca core’.
Chapters 5–12 deal largely with general pedagogic
issues and their relevance to ELT. There is very
good coverage of learner types and behaviour, the
relationship between age and learning, current views
on learner differences, the nebulous question of
‘learner styles’ (and associated ‘neuromythologies’),
motivation, teaching for different levels, frameworks
for measuring proficiency, and learner autonomy.
Teacher roles and behaviour are discussed at some
length, along with the qualities of a good teacher,
teacher development, collaborative teaching, action
research and other relevant matters. A substantial
proportion of this section is devoted to quite detailed
coverage of classroom practicalities. While much
of this has little to say to graduates of full-scale
teacher training programmes, it may well be useful
for English teachers who do not have this kind of
background, especially those who have drifted into
the profession (there are still a lot of us about).
Correction and feedback have a clear and reasonably
comprehensive chapter to themselves. Harmer has
updated his treatment of technology in the light of the
substantial developments that have taken place since
the fourth edition was published; and there are good
introductions to blended learning and the ‘flipped
classroom’.
The section on skills teaching begins with a
wide-ranging and well-informed introduction
(Chapter 17), discussing among other things topdown and bottom-up processing, authenticity versus
simplification, integrating skills with language work,
and the use of projects. Harmer argues strongly that it
makes little sense to treat skills in isolation, and stresses
the need for skills work to teach, not simply to test.
Chapters 13–16 deal with language forms, beginning
with a general introduction (Chapter 13) to ‘teaching
language construction’. While much of this is good,
the treatment of certain topics suffers from the
summary nature of the chapter, and some points
might be better left for the following three chapters,
where they are given the space they deserve. These
chapters deal in turn with grammar, vocabulary and
pronunciation, and illustrate a rich variety of teaching
activities with numerous practical examples. There are
one or two gaps in the coverage of grammar teaching.
Mother-tongue explanations are not mentioned:
the book’s British-ELT orientation has pushed this
sensible and widespread choice below the horizon.
On p. 239 Harmer promises to discuss ‘grammar
books and their uses’, but he does not actually do so.
It would be good to see more reference to the wide
differences in the grammatical difficulties experienced
by speakers of different mother tongues, and a note
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The following chapters on reading, listening, writing
and speaking are well structured, generally very
comprehensive, and impressively documented. The
chapter on reading deals with a variety of text-based
activities, illustrating not only work of the kind often
believed to foster reading skills proper (practice in
predicting, skimming, scanning, identifying main
points and the rest), but also, for example, the use
of texts to stimulate discussion, and ways of mining
texts for grammar and vocabulary. Extensive reading
is given the importance it deserves. The treatment
of what is usually called ‘listening’ is interesting and
helpful. Unlike some scholars, Harmer mentions the
important role of bottom-up decoding and the need
for focused training in this area. This chapter also has
useful things to say about extensive listening practice.
The wide-ranging chapter on writing includes a note
on difficulties learners might have with handwriting,
spelling, punctuation and text construction. However,
the treatment is short on suggestions for specific ways
of dealing with these problems at a level of detail. It
would be good, next time round, to have references
to handwriting training materials and to sources
of information about punctuation conventions (an
area where many teachers are uncertain of their
ground), as well as some guidance on training in
text construction for those who need it. The chapter
on speaking that concludes this section covers the
teaching of spoken language, problems in getting
students to speak, the value of repetition, and the use
of conversation activities, games, drama and role play.
Harmer generally takes the need to ‘teach skills’ for
granted, as will most of his readers, though there are
good reasons for questioning the received wisdom
in this area (Swan and Walter 2017). He does briefly
question the widespread implicit assumption that
readers and listeners cannot easily deploy their
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normal comprehension skills or real-world knowledge
in a new language, so that these need to be taught
or activated all over again. But to a great extent he
simply works within the current orthodoxy with regard
to work on all four skills. This aspect of language
teaching might well benefit from a more detached look
in a future edition.
take seriously statements such as the claim on p. 96
that the ability to ‘distinguish facts from opinions in
a simple straightforward lecture’ locates a learner’s
English at point 57 (rather than, say, 56 or 58) on
a 90-point scale. This simply offers the illusion of
scientific precision in an area where no such precision
is possible.
