Paul Nation is a highly regarded veteran teacher, researcher and writer about language learning, particularly in his field of teaching English as a second or foreign language. He is most well known for his standard book about vocabulary learning (republished a few times) and for his 'four strands' model of language curriculum design. I've been reading his 2024 book called The 20 Most Effective Language Teaching Techniques and thought I would share with you the Principles of Learning he lays out, and by which, he argues, we should judge the usefulness of classroom language learning tasks. At a later date, when I have finished Nation's book, I intend to write a review for those who may be interested in reading it.
The principles I shall summarise come from Chapter 4 of the book. He categorises his principles as follows:
Motivation principles (Engagement)
1. Motivation: the degree of engagement with a task affects the likelihood of learning occurring.
2. Self-efficacy: confidence in one's skills affects success in learning.
Focus principles (Usefulness)
3. Focus: we learn what we focus on and, secondly, learning is more useful if it resembles the use we need to make of what we learn ('transfer-appropriate'). For incidental learning to have a strong effect, some deliberate focus on language features may be needed. (My note: what researchers usually call 'focus on form'.)
4. Accuracy: learning is more efficient if the information we are focused on is complete, accurate and comprehensible. (My note: Nation is closely associated with the idea that we need to understand around 98% of ther 'language tokens' we read or hear to have adequate comprehension).
Quantity principles (Amount)
5. Repetition: the more repetitions, the stronger the learning.
6. Time-on-task: quantity of attention is increased by the level of 'desirable difficulty'. Spacing, expanding spacing (my note - this means gradually lengthening the gaps between encounters with language items) and the lag effect, retrieval, deliberate attention, testing (rather than restudying), multi-choice glosses, interleaving, production, form recall and variation all ensure greater attention and better long-term retention. (My note - Nation is drawing on research from cognitive science here.)
Quality principles (Connections)
7. Elaboration: includes enriching encoding of items through using different modalities (speaking, listening, reading, writing), both receptive and productive use, variation in grammatical use, and embedding language in larger units. (My note - he is arguing for focusing on connected language, not just isolated words) and integrating skills.)
8. Analysis: this about relating familiar parts to an unfamiliar whole, for example looking at components of sounds and phonics, spelling patterns, word parts, parts of speech, grammatical constructions, and discourse analysis, among other aspects. (My note - although Nation recognises the role of input being comprehensible, he is not in the 'CI' camp since he believes that there needs to be significant analysis and focus on form. Elsewhere in the book, he does warn of the risk of spending too much time on this at the expense of communication, extensive reading and listening.)
So there we have his eight principles which, of course, make a lot of sense. We can see how influenced he has been by the growing role the findings of cognitive science have been playing in the research into language acquisition. We see the role of spaced learning, retrieval, testing, attention, deep processing and desirable difficulty (Bjork). He does not dwell on the famous learning/acquisition issue (Krashen) and the extent to which formal learning of language and explicit instruction can become internalised, proceduralised or 'acquired' (in Krashen's famous terminology). He seems to assume that at least some declarative knowledge can become automatised, as the skill acquisition model has it.
That said, elsewhere in the book and in his writings, Nation is a great believer in the role of incidental learning through extensive reading and listening. He knows how vital this is for long-term acquisition. We 'pick up' a lot of language incidentally as we focus on meaning.
We also see in his principles the attention given to motivation, notably the question of self-efficacy (Bandura), often liked to the Deci and Ryan notion of competence in their Self-Determination Theory - very much in vogue.
Nation enjoys categorising and quantifying things when he writes about learning and curriculum, and I daresay you could categorise principles differently and focus on others. I like the general emphasis on motivation, attention (these two are closely related of course), quantity and quality. Perhaps some more emphasis on the limitations of working memory and the question of cognitive load would have been welcome? I also like the clear stress laid on intensive, repetitive practice of language, preferably in chunked form. It's worth mentioning also that some of the principles are more relevant to beginners than others - for example with young novices attention to grammar, discourse and deep processing would be much more limited. My co-writer Gianfranco Conti has recently blogged about why grammar teaching is ineffective with young learners.
Readers may like to make other suggestions. Do comment below.
For another way of categorising principles of language teaching you may be interested in the ones Gianfranco Conti and I listed in The Language Teacher Toolkit (2nd ed). We came at this from a different perspective, but you will see some overlap with Nation's list.
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