student-led lessons in the esl/esol/tefl classroom - the challenges

Student-centred learning has become much more of a standard approach over the last couple of decades: 

Student-centred learning (SCL) is an approach to education, which aims at overcoming some of the problems inherent to more traditional forms of education by focusing on the learner and their needs, rather than being centred around the teacher's input.

There are problems with this, however...

One issue is that students and teachers prefer different activities when learning English...

Another is that perhaps the teacher needs to challenge the learners - through critical pedagogy.

And there is the issue of using digital technology in a student-centred classroom - and what sort of control and freedom should be allowed.

A point to consider is whether 'student-centred' should not actually be a matter of 'student-led'.

Looking at the conventional classroom, we should look at what student-led learning looks like in a real classroom:

We talk a lot about giving students ownership of their learning — about letting them explore, wonder, lead. It’s a beautiful idea. But if you’re teaching in a traditional school with pacing guides, curriculum maps, and assessment deadlines, you might find yourself asking, “But how?”

Here's a TED Talk on Education Reimagined: Student-led Learning:

Dr. Catlin Tucker addresses the urgent need to reimagine education and create more effective, equitable, and student-led learning environments. It’s time to transform classrooms into collaborative spaces where educators work alongside students, creating a more sustainable and fulfilling teaching and learning experience for everyone...

Fundamentally, though, it's about fostering student agency:

Student-led learning is more than "letting students do what they want." It's a sophisticated instructional framework and key component of personalized learning models, built on three essential pillars:

Voice: Students have a say in how they learn and demonstrate their knowledge. For example, they can choose to create a podcast instead of writing a traditional essay to demonstrate their understanding of a historical event.

Choice: Students have meaningful options in their learning, such as selecting a research topic within a theme or choosing which problems to solve. This student choice creates ownership and motivation that can't be replicated with predetermined learning.

Ownership: When students have voice and choice, they develop a sense of responsibility and ownership over their education. This leads to greater intrinsic motivation and deeper engagement.

This approach evolves traditional teaching models rather than replacing them. The goal isn't to eliminate teacher guidance but to recalibrate the balance, transforming students from passive recipients to active participants in knowledge construction. Teachers remain essential, but their role shifts from being the sole information source to facilitators structuring the learning environment, providing feedback, and guiding student discovery through student-led learning approaches.

Looking at the ESL/ESOL/TEFL classroom, there is the very well-established The Silent Way: A Student-Led Approach to Language Learning - as considered again recently:

The Silent Way is one of the most unconventional teaching methods in the ESL world. Instead of the teacher explaining, correcting, and dominating the conversation, the students are the ones doing the work—speaking, testing, problem-solving, and figuring things out for themselves. It’s a method that flips the script in the most literal way.

Here is a look by the E L Gazette at when “student-led” tasks quietly break down, in an excellent piece by Mark Frohnsdorff - with the first section here:

What often goes unexamined is why tasks that look pedagogically sound on paper can become teacher-dependent almost immediately, and what that tells us about how lesson design really works.

Teacher-led vs teacher-dependent

Part of the problem lies in a distinction we don’t always make clearly.

A teacher-led lesson is an instructional choice. The teacher controls pacing, structure, and input, often deliberately. This can be highly effective, particularly when learners need models, shared reference points, or access to language they cannot yet generate independently.

Teacher-dependence, by contrast, is not a teaching style. It is something that emerges during a task.

A task becomes teacher-dependent when learners cannot proceed without repeated intervention, even though it was designed to be learner-led. The teacher ends up supplying the thinking learners were meant to do themselves. Authority shifts back to the teacher, not by design, but by necessity.

This distinction matters because the issue is not who is talking, but who is able to think.

A lesson can be teacher-led without being teacher-dependent. A task intended to encourage autonomy can become teacher-dependent very quickly if learners lack the resources required to engage with it.

When that happens early and repeatedly, it is usually a signal worth paying attention to.

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the hidden curriculum of the esl/esol/tefl classroom

WHAT IS 'THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM'?

The hidden curriculum is at the heart of the classroom:

A hidden curriculum is a set of lessons "which are learned but not openly intended"[1] to be taught in school such as the norms, values, and beliefs conveyed in both the classroom and social environment.[2] In many cases, it occurs as a result of social interactions and expectations. The term hidden curriculum is sometimes seen as synonymous with, or a subset of, the implicit curriculum.[3]

And there's quite a lot of philosophy, politics and sociology behind this - as in this piece in the simplysociology website on the Hidden Curriculum:

The hidden curriculum, first described by Philip Jackson (1968), is a set of unspoken or implicit rules and values that students learn while attending school. It is often contrasted with the more formalized, official curriculum that is spelled out in a school’s mission statement or lesson plans. 

To return to the Wikipedia entry:

The hidden curriculum has been further explored by a number of educators. Starting with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1972, through the late 1990s, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire explored various effects of presumptive teaching on students, schools, and society as a whole. Freire's explorations were in sync with those of John Holt and Ivan Illich, each of whom were quickly identified as radical educators. Other theorists who have identified the nature of hidden curricula and hidden agendas include Neil Postman, Paul Goodman, Joel Spring, John Taylor Gatto, and others.

Additionally, developmental psychologist Robert Kegan addressed the hidden curriculum of everyday life in his 1994 book In Over Our Heads, which focused on the relation between cognitive development and the "cognitive demands" of cultural expectations.

Most of these educators have been featured on this blog, including: 

Paulo Freire and the tabula rasa

John Holt and how teaching interferes with learning and the most schooled generation in history is miserable

Ivan Illich on education and health and deschooling society and homeschooling and deschooling and Jay Ivan Illich: schooling, technology, and culture

teaching as a subversive activity

John Taylor Gatto: teacher, mentor, revolutionary and human resources as social engineering and is the purpose of education 'social uplift' - or 'social control'? and the Prussian school system and the factory model of education

Meanwhile, here's the rather different Wikipedia entry from 2014, as recorded on these pages: Jay Doubleyou: the hidden curriculum

WHAT IS 'THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM' IN THE ESL/ESOL/TEFL CLASSROOM?

