Backwash Effect

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The backwash effect: from

testing to teaching

Luke Prodromou

Teach: If you teach someone something you give them instructions so they know about it or how to do it; you make them think, feel or act in a new or different way; you explain or show students how to do something. (Collins' COBUILD Dictionary)

Test: To find out how much someone knows by asking them questions. (Longman's Active Study Dictionary).

'Teach' and 'test' are quite close together in a dictionary, but in testing we do different things from the things we do when we teach. This article assesses the concept of 'backwash' in language teaching, looks at the consequences of testing on teaching in a broad educational context, and suggests that 'negative backwash' makes good language teaching more difficult. The two processes of testing and teaching are considered to be necessary but distinct. A system is described for distinguishing between them which is then applied to developing classroom activities for examination preparation classes, to help teachers move from testing to teaching procedures.

What is the The backwash effect can be defined as the direct or indirect effect of backwash effect? examinations on teaching methods. According to the effect of examinations on what we do in the classroom we may refer to 'positive' and 'negative' backwash (Heaton 1990: 170, Hughes 1989: 1). Although it is an important factor in classrooms wherever examinations play a dominant role in the educational process, it has not been fully explored. It is not mentioned in the index to such standard ELT handbooks as Stern (1983), Howatt (1984), or Harmer (1991), and reference books such as Richards et al. (1985) and Seaton (1982) do not consider it worthy of an entry. Heaton (1990) and Hughes (1989) discuss, rather sketchily, what I refer to as 'overt' backwash (see below), but do not explore the broader educational implications of 'covert' backwash. The most thorough treatment of the concept of backwash is that of Alderson and Wall (1993), who suggest that 'washback' as they call it, is more complex than has hitherto been assumed. They make the valid point that there is no one-to-one relationship between tests, good or bad, and their effect on the classroom. In their view, before a test has any impact on classroom practice it is mediated by factors such as the place of examinations in particular societies, the teacher's competence, and the resources available within the school system.

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The consequences of backwash

Whether the backwash effect is positive or negative, how it operates in particular contexts—indeed, whether it exists at all—must be explored empirically. Many of the assumptions about backwash are untested and simplistic. Alderson and Wall (1993) point out that very little observation of the effect has been carried out, and that what evidence there is points to the highly complex nature of the process.

Bearing these words of caution in mind, it might be useful to provide a brief background to the description of backwash put forward in this article. I have been involved in examinations at several levels: as a teacher, trainer, examiner, and writer of tests and examination-related materials. The backwash effect described here is based on my observation of examination classes in the private and public sectors, over a period of twenty years, in a society (Greece) where examinations play a very significant role.

Professional neglect of the backwash effect (what it is, how it operates, and its consequences) is one of the main reasons why new methods often fail to take root in language classes. Many teachers, trapped in an examination preparation cycle, feel that communicative and humanistic methodologies are luxuries they cannot afford. When the market calls on teachers and institutions to produce quantifiable results, it usually means good examination results. Sound teaching practices are often sacrificed in an anxious attempt to 'cover' the examination syllabus, and to keep ahead of the competition. In summary, 'negative backwash', as experienced by the learner, means language learning in a stressful, textbook-bound environment.

The value of testing

Uses and abuses of testing

It goes without saying that tests and examinations—at the right time, in the right proportions—have a valuable contribution to make in assessing learners' proficiency, progress, and achievement. As a device for diagnosing learners' errors, and for defining the interlanguage of individuals and groups of learners, they are indispensable. Tests are also the simplest and most effective form of extrinsic motivation, of imposing discipline on the most unruly class, and of ensuring attention as well as regular attendance. Because they are closely bound up with classroom authority, tests invariably lead to teacher-centred lessons, especially where the teacher is inexperienced or insecure.

Abuse of testing occurs when tests invade essential teaching space, when they are not the final stage of a process of learning but become the beginning, middle, and end of the whole process. Testing may be a short cut to extrinsic motivation, but constant resort to it is an admission of the teacher's failure to make intrinsic motivation work. In the long run, it will demotivate the learner.

Overt backwash The backwash effect can be overt or covert. In its overt forms, it usually

means doing a lot of past papers in class as preparation for an examination; it may involve replicating, from past papers or the textbook, the

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types favoured in the particular examination students will be taking: multiple-choice, transformation, or gap-filling. The methodological routine that results from the negative backwash effect in its overt forms is an all too familiar one: presentation of the text followed by questions similar to those in the examination. This 'text + questions' formula is a crude mirror-image of what happens in most conventional examinations.

