Jeremy Harmer ELT

Why do people write? Why especially would anyone write when all you have to do is to ask Chat GPT to do it for you? Speaking personally, why am I still writing at all? Is it just a hangover from an earlier time and I’m just going on repeating patterns of behaviour like all older people do? Is it as obsolete as map reading or remembering someone’s telephone number? I’ve been wondering.

I’ve been writing, on and off, all my life. I wrote my first song when I was 14 (It was called ‘Together in love’ and was about as bad as it sounds!!). I wrote poems (pretty awful, though in later years they were a bit better I suppose), stories and who knows what else.

Rather by accident, it seems (though now I’m not so sure) I ended up writing material for students and teachers of English as a foreign language. What I especially enjoy is writing long-form methodology, trying to use my own ‘voice’ or style to communicate ideas. Along the way I have written, too, a number of novels (because why wouldn’t you!) and have got better as a fiction writer, I hope.

Oh, and when I am not doing that I am writing songs, lots and lots and lots of songs and then learning to perform them – which I do as often as people will let me!

Is it a compulsion? A kind of wild neurodivergence? An exercise in ego and selfishness? A desire to communicate and reach out? I’ve given up asking myself, to be honest. Every other writer of anything must ask themselves too but as yet I have never really heard a satisfactory answer (have you?)

But there is one great poem by Seamus Heaney which I love (you may prefer to read it with proper punctuation and spacing here) and which has something to say on the matter:

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father digging. I look down.

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

When he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked.

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Though living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

I like writing books. I’ve been doing it for years. Despite the loneliness, the impossibly hard slog, the fear of going blank, the emotional ups and downs and the backache, the writing process is almost always challenging and invigorating (except on the days when it isn’t!). Add to that the joy of meeting someone who has experienced real emotion, relief, support or pathos because of something you have written and, well why doesn’t everyone do it?! 

Now that I’m writing again (fiction & non-fiction) new questions and doubts have crept into the whole business. To take a few examples, (1) do people actually want to read books anymore whether fiction or, especially, non-fiction when there are so many other ways of finding sources of entertainment and distraction (the whole world of social media)? (2) If you want to find information, why go to a book when you can just ask AI (Google, you’re so last year!)? Sure we know that AI gets things wrong sometimes but as I have said before, as time passes, that will almost certainly happen significantly less frequently.

Recently I have read two novels which moved me beyond anything I expected (The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See and Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis) and the experience of sitting on the sofa with a paperback in my hand is as compelling as it has always been – and an experience I don’t do as much as before thanks to (?) the phone in my pocket. But then, without being specific, I am not in the first flush of youth! Maybe I’m part of a dwindling reading demographic? 

According to one source, however, print books will have 1.9 billion readers by 2029 and ebooks will have 1.2 billion readers at the same time despite the fact that when they first started appearing the expectation was that paper books would disappear. Clearly though (I am pleased to say) they’re not going anywhere. A survey in the United States, for example, suggested that 75% of the responders had read a book or ebook in the last year. 32% only read print books, 33% were happy with either, 9% only read ebooks and 23% didn’t read books at all! (3)What should I publish then in my field (English Language Teaching methodology); ebooks print books or both?  OK I have no idea how reliable these stats are, but they don’t sound too far off.

The really big question, though, is (4) would anyone pay for this stuff (see questions 1 & 2 above) because if not I might as well just go and pick up one of my guitars! Come to think of it that’s not such a bad idea…….

That may seem like a very strange question to ask, and before we go on this little piece is nothing to do with modern ‘influencers’ who peddle beauty products. At least I don’t think it is!

Recently I was at a big conference and in one of those convivial publisher evening events I asked a friend of mine (a phenomenally successful writer in the field of English as a Foreign Language – probably among the top 5 in the world in this field) whether he had ever considered self-publishing. As I expected, he looked almost offended and said that of course he had not, and I suppose one of the reasons for this is that he doesn’t actually have to. There are one or two publishers who will always work with him because he has the success gene, fed by vibrant creativity and a work ethic that puts most people to shame.