And what about the invisible curriculum of international schools?

Writing for the E L Gazette, Ines Katsouri looks at what globally mobile students learn beyond the classroom. Here's the opening of an excellent piece where she looks at the hidden or invisible curriculum from the perspective of the teacher and student working in the ESL/ESOL/TEFL world:

International schools are often celebrated for the richness of their academic programmes and global outlook. Curricula designed to develop internationally minded learners prepare students to navigate an increasingly interconnected world. Yet alongside these visible structures, students are also learning something far less explicit.

Simply by participating in internationally mobile school communities, they encounter what might be described as an invisible curriculum — a set of social and psychological lessons that shape how they experience belonging, adaptation, expectation, and learning itself.

The idea of a hidden or invisible curriculum has long been discussed in educational research. Educational researcher Philip W. Jackson first described how students learn important social norms and expectations through everyday school life beyond official syllabi. Schools, after all, do not only transmit knowledge; they also shape behaviour, identity, and social understanding.

In international school environments, however, this invisible curriculum takes on distinctive forms. The realities of globally mobile communities mean that students often navigate experiences that are less common in more stable national schooling systems...

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carl rogers and communication

We seem to forget that people matter! Psychologist Carl Rogers put them first:

The person-centered approach, Rogers's approach to understanding personality and human relationships, found wide application in various domains, such as psychotherapy and counseling (client-centered therapy), education (student-centered learning), organizations, and other group settings.

Looking at his person-centered therapy:

Person-centered therapy emphasizes the importance of creating a therapeutic environment grounded in three core conditions: unconditional positive regard (acceptance), congruence (genuineness), and empathic understanding.

And in education:

PCT has also been applied in educational and youth counseling settings. Its emphasis on empathy, acceptance, and authentic communication makes it particularly effective for adolescents and young adults who are navigating identity development, interpersonal challenges, and emotional regulation. Additionally, the non-directive nature of PCT allows it to be used across cultural contexts where traditional therapist-led approaches may not align with community values or client expectations.

He's quite important, with his Humanistic Approach and Psychology:

In the landscape of 20th-century psychology and education, few figures loom as large as Carl Ransom Rogers. His person-centred approach to therapy and education has left an indelible mark on how we understand human growth, learning, and interpersonal relationships...

These ideas have had a profound impact on our understanding of child development and learning. They have influenced educational practices, particularly in Early Years settings, by promoting child-centred approaches that value each child’s unique perspective and potential for growth (Rogers, 1969).

Rogers’ work has not only shaped the field of psychology but has also had far-reaching implications for education, counselling, and even international diplomacy. His emphasis on empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard has influenced approaches to conflict resolution and peace-making on a global scale (Kirschenbaum, 2007).

From the Infed website, we go deeper into Carl Rogers, core conditions and education:

The strength of Rogers’ approach lies in part in his focus on relationship: "We cannot teach another person directly; we can only facilitate his learning".

Carl Rogers was a gifted teacher. His approach grew from his orientation in one-to-one professional encounters. He saw himself as a facilitator – one who created the environment for engagement. This he might do through making a short (often provocative, input). However, what he was also to emphasize was the attitude of the facilitator. There were ‘ways of being’ with others that foster exploration and encounter – and these are more significant than the methods employed.

He was particularly interested in Experiential Learning:

Rogers distinguished two types of learning: cognitive (meaningless) and experiential (significant). The former corresponds to academic knowledge such as learning vocabulary or multiplication tables and the latter refers to applied knowledge such as learning about engines in order to repair a car. The key to the distinction is that experiential learning addresses the needs and wants of the learner. Rogers lists these qualities of experiential learning: personal involvement, self-initiated, evaluated by learner, and pervasive effects on learner.

Here are a couple of (short!) videos:

The Humanistic Theory by CARL ROGERS - Simplest Explanation Ever - YouTube

Carl Rogers: Meaningful Learning and the Role of the Facilitating Teacher - YouTube

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leopold kohr: opposing the cult of 'bigness' - and understanding that 'small is beautiful'

The idea that Small Is Beautiful was first popularised by the German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher over fifty years ago.

But his challenge to 'bigness' came from his mentor Leopold Kohr. And indeed, another of Kohr's pupils gave the lecture The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics - this being the educationalist and philosopher Ivan Illich who has featured several times on this blog:

During his life-time, this teasing leprechaun was recognized by very few as a man ahead of his time. Even today, few have caught up with him; there is still no school of thought that carries on his social morphology... Throughout his life, Kohr labored to lay the foundations for an alternative to economics; he worked to subvert conventional economic wisdom, no matter how advanced.

With more on Leopold Kohr from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics:

Believing in the effectiveness of returning to the local level to solve the problems affecting humankind, he saw small self-governing communities as best able to solve their problems with their own resources.

He was against 'bigness':

Leopold Kohr was highly critical of the claim that the world is split into too many states and opposed pan-nationalist, continental and global unions. He argued that the success of Swiss Confederation did not lie in a union between the French, German and Italian-speaking peoples, as that would lead to the domination of Swiss Germans and to the gradual decline of other groups. The reason that Switzerland remained diverse was that instead of having three nationalities, it was federated into 22 cantons, representing the actual cultural divisions of Switzerland. Kohr argued that number of autonomous cantons "eliminates all possible imperialist ambitions on the part of any one canton, because it would always be outnumbered by even a very small combination of other".[15]

According to Kohr, a European Federation of unequally large states would lead to a domination of a single nation and thus an erosion of dialects and smaller languages "with just the same inevitability as the German federation, in which 24 small states were linked to the one 40-million Power of Prussia ended up in Prussian hegemony". For him, a successful European unification can be based only on the Swiss model, which would entail splitting the existing nation-states into smaller ones on the basis of cultural and historical regions. He defends the concept of Kleinstaaterei by arguing that while in the Middle Ages, wars were common, they were brief and caused little to no devastation. However, after the consolidation of Europe into a few large states, every war that erupted between caused huge destruction and loss life.[15]...