Other hallmarks of the backwash effect include the use of fragments of (often inauthentic) language, a concentration on word- and sentence-level linguistic features, and a focus on skills which in terms of administration and marking are easier to test. This is why reading and writing tend to be given much more emphasis in classrooms than speaking and listening. This kind of overt backwash is usually negative, but there is no reason why we should not have tests which adopt techniques more in line with communicative and, to some extent, humanistic teaching. Fortunately, it seems that most examination boards are aware of the problem, and are taking steps to tip the balance in favour of positive backwash. It is possible for testing procedures to have a positive effect on classroom practice. For example, when one of the examination boards introduced a listening test based on audio-cassette material (to replace the texts read aloud by an examination supervisor), this had the effect of heightening awareness of what authentic listening involves, and schools quickly began to prepare students to cope with the new challenges.

Covert backwash The explicit consequences of the backwash effect are easily identifiable.

The implicit consequences are more elusive, and more disturbing. Even if examination boards reduced the number of boring multiple-choice exercises, the examination class would still be in conflict with the teacher's desire to teach communicatively and humanistically. This is because covert testing will always be with us. It is a deep-seated, often unconscious process, which reflects unexamined assumptions about a wide range of pedagogic principles: how people learn, the relationship between learner and teacher, the nature of teacher authority, the importance of correction, the balance between form and content, the role of classroom management, and so on.

Basically, covert testing amounts to teaching a textbook as if it were a

testbook. Usually the teacher is not fully aware of this process: in his or

her mind there is a clear dividing line between a lesson which involves teaching and one which involves testing. I am using the latter term in a specific sense which includes both overt and covert backwash effects. Some examples of covert testing will show what I mean. I have observed many lessons where the teacher asks a question, receives a correct answer from a particular student, and then moves on to ask the next student the next question. The objective of this routine is to find out what the students know. This, and the lack of involvement of the rest of the class in the sequence, makes the activity more of an informal assessment than a

teaching procedure. The absence of any lead-in or follow-up to the work

done on a text is entirely typical of testing procedures.

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Lead-ins and follow-ups have become standard teaching devices (see Peck 1988: 201, where he refers to them as 'heads and tails'). The pedagogic rationale of a lead-in is to arouse interest and draw on the students' knowledge, thereby making learning 'easier'. By drawing a personal response from students, a follow-up will help fix or anchor the new input in the learners' memories. A good teacher maximises the learners' chance of success by teaching vocabulary, and doing Jistening and pre-reading tasks to motivate learners, activate their past experience, and draw on their potential for more effective learning strategies. This approach could not be more in contrast to the standard ritual in classroom tests and public examinations, where the teacher simply gives out the papers, and instructs students to 'get on with it' in silence.

Penalizing error Testing values correct answers, and penalizes error. But in teaching we

should be as interested in the process by which students arrive at the wrong answer as we are in the correct answer itself. Holt (1964: 142-3) described how the process of 'only the right answer' ignores the stage individual students have reached in their learning, and imposes on them models of performance based on the 'good' learners in the class. In testing, the good learner is a yardstick by which all students are measured; in teaching, the student is his or her own yardstick. This is important: covert testing occurs whenever we do not give individuals their own space and time to answer questions; it is in subtle, invisible ways like this that we set up students to fail. Failure may be an inevitable feature of the discrimination required in testing procedures, and the classroom hierarchies this leads to; in teaching, however, discrimination in the negative sense has no place—for the good language teacher, success in tests should be as routine as failure.

Asking questions In overt tests, the teacher or the examiners ask a lot of questions, but

students taking public examinations, for instance, are expressly discouraged from doing so, unless there are exceptional circumstances. In covert testing, too, the teacher asks a lot of questions, while the students are not given much opportunity to ask questions (of the teacher or each other). A teaching procedure, on the other hand, allows students to exercise the power of asking questions; question-asking is accepted as an assertion of personality that can give a boost to self-confidence. It is symptomatic of the psychology of conventional testing that questions are discouraged, and worrying to note how often teaching mimics the mono-interrogative mode of public examination, with parallel systems of teacher authority and student submissiveness.

Denying learners' In covert testing less able learners are penalized by the collective thinking time assumption that the objective of teacher questions is to elicit the right

answer in the shortest possible time. Thus, good students shout out the answers, put their hands up first, fill in the pauses created by 'slower' learners searching for the right answer. Testing abhors pauses, which it sees as a vacuum rather than a necessary space in which students find their own level.

