the practice of english language teaching

If you teach English anywhere on earth, this is the field's standard map. It tells you what to do on Monday morning: how to stage a lesson, when to correct, how much to talk, how to plan. New teachers get a complete toolkit; experienced ones get language for what they already sense. Read it before your first class or your next observation.

1. 1Chapter 1

   English has three billion owners now

   Harmer sorts the world into ENL, ESL, and EFL, and adds a fourth category, ELF, English as a lingua franca, for conversations between people who share no other language.

   The idea

   The centre of gravity has shifted. When most English conversations happen between non-native speakers, the native-speaker classroom model stops making sense as the only target. Harmer's categories matter practically: an ESL learner in London needs survival English in the community; an EFL learner in a country where English is rarely heard needs everything built inside the classroom walls. ELF asks who the English is actually for, and the answer is often: each other.

   Try this: This week, list which of the four labels (ENL, ESL, EFL, ELF) fits each class you teach, and adjust one activity toward how your students will actually use English.

2. 2Chapter 3

   Adolescents: the hardest and most rewarding crowd

   Harmer sorts learners into young learners, adolescents, and adults, and flags adolescents as the group that often presents the greatest discipline challenges. The reason is not defiance for its own sake: they are searching for identity and are acutely sensitive to peer approval. Every classroom moment is also a social moment, judged by an audience that matters more to them than you do.

   The idea

   Discipline problems in adolescence are usually identity problems. A teenager who fears looking foolish in front of friends will avoid risk, and language learning demands risk. Adults bring motivation and self-discipline; young children bring curiosity and short attention spans; adolescents bring the trickiest equation. The practical move is to make the classroom a place where peer approval and participation point the same direction, so answering a question costs nothing socially.

   Try this: Next lesson with teenagers, make one low-stakes pair task before any open-class answer, so nobody performs alone in front of the group.

3. 3Chapter 4

   Step back: the facilitator's job

   Harmer offers a different role from the teacher at the front with knowledge flowing one way: the facilitator. This teacher does not stand at the front transmitting knowledge. Instead, she sets up the conditions for learning, then steps back, intervening only when necessary. The scene looks less dramatic: students working, teacher circulating, silence that is actually productive. The skill moved from performing to designing.

   The idea

   Facilitation is harder than lecturing, not easier. You have to predict what conditions your particular students need, arrange them, and then resist the urge to fill silence. Intervention becomes a precise tool used only when learning stalls, not a constant narration. The measure of a facilitator is what students do when the teacher is not talking, which is most of the time in a well-run class.

   Try this: In one activity this week, set it up, then physically step back and count how long you can go without intervening. Note what triggered your first intervention.

4. 4Chapters 4-5

   EFL or ESL: the walls of your classroom

   Two learners, two worlds. One studies English in a country where the language is not widely used outside the classroom: after the lesson ends, English goes silent. The other is surrounded by English in the community: the bus, the shop, the television. Harmer contrasts these EFL and ESL settings because everything downstream changes: what can be homework, what needs bringing into class, what counts as exposure. Same language, opposite environments.

   The idea

   Context is not background noise; it is a design constraint. In ESL settings, the classroom can harvest the street: real encounters become material. In EFL settings, the classroom must manufacture the exposure the country does not provide, which raises the value of recordings, texts, and staged practice. Teachers who import methods across this line without adjusting wonder why they flop.

   Try this: Write down how many minutes of English your students hear outside class in a typical day. Let that number shape how much input you build into lessons.

5. 5Chapter 6

   From Grammar-Translation to eclecticism

   Grammar-Translation has students translating texts and memorising rules stated first, applied later. Then the Direct Method bans translation; Audiolingualism turns language into drills until patterns are automatic. The Communicative Approach pushes meaning to the centre. Harmer traces this history and lands on eclecticism: no single method wins, but picking techniques must be principled, not random.

