Tom Needham's 'Explicit English Teaching'

Any book specifically directed at English teaching is always going to draw my attention (here is a list of some such recommended books). So Explicit English Teaching (2023, Corwin) by Tom Needham is welcome: he has been a consistently interesting blogger on English matters for some years.

The book is rooted in cognitive science, and is in its initial sections a fine introduction to its basics. Tom Needham then deepens his analysis in showing how English teaching can benefit from such awareness: this is particularly cheering since much writing about the area comes from a scientific/mathematics background. The earlier chapters deal with the fundamentals of learning, including remembering and understanding, and he points out that

Although inflexible knowledge is almost always the start point in a sequence of learning, the goal is almost always for students to gain deep and flexible knowledge so that they can transfer and apply it to the widest possible range of contexts and situations.

This is the process that as teachers we guide, and too often ‘outsiders’ to the profession misunderstand it, wrongly and pejoratively labelling the starting point ‘rote learning’: I wrote an exasperated post a while ago on the wrongness of this term for Leaving Certificate English.

Further chapters look at retrieval and testing effects, and the differences between novices and experts, including the importance of Cognitive Load Theory. In Chapter 5 Needham digs into the details of teaching vocabulary and how to help students access challenging texts, and then moves on to the often mis-cited Direct Instruction (with and without capital letters), as well as the now quite familiar work of Barak Rosenshine (particularly on modelling and guided practice). His granular chapter on Instructional Sequences’ may well be helpful for relatively new teachers in particular, though it isn’t my thing.

Each chapter starts with bullet-point indicators, and concludes with summaries and detailed references. I would recommend going through it in order, building incrementally on previous ideas, though it would still be possible to dive straight into an individual section. Explicit English Teaching is a valuable addition to English-specific teaching literature.