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The proxemics of covert testing Denying learners communication Inflation of teacher authority

Some learners need more thinking time than others, but conventional testing conditions impose a strict time limit on the production of knowledge. It is not uncommon to hear of highly intelligent people who have failed public examinations because of time constraints, or an inability to adapt their learning style to examination conditions.

In denying learners essential thinking time teachers often unconsciously recreate these conditions; it is a great temptation to accept a correct answer from the quicker students and move on to the next question. Not giving students the time they need to prepare and process language, either in whole-class work or in pairs, creates anxiety, even panic, and therefore error—teacher-induced error. The strict time limits of formal tests can produce error in the same way.

Covert testing routines are often accompanied and reinforced by the teacher's approach to classroom management. The use of space is one important dimension of the management of groups. Teachers can teach badly, not because of the methods or techniques they have adopted, but through mismanagement of space.

Many teachers tend to move closer to the student they have asked to answer a question, and to fix their gaze on this student as they wait for the answer they have in mind. This proximity of teacher and nominated student tends to exclude the rest of the class; the teacher's body language, almost invites the non-participants, to 'switch off and talk amongst themselves, which they often do, till the teacher turns to them in search of the next correct answer.

A powerful visual message is also conveyed by the way desks are arranged in the classroom. In testing, the desks are invariably arranged in straight lines with a space between them large enough to deter students from communicating with each other. Communication between students in a test is thus both implictly and explicitly forbidden.

In teaching, by contrast, we encourage sharing and communication by arranging desks in a semi-circular or group formation. These are familiar dichotomies. Yet how many teachers go into a classroom for an ordinary lesson where the desks have already been laid out in linear fashion and leave them exactly as they are, even though a horse-shoe or group arrangement is possible? The learners are thus given an unspoken but powerful message about the teacher's methodological assumptions; what in teaching we would call 'caring and sharing', in testing becomes 'cheating'.

The way we use space in class is as important as the texts we choose and the methodology we adopt in presenting them. An arrangement of desks, appropriate in the context of objective assessment, when transferred to everyday teaching, may obstruct the process of learning.

Testing, overt and covert is, as Fabian (1982: 24) has argued, a paternalistic, teacher-centred business: 'Examinations—like democratic institutions—do not thrive in isolation. When the consumer and the

The backwash effect: testing and teaching ₁₇

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Characteristics of testing and teaching

Failure and success

community at large surrender to academic technicians their right and duty to be involved, they also surrender their right to check on the teaching strategies that are the direct result.'

The premium placed on the 'right answer' in both overt and covert testing inevitably adds to the inflation of the teacher's authority, based on his or her role as arbiter of correctness. One of my main arguments is that we need to move away from this relationship towards a learner-centred approach to testing, and I will give examples of how this can begin to happen. In Table 1,1 summarize what I feel are the most important characteristics of the teaching and testing processes.

The qualities listed there under 'Teaching' are based on my own observation of teachers, native-speakers and non-native speakers, in the context of a number of teacher training courses and on a survey I have been conducting with students into what makes a good language teacher. I have also drawn on the work into effective teaching reported in Holt (1964), Peck (1988), Richards (1990), and Harmer (1991).

The features listed under 'Testing' are those we normally associate with the backwash effect, with the addition of what I have referred to as covert symptoms of backwash. While most public examinations and tests, often against the testers' wishes, encourage attitudes to learning summed up under Testing, it should be said that a number of recent public examinations have tried to counter negative backwash by basing more of their material on authentic sources, and reducing the number of decontextualized sentences. Discrete item testing (knowledge of individual points of language) is balanced with global testing (successful use of more than one language skill in more extensive chunks of text). In addition, the testing of speaking has become a more important feature, and has been made more natural and communicative. It is also refreshing to see some examining bodies insist on the use of dictionaries in the examination room: in real life, students would not be isolated from such useful resources, so why should the examination not allow this? However, the backwash effect remains predominantly negative and encourages a model of learning summed up in the left-hand column of Table 1. (Broadly speaking, the two approaches described correspond to left and right brain learning—see, for example, Gerngross and Puchta, 1992. I would like now to discuss in more detail some of the characteristics listed in Table 1.