   The idea

   Every method was a correction of the previous one's blind spot, and each left something worth keeping. Grammar-Translation built explicit knowledge; Audiolingualism built fluency of form; Communicative language teaching built the will to communicate. Rigid adherence to one method fails because learners need all three. The modern teacher's unit of choice is the technique, chosen for a reason you can state.

   Try this: Take one activity from your last lesson and write one sentence explaining why you chose it. If you cannot, swap it for something you can defend.

6. 6Chapter 6

   PPP: the workhorse lesson, and its critics

   A past simple lesson unfolds in three beats. Presentation: the teacher states the rule. Practice: gap-fill exercises, controlled and safe. Production: a free writing task where students use the form for themselves. This is PPP, Presentation, Practice, Production, the staging model countless textbooks assume. Harmer presents it as widely used and useful for beginners, while reporting the criticism: it is too linear, and it does not reflect natural language acquisition sequences.

   The idea

   PPP gives new teachers a spine: something to present, something to practise, something to produce. The criticism is fair, because acquisition does not march in straight lines; learners meet forms before they master them. Harmer's defence matters for beginners, who need the scaffolding of a clear sequence. The mature position is to know what PPP is good for and when a different shape serves better.

   Try this: Sketch your next grammar lesson as P-P-P, then mark which stage you could make less linear, for example letting students meet the form before you present it.

7. 7Chapter 7

   Slips, errors, attempts: diagnose before you correct

   A student says something wrong. Three possibilities, three different responses. If it is a slip, prompt them and they fix it themselves; they knew the form. If it is an error, they cannot yet self-correct; the form is not theirs yet. If it is an attempt, they were reaching for something they have never been taught how to say. Harmer's three-way split turns correction from reflex into diagnosis.

   The idea

   The same wrong sentence can deserve three different treatments depending on which category it falls into. Slips need a nudge; errors need teaching or time; attempts need the missing piece supplied, ideally with respect for the effort. Teachers who treat every mistake as a slip badger students who genuinely do not know; teachers who treat everything as an error drown students in explanation. Diagnosis first, correction second.

   Try this: Collect three mistakes from your next lesson and label each slip, error, or attempt. Correct each according to its category, not your habit.

8. 8Chapter 7

   Never interrupt a fluency activity

   Free conversation is rolling. A student mangles a tense. The teacher's fingers itch. Harmer's rule: during fluency activities, do not correct on the spot. Intervene gently at most, and never break the flow of communication. Instead, note the error down and bring it back later as delayed correction. Accuracy activities like grammar drills are the place for immediate correction; fluency is the place to let meaning run.

   The idea

   Correction has a cost, and during fluency work the cost is the activity itself. Students who expect interruption start performing safety instead of meaning, which is exactly what fluency practice is supposed to exercise. Delayed correction gets the best of both: communication stays whole, and the error still gets addressed. The discipline is writing it down instead of saying it now.

   Try this: During your next speaking activity, keep a pen and paper and write down errors instead of correcting them. Run a five-minute correction slot afterwards.

9. 9Chapter 8

   The Boomerang: test first, teach what the test reveals

   Flip the lesson. Instead of teaching first, Harmer's Boomerang sequence starts with Engage, then Activate: students attempt a real task and discover what they are missing. Only then comes Study, focused language input aimed at exactly that gap. Then Activate again: students redo the task, now with new awareness, and feel the difference. The need comes before the teaching, and the teaching lands because of it.

   The idea

   Boomerang solves PPP's linearity problem by reversing it: production first, so the gap is felt rather than announced. Students who have just failed to say something want the form in a way students who were just told it do not. The second activation is the payoff, because improvement is visible against their own earlier attempt. It is a lesson shape, not a method, so it can wrap around any content.

   Try this: Next week, open a lesson with a task students will partly fail, teach the language the failure exposes, then have them redo the same task.

10. 10Chapter 8

    Guided discovery: let them find the rule

    Two contrasting sentences on the board. The teacher says nothing about rules. Students look, compare, and work out the difference between present perfect and past simple for themselves. This is discovery learning: examples first, rule second, with the teacher guiding rather than telling. The rule arrives with the satisfaction of something found, not delivered.

