The Practice of English Language Teaching, 5th edition

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 English-language 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 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’.)

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’.

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 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’.

The section on skills teaching begins with a wide-ranging and well-informed introduction (Chapter 17), discussing among other things top-down 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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 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, 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.

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.

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