Tests are designed to discriminate proficiency, progress, and achievement. Indeed, some tests would be regarded as inefficient if all candidates enjoyed equal success. This is innocent enough, and, in administrative terms, very useful. It does, however, tend to encourage a view of students as 'good' or 'bad', 'strong' or 'weak'. Such a classification may be the first step towards a fatalism that assumes some students are born to fail and others are 'natural' language learners. The victim of this Manichaean view of the classroom world is usually the so-called 'bad' learner, who is

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Table 1 Testing Teaching

exercises (multiple-choice, etc.] failure weakness errorphobia marks fear anxiety teacher control textbook input judgement mistrust individualism, competition impersonality insensitivity isolated sentences fragments of text form culture-bound text+questions solemnity boredom extrinsic motivation product tasks success strength

learning from error achievement confidence pleasure

learner independence learner input

support (from teacher and peer group) rapport

the group, co-operation personalization sensitivity to learners text whole texts content culture-sensitive lead-in, follow-up humour interest intrinsic motivation process

condemned to failure by the pressures of examination preparation. Testing is a straitjacket that cramps personal learning styles and discourages the 'weak' learner's potential for growth.

Error In testing, there is a pre-occupation with accuracy and error that reaches

almost behaviourist proportions. Sadly, 'errormania' on the part of the teacher encourages 'errorphobia' in the learners: a reluctance by 'weaker' members of the group in particular to take risks for fear of making mistakes, losing marks, and thus slipping down in the classroom hierarchy. The result is a silence arising not from the learners' ability but from discriminatory classroom procedures. Research into the good language learner has highlighted the fact that these learners are risk-takers who are also able to learn from their mistakes (Rubin 1987, Wenden 1987, Stern 1983). By not encouraging learners to learn from their mistakes and work out the rules of the language for themselves, conventional testing prevents the full development of the cognitive aspects of learning, thereby contradicting what we have come to consider as good teaching practice. Marks versus

achievement

A classroom climate dominated by testing will give students the impression that what matters in language learning is the mark they get, not only in tests, but also for classroom performance, assignments, and homework, even though these may have no direct connection with the final examination. The students' frequent demand for feedback on all of their errors and their preoccupation with their weaknesses rather than their strengths have their numerical equivalent in the pursuit of high marks or grades. Although the view that language acquisition is easily quantifiable may encourage students to work harder (extrinsic motivation), it also obscures the importance of concepts which are not always easy to measure, such as appropriacy, quality, and attitude in learning.

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Anxiety versus pleasure Textbook input versus learner input The discourse of examination texts

Tests and examinations are closely associated in learners' minds with anxiety; it is doubtful whether performance, even in tests, is facilitated by an attack of fear and nervous tension but, in educational terms, these are a major obstacle to learning. Most recent approaches to language learning would accept the importance of affective factors in the classroom. The features of orthodox testing I have described so far all contribute towards raising the learner's affective filter, and thus placing barriers in the way of efficient learning. Moreover, a great strain is placed on classroom relationships when the teacher is called upon to play the role of the students' judge and executioner: when testing comes through the door, rapport between teacher and learner often goes out the window.

Anxiety about covering the examination syllabus means teachers are afraid to take risks with material not manifestly related to the examination; students may also become impatient with material which does not seem to be in the form of examination practice. This has multiple consequences: textbook and teacher input are the order of the day, and the material chosen may be irrelevant to learners' personal needs or culture; even when the material is potentially interesting it is not taught for content but for form, as this serves the narrow requirements of examination preparation.

One-dimensional or anaemic textbook/teacher input is to some extent inevitable when the public examination is also an international examination, available in countries with widely differing cultures. Challenging and culturally relevant material is watered down on the principle of the lowest common denominator. Examination material will tend to reflect the culture in which English is spoken as a first language. The problem of alien and alienating content is a parallel one to that of the 'global textbook', but in an even more acute form. The remedy might be a greater use of local and learner input, but this is an option rarely adopted by teachers and students straitjacketed by examination syllabuses and materials: material that will not 'come up in the exams' will rarely be 'brought up' in class.

The content of texts used in examination preparation is not only impersonal and culture-bound, it is often a peculiar variety of English, which is neither fact not fiction. Test items like the following are unique to the examination genre—they are literally context-less and content-less, about nothing and nobody in particular:

1 I'd like to visit India more than any other country in the world. India is

2 The flight to Moscow lasted three and a half hours. It took

Pronouns in English usually refer to somebody or something previously mentioned, but the pronoun in sentence 1 refers to neither: it is pure form. We do not know who the T referred to is, and we will never know why he or she would like to visit India.