The reason that I asked him, of course, is that I am considering self-publishing, something I have always resisted because it has always carried the vaguely rancid odour of’ ‘vanity’ publishing – something which doesn’t seem to worry me at all when putting out music CDs (remember them?) but which seems a bit pathetic and egotistical in a writer. Yet with the changes in publishing over the last few years (moving away from author-lead projects, royalty-based contracts and anything that would not have high-sale potential) writers like me who deal with more niche fields (in my case books about how to teach etc) have been frozen out of the world of books. In my case the most recent edition for my most successful book is over 10 years old, and in today’s world, therefore, little more than a historical artefact.

Writers like me are then left with unenviable options: let your books fade away and die (which by virtue of their age might be the right and proper course of events) or try and publish ourselves with all the risks and pitfalls that represents (sample questions: how do you get it edited? How much would you have to invest – and potentially lose – to make it worthwhile? What kind of format should you write in? and how on earth can an individual market their own book – something which we cheerfully relied on our publisher to do in earlier times?). Perhaps the biggest unknown, however, is whether people still want to read a book – or an ebook or whatever – when Google and AI can pretty much tell you everything you want to know.

All these questions have led me to becoming a student again for the first time in more than forty years! It’s a strange experience but remarkably exciting and invigorating. Run by the International Teacher development Institute and taught by the estimable – and extremely knowledgeable – Dorothy Zemach, the course on Self-publishing will have been worth doing even if I never actually self-publish because it’s good fun and very stimulating. It seems, too, like the perfect blend of creativity and entrepreneurship and it beats staring out of the window and feeling nostalgic for days gone past. Guess what? Being a student in a stimulating environment appears to be good for you!

I had an uncle once to who vanity-published an autobiography (and it was very vain!), something which became a bit of a family embarrassment. Hardly anyone read it, and those that did winced and rather wished they hadn’t! Yet maybe in our current climate – and depending on what you are writing about – it is the only option available to those of us who feel we have things we need to want to say? Is it worth the risk, though? Is it worth the potential financial pain?  

And – to return to the question in this little posting – is there anything REALLY wrong with vanity? Maybe you would never get great composers, writers, painters, architects (choose your speciality) without it?

I would go on, but I have an assignment to complete and it’s overdue! What about you, though, what do you think?

Recently I was asked to do a survey of some of the Cambridge Elements for Language Teachers for the ELT Journal (Harmer 2025) and one of the titles I looked at was Assessment in Language Teaching (Phakiti & Leung 2024). It sets out some of the basic issues in assessment but, and perhaps uniquely (and surprisingly in many ways, but that’s for another discussion), it includes some links to videos which are fiercely anti-testing for a number of reasons. Linda Darling-Hammond from Standford University, for example, rails against the pernicious effects  of modern testing. Then there’s Chris Quickenbrush from the Florida Citizens Alliance explaining why standardized tests are a disaster (and do you remember the 9-year old laying into testing in front of a school board in – you guessed it – Florida, 9 years ago?). Among many other vídeo links which veered between practical advice and concept-explaining was one questioning concepts such as validity and reliability by Dylan Williams (you can check out many of his videos on testing if you go to Youtube). The one that stood out for me, however, was a TedEx talk given by Karen Leung talking about embracing and eradicating linguistic bias. In a powerfully and emotionally argued piece about immigrant bi-linguals she makes the point that “what we say is far more important than how we say it” 

As I think of writing about assessment yet again for an up-to-date methodology project I have to work out, (yet again!) where I position myself in the testing-teaching firmament? It would be tempting to claim that all tests (especially high-stakes tests like end-of-year assessment in order to progress, exam-qualification tests, public exams like The Cambridge Proficiency test TOEFL etc) were the spawn of the devil and focus obsessively on accuracy (see Karen Yeung above),go into a corner and sit comfortably in an alternative education universe, responding only with my heart rather than my head. But my head says that I can’t ignore that fact that education systems need to measure how effective they are, or that preparing for tests can be highly motivating for some learners (but most definitely not all) or that clutching a recognized qualification can be very helpful in trying to gain employment. I am also aware that a whole multitude of good, intelligent, expert people work tirelessly to improve testing both statistically and also in terms of content and relevance.

