Teaching English as a second language to children and adults: variations in practices

Abstract

Often research into classroom teaching ignores teachers’ perspectives on the practices they implement in their lessons. This paper reports research that describes and classifies actual teaching practices used by 18 ESL teachers in Australian classrooms. The data were collected through observations of three lessons and subsequent interviews with each teacher. Almost 300 individual practices were identified, a large proportion of which appeared similar but were described in different terms by the teachers. Evidence showed that teachers of child ESL students and teachers of adult ESL learners shared some common sets of practices but also differed in the teaching practices they used in their lessons and thus confirmed that indeed the age of the learners does make a difference to what language teachers do in their classrooms. Some differences were also found in the practices of teachers with varying lengths of ESL teaching experience. There were also differences in practices between those teachers who had experience of learning other languages as compared with those who did not.