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The definite article in sentence 2 is tantalizingly specific, but in fact the cohesion is misleading: there is no flight, definite or indefinite; there is no context to which this text belongs and to which we can refer if we want to know more. It is difficult (though not impossible, as I will show later) to relate these propositions to a linguistic or real-world context. Functionally, we do not know whether these texts are parts of a narrative or argumentative text.

Solemnity versus

humour Humour, like context and content, is considered inappropriate in testing. Tests cannot be funny because there is not thought to be room for humour in the solemn ritual of the examination process. Thus, testing becomes a pretext for numerous practices which in any other pedagogic context we would reject out of hand as inimical to good language learning.

Product and

process The two methods of imparting language that I have referred to as testing and teaching differ in one overarching essential: the first focuses almost exclusively on the product (the language to be taught), while the second aims to make the process of imparting language both interesting and fulfilling. In the former, the learner's potential, both linguistic and personal, is downgraded; in the latter, it is encouraged. The obsession with the linguistic product, and the sacrifice of rich pedagogic processes, is usually accompanied by cries of 'We don't have time', 'I must finish the book', 'Cover the syllabus', etc. Preoccupation with the end-product obscures the importance in language teaching of two factors mentioned earlier: classroom management and rapport. If the examination syllabus and its accompanying exercise types are the destination for many teachers, the process by which they reach that destination is the journey: I have been arguing that this journey, which depends so much on good management and rapport, should be both enjoyable and educationally satisfying. Transferring testing procedures to teaching procedures

Tests and examinations are not going to go away; the product, both linguistic and commercial, will continue to be packaged, marketed, and sold. Any suggestions one makes concerning the transfer from testing procedures to teaching procedures must take this fact of educational life into account. The examples I give in the final part of this paper are based on exercise types commonly used in examinations. I will try to show how the most unpromising testing material might be made into a more challenging vehicle of personal expression, without the teacher having to abandon the book or the syllabus.

The overall principle behind the techniques described below is the shift from teacher control to student control. The tasks will therefore involve the use of learner input, which I feel is a key element in transforming negative into positive backwash and in making examination preparation more of an educational activity than it is at present in most examination classes.

The backwash effect: testing and teaching 21

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1 The examiner's hat

(i) Students complete sentence-level multiple-choice, gap-filling, or transformation exercises in the conventional way.

(ii) Students rewrite the test items to reflect their personal views, using the textbook or testbook as a guide. Thus, if an original sentence in the test says 'Stamp collecting is the most enjoyable hobby I know', students can replace either the subject or the adjective with items of their choice. Students may also replace impersonal or 'non-existent' subjects such as 'he', 'she', or 'John', with the names of friends, people in the class, members of their family, or famous people, or make the sentence interesting or amusing in any way they wish. The objective in each case is to make the utterly forgettable original sentence become memorable in some way.

(iii) In groups, the students re-cast their personalized sentences in the style of the test format they are working on (multiple-choice, gap-filling, transformation exercises, etc).

(iv) The groups swap their personalized test items and do each other's tests.

(v) The teacher checks and gets feedback on the form and in particular on the content of the sentences.

2 Gender bending

(i) Get students to rewrite sentence-level multiple-choice and transformation exercises by asking them to change all feminine subjects into masculine and vice versa. The results will be both surprising and memorable.

(ii) Focus on content: consider whether the resulting sentences are (a) correct (b) acceptable. A lively debate will invariably ensue as, for instance, when 'He's such a naughty boy; it's amazing what his mother lets him get away with' becomes 'She's such a naughty girl; it's amazing what her father lets her get away with' or when 'Having laid the table, Mrs Jones called the family to supper' becomes 'Having laid the table, Mr Jones called the family to supper.'

(iii) Ask students to summarize the results of this exercise into a chart similar to Table 2. (This is a small sample based on an authentic, international public examination!).

(iv) Ask students to write an argumentative composition on equality of the sexes based on the 'data' given in Table 2.

3 Transformation tennis

The following exercise breaks down the pattern of serried ranks of students—heads in books, no eye contact—by using the classroom space as a kind of verbal tennis court.

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Table 2 Males Females

stay out late have to come home early can push open doors make chocolate cake

earn a lot of money give up their jobs to look after children drive quickly and carelessly look carefully before crossing the road make difficult decisions are afraid to go into the sea

take an active part in politics tell lies become priests become nurses

(i) The class form into two teams. A student in team X 'serves' the first half of a pair of transformation sentences, for example by saying 'India is the country I would like to visit more than any other.' (ii) A student from team Y serves the sentence back in the form of an

appropriate transformation, using the stem provided in the book: The

country (I would like to visit more than any other is India). Team Y

scores if the transformation is correct. (iii) The teams take it in turns to serve.