Ah, says the devil on my shoulder, but don’t they make a mountain of cash from doing that? Obviously bad says someone who has depended on selling books!!!

So as you can see, I am confused. Would anyone care to help me out?

Harmer, J (2025) Survey Review. Cambridge Elements for Language teachers. ELT Journal 79/2.  Oxford University Press.

Phakiti, A & Leung, C (2024) Assessment for Language Teaching. Cambridge Essentials for Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press. 

Back then grammar was all the rage! I mean, of course, in the 1970s and 80s. It certainly formed the way I started teaching. Most lessons I offered (or was asked to offer) were based on a grammar structure, with vocabulary slotted in so that students could make sentences to talk about something. Of course I wrote about it in those days (Harmer 1983, 1987) partly influenced by the amazing after-lunch lectures by the young David Crystal at the University of Reading during my MA year. Week after week he took us through issues in A University Grammar of English (Quirk & Greenbaum 1973) teasing out the ambiguities and the awkwardnesses of describing the complexities of the grammar system.

Later on we had a range of pedagogic grammars for students, notably, of course Practical English Usage (Swan 1980 – and now in a newer edition, 2019) and of course, at a more ‘classroom’ level English Grammar in Use (Murphy 1985, and most recently, 2019) and many practice books, all following in the wake of a book than only some of us still remember (in my case originally published a very long time before I did my first 4-week training course), A Practical English Grammar (Thomson & Martinet 1960).  There have been countless other titles too, too numerous to mention, so I hope all those authors will forgive me for not mentioning them if they ever read this!

There were other ways of looking at/dissecting language too, however, from the attention paid to language Functions (Wilkins 1976), to an increasing focus on Lexical English – language-chunk influenced accounts of language – (see for example Lewis1993 , Thornbury 2004, Dellar & Walkley 2017) and more recent discussions have coalesced around ‘Emergent Language’ (see for example Chin & Norrington-Davies 2023) where rather than building teaching programmes around a ladder of (mostly grammar) items teachers are encouraged to deal with language that comes up based on what students want to talk about,. Content and language Integrated Learning (CLIL) eschews a strict grammar progression because the content – rather than that progression – determines what the students need to say (see, for example, Doyle, Hood & Marsh (2012) and Dale .& Tanner (2012)).

I think my point here is that while grammar was a central part of our lives and we talked about it a lot – and grammar books were amongst the most popular titles ever published – it seems to have ceased to be a subject of intense interest and presence and many commentators (but perhaps not ‘chalk-face’ teachers) inveigh against the grammar syllabus and, as we have seen, propose all sorts of alternatives. At least that’s what it feels like. You may want to correct me of course, and that’s fine because that, after all, is the function of blogs rather than books.

And yet, of course, the world of language teaching is dominated by high-stakes testing and however much such tests are becoming more humane and more task- and communication-based they still demand a mostly two-varieties linguistic accuracy (for a short and somewhat polemic account of the basics of, and arguments about assessment see Phakiti & Leung 2024).

You may think that this has been a vey sketchy post, not much more really, than some passing thoughts, and you’d be right, I suppose. After all you’d need a few hundred pages to deal with all this (or maybe a PhD in Linguistics!) let alone studying the latest findings from the computational linguistics that have fed into modern systems, and the current behavior of Artificial Intelligence. But as I start writing methodology again after a time away, the role of grammar and the place it should occupy in teaching is, once again, preoccupying me.

What do you think? How central is English Grammar in your life ( in your professional life)? How much time do you devote to it? How much do you draw your students’ attention to it? What’s the proportion of grammar focus in your lessons compared itch all the other things you (have to) do? I’d love to hear, if you feel like leaving a comment here.

References:

Chin, R & Norrington-Davies, D (2023) Working with Emergent Language. Pavilion Publishing.