The chapters on language forms and skills contain
copious illustrative examples of teaching activities
and activity sequences, many of them taken from
published materials. They are clearly and attractively
presented, with introductory panels indicating the ‘can
do’ aim of each activity, its nature, the skills practised
(where relevant), and the level and age group focused
on. This feature is one of the several strengths of the
book. However, it might be even more valuable if
the examples were presented less as model lessons,
and more as a basis for discussion and evaluation,
in the light of criteria such as Harmer’s own notes in
Chapter 13 on choosing and assessing study activities.
This would better reflect the fact that these activities
do in fact vary somewhat in clarity of focus, pedagogic
design and likely effectiveness.
One of this book’s strengths is the breadth
and volume of the supportive documentation.
Interestingly, the majority of the publications listed
in the bibliography have appeared since the date of
Harmer’s previous edition—a striking testimony to
the work that has gone into this revision. While British
and American academic sources are cited where
appropriate, there is very heavy reliance on writing by
British practitioners: around half the references are to
the same three UK teachers’ journals. This amounts
sometimes to overkill, especially where citations are
to expressions of shared opinion rather than research
results. Older work or long-established beliefs are
occasionally wrongly attributed to current writers.
Studies of aviation English (p. 5) substantially
pre-date Emery’s 2008 article. Discussion of wants
and needs has taken place for much longer than
Harmer’s p. 6 references suggest. Dörnyei was
scarcely the first to discover that second-language
learning generally fails to reach native-speaker
standard, or to question Chomsky’s and Krashen’s
pronouncements on the matter, as implied on p. 43.
There is nothing new about the notion of ‘grammar as
choice’, apparently attributed to Carter and McCarthy’s
2006 work (p. 23).
The book’s last chapter covers testing and evaluation,
concluding with a detailed list of public exams.
Harmer deals lucidly with the main issues in language
testing, including validity, reliability and the purposes
of various kinds of tests. He sees washback as
essentially benign; some readers might question this,
feeling that learners sometimes have better things
to do than practise jumping through the hoops that
examinations confront them with. It would be helpful
to see a note on the negative effects of excessive
testing and grading (a weakness of many teachers),
whereby learners who achieve poor marks can easily
be discouraged by being repeatedly labelled as
relative failures. Harmer draws attention to the ‘test
yourself’ potential of the can-do lists of the Common
European Framework, which can help learners to
assess their own achievement and progress. It is,
however, disturbing to see the Cambridge exam
suite and the Pearson 230-point ‘Global Scale of
English’ (to which this Pearson publication makes
repeated reference) described as being ‘aligned’ to
the levels of the Common European Framework.
Accurate alignment between the level assignments of
publishers or examiners, however carefully specified,
on the one hand, and the inescapably ill-defined
levels of the CEFR on the other, is simply not feasible
(Swan 2014). This would be on a par with checking
the accuracy of one’s wristwatch by calibrating it
against the readings of a water clock. And while no
doubt the Pearson assessment instrument is based
on substantial research and reflection, it is hard to
Complete though the referencing is, I noticed one or two
omissions that could be remedied in a future edition.
Biber et al.’s 2002 Longman Student Grammar of
Spoken and Written English would be a more appropriate
guide for teachers than its heavyweight counterpart
recommended on p. 256. Published grammar practice
material gets short shrift: Murphy’s English Grammar in
Use series gets a very brief end-of-chapter note (with the
author’s name left out), and none of OUP’s important
recent books in this field are mentioned. Ur’s invaluable
Discussions that Work, referenced in the fourth edition
and recently revised, has disappeared. Although two of
Thorn’s articles on constructive approaches to teaching
listening are mentioned, there is no reference to her
important Real Lives, Real Listening classroom practice
series (Collins 2011, 2013). Jenkins’s influential work on
establishing a ‘pronunciation core’ is mentioned on p. 3,
but she is not referenced anywhere in the chapter on
pronunciation teaching.
