Contents
Robert Murphy’s Tenets
The 19 “classic” tenets
- Provide choices.
- Add emotional content.
- Add “solvable mysteries”.
- Add potential “Aha moments”
- Â Add empowerment activities.
- Add activities that are semi-controlled by the learner.
- Focus on real-time issues and mistakes; ensure regular teaching content updates.
- Add emphasis on social learning.
- Ensure vertical coherence and horizontal coherence in the coursebook design.
- Make the goals clear.
- Add a strong sense of closure per unit of study.
- Add generative lexical concepts.
- Add “word maps” and “lexical item grouping” activities.
- Allow confidence to grow with “small group work” before “big group work”.
- Challenge students’ intellect in the L2.
- Revisit content for meaningful and compounding growth—make sure it is not “just a review”.
- Question: Is the learning well-arced?
- Question: Will the learning tasks activate the teacher-student relationship?
- Question: Does the learning task have a real-world application?
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The 20 “new” tenets
- Provide more “thinking” activities in the L2 than basic “linguistic” activities.
- Provide a wide range of cyclically connected activities.
- Manufacture a strong need for lexis—then provide them like presents.
- Provide lectures (top-down teaching) only when students will strongly welcome them.
- Provide novelty; challenge students in novel ways that students will appreciate.
- Design the syllabus to be able to sustain cyclical compounding learning tasks.
- Do not allow critical breaks to happen to students.
- Provide a “Performance-based learning climax” in each chapter of study.
- Do not simply throw in “pair work for discussion” after each learning activity.
- Ensure students’ realization that “Personal growth with the L2” is the ultimate goal.
- Disclose the pedagogical strategies to the students so that they are more self- aware of their learning and their learning process.
- Regularity and unwavering cyclical designs lead to quicker automaticity in L2 skill building and L2 usage.
- Be aware of “rapport with students” and how rapport affects student motivation, evaluation, and learning potential (halo effect).
- Teach with “L2 Maturity” in mind, with a good understanding of students’ L1 competence.
- Assess and track L2 Maturation rates per student.
- Provide “focus group” tasks in and/or outside of the classroom.
- Timing within cycles can be just as important as the content of cycles.
- High support contexts nurture deeper thinking in students, but they are difficult to design.
- Allow for critical self-review of past work.
- Establish explicit “learning from peer” tasks.