    The idea

    Rules that students deduce stick better than rules they are told, because the deduction is the learning. Guided discovery also reveals misunderstandings immediately: if a student derives the wrong rule, you see it and address it, instead of discovering the gap a week later in a test. The teacher's craft is choosing examples whose contrast makes the target rule almost visible.

    Try this: Pick one grammar point and write three example pairs whose contrast exposes the rule. Let students state the rule before you confirm it.

11. 11Chapter 11

    Predict before you read

    Before the reading starts, the teacher holds up the headline and the pictures. What will this be about? Students guess, argue, commit. Harmer stresses activating prior knowledge before reading through pre-reading tasks like predicting from headlines or pictures, because comprehension becomes more efficient when the mind is already primed. The same logic extends to listening: show a picture of a busy street scene and ask students to predict what sounds they might hear in a recording.

    The idea

    Reading is not decoding alone; it is matching text against what you already expect. Prediction turns passive reception into active hypothesis-testing, so students read to confirm or revise, which is faster and deeper than reading cold. Pre-tasks also level the field: students with weaker vocabulary can still contribute a guess from a picture, and the guess motivates the text.

    Try this: Before your next reading or listening text, run a two-minute prediction from the headline or picture, and have students check their guesses against the text.

12. 12Chapter 12

    Six principles for teaching listening

    Harmer's six principles for listening: the tape recorder is just as important as the tape, because a bad machine ruins good material. Preparation is vital. Once will not be enough: plan for replay. Students should respond to content, not just language. Different listening stages demand different tasks. And good teachers exploit listening texts to the full, squeezing every use from one recording.

    The idea

    Listening fails in classrooms less because of the audio than because of the handling. A text played once, cold, with a language-focused question, wastes material that could carry three stages of work. The principles redistribute teacher effort to where it pays: preparation, task design per stage, and replay. Content-first questions also respect why humans listen at all, which is to find out what was said.

    Try this: Take one listening text and plan two plays with two different tasks: first for content, second for detail. Notice how much more students extract.

13. 13Chapter 13

    Talking to get things done vs talking to be together

    Harmer splits speaking into two functions. Transactional speaking is getting something done or conveying information, like at a shop counter. Interactional speaking is building and maintaining social ties, like across a dinner table. They demand different things. Transactional talk needs clarity and completion; interactional talk needs turn-taking, rapport, and the skill of keeping conversation alive.

    The idea

    Classrooms over-train transactional English, because it is easy to stage and assess, and under-train interactional English, which is what keeps friendships and jobs. The two genres reward different teaching: transactional tasks can be completed and checked; interactional tasks need open-endedness and social stakes. Naming the difference lets you choose which one a lesson is actually practising.

    Try this: Audit your last five speaking activities: how many were transactional, how many interactional? Add one small-talk style task this week if the balance is lopsided.

14. 14Chapter 14

    Writing as a process, not a product

    Harmer contrasts the product approach, where students imitate a model and hand in a final version, with the process approach, where the stages are the point: pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing. Writing becomes recursive, looping back on itself rather than marching to a single finished text. The draft is not a failure; it is the middle of the work.

    The idea

    Product writing teaches imitation; process writing teaches the habits that produce good writing in any genre. Because real writers brainstorm, draft, review, and edit in loops, students taught only to imitate models never learn to revise, which is where most writing quality actually happens. The process approach also makes feedback timely: commenting on a draft helps the final text, while commenting on a final text helps nobody.

    Try this: Run one writing task as draft-then-revise: collect drafts, give feedback, and have students revise before any grade exists.

15. 15Chapter 15

    Use the coursebook, do not obey it

    The coursebook arrives: coherent syllabus, hours of preparation saved. Harmer values both. Then the trap: coursebook-driven teaching, where the book dictates every lesson and the teacher becomes its page-turner. His alternative is a toolkit of adaptation: adapt, omit, supplement. One concrete strategy is omission, leaving out an exercise that does not suit your particular class, rather than slavishly following the book page by page.