This technique can be applied to any textbook exercise which is in two distinct parts: matching, multiple-choice, word-building (e.g. noun to adjective).

4 Connecting the fragments

The following exercise takes impersonal fragments of language with minimal content and gets students to make them into an integrated part of a whole text.

(i) Complete a sentence-level test in your usual way (multiple-choice, transformations, word-building, expansion from notes to complete sentences, etc.).

(ii) Ask students to write a composition to include at least one of the practice sentences. They can incorporate the sentences at the beginning, middle, or end of their composition.

(iii) Students circulate their compositions round the class (or you can stick them up on the class noticeboard as an 'exhibition'). Students read each other's texts and try to identify and make a note of the sentences from the original textbook exercise.

This exercise not only provides creative composition practice, but also revises those sentences which, no sooner practised, are usually forgotten. Management My suggestions may seem to imply that the problem of negative techniques backwash is one of course design and methodology. It is, however, especially in its covert forms, chiefly a problem of attitude and rapport. Teachers express attitudes towards learning not only in their choice of materials and methods, but also in their approach to classroom management. This discipline—which involves the use of time, space, voice, and gesture—weaves subtle messages which can motivate or demotivate a class. For this reason I would like to end with a brief

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checklist of management tactics which will tend to mitigate some of the features of testing, and encourage an ideology of co-operative learning.

From multiple 1 When you ask the class a question, allow the 'weaker' students some choice to personal thinking time—do not make question and answer routine a race to the

choice right answer.

2 Do not stand too close to the student who is answering the question, thereby excluding the rest of the class: use space and distance to create an inclusive, group feeling.

3 When you get a 'right' answer do not just move on to the next item: ask other students 'Do you agree?', 'What have you got?' Do not reveal the right answer too soon. The process is as important as the product.

4 Give students time to look at questions before they listen or read—this will make the task more directed, and help develop skills rather than merely test them.

5 Encourage students to share—establish the idea of tests as a group activity alongside individual testing tactics.

6 Ensure smooth linking of the stages of the lesson—avoid the disconnected, random fragments, the rag-bag so characteristic of test material and examination preparation classes.

7 Avoid saying things like 'work quickly', or 'you've got one minute to do this—hurry up'.

8 Arrange desks in such a way that students can see each other and make eye contact.

9 When you ask a question or discuss a problem use eye contact to include the whole class, not just the 'best' students.

10 Use your voice to suggest that error is a useful contribution to the class, not an unfortunate lapse on the part of the student. Try a fall-rise intonation ('Yes, but . . .') rather than a fall ('No').

Received December 1993

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References

Alderson, C. and D. Wall. 1993. 'Does washback exist?' Applied Linguistics 14/2: 115-29. Fabian, P. 1982. 'Examinations: why tolerate their

paternalism?' in J. B. Heaton (ed.) Language

Testing. London: Modern English Publications. Gerngross, G. and H. Puchta. 1992. Creative

Grammar Practice. London: Longman.

Harmer, J. 1991. The Practice of English Language Teaching. London: Longman.

Heaton, J. D. 1990. Writing English Language Tests. London: Longman.

Holt, J. 1964. How Children Fail. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Howatt, A. P. R. 1984. A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Hughes, A. 1989. Testing for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Peck, A. 1988. Language Teachers at Work. London: Prentice Hall.

Richards, J., J. Platt, and H. Weber. 1985. The Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics.

London: Longman.

Richards, J. C. 1990. The Language Teaching Matrix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubin, J. 1987. 'What the 'good language learner'

can teach us'. TESOL Quarterly 9/1:41-51. Seaton, B. 1982. A Handbook of English Language

Teaching Terms and Practice. London: Macmillan. Stern, H. H. 1983. Fundamental Concepts of

Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Wenden, A. 1987. 'How to be a good language learner' in A. Wenden and J. Rubin (eds.) Learner

Strategies in Language Learning. Englewood

Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

The author

Luke Prodromou works for The British Council in Greece. He has been involved in training teachers for the DTEFLA and DOTE and is an assessor/moderator for these schemes. He has also been a member of the UCLES CTEFLA Scheme Committee and the team working on the new Cambridge Integrated Language Training Schemes (CILTS). He is the author of Mixed

Ability Classes (Macmillan) and several textbooks for

examination classes.