How often do our students give us one-word or short answers when we know they can do so much more? With a few simple twists and some consistency we can encourage our students to so much more, to use much more language, to build their confidence and enjoy using English even more. Let’s encourage our students to do more, let’s demand more of them and watch them fly.

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In 2012 Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill brought the idea of demanding higher, asking more of our students. The website is a goldmine of ideas and inspiration, you can read it here

What is “Demand High”?

“Demand High is the meme – the raw idea that we can ask more of our students, that we can challenge them”

Yes, we want students to have a good time in class, to enjoy their English experience and to keep coming back to class and for too long, they argue we, as communicative language teachers, had gone to far with “fun” and lost sight of some fundamentals. Written almost 15 years ago, is it still relevant? Let's ask ourselves the question, are we content when students answer questions coherently or do we ask for more? Whatever age groups we're teaching from adult hobbyists, through exam preparation and all the way to our youngest learners, we can and should, arguably, must ask more of them and give them more opportunities to do more, try harder and go further with their use of language.

Words are good, sentences are better but questions and answers are what we really want.

Here we might mainly be thinking of our younger learners as we hide a a flashcard, ask “What's this?”, and they need to guess. They say, “bike”, correct, great, they've given us the right answer, it's communicatively appropriate, job done. A word is good.

We could ask them to say “It's a”, “It's a bike.” That's better, a full sentence at least. We could ask them to say, “I think it's a bike”. This could come complete with the student pointing to themselves for “I”, to their head for “think” and a flick up with their finger to emphasise the “k”, a lovely bit of physicalised pronunciation. Students through infants and primary seem to like it and it sounds great. Sentences are indeed better.

We could take it further and invite students to say “I think it's a bike. Is it a bike?” and we can reply, “No, it isn't a bike, bad luck” or “Yes, it I'd a bike, well done!” with a bit of exaggerated intonation for fun. Yes, questions and answers are what we really want.

This activity can start off as teacher-led, then with a student-as-teacher and then we can move to small groups working independently. Leave the mini-dialogue on the board to scaffold support for students who need it. We could extend the challenge further by taking away a few letters or the odd word. And we can sit back for a moment and bask in the delight of listening to several different groups of students making questions, giving answers and sounding great. So simple, do effective.

Make it longer!

Thid is relevant for all ages and levels. When students offer an answer ask them to say more, to make it longer. Many of us instinctively do it, some of us are natural born Demand High teachers. I first heard it put so succinctly in a conference talk by Borja Uruñuela in Andalucía, Spain. That's it I thought, I wrote that one down. An utterance is good, a sentence is better, an extended sentence with a two clauses, a conjunction and a couple of adjectives is just so good. It's about establishing good habits in the classroom and in this case for students to extend themselves, try out new language, get in that zone of proximal development and demanding higher of themselves.

“How are you today?” we can ask at any level. “Fine”, is well, fine. “I'm fine, thanks” is a bit better. “I'm fine because today I had a delicious pizza for lunch and I love pizza”, now that's an answer. Of course, this would be great from an A2 student and the language can get more sophisticated the higher up we go.

Higher level students can get into habits of upgrading their language and looking for moments to recycle  grammatical bites and bits of interesting vocabulary, it's what good students do. Let's help our students use better language more often and in freer speaking situations by just them to make their utterances longer. Again, super-simple and really effective longer term.

Extra questions, please!

This is another tactic we can use from our C2 students all the way to our primary students, the principle is the same. Another huge advantage is that it gets the students really listening to each other and, perhaps even better, encourages them to drive the conversations rather than us. All we need to say is “Ask extra questions, please.” and with a bit of practice they can fo the rest.

“What did you do at the weekend?” is the question we ask at the beginning of so many weeks to do many people. They tell and we move on to the next person willing to share. Inviting students to ask extra questions gets them practicing questions, actively listening to ask more questions and on ir can roll into some fabulous language work and we can also find out much, much more about our students over time. For the scaffold, we could put level appropriate question prompts on the board, we could monitor their use by putting a tick next to prompts the class use and encourage people to try the other lesser used questions.  It makes the class student centred and student driven. Is this the stuff of TEFL dreams?

With teenage and adult groups especially, I like to keep extending this and adding in and noting on the board some emergent language too. It's the Dogme approach in action, it can be beautiful. We can then play further with the students as we help them use the words, chunks of language and sentences that have found their way onto the board, this coukd happen in pairs or small groups to give more people more opportunitiesto speak, to have several conversations buzzing round the room, maximising student talking time and demanding high. Very occasionally, in special moments, the whole class can become this. Often the conversation naturally dries up and we head to the book or into the planned lesson. Sometimes we csn just drift our hand over to the coursebook, and magically the conversation picks up again.

Is there more?

Demand High is more than this, of course, much more, visit the website and read around. Nevertheless, this trio of ideas gives us some simple and effective ideas about how we can do more with our students, have engaging, personalised moments with more meaningful practice and explicit learning.

TEFLers, Demand High is our gold, let's pan for it, let's mine it, let's trade it, wear it, enjoy it.

What do you do to ask more of your students? Please do share your thought with us wherever you read this.

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Happy TEFLing, TEFLers!