    The idea

    A coursebook is a well-informed guess about an unknown class; you teach a known one. Its coherence and time-saving are real benefits, but they become costs when fidelity to the page replaces fidelity to the learners. Omission is the easiest entry point to adaptation because it requires no creation, only judgement: this exercise, for these students, today, is dead weight.

    Try this: Open your coursebook to next week's unit and cross out one exercise that does not fit your class. Teach the unit without it.

16. 16Chapter 16

    The plan: aims, timing, and what could go wrong

    A lesson plan on the desk carries headings: Aims, Materials, Procedure, Timing, Anticipated problems. Activities come with their timing, and interaction patterns are marked, T-S or S-S, so the teacher can see at a glance who is talking when. The most professional column is the last: anticipated problems and possible solutions, written before the lesson, when there is still time to think.

    The idea

    A plan is not a script; it is a set of decisions made in advance so that in-class attention goes to students rather than logistics. Timing keeps ambitions honest, interaction patterns expose lessons that are secretly monologues, and the anticipated-problems column converts teaching experience into foresight. The discipline of writing solutions beforehand is what separates planning from wishing.

    Try this: For your next lesson, add one row: the single most likely problem and your planned response. Reuse the row format every week.

17. 17Chapter 17

    Direct and indirect tests; summative and formative

    Two test items sit side by side. One asks the candidate to write an essay: a direct item, performing the very skill being tested. The other is a multiple-choice grammar question: an indirect item, probing an enabling skill rather than the skill itself. Harmer also splits assessment by timing: summative assessment, like an end-of-term exam, sums up; formative assessment gives ongoing feedback during the course, while there is still time to act.

    The idea

    Direct items are honest but hard to mark consistently; indirect items are easy to mark but only measure proxies. Most real tests mix them, and knowing which is which tells you what a score actually claims to measure. The summative-formative split matters more for teaching: summative results arrive too late to help the students who took them, so formative feedback is where assessment changes learning.

    Try this: Look at your last test and label each item direct or indirect. If everything is indirect, add one direct task next time.

18. 18Chapter 18

    The whiteboard is only as good as the teaching

    Harmer presents interactive whiteboards as genuinely able to enhance lessons by letting teachers manipulate text and images live, for example inviting students to drag labels onto a picture. Then the caution: the technology is not a substitute for good teaching, and it is only as effective as the pedagogical use made of it.

    The idea

    Interactive whiteboards earn their cost through interactivity that serves learning, not through novelty. Dragging labels works because the students act, predict, and get immediate feedback, not because the image glows. The same board in service of teacher-only display would be an expensive projector. The evaluation question is always pedagogical: what does the touch or the drag make students think about?

    Try this: If you have a board or screen, design one task where students physically manipulate something on it, and one where you do. Compare the engagement.

19. 19Chapter 17

    30/70: shut up more

    Harmer names the quantities: teacher talking time, TTT, and student talking time, STT. He is fair to TTT, which can provide valuable comprehensible input. But the common teacher error is talking too much, which strips students of opportunities to practise speaking. His suggested target ratio: about 30% TTT and 70% STT.

    The idea

    The ratio is a diagnostic, not a law: the point is that in a language class, the learners' speaking practice is the scarce resource, and teacher talk is its main competitor. Because TTT feels like teaching, it is seductive; because it is fluent and accurate, it can even be useful input. The discipline is noticing, usually by recording or counting, how the minutes actually divide.

    Try this: Record five minutes of your next lesson and estimate your TTT share. If it is above 30%, plan one activity that forces student-to-student talk.

20. 20Chapter 17

    Wait three seconds before you rescue them

    Harmer calls this pause wait time: the gap after asking a question before calling on a student or rephrasing. His finding: increasing wait time to just a few seconds leads to longer, more complex student responses. The silence that feels like failure is often students thinking.

    The idea

    Teachers break silences for their own comfort, not the students' benefit. A few seconds of wait time changes the cognitive offer: students who expect the floor to stay open build longer, more complex answers, while students who expect rescue after half a second learn to wait for it. The technique costs nothing and requires only tolerance for a pause that feels longer than it is.

