Book review: The Twenty Most Effective Language Teaching Techniques by Paul Nation

This book by highly respected and frequently published writer about language learning and teaching, Paul Nation, was published in 2024. Being familiar with a good deal of Paul Nation's work, I was curious to read this latest volume.

Paul Nation is a veteran teacher, researcher and writer about English Language Teaching (ELT). He is best known for his best-selling books about vocabulary learning and for his 'four strands' model of curriculum design. In this very clearly structured book, largely based on previously written works, Nation lays out the basics of his Four Strands model, alongside his so-called Principles of Learning. He then chooses what he considers to be the most effective language teaching techniques (activities) and assesses them in relation to the Principles and the Four Strands. After the introduction, each chapter describes the technique and how best to implement it, considers what research evidence might support it, briefly looks at any digital applications and then relates the technique back to his Principles. In my previous post I summarised the Principles, so I shall not relist them here.

I shall, howver, briefly decribe his Four Strands model of curriculum design. According to Nation a balanced language learning programme should consist of four key components:

1. Meaning-Focused Input: Learners acquire language through listening and reading that is mostly understandable.
2. Meaning-Focused Output: Learners use language to express meaning through speaking and writing.
3. Language-Focused Learning: Learners deliberately focus on language features like grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.
4. Fluency Development: Learners practise using known language smoothly and quickly.

A well-designed curriculum, Nation claims, should distribute time equally across all four strands to ensure comprehensive language development.

The 20 techniques (he uses the term very loosely) fit into one or more of the four strands. A particularity of Nation's work is the emphasis on fluency development - the idea that tasks can be devised which specifically aim to build speed of recall, comprehension, speaking and writing. To give an example from the book, he describes his much quoted 4/3/2 activity whereby a student gives a talk for 4 minutes, then the same talk for 3 minutes, then again for 2 minutes (the timings can vary depending on the level). A second example he mentions is '10-minute writing', where students must write to a strict time limit. to encourage speed. As with the 4/3/2 task, the time could be reduced on the second or third attempt at the written task. 

Among his 20 techniques you'll find, for instance, the use of flashcards for vocabulary learning (which he argues from research an efficient way to acquire vocabulary), the use of substitution tables (aka sentence builders), extensive reading through graded readers, dictation (he provides examples of different types of dictation), guided writing, intensive reading and problem-solving tasks (a staple of Task-Based Language Teaching).

There are plenty of specific classroom activities described and multiple references to cognitive science prnciples such as the role of repetition, spaced repetition, transfer-appropriate processing, deep processing, mental rehearsal (e.g. through delayed dictation and delayed copying) and working memory/chunking. The role of comprehensible input is made clear (Krashen). And his notion that 98% of words or 'language tokens' in a text need to be known or easily inferred for a text to be adequately understood is explained.

I should make clear that this book is focused very largely on the teaching of English as an additional language and that, as I interpret it, most of the techniques are more suitable for intermediate and advanced learners (A2 and above) than beginners, even though he often makes the point (not entirely convincingly) that his techniques can often be adapted for beginners. So for me, this book is good for English teachers, but not very applicable to the modern language teaching context where most learners are novices or low-intermediate level. I would also add that the choice of techniques is somewhat subjective and some could be replaced with others. His chapter on substitution tables would have benefitted from the insights of EPI teaching (Conti) where sentence builders are exploited in all sorts of interesting ways Nation does not mention.

Nation gets into the argument about skills acquisition and whether, following DeKeyser, declarative knowledge can become procedural. He does take a very clear stance on this, but seems happy to accept (like most teachers) that knowledge can become automatised and that, in effect, there is no 'functional difference', as he puts it, between automatised declarative knowledge and implicit knowledge ('picking up' the language incidentally while doing meaning-related tasks).

Research references are fairly copious, so the book does fall into that category of 'research to practice' and readers will learn about some key aspects of language acquisition, cognitive science and motivation, but the general emphasis is on classroom pedagogy, if not so much the nitty-gritty of classroom teaching procedures.

On reading through the book, I had the sense of everything being shoe-horned into Nation's own view of the curriculum and learning principles, both of which are open to debate. For example, with the four strands in mind, Nation likes to quantify quite strictly the amount of time spent on each strand. I believe these quantities could vary a good deal depending on the specific aims of a course and the proficiency of the learners. I would add that although Nation believes many teachers spend too much time on language-focused activities (at the expense of extensive reading and listening, and fluency building), some critics might argue that even 25% of time is a lot to spend on language-focused tasks such as grammar exercises, dictation, phonics and vocabulary exercises. Nation in some ways is quite a traditionalist in his support for activities such as dictation and vocabulary learning. (He does not refer very much to translation.) Teachers in England may also be interested in the fact that nowhere does he refer to 'three pillars' of phonics, vocabulary and grammar!

In sum, not a book to recommend for modern/world language teachers, but useful additional reading for ESL teachers.