How to waste time in the EFL class

A definitive guide for exhausted English teachers

Every English teacher knows the feeling: the term is dragging on, it's raining outside, and the students are getting restless. Fortunately, ELT methodology over the last few decades has come up with a magnificent array of high-overhead, low-output activities guaranteed to keep everyone busy and happy while ensuring that the boring spadework of actual language acquisition is kept to an absolute minimum.

If your goal is to occupy forty-five minutes or an hour of classroom time with activities that make the classroom seem busy and active, without actually doing much to develop your students' command of English, here are a few ideas that can guarantee successful time-wasting in the modern EFL classroom.

1. The sacred art of Jigsaw Reading

Why let students read a coherent text in ten minutes when you can turn it into a 40-minute organisational nightmare, using a technique such as Jigsaw Reading ? For those who are not familiar with this TBI (Task Based Instruction) activity, here's how to do it.

First, divide a 300-word text into four random sections. Next, spend fifteen minutes physically shuffling your class of bemused adolescents into "home groups," then "expert groups," and then back to "home groups." By the time everyone has explained their tiny piece of the puzzle through a combination of fractured English and mime, an entire period has gone by. Students may perhaps have learned a new word or sentence structure - be it right or wrong - from their peers,  but on the bright side, they've experienced the joy of group logistics, and the class has gone by without a moment of boredom.

   Yet as Michael Swan has concluded, in a more academic style, "The claim that TBI is a superior teaching approach, solidly based on the findings of current theory and research, cannot be sustained. The hypotheses frequently associated with TBI, to the effect that second-language acquisition happens exclusively as a result of ‘noticing’ during communicative activity, and is constrained by inflexible developmental sequences, are supported neither by convincing theoretical argument nor by empirical evidence, and are contradicted by common language-learning experience."
(1. Swan 2005).

2. The Great classroom production line

Procrastination, it is said, is the thief of time. Bearing this in mind, never allow students to do at home what can be later used to consume precious class time. Don't ask them to brainstorm, outline, or read a text before class - a technique referred to as "flipped reading" ² ? Doing so risks having them come into the classroom prepared and ready to learn.

   Instead, procrastinate and make sure that you can justify spending the first twenty minutes of classtime doing tasks like cutting out flashcards, coloring diagrams, or silently reading a two-paragraph text that could easily have been read on the bus. It’s true that a handful of students won't do homework if assigned beforehand, but sacrificing the momentum of the entire class to accommodate the unprepared is a classic and very successful technique for using up your valuable minutes of classroom time.

 More seriously, as the results of a recent study showed,  "Flipped learning offers personalized outcomes. That is, the approach can be tailored to meet the individual needs of students, allowing them to learn at their own pace and in their preferred style. By using a blend of different learning methods, flipped classes can offer students a more customized and engaging learning experience that can lead to better learning outcomes."
( 2 Fahmi, Mukminatien, et al. 2024 )

3. The illusion of participation

In a traditional class of twenty or thirty pupils, how can you make sure that each student gets a chance to speak some English? The answer obviously is to demand participation, by calling on students one by one.   It's a common classroom technique, and one that is an excellent way to waste your valuable classroom time. You can get students to read out in turn sentences from a text you're studying, or ask each student, one by one, to answer a question. Each student gets personal attention for maybe 5% of the class time, and for the 95% that remains, has ample time to listen to your conversation with a classmate, or more likely to stare at the ceiling, catch up on lost sleep, or doodle on the their desk. 

On paper, this popular pedagogical activity is justified as giving every student their fair share of the teacher’s time and an equal opportunity to produce spoken English.  In practice, it is often no more than an illusion of participation, a low-engagement classroom technique that can be painfully tedious, and remarkably effective at reducing the pace of a lesson to a crawl.

4. Over-engineered gamification

Language teaching is so much more fun, if you can convince students that they're playing a game, not doing boring classwork.  This is true, and classroom games, or "serious games", can be both fun and productive, if well managed. There is plenty of academic literature on the subject. However gamification can also be used with great success to replace actual language learning with game playing, which will go down very well with lots of learners, especially adolescents.

   For example, if a simple matching exercise on the whiteboard takes five minutes, you can transform it into a complex, multi-stage game requiring throwing a dice, elaborate scoring rules, and ten minutes of rule explanation. You can then spend half your very limited classroom time resolving disputes about whether Team B cheated during round two. Naturally, resolving disputes will normally involve using the students' native language, unless you have a class where English is the only "common" language shared by all. The actual exposure to target vocabulary will be minuscule, but the room will certainly sound busy, and with a bit of luck, your students will think they had a good lesson.

5. The fine art of Reclaiming the Class

While many gimmicks offer a comfortable illusion of modern, student-centered activity, there is a real risk that they trade genuine learning for organisational clutter.

Similar problems have existed for generations! Anyone over the age of 25 is sure to have met or known people who passed the language content of their secondary school  certificate or university diploma, maybe even with brio, but then a few years later have forgotten everything they learned. The reality is that they didn't actually learn very much, they gained a superficial passing familiarity with English that was enough to get them through their exams, but they did not do the inevitable (and sometimes boring) spadework that for most learners, except the most linguistically gifted,  is an inescapable aspect of real language learning.

A quiet class engaged in direct, teacher-guided reading and listening, or targeted grammar and vocabulary work, and focused discussion, may look traditional, but it makes full use of the most precious commodity in education: time. Teachers who strip away the elaborate staging, insist on preparation outside the room, and get students to proactively help and encourage each other, will not be wasting their time, nor their students' time, but using those valuable minutes in the classroom  for a more satisfying and productive result. 

References:
Swan, Michael. (2005). Legislation by Hypothesis: The Case of Task-Based Instruction. Applied Linguistics, 26(3), 376–401.
Fahmi, Mukminatien, et al (2024)  The impact of flipping class intervention on reading comprehension.  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305041