Competence and Performance in Language Teaching #1 - Introduction

Interchange author and world-renowned linguist Jack C. Richards is back with a new series of posts, looking at what distinguishes the very best language teachers, and what we can learn from them.

What is it that language teachers need to know and do to be effective classroom practitioners and language teaching professionals? How is this knowledge and practice acquired? And how does it change over time? The issue of language teachers’ knowledge and skill base is fundamental to our understanding of effective teaching and to approaches to language teacher education.

In this series of posts, I want to explore the knowledge, beliefs, and skills that language teachers make use of in their practice. My focus is on the understandings and practices of those teachers who would generally be regarded by their peers as exemplary language teaching professionals. We all recognize those teachers when we work with them. But what distinguishes the way they understand and approach their work? In trying to answer this question, I will focus on ten core dimensions of language teaching expertise and practice. They are not in any hierarchical relationship, and there is some overlap among them, but they help lay out some of the basic territory and will hopefully help conceptualize the nature of competence, expertise, and professionalism in language teaching.

But first a word of caution. The nature of what we mean by effectiveness in teaching is not always easy to define because conceptions of good teaching differ from culture to culture (Tsui 2009). In some cultures, a good teacher is one who controls and directs learners and who maintains a respectful distance between the teacher and the learners. Learners are the more or less passive recipients of the teacher’s expertise. Teaching is viewed as a teacher-controlled and directed process.

In other cultures, the teacher may be viewed more as a facilitator. The ability to form close interpersonal relations with students is highly valued, and there is a strong emphasis on individual learner creativity and independent learning. Students may even be encouraged to question and challenge what the teacher says. These different understandings of good teaching are reflected in the following teacher comments.

When I present a reading text to the class, the students expect me to go through it word by word and explain every point of vocabulary or grammar. They would be uncomfortable if I left it for them to work it out on their own or if I asked them just to try to understand the main ideas. – Egyptian EFL teacher

If a student doesn’t succeed, it is my fault for not presenting the materials clearly enough. If a student doesn’t understand something, I must find a way to present it more clearly. – Taiwanese EFL teacher

If I do group work or open-ended communicative activities, the students and other colleagues will feel that I’m not really teaching them. They will feel that I didn’t have anything really planned for the lesson and that I’m just filling in time. – Japanese EFL teacher

The way a person teaches and his or her view of what good teaching is will therefore reflect his or her cultural background and personal history, the context in which he or she is working, and the kind of students in the class. For this reason, teaching is sometimes said to be “situated” and can only be understood within a particular context. This is reflected in a comment by an Australian student studying Chinese in China and reacting to the “Chinese approach” to teaching:

The trouble with Chinese teachers is that they’ve never done any real teacher-training courses, so they don’t know how to teach. All they do is follow the book. They never give us any opportunity to talk. How in the world do they expect us to learn?

Compare this with the comments of a Chinese student studying in Australia:
Australian teachers are very friendly, but they can’t teach very well. I never know where they’re going – there’s no system and I just get lost. Also, they’re often very badly trained and don’t have a thorough grasp of their subject. (Brick 1991, 153)

References and Further Reading

Read the other posts in this series: