Demand High ELT Session 2 Friday 23rd November 2012
Adrian Underhill and Jim Scrivener have suggested teachers could consider various questions
to help them investigate and as a result, hopefully upgrade their own teaching:
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How can I push my students to upgrade their language and improve their skills more than
they believed possible?
How can I gain real learning value from classroom activities that have become tired or
familiar?
What teacher interventions make a real difference?
How can I shift my preoccupation from “successful task “to “optimal learning”?
How can we transform “undoable” or “low” demand into “doable demand”?
What is the minimum tweak necessary at any point in any lesson to shift the activity
sideways into the “challenge zone”?
What attitude and action changes would lead to “Demand-High” teaching in my
classroom?
What is the demand on a teacher to become a “Demand High” teacher?
We can try and provide ‘doable demand’ in many aspects of our teaching:
Language Work
 Vocabulary
 Grammar
 Pronunciation
Skills Development
 Listening
 Reading
 Writing
 Speaking
Classroom Management
 Early / fast finishers
 Managing feedback
Demand High ELT Session 2 Friday 23rd November 2012
Examples of activities that are not
How to make these questions and
Examples of activities that are too
challenging enough / don’t
activities into more ‘doable
challenging / difficult and why
stretch the sts and why
demands’
Vocabulary
A. Teacher to sts: What does ‘a
range’ mean?
Not necessarily sufficiently
contextualized; Sts may well not
have the language to explain, even
though they understand. Net result
could be that teacher is faced with
silence, so wastes time explaining
again.
B. Teacher to sts: Write a job for
every letter of the alphabet. The
group with the most is the winner.
C. Teacher to sts: read and repeat
these words
Very little demand on sts. They
may not be sufficiently engaged
with the task to learn anything
from it.
A. Provide a context, or refer sts
back to the context from which the
word came. Elicit or give
examples, or synonyms (and if nec
clarify difference between the two
words). Get sts to put the new
word in a sentence to demonstrate
they understand meaning, form and
context(s).
D. Teacher to sts: Read and match
these words to the pictures
Other ideas for making Vocabulary work more challenging
Sts compare various pairs of words and decide on various similarities / differences.
Sts reflect on words covered in the lesson eg: which ones do they like/not like/are ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’/might
be useful/are already familiar to them and why.
In presentation, teacher tells sts ‘I bet you know at least six of these words’ / ‘I bet you find 5 of these words
hard to pronounce.’
Listening
A. Listen to the conversation and
take notes
B. Teacher conducts open-class
feedback of sts’ answers
immediately after listening to the
text
C. Sts and read and listen to the
text at the same time.
D. Teacher plays the text twice
because that’s what s/he was
trained to do
Other ideas for making Listening work more challenging
Examples of activities that are not
How to make these questions and
Examples of activities that are too
challenging enough / don’t
activities into more ‘doable
challenging / difficult and why
stretch the sts and why
demands’
Reading
A. Teacher doesn’t generate
interest in the text or activate sts’
schemata
C. Teacher gets sts to say what the
text is about generally, and then
takes specific examples of a
structure from the text as a basis
for language analysis
B. Teacher gives sts a list of
questions that unwittingly test a
mixture of different types of
reading subskills eg: gist, scanning,
inference, opinion, deducing
meaning of vocabulary
Other ideas for making Reading work more challenging
Writing
A. Teacher hands out a writing task
at the end of the lessons for sts to
complete at home
C. The model text the sts work
from is too similar to one they will
produce – they won’t need to make
many changes.
B. Teacher gets sts to use a model
text as a basis for them writing
their own, but doesn’t highlight
textual elements eg: text
organisation and layout, language
features that they should use.
Other ideas for making Writing work more challenging
Examples of activities that are not
How to make these questions and
Examples of activities that are too
challenging enough / don’t
activities into more ‘doable
challenging / difficult and why
stretch the sts and why
demands’
Speaking
A. Teacher gives sts some questions
to discuss in pairs.
B. In an information gap activity
(pairwork or mingling), the
complete questions that sts are
required to work from are on the
tasksheet.
C. Teacher provides choral drilling,
working from complete sentences
written on the board.
Other ideas for making Speaking work more challenging
Pronunciation
A. Teacher ‘corrects’ every
pronunciation mistake a st makes,
but doesn’t show sts the difference
between what they are saying and a
more intelligible version, not how
to aim for that.
B. Teacher uses a minimal pair
activity from the coursebook that is
not relevant eg: for Portuguese sts /b/ and /v/ or /l/ and /r/.
Other ideas for making Pronunciation work more challenging
Examples of activities that are not
How to make these questions and
Examples of activities that are too
challenging enough / don’t
activities into more ‘doable
challenging / difficult and why
stretch the sts and why
demands’
Early / Fast finishers
A. Teacher gives them a reading
text to look at.
B. Sts wait until everyone else has
finished the task.
Other ideas for keeping early / fast finishers more challenged
Grammar
A. Teacher does not integrate form,
meaning and pronunciation in the
presentation phase.
D. Teacher gives explanations
rather than asks concept questions
– either verbally or by getting sts to
read through grammar table in
coursebook.
B. Teacher asks insufficient or no
concept questions.
E. In a test, sts are not required to
produce language for themselves
(eg cloze test), but to complete
gaps choosing from a limited
number of given words.
C. Teacher doesn’t anticipate
potential problems with the
language when planning the lesson,
and/or doesn’t consider what
assumptions can be made regarding
what sts already know/can do with
the target language.
Other ideas for making Grammar work more challenging
Examples of activities that are not
How to make these questions and
Examples of activities that are too
challenging enough / don’t
activities into more ‘doable
challenging / difficult and why
stretch the sts and why
demands’
Managing feedback
A. Teacher asks shyer / weaker sts
for their answers first;
B. Teacher doesn’t allow sts time
to prepare for feedback or
‘decode/recode’ what they’ve
understood from a text.
C. Teacher goes through all the
answers to an exercise and gets the
right answer to one question from
one st, then moves on to the next
question and so on.
D. Teacher doesn’t nominate –
questions are not directed to any
particular st.
Other ideas for making feedback more challenging