    Try this: After your next question, silently count to three before accepting any answer or rephrasing. Note how the answers change.

21. 21Chapter 21

    Young learners: concrete, short, and musical

    Harmer's picture of young learners up to about nine or ten: they learn best through concrete experiences, games, songs, and stories, and their limited attention span demands frequent changes of activity. The lesson that asks a young child to sit and study abstractly for an hour is designed against the child's nature.

    The idea

    With young learners, the medium is the method: concrete, playful, and varied, because abstraction and long focus are still under construction. Frequent activity changes are not indulgence but attention management, resetting the span before it breaks. Stories and songs carry language in memorable, repeatable packages, which suits children who learn through experience rather than explanation.

    Try this: In a young-learner lesson, plan a change of activity every eight to ten minutes, alternating sitting, moving, singing, and listening.

22. 22Chapter 19

    CLIL: two subjects for the price of one lesson

    This is CLIL, Content and Language Integrated Learning: subjects such as history or science taught through the medium of English, with the dual aim of learning the subject content and the language simultaneously. Neither aim is subordinate.

    The idea

    CLIL dissolves the wall between English class and everything else: language becomes the vehicle for content, and content gives language a reason to exist. For students, the payoff is double and mutually reinforcing, because subject knowledge gives context that makes language memorable, and language gives access to more subject material. For teachers, it demands planning for both aims explicitly, since either can silently disappear.

    Try this: Take one topic from another subject your students study and build a ten-minute English activity around its vocabulary and one core idea.

23. 23Chapter 20

    Action research: study your own classroom

    Harmer describes action research as a cycle: identify the problem. Collect data, through recordings or observation. Reflect on the findings, and make changes based on what the evidence shows. The classroom becomes both the laboratory and the beneficiary, and the teacher becomes the researcher.

    The idea

    Action research replaces hunch with evidence at the scale of one teacher's practice. Its power is accessibility: no lab, no budget, just a question, a recording, and honest looking. Because the researcher teaches the class, findings translate into changes immediately, and the changes can be checked in the next cycle. It is professional development that runs on the job you already have.

    Try this: Pick one classroom problem, record or observe one lesson this week with that problem in mind, and write down three things you notice.

24. 24Chapter 20

    'I am not a finished product'

    Harmer quotes Julian Edge on teacher development: the teacher is a teacher in development, not a finished product, and has a responsibility to create the best possible conditions for learning. Together they reframe the career: not a qualification to complete but a practice to keep developing, with the conditions for learning as the teacher's core deliverable.

    The idea

    The quotes capture the book's stance on teacher development: development is a permanent condition, not a stage you finish and leave behind. Edge's second line connects it back to facilitation, because creating conditions for learning is exactly what a developing teacher gets better at. The identity shift matters: teachers who see themselves as finished stop noticing their classrooms, and noticing is where improvement starts.

    Try this: Write Edge's first sentence somewhere you will see it before class, and add one thing you are currently working on as a teacher.

25. 25Chapter 21

    The reflective practitioner

    The book closes not with a technique but with a stance. Good teachers, Harmer says, are not just classroom technicians. They are reflective practitioners who constantly question what they do and why, and who seek to grow professionally throughout their careers. The techniques in the preceding chapters are the toolkit; this is the habit that keeps the toolkit improving.

    The idea

    Technique without reflection calcifies: the same activities repeat for years, defended by habit rather than results. Reflection is the mechanism that turns experience into improvement, because questioning what you do and why is what converts a lesson that happened into a lesson understood. Careers lengthen the stakes: the teachers who keep growing are the ones who never stop asking.

    Try this: After your last lesson of this week, write two sentences: what you did and why. Do it again next week and read both together.

New teachers who want a map before their first lesson, and experienced ones who suspect their habits have gone stale. Also ideal for CELTA and TESOL students, since Harmer's book sits on the syllabus of teacher-training courses worldwide.

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