Kohr also discusses the problem of cultural heritage and cultural assimilation. According to him, culture is a product of individuals, and since individual cannot prosper under a large power, neither can culture. He describes democracy as a "system of divisions, factions, and small-group balances", which slowly wither away under internal consolidation of a large state and with it the ability for cultural and intellectual flourishment.[27]

Following the banking crisis of 2009, the author Paul Kingsnorth wrote in the Guardian that this economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness':

One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of...

Drawing from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it. The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world's problems was not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of any one unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative. On a whistlestop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does a brilliant job of persuading the reader that many of the glories of western culture, from cathedrals to great art to scientific innovations, were the product of small states.

To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr's vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some if it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for "whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions". Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

Here are some very helpful reviews and summaries of The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr on Goodreads

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metaphor is everywhere - and is the stuff of language

Using metaphor is a very good way to communicate.

For example, in how to give a 3 minute presentation we learn that winning speakers made use of metaphor and other verbal illustrations to simplify a complex idea.

If we accept that we are by nature multilingual, then it's good to have an understanding of how metaphor works and that it is central to how in fact language works.

We live by metaphors, as in clichés, pragmatics and how we use language to connect us beyond the actual words used:

Metaphors We Live By - Wikipedia [metaphor is a tool that enables people to use what they know about their direct physical and social experiences to understand more abstract things like work, time, mental activity and feelings.] and Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - YouTube [Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphors aren’t just poetry, but a fundamental part of our brain conceptual system. That is, they’re central to the way we perceive ourselves, others, and the world.]

It goes pretty deep, whether it's the language of money... the language of religion... the language of love...:

The Bible is peppered with the language of debt. Sin, forgiveness, reckoning, redemption - all of these words actually derive from the language of ancient finance. What's more, this seems to be true in all the great religious traditions - not just Judaism and Christianity, but Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam - all of their texts are filled with financial metaphors, many of which relate to issues surrounding debt... We tend to think of these religions as teaching us that we must repay our debts. But the truth is that the financial metaphors in religious texts are oddly ambivalent. The original translation of the Lord's Prayer from 1381 reads "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors". But do we forgive our debtors? Actually, most of us don't.

[There is in The Merchant of Venice] the ironic weight the actors gave to all the financial metaphors that Shakespeare deploys in the love plot. Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia is first announced as his scheme “to get clear of all the debts I owe”, because Portia is rich. He refers to Portia’s famed “worth”, and calls her a “rich” “gem”. He marvels: “Look on beauty, / And you shall see ’tis purchas’d by the weight.” And while Shylock demands the fulfilment of the “bond” that Antonio signed, the pledged lovers twitter happily about “love’s bonds”, and Graziano speaks of the “bargain” of their faith. At the end, Portia tells Antonio that he is going to be Bassanio’s “surety”, to guarantee his faithfulness.

Or, to look at a BBC piece on the words that help us understand the world: 

We use them so much in everyday language that we often don’t even notice them, but metaphors and similes help us think more deeply – and make sense of the world around us...

And here's a fascinating piece on The Ubiquity of Metaphor from the perspective of a behavioural scientists.

So, it's more than just a bit of 'fancy' or 'flowery' language: language is metaphor.

Let's look at some philosophy and whether someone can explain structuralism to me like I'm 5;

1: Levi-Strauss reckoned that the way we think about things has been set in place already by cultural factors (mainly language) - so the individual is almost a base through which ‘society’ does its work. Think about it like this - language existed before we were, and will continue after we will be gone, but we think through it and it constrains our understanding. The language allows understanding by contrasting together concepts, like dark:light. Would you understand dark if you didn't understand light? Then language goes one step further, and uses metaphor (or, if you like, myth) to allow even deeper understanding of something. So dark is to light as order is to chaos as Man is to Woman. You understand the first concept much more richly by linking it to your understanding of the other contrasts.

2: We actually understand things only through metaphors. Every word was once a metaphor - 'muscle' for example, came through the German word for 'mouse', because muscles looked like little animals moving under the skin. This extends up how we act out concepts. When we speak of 'knowledge', for instance, we understand it to be a 'space'. We 'shed light on that' or 'find common ground', or 'another perspective'. We therefore exchange knowledge freely, because everyone can stand in that space. Other cultures, for instance the Maori of New Zealand, understand knowledge to be a treasure. They therefore DON'T share knowledge except with (male) descendants, and don't particularly care if it's actually right or not, because it was a gift from their ancestors. See how this metaphor language stuff shapes society and understanding?

And let's look at the magazine Philosophy Now and A Gentle Introduction to Structuralism, Postmodernism And All That:

Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French intellectual and philosopher of the time, and didn’t so much win, as went unanswered (which from Sartre’s point of view was worse). Here was France’s main philosopher, Sartre, who usually had something to say about everything, being attacked in Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, and yet not replying! The implication was that he couldn’t reply, and the intellectual mood began to move towards Lévi-Strauss’ intellectual position, which he called structuralism.

A simple explanation of structuralism is that it understands phenomena using the metaphor of language. That is, we can understand language as a system, or structure, which defines itself in terms of itself. There is no language ‘behind’ language with which we understand it, no metalanguage to explain what language means. Instead it is a self-referential system. Words explain words explain words (as in a dictionary), and meaning is present as a set of structures.

Helpful?!

To finish, here's something a bit strange(r)...

Going further, malaphors are when we get our metaphors mixed up [as in "it's not rocket surgery" instead of "it's not rocket science"!]

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listening to the languages of papua new guinea and questioning the notion of a 'universal grammar'

It's clear that language is a human thing.

But how has language come about? What do languages have in common?

Here are some ideas:

the language of thought hypothesis

learning theory: the poverty of the stimulus

paulo freire and the tabula rasa

steven pinker - and language

The most dominant theory comes from Chomsky:

theories of language learning and teaching: behaviourism vs nativism

chomsky and language acquisition

what makes us human: noam chomsky and human languages

behaviourism >>> krashen... pinker... skinner... chomsky

As Wikipedia summarises:

Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG.[1] The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established.

Other linguists have opposed that notion, arguing that languages are so diverse that the postulated universality is rare.[2] The theory of universal grammar remains a subject of debate among linguists.[3]

And the theory is indeed being debated.