The book is accompanied by a DVD (‘Teachers at
Work’) showing extracts from lessons filmed in
Britain, Turkey and Mexico, exemplifying a variety
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of contexts, approaches, levels, ages and aims, and
accompanied by Harmer’s comments. The DVD
also contains clips from Harmer’s discussions
with the teachers about their approaches, as well
as their views on mother-tongue use and choice of
resources (technological and other). The lessons
and discussions add a good deal to what is in the
book; the illustrations of work in a Turkish primary
school in particular are pure delight. The discussion
of resources is a little odd: although the DVD was
apparently made specifically for this edition, OHP
use is illustrated, and blackboards and the like figure
prominently, while whiteboards are totally absent.
The accompanying online material now contains
downloadable worksheets to accompany the DVD,
along with copies of the teachers’ lesson plans.
A further chapter-by-chapter set of tutorial worksheets
is designed for use with the book itself. Videos of
teachers talking about themselves and illustrating and
discussing their teaching have also been brought over
from the fourth edition online material.
Any book that goes into a fifth edition is clearly
getting most things right. It must be said, however,
that The Practice of English Language Teaching
reflects the typical teaching approaches and implicit
assumptions of Harmer’s main readership—indeed,
the book will have done much over the years to
reinforce these approaches and assumptions. In
this tradition, communicative activity plays a central
role, not only as a basis for ‘skills’ work, but also as
an important locus for the incidental emergence of
new language. While this largely reactive opportunist
stance can generate some very effective teaching,
as Harmer demonstrates, it has its limitations and
dangers. Doing things with language, and working
on what happens to come up while you are doing
them, is rarely a cost-effective approach to teaching
new grammar and vocabulary. And teachers can
easily be led to feel, mistakenly, that any motivating
engagement with language—reading a text,
listening to a recording, discussing a news item or
whatever—is valuable by its very nature. In most
teaching contexts, the reactive stance needs to be
balanced by proactive work based on previously
established syllabuses of language priorities. In the
event, however, Harmer has virtually nothing to say
about criteria for the systematic selection of language
forms for teaching: grammatical sequencing gets
little attention, lexical frequency is not discussed,
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and I do not think the word ‘corpus’ occurs in the
book. While Chapter 4 (‘Popular Methodology’) does
deal briefly with the proactive–reactive opposition,
it would be good to see a more extended discussion
of the factors that determine the choice between the
two perspectives (topic, level, time available, teaching
context, learners’ aims, etc.), and more balanced
assessment and illustration of the pros and cons
of both.
That said, what this book sets out to do it generally
does very well indeed. It is well written, clear, packed
with professional wisdom, and eminently close to
the classroom—if I had been writing 30 years ago
I would have said ‘You can smell the chalk’. Within
the limits discussed above, it offers comprehensive
coverage of the field: indeed, judicious selection is
likely to be needed for its effective use in a teacher
training context. The new edition adds a good deal
more to what was already a valuable work, and it can
be warmly recommended.
Every reviewer needs to draw attention to a misprint in
order to prove that he or she has really read the book,
so here goes. The misspelling of Spanish embarazada
with an s (p. 156) has made it through to the fifth
edition; perhaps this could be corrected in the sixth
when the time comes.
References
Swan, M. 2014. Review of Hawkins & Filipovic⁄ English
Profile Studies 1, CUP 2012. English Language Teaching
Journal 68/1: 89–96.
Swan, M. and C. Walter. 2017. ‘Misunderstanding
comprehension’. English Language Teaching Journal
71/2: 228–36.
The reviewer
Michael Swan writes English-language teaching and
reference materials. His interests include descriptive
and pedagogic grammar, instructed and naturalistic
second-language acquisition, cross-language
influence, and the relationship between applied
linguistic theory and classroom language-teaching
practice. He has had extensive teaching experience
with adult learners, and has worked with teachers in
many countries.
Email: swanmic@gmail.com
doi:10.1093/elt/ccx060
Review
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by University of Durham user
on 05 January 2018