This is my third article focusing on class-centred teaching: encouraging classes of language learners to develop into cohesive groups. Class-centred teachers know that they must behave in certain ways if they want their classes to be cohesive. They must encourage feelings of friendliness, trust and mutual support between  class members, not stand on ceremony; they must accept student individuality and spontaneity, discipline individuals in sensitive ways, and so on.

However, there’s one essential factor that even classcentred teachers tend to forget: the need to focus on learning goals. Unless students feel that they’re making genuine progress towards achieving learning goals, classes can only become superficially cohesive. That deep sense of unity and common purpose that comes from making genuine learning progress will be absent. Goals are tricky things because we tend to think they’re obvious and shared by everyone – and that progress towards them is self-evident. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unless we explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it (which involves articulating our beliefs about language learning), students can be genuinely bewildered and think ‘Why am I doing this?’ ‘What’s the point of that?’ or ‘What have I actually learnt today?’ This is particularly true in classes in which students spend a significant amount of time engaged in small-group interactive tasks, and proportionately less time focusing on the building blocks of language. How precisely do we translate the broad goal of improving our students’ linguistic proficiency into practice? First, we must ensure that every lesson has an overall sense of coherence, with each element fitting into the lesson in a logical way.

If we’re using a textbook, we need to examine the relevant chapter beforehand so that we can plan how best to create interest, introduce new language, sequence activities, and so on. Planning to ‘do a chapter’ isn’t enough: we need to plan precisely how we’re going to do it. Only by having things crystal clear in our own minds can we convey a sense of purpose and direction.
Second, we must be explicit about our intentions and expectations at the beginning of lessons. We don’t need to go into great detail, but we do need to give some idea of what we plan to do. Some teachers make a point of saying ‘Today we’re going to do this’, while others write a sequence of activities in a corner of the board and tick them off one by one. We must, of course, be prepared to be flexible because planned activities aren’t always appropriate – and we may find better ways of achieving the same goals. Whatever else, we must exhibit an overall demeanour of purposefulness.

Third, we need to explain to our students how different classroom activities will benefit their learning by saying things like ‘I want you to listen to the tape right through with your eyes closed before looking at the questions. This will encourage you to listen actively so that you gradually come to understand what the story’s about’. By justifying our selection of activities – and the ways in which we require our students to complete those activities – we reveal our beliefs about how linguistic proficiency develops. If students know there are sound reasons for doing things in certain ways, they will behave collectively in a more focused and goal-oriented manner.

Finally, if we want our classes to maintain a sense of forward momentum, we need to provide our students with ongoing proof that they’re making learning progress. Because it’s difficult to measure communicative competence, we need to draw attention to the things that have been achieved during lessons. Some teachers make a point of saying what’s been learnt at the end of each lesson, or remind students what they’ve achieved at the beginning of the next. Others create mini quizzes on a regular basis – or have their students identify what they’ve recently learnt in order to test their friends (new vocabulary items, for instance). Other teachers regularly talk in general terms about the progress of their class, identifying particular areas of improvement.
As with anything, it’s easy to go too far in the opposite direction. Focusing on goals is no exception. Just as we can fail to focus sufficiently on learning goals, so we can become so goal-focused that we fail to notice that some students have fallen behind. This is most likely to happen in exam preparation classes where we’re concerned to cover everything in the syllabus or reach the final page of the book. Just as a group of hill walkers is no longer united if some members have become separated from the main group, so a language class is no longer cohesive if some class members have been ‘dropped’.
So, giving coherence to our teaching programs, being explicit about our expectations and explaining how and why different activities benefit student learning are essential components of class-centred teaching. Without overall class goals that embrace individual student goals our classes will never become truly cohesive. The lesson for today is: be goal-oriented!
Rose Senior is the author of The Experience of Language Teaching, published by CUP and the recent winner of the Ben Warren Prize.