This month, the British Academy Neil and Saras Smith Medal has just been awarded to Professor Nicholas Evans for his long and distinguished career working on endangered languages, both documenting hitherto undescribed languages and exploring the consequences of such data for general linguistic theory.

This is the linguist they can’t shut up: 

Nicholas Evans was wading out to a boat moored in the shallow Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern coast of Australia, when he felt what he thought was a baby shark nipping at his heels. The “nips” were actually bullets hitting the sea on either side of him. They had exited a rifle wielded by a hungover pilot called Fletcher...

And this is his book, courtesy of the New European/World:

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Words of Wonder: Endangered Languages and What They Tell Us (The Language Library) : Evans, Nicholas: Amazon.co.uk: Books

This is quite revolutionary when it comes to understanding human language, because, through a lifetime of deep listening, Nicholas Evans has reshaped the global study of languages:

Evans’ work has made a significant impact beyond academia – interpreting for Native Title cases and cultural heritage documentation, developing writing systems for previously unwritten languages, and helping revitalise endangered languages.

Evans is currently teaching in Garrthalala, Northeastern Arnhem Land at a new ‘bush uni’ initiative aimed at bridging the path to university studies for Yolŋu Matha-speaking students. He will return to Canberra next month to continue exploring how languages shape – and are shaped – by the ways humans think, feel, and imagine.

It’s a reminder that every language reveals a unique act of human imagination, and a testament to a lifetime spent listening deeply to the many voices of our world.

Interestingly, Chomsky was the first to receive the British Academy prize - as reported by the Observer this weekend on Cracking the code of Papua New Guinea’s undocumented languages:

The first winner of that medal, in 2014, was Noam Chomsky. Chomsky famously emphasised the commonalities across languages, the universal template or grammar that a baby is born with, that allows it to pick up any natural language with minimal prompting.

Evans thinks the Chomskyans are looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and that what defines language is its staggering diversity – the vast span of “engineering solutions” that evolution has found to the problem of human communication.

A language must allow a person to express any idea to another person, but it also has to be learnable by babies. These two constraints drive language evolution, but what nobody yet knows is where the limits of the possible lie. How big is the language design space? Or, to put it another way, how complex or expressive of the minutiae of human experience can a language become, before it becomes unlearnable?

The reason nobody knows this is because it is thought that only about 10% of the estimated 7,000 living languages are well documented. Since 90% of those languages are also endangered, with many of the unwritten ones being at the greatest risk of extinction, Evans has long argued for the need to record them.

The linguists who take on that painstaking task are constantly reminded of the ocean of diversity on whose shore they stand. “Almost every new language that comes under the microscope reveals unanticipated new features,” Evans and fellow linguist Stephen Levinson, then director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, wrote in a landmark 2009 paper questioning the mainstream Chomskyan view.

There is another reason why Evans considers documentation so vital. Language infuses everything we do, so studying it is, he says, “mainlining into the human experience” – past and present.

This is the research by Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson from 2009: With diversity in mind: Freeing the language sciences from Universal Grammar | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

The Evans-Levinson work is quite fundamental to what makes us human:

Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

Others have followed this up, looking at the myth of language universals and the myth of universal grammar:

It has been widely argued that an innate Universal Grammar (UG) must be postulated to explain two key observations: first, that languages share putatively “universal” patterns, which appear arbitrary from a functional, communicative point of view; and second, that children acquire language so readily from an apparently impoverished linguistic input (the “poverty of the stimulus” argument). The second point has been the subject of considerable recent interest, with many theorists arguing that linguistic input is richer than has previously been suspected (e.g., Pullum & Scholz 2002; Reali & Christiansen 2005) or that modern learning methods are richer than is often presumed (e.g., Chater & Vita´nyi 2007; Harman & Kulkarni 2007). The first argument, based on language universals, has gone relatively unchallenged in the cognitive science literature– but no longer. Evans & Levinson (E&L) provide powerful evidence that language universals are myth rather than reality, and hence, that this line of defense of UG is swept aside. It remains to be explained, though, how languages came to display such stunning diversity, and this is where research on language evolution may offer some insight.

Finally, another [Vyvyan] Evans has written a more accessible book challenging The Language Myth - but it was really not liked by the academic establishment:

In 2016, Language, the flagship academic journal of the Linguistic Society of America published a series of "Alternative (Re)views"[12] by six leading linguists, all addressing The Language Myth. Evans was originally invited to contribute a response to those articles. However, his submission was rejected by the journal's review editor.[13] Evans wrote an open-letter to the linguistics community claiming that he was being censored.[14]

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clichés, pragmatics and how we use language to connect us beyond the actual words used

What is the purpose of language? Do words carry meaning? Is language communication?

These are questions Michael Rosen looks at in his excellent weekly programme on BBC Radio 4 - and this week, it's: Word of Mouth - It's not what you say, it's how you say it - BBC Sounds

Michael Rosen on the linguistic comfort food of clichés, pragmatics and how we use language to connect us beyond the actual words used. Derek Bousfield explains how words do more than carry meaning: context governs what we say and how it’s understood. Dr Bousfield is Reader in Pragmatics and Communication and Co-Director of The Manchester Centre for Research in Linguistics and co-author of Talking in Clichés: The Use of Stock Phrases in Discourse and Communication.

They look at Pragmatics - how we say things beyond what they literally mean - for example "How are you?" is not asking about your health/problems: Jay Doubleyou: pragmatics: it ain't what you say it's the way that you say it

Language is not literal! Especially in conversation, which is guided by culture and context.

Language is non-direct - for example: "Why don't we have a coffee some time?" is not making a specific arrangement to meet. Another example: "We'll see how it goes" means I don't agree with you but I don't want to talk about it any more. 

The British love understatement or litotes - which are codes to build rapport.

There is the world of clichés - and comedians such as Peter Kay enjoy playing with them. We use them all the time to connect people -  and that "we are all on the same page", to use a cliché.

We live by metaphors: Metaphors We Live By - Wikipedia [metaphor is a tool that enables people to use what they know about their direct physical and social experiences to understand more abstract things like work, time, mental activity and feelings.] and Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - YouTube [Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphors aren’t just poetry, but a fundamental part of our brain conceptual system. That is, they’re central to the way we perceive ourselves, others, and the world.]

A favourite example from Prof Bousfield is 'literally': Urban Dictionary: literally

And a favourite from Michael is 'the bottom line': BOTTOM LINE definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary and What does ‘bottom-line’ mean here? : r/EnglishLearning

The word 'cliché' comes from French: Cliché - Wikipedia

To finish this look at the programme, here's Derek Bousfield's book: Talking in Clichés: The Use of Stock Phrases in Discourse and Communication: Amazon.co.uk: Bullo, Stella: 9781108458139: Books

For decades, social perspectives, and even academic studies of language, have considered clichés as a hackneyed, tired, lazy, unthinking and uninspiring form of communication. Authored by two established scholars in the fields of Systemic-Functional Linguistics and Discourse Studies and Pragmatics, this cutting-edge book comprehensively explores the perception and use of clichés in language from these complementary perspectives. It draws data from a variety of both written and spoken sources, to re-interrogate and re-imagine the nature, role and usage of clichés, identifying the innovative and creative ways in which the concepts are utilised in communication, interaction, and in self-presentation. 

Observing a rich, complex layering of usage, the authors deconstruct the many and varied ways in which clichés operate and are interdependently constructed; from the role they play in discourse in general, to their functions as argumentative strategies, as constructs of social cognition, as politeness strategies, and finally as markers of identity.

And here's a look or two at clichés:

What is a cliché? Check out this list of examples.

SUPER IMPORTANT EXPRESSIONS | Clichés in Spoken English - YouTube

See also:

Jay Doubleyou: pragmatics

Jay Doubleyou: juergen habermas: communicative rationality and deliberative democracy

Jay Doubleyou: ambiguity is everywhere in englsh

Jay Doubleyou: behaviourism >>> krashen... pinker... skinner... chomsky

Jay Doubleyou: small talk, phatic communication and the games people play

Jay Doubleyou: english is not transparent

Jay Doubleyou: writing with register: a lesson in using different levels of 'politeness'

Jay Doubleyou: what is 'politeness' and how can we teach it?

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language distance

In many ways, we can see why English is so different from other languages. It's a mixture of other languages and its grammar has been greatly simplified

It can be very interesting to compare English with, say, Chinese. Do you see any similarities with your langauge? Language differences: English - Chinese

From an English-speakers perspective, there are 'difficult' languages. How do these compare with yours Most Difficult Language To Learn

... And there are the 'easy' languages: Easiest Foreign Languages To Learn - Business Insider

This is what we can 'language distance' - and there is a useful guide from Gill Ragsdale on how language distance shapes fluency in the E L Gazette:

The ‘language distance’ between English and a language learner’s first language affects reading fluency, but not comprehension according to a study by Victor Kuperman at McMaster University, Canada. Gill Ragsdale reports.

Clearly it is easier for someone to learn a language that is more like their native language than one that is more distant: learning English is generally easier for Italian than for Japanese speakers. What is less clear is which processes in language learning are affected and how to quantify those effects.

Kuperman set out to clarify the effect of language distance on reading fluency and comprehension. Past studies have given mixed results, possibly because the focus has been on comprehension, which is relatively easy to measure.

Data for this study was taken from the Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus. This database has measures of reading fluency and comprehension from 1,105 students and staff from 24 universities having 18 distinct first languages.

For more, see: How does language distance affect reading fluency and comprehension in English as second language? by Victor Kuperman.

And: Linguistic distance - Wikipedia

Plus the discussions on Language distance in Europe : r/languagelearning

Working Groups | Townsend Center for the Humanities

Worldwide map or data for linguistic distance? - Linguistics Stack Exchange

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translanguaging

The idea and practice of translanguaging is basically the practice of using two languages in the same lesson, which differs from many previous methods of bilingual education that tried to separate languages by class, time, or day

So, What Is Translanguaging and How Is It Used in the Classroom?

In translanguaging, students are able to think in multiple languages simultaneously and use their home language as a vehicle to learn academic English.

A student could be reading an article about the solar system in English, but in their brain, they are also thinking and making connections in Spanish. They might annotate in Spanish or first write down reading comprehension responses in Spanish and then figure out how to provide the responses in English, said Marrero-Colon.

It’s all about encouraging students to access their full linguistic repertoires, said Emily Phillips Galloway, an assistant professor at the Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University.

From the perspective of the ESL/ESOL/EAL world, here's an answer to the question What is translanguaging?

Picture the scene: two students are sitting together, working intently on a handout. They have different first languages but some shared knowledge of the words and phrases of each other’s languages, so they are moving in and out of English to get their message across. Another two students are sitting together nearby. Both of them are Spanish speakers, but are very strong in English and often use it as their main language. At other times, as now, they blend Spanish and English together.

Are either of these examples of translanguaging? In both cases, yes. The young people are using resources from different languages together, with very little regard for what we might call the ‘boundaries’ of named languages such as ‘Spanish’ or ‘English’. They are using elements of each language together to communicate more effectively. This is translanguaging: it’s about using the all your language resources to communicate.

Finally, here's an academic piece looking at Translanguaging and emotionality of English as a second language (ESL) teachers:

Often there is a notable gap between expected emotions or ‘emotional rules’ in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms and genuine emotions which results in ‘emotional labour’ for ESL teachers... The study revealed complex and conflicting teacher emotions around translanguaging including pride, comfort (related to feelings of safety), shame (related to linguistic inferiority complexes), guilt, and frustration.

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language is a human thing

Other species can communicate of course - but parrots speaking human languages is in fact only a matter of mimicry, because only humans can use language. 

Other 'minds' can communicate - but whilst there is a lot of promise in AI and the future of education for example, only humans can use language in the way humans do. 

Only humans can do code-switching: jumping between different registers, different voices and different languages. Only humans enjoy word play - and things such as malapropisms, spoonerisms and nonsense words. Humans love ambiguity - and ambiguity is everywhere in Englsh!

