Test-teach-test approach to teaching English

Any teacher will rightly stress the importance of clear lesson structure for language lessons. Staging a class with purpose is important to work towards your lesson aims in a systematic way, and to ensure that you include time for student talk, correction, assessment of upgrade, and all the other features of an effective lesson.

The main goal of this phase is for the teacher to observe errors that students are making with the target language. 

In the “test” stage, the teacher should set the context by having the students do a test of some kind. It can be an actual test, or it could be a task or activity of some kind that uses the target language.

The teacher will observe carefully and monitor in order to see how students are using the language. Look particularly for any errors or omissions and write them down in preparation for the “teach” phase.

These activities work better for finding out what vocabulary students know about a certain topic. To find out about grammatical knowledge, we can give an explicit test of some kind.

You’ve got two options at this stage. If the learners made errors with the language you thought they would, you can go ahead and ‘teach’ the target language to the learners in this stage.

However, if they made some errors that you feel is even more important (i.e. it impedes fluency even more than the language you anticipated teaching), you can focus on that instead.

Either way, this means a focus on form and accuracy. You could:

• Do delayed error correction with the examples of language from the last stage (elicit the errors, or peer correction).
• Explicitly tell the learners the target language, form, usage.
• Give learners examples (on the board, on worksheets) and ask them to spot the patterns and work out the usage.
• Run through some drills, individual and choral.
• Do gap-fills, cloze activities, or other worksheets.
• Or anything else that you’d normally do!

Don’t forget to concept check to make sure the weaker learners understand.

The goal of the second “test” phase is to help students improve their fluency while maintaining accuracy with the target language. 

To round out the lesson, students will do another “test” of some kind. This can be a task or activity that uses the language in a freer way. The focus should be on improving fluency with the language while still maintaining a good degree of accuracy.

Some activities to consider using for this are role plays, board games, telling stories, and different presentations. 

Firstly,  TTT lessons provide clear evidence of improvement. The demonstrated language understanding and use from the first Test stage can be compared to that of the final Test stage, and more often than not, improvement is clear, based on the teaching which occurs in the middle of the lesson. 

Also,  TTT is good with classes that you don’t know well (or you don’t know how well they know the target language). It’s great to use with learners that lack confidence, as they can see/hear their progress in one lesson. 

Especially if you use the same task for both ‘test’ stages, it’s very obvious to the students that they’ve improved. The word ‘Test’ can be a bit misleading, as you’re not actually testing the students, but observing them use it.