The problems around the relationship between language and thought is clearly only something humans are struggling with. It does seem to be, though, that language shapes the way we think, which is not the case with parrots or ChatGPT.

Another issue is that no matter how much 'input' we get when learning a language, there will always be the poverty of the stimulus - in other words, "there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain". 

These are theories of language learning and teaching: of behaviourism vs nativism - and look to theorist Chomsky and language acquisition and what makes us human.

And the latest edition of the Philosophy Now magazine takes a look at this:

Contemporary linguists and philosophers have formalized Descartes’ and Cordemoy’s observations about human linguistic possibility into three conditions:

Stimulus-Freedom: Humans can produce new expressions that lack any one-to-one relationship with their environments. Generally, stimuli in a human’s local environment appear to elicit utterances, but not cause them. If human language use is not affixed in some determinate, predictable fashion to stimuli, then language use is not directly caused by situations. Among other things, this means that meaningful expressions can be generated about environments far-removed from the local context in which the person speaks; or even about imaginary contexts. The contrast with animal communication is striking here. For animals, communication is restricted to the local context of its use. Human language use is, in sharp contrast, detachable: a pillar of the human intellect may be the ability to detach oneself from the circumstances in which cognitive resources are deployed without reliance on stimuli to do so. In other words, we can think for ourselves.

Unboundedness: Human language use is not confined to a pre-sorted list of words, phrases, or sentences (as it is with LLMs). Instead, there’s no fixed set of utterances humans can produce. This is the infinite productivity of human language – the unlimited combination and re-combination of finite elements into new forms that convey new, independent meanings.

Appropriateness to Circumstance: That human language use is stimulus-free can be revealing when we reflect that utterances are routinely appropriate to the situations in which they are made and coherent to others who hear them. If human language use is both stimulus-free and not caused by situations, this means its relation to one’s environment must be the more obscure relation of appropriateness. Indeed, language use “is recognized as appropriate by other participants in the discourse situation who might have reacted in similar ways and whose thoughts, evoked by this discourse, correspond to those of the speaker” (Language and Problems of Knowledge, Noam Chomsky, 1988).

Only when all three conditions are simultaneously present does language use take on its special human character. As Chomsky summarized it:

“man has a species-specific capacity, a unique type of intellectual organization which cannot be attributed to peripheral organs or related to general intelligence and which manifests itself in what we may refer to as the ‘creative aspect’ of ordinary language use – its property being both unbounded in scope and stimulus-free. Thus Descartes maintains that language is available for the free expression of thought or for appropriate response in any new context and is undetermined by any fixed association of utterances to external stimuli or physiological states (identifiable in any noncircular fashion)”
(Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, 1966).

It is a distinctively human trait to use language in a manner that is simultaneously stimulus-free, unbounded, yet appropriate and coherent to others. Such language use is neither determined (by a stimulus) nor random (inappropriate). This ability enables people to deploy their intellectual resources to any problem, or to create new problems altogether, putting our shared cognitive capacities to use across contexts at will. It is little wonder then why Descartes assigns such importance to language use in his test for other minds. A being that uses language in only one or two of the three ways described can be explained in mechanical terms – but the presence of all three is something that modern technology lacks the tools to create.

Rescuing Mind from the Machines | Issue 168 | Philosophy Now

Or, to put it another way:

The article discusses the misconceptions of "AGI doomers" - those who believe that a future artificial general intelligence (AGI) system could rebel against humanity. The author argues that the key flaw in the doomer's argument is their failure to recognize the "creative aspect of language use" (CALU) - the uniquely human ability to use language in a stimulus-free, unbounded, yet appropriate and coherent manner. The author contends that this extra-mechanical nature of human language and cognition is a critical characteristic that current AI systems lack, and that the doomer's assumption of an AGI system spontaneously developing such capabilities is unfounded.

What the AGI Doomers Misunderstand - Aili

This is quite a debate:

Do large language models (LLMs) use language creatively? Ample intellectual content has been produced recently over whether LLMs generate text sufficiently novel to be considered “creative” or merely synthesize creatively human-generated content without a distinctive contribution of their own. It is one dimension of a highly complex debate that is unfolding over the nature of both LLMs and human intelligence.

This saga has seen contributions from thinkers in a diversity of disciplines, including computer science, robotics, cognitive science, philosophy, and even national security. A notable flashpoint is linguist Noam Chomsky’s fiery critique of ChatGPT and LLMs in The New York Times. This controversial piece illuminates stark divides between scientific approaches to the nature of the human mind, natural and artificial intelligence (AI), and how engineering makes use (or doesn’t) of these notions.

Chomsky’s NYT piece spurred tremendous debates on this subject, as he highlighted his belief that “Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism.” The discourse which has sprung up in the wake of this and other pieces surrounds familiar arguments about the utility of generative linguistics, the role of cognitive science in AI, and even broader matters such as the emergent theory of mind capabilities in LLMs.

I find myself frustrated and baffled. This is good because otherwise, I may not have written this article. But the reasons are not stellar: Chomsky’s rigid communication style has prevented him from leveraging some of the fascinating features of his own linguistic work in a direct and explicit manner to assess LLMs’ capabilities. Conversely, machine learning researchers have so thoroughly indulged in the euphoria of the field’s recent (and real) advancements that they frequently lack the will required to assess whether human cognition is as straightforward as it seems.

I attempt to remedy this here. Where Chomsky’s approach to the mind and the tradition of generative linguistics broadly are brought into AI, they have focused intensely on familiar arguments like the poverty of the stimulus and the innateness of linguistic knowledge or principles. I instead highlight what is known in the rationalist tradition in philosophy and cognitive science as the “creative aspect of language use,” or CALU.

Do Large Language Models Have Minds Like Ours? | Towards AI

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code-switching: jumping between different registers, different voices and different languages

REGISTER:

We can communicate using different registers and different types of language, depending on the context - for example:

For formal and informal register; 'Would you mind passing the salt?' is appropriate for a formal situation with strangers, whereas 'Pass me the salt' would be used for a situation where friends are talking, or possibly when being rude.

Register | TeachingEnglish | British Council

Here's a good introduction:

Register: Language Formality in Creative Writing–#AuthorToolboxBlogHop – Words like trees

We need to be teaching and learning about it:

MultiBrief: Language register: What is it and why does it matter in education?

How Did That Register? Five Levels of Formality in Language | ALTA Language Services

Here are some of those different contexts:

Jay Doubleyou: writing about your holiday in different registers

Jay Doubleyou: register: populism, culture wars and woke

Jay Doubleyou: learning to use the appropriate register @ fawlty towers

Jay Doubleyou: writing with register: a lesson in using different levels of 'politeness'

Jay Doubleyou: high culture > popular culture --- high register > low register

It becomes much more difficult to change register or 'voice' in the middle of speaking or writing

Do native English speakers face difficulty in switching between registers?

CODE-SWITCHING:

We can call this 'code-switching':

Register and style: code-switching

Code-switching isn't just for bilingual people: Code-switching is switching between multiple different languages, dialects, and registers depending on the social situation the speaker is in.

Although we usually talk about code-switching in terms of switching languages, utilising different registers in communication is also considered code-switching. A teenager at school may talk to their friends and classmates using a casual register, then code-switch to a formal or consultative register when talking to their teacher.

Register and Style: Definition, Meaning & Examples | StudySmarter

It's quite a hot topic:

Code-Switching in Language | Definition, Types & Examples | Study.com

For example:

In popular usage and in sociolinguistic study, the term code-switching is frequently used to refer to switching among dialects, styles or registers.[9] This form of switching is practiced, for example, by speakers of African American Vernacular English as they move from less formal to more formal settings.[10] Such shifts, when performed by public figures such as politicians, are sometimes criticized as signaling inauthenticity or insincerity.[11]

Code-switching - Wikipedia

HETEROGLOSSIA:

Mixing up register/voice/language can go beyond the sociology and politics of language.

Here's an interesting idea: 'heteroglossia':

In literature it refers to different voices used within a text, so that might be the differentiation between characters and an omniscient narrator, or it could be different sociolects (class/regional etc dialects) represented by characters. Any time the speech of someone in the text tells you about who they are and how they're different to others in the text is an example of heteroglossia. In non fiction, the same applies, only the heteroglossia arises out of people's real differences rather than having to be invented by an author. Linguistic code in this context is deliberately vague, but does entail that the characters should be using mutually intelligible language. So, it might be two male characters that both speak English but one is poor and black and uses ebonics and one is rich and white and speaks a more formal, standardised way, or it could be two middle class people but the male uses more assertive language and the female is more passive.

Confused about 'heteroglossia' meaning : r/linguistics

With more from Wikipedia:

Heteroglossia is the presence in language of a variety of "points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values."[1] For Bakhtin, this diversity of "languages" within a single language brings into question the basic assumptions of system-based linguistics. Every word uttered, in any specific time or place, is a function of a complex convergence of forces and conditions that are unique to that time and place...

The hybrid utterance, as defined by Bakhtin, is a passage that employs only a single speaker—the author, for example— but uses different kinds of speech. The juxtaposition of the different speeches brings with it a contradiction and conflict in belief systems.

In examination of the English comic novel, particularly the works of Charles Dickens, Bakhtin identifies examples of his argument. Dickens parodies both the 'common tongue' and the language of Parliament or high-class banquets, using concealed languages to create humor. In one passage, Dickens shifts from his authorial narrative voice into a formalized, almost epic tone while describing the work of an unremarkable bureaucrat; his intent is to parody the self-importance and vainglory of the bureaucrat's position. The use of concealed speech, without formal markers of a speaker change, is what allows the parody to work. It is, in Bakhtin's parlance, a hybrid utterance. In this instance the conflict is between the factual narrative and the biting hyperbole of the new, epic/formalistic tone.

Bakhtin goes on to discuss the interconnectedness of conversation. Even a simple dialogue, in his view, is full of quotations and references, often to a general "everyone says" or "I heard that.." Opinion and information are transmitted by way of reference to an indefinite, general source. By way of these references, humans selectively assimilate the discourse of others and make it their own.

Heteroglossia - Wikipedia

Let's draw back to give a bit more context.

Here's a very readable look at all of this by Jena Barchas of the Everyday linguistic anthropology blog:

Words have flavors: indexicality, heteroglossia, intertextuality

Let me start with an obvious point: we all have boatloads of resources at our disposal for making meaning. Not just our words — we’ve also got our clothing, our posture, the way we walk — but for now, I’m mostly going to talk about words.

All these resources communicate through indexicality. Basically, they point to other meanings. Classically, smoke indexes fire: it doesn’t look like fire, but it points to it by means of long association. Of course, smoke could mean that there’s a smoke machine rather than a fire. But most of the time, it doesn’t.

When we talk about indexicality and language, we’re generally talking about different ways of saying the same thing, which carry different meanings.

For example:

Using a higher pitch indexes femininity. It doesn’t resemble a woman in any way, but it’s connected by regular proximity. When men want to make it clear that they’re imitating women, the first thing they do is raise the pitch of their voices.
If I stop someone on the street and ask them for the time, do I say, “Yo” or “Excuse me, sir”? In fact, both are correct — but they tell you different things about me, that person, and our relationship.
Speaking a particular language or dialect often indexes group affiliation.
Accents index a particular region.
Slang indexes a particular age, among many other personal characteristics.

In short, words have flavors.

Consider the word “dude.” These days, it indexes a sort of laid-back Californian vibe, in addition to heterosexual masculinity. It’s not a quotation from a specific original source, but it’s connected to a way of talking, a voice in the broadest sense.

Or consider the words “beget” and “Sabbath.” They’ve both got Judeo-Christian Bible flavor. “Wack,” “talk to the hand,” and “the bomb” have ’90s flavor. “Actionable” and “productize” have corporate flavor. “Occupy” indexes leftist politics and inequality — and it’s only done so for about five years.

As you can see, a single language — in this case, English — always contains multiple voices and varieties. And it doesn’t matter how self-contained and original a single stretch of language is; it contains elements that index various contexts, norms, and voices.

When we talk about this sense that language always contains multiple voices, we’re talking about heteroglossia (lit. “different voices”). (The term was coined by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin and promptly appropriated by linguistic anthropologists.)

We also often talk about a special case of heteroglossia, which we call intertextuality: the borrowing, quoting, or reworking of a recognizable (oral or written) text.

The movie Clueless is a reworking of Jane Austen’s Emma.
If I say “Accio pencil,” what am I referring to? What will you do? (I once heard a student say this in class, and another student picked up the pencil she’d just dropped.)
Internet memes often blend multiple texts, as do parodies.

So what? Why is this interesting?

Here’s why: both heteroglossia and intertextuality only work as devices if we can assume that some voices and texts are shared. “Accio pencil” is only meaningful if you’re also familiar with Harry Potter; this faux-mercial is only funny if you’ve seen this (real) commercial; a man raising the pitch of his voice to imitate his mother-in-law only makes sense if you share the knowledge that women have high voices.

Language isn’t homogeneous within a group of people, and language is never neutral. Heteroglossia makes visible our knowledge and assumptions of just how that diversity is organized.

Words have flavors: indexicality, heteroglossia, intertextuality | Everyday linguistic anthropology

Let's finish with a challenge to teachers in the classroom:

Dialogic education is a teaching method which is in stark contrast with monologic teaching methods. Nowadays, the educational systems all around the world characterize monologic education in which the ideas and voices of the teachers are the first and last ones uttered in the classrooms, textbooks are aimed so that students learn how to speak and write “correctly” and the time extent of the class is so short that teachers are struggling to cover all the “important” points mandated in the textbooks and by educational authorities. 

In contrast in dialogic education, the teacher shares his or her authority with the students; the voices of the students are heard and their opinions are valuable. In a dialogic class, the students are divided into groups to practice “exploratory talk” and “think reasonably”. The aim in discussing different opinions is just that; discussing different opinions not winning or losing. The role of the teacher is to facilitate the process; he or she is not a judge or referee, he or she is simply a guide. A dialogic environment is like a carnival; to borrow from Bakhtin. There are no omnipresent powers. 

The current study shows that different components of Bakhtin’s dialogism concept can be a very good starting point for a modern and effective theoretical framework for learning and teaching processes.

Dialogism versus Monologism: A Bakhtinian Approach to Teaching

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the communicative approach in the esl/esol/tefl classroom

Today, the 'communicative approach' is pretty much everywhere in the language classroom, but teachers and students still don't quite understand the point of it.

Here's a good start:

The Communicative Approach is based on the idea that learning a language successfully comes through having to communicate real meaning. In the Communicative Approach, the main objective is to present a topic in context as natural as possible.

Communicative Approach in TESOL/TEFL (CLT)

And something a bit more academic

The Communicative Approach (CA) – or Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) –is “an approach to the teaching of second and foreign languages that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language,” (“Communicative language teaching”, Wikipedia) going so far as to “initially [prioritize] communicative competence over accurate grammar“ (Hart). This approach comprises a wide range of methods, not a single, well-defined one, but invariably they all work towards showing the learners “how we really use language in authentic discourse” (Davies, Pearse 193-194). In general, CA lessons are built round situations which are practical and authentic in the real world, e.g. asking for information, complaining, apologizing, job interviews or telephoning. Consequently, dialogues, that occur, focus on communicative functions such as socializing, giving directions, or making telephone calls, which all have relevance and purpose in real-life situations, allowing students to see the direct benefit of learning (Hart).

AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING | Masaryk University in Brno

Here's a good list from Gill Hart:

Gill Hart gives the following 13main core suggestions which make the CA the most successful language learning approach in use today. 

1. A teacher's main role is a facilitator and monitor rather than leading the class. In other words, "the guide by the side" and not "the sage on the stage". 

2. Lessons are usually topic or theme based, with the target grammar "hidden" in the context e.g. a job interview (using the Present Perfect tense.) 

3. Lessons are built round situations/functions practical and authentic in the real world e.g. asking for information, complaining, apologizing, job interviews, telephoning. 

4. Activities set by the teacher have relevance and purpose to real life situations - students can see the direct benefit of learning. 

5. Dialogues are used that centre around communicative functions, such as socializing, giving directions, making telephone calls. 

6. Emphasis on engaging learners in more useful and authentic language rather than repetitive phrases or grammar patterns. 

7. Emphasis on communication and meaning rather than accuracy. Being understood takes precedence over correct grammar. The fine tuning of grammar comes later. 

8. Emphasis is put on the “appropriacy” of language. What is the most appropriate language and tone for a particular situation? 

9. Communicative competence is the desired goal. i.e. being able to survive, converse and be understood in the language. 

10. Emphasis is put on correct pronunciation and choral (group) and individual drilling is used. 

11. Authentic listening and reading texts are used more often, rather than artificial texts simply produced to feature the target language. 

12. Use of songs and games are encouraged and provide a natural environment to promote language and enhance correct pronunciation. 

13. Feedback and correction is usually given by the teacher after tasks have been completed, rather than at the point of error, thus interrupting the flow.

The foundations of the communicative approach and three of its applications

There are more suggestions of what to do in the classroom:

Communicative approach | TeachingEnglish | British Council

3 Sample Activities Using the Communicative Approach with Intermediate Levels | OnTESOL

10 Ways to Apply the Communicative Language Teaching Method

Finally, there is the criticism that having fun in the classroom doesn't mean the students are actually learning anything - especially grammar!

Opposite to what critics say, Authentic Material is not used in a vacuum to spend some class time having fun. When ESL teachers properly use the Communicative Approach in the classroom, Authentic Material is supported with activities that reinforce practice of grammar structure.

For example, this Communicative Approach lesson plan developed by an OnTESOL graduate during the TESOL course shows how a TV show can be used to teach Phrasal Verbs. This other PPP lesson plan shows how a newspaper article can be used to teach the Present Progressive. The Engage-Study-Activate (ESA) framework is also a great way to teach English with the Communicative Approach. Here is a ESA lesson plan by an OnTESOL graduate.

Communicative Approach in TESOL/TEFL (CLT)

Teaching Grammar: Understanding Structures and Functions - YouTube

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