Coyle, D Hood, P & Marsh D (2012) CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning. Cambridge University Press.

Dale, L & Tanner, R (2012) CLIL Activities with CD-ROM: A Resource for Subject and Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press and Assessment.

Dellar, H & Walkley, A (2017) Teaching Lexically: Principles and Practice. DELTA Publishing.

Harmer, J (1983) The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.

Harmer, J (1987) Teaching and learning Grammar. Longman.

Lewis, M (1993) The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward. 2^nd ed. Cengage Learning.

Murphy, R (1985) English Grammar in Use. Cambridge University press and Assessment.

Phakiti , & Leung, C (2024) Assessment for Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press and Assessment.

Quirk, R & Greenbaum, S (1973) A University Grammar of English. Longman.

Thomson, A & Martinet, A (1960) A Practical English Grammar. Oxford University Press.

“I first encountered the term Artificial intelligence (AI) in the early 1980s,” writes Nicky Hockly in her recent book Essentials for Using Artificial Intelligence (Hockly 2024: vii) and as she points out “With the amount of hype and hysteria that surrounded the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022, you’d be forgiven for thinking that AI is a completely new technology. Not so.” (ibid:2). She goes on to say that early iterations such as CALL (computer assisted language learning) were the first ‘primitive’ (my word) attempts at what became an increasing advance in machine-driven tools for learners and teachers, from exercise generation (fill-ins etc) to automatic marking of exercises. How quaint that now seems. As Dom Thurbon pointed out, in a plenary for English Australia many years ago “change is slow until it isn’t,” and suddenly it feels as if this new generative technology is in danger of taking over the world. Consider the facts: on April 13 this year (2025) ChatGPT 4.5 passed the Turing test – designed to sift out technology from humankind and a recent short story in which a new AI creative writing model was asked to write meta fiction about grief from the point of view of AI was genuinely affecting. How scared should we be when algorithms can do in a few seconds what it took Kazuo Ishiguro years of work and 352 pages to do in his wonderful novel Klara and the sun? Maybe, as Alan McKenzie suggested at the 2025 IATEFL conference (McKenzie 2025) somewhat provocatively?, we won’t need teachers anymore and when we consider what is happening on the USA it is not fanciful to suggest that Elon Musk and his ilk would love to replace noisy, awkward teachers with profit-generating machines. And when will AI take over the world?

What does the language teaching community think of all this, and how scared or excited should we be – as teachers, materials writers, curriculum planners or indeed learners? 

Considering all this I thought it might be worth tracking some opinions across the annual IATEFL conferences. IATEFL www.iatefl.org – in case you are unaware of this – is the Internation Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) and organises, every year, a conference attended by teachers from literally all over the world.

I first became properly aware of AI in language teaching at the 2023 IATEFL conference when at the end of his plenary presentation Evan Frendo, an expert in maritime English (amongst other things) told us how he got ChatGPT to write typical maritime English dialogues because it saved him so much time! A year later ((IATEFL 2024) Vicky Saumell, in a wonderful overview of the topic, pointed out the appalling environmental impact of the smallest AI task from the massive overuse of electrical energy to the vast waste of water  it provokes .

A year later and the profession is still trying to work out its stance on this ‘new’ (see above) technology. For example Rachel Tonelli and Ilka kastka from North Eastern university, USA, report on mixed reactions from the teachers they followed in their study They conclude that “In sum, building a community of supportive practitioners is more important than ever as we teach in unknown territory and prepare students for an AI-driven future that is still uncertain..

Meanwhile other teachers are using AI to plan lessons (one publisher even demonstrated its own ‘Smart lesson generator’ at this year’s conference) to write grammar exercises, to mark written work (because it saves us hours of time when we could be watching TV or playing the guitar!), to incorporate into lessons (I got AI to write a song and built a lesson sequence round that for students to work on collaboratively Harmer 2025), to plan an extensive reading programme and provide level- and subject-appropriate material (Collins 2025), to have students summarise texts (though why this better than having students do it themselves is a moot point) and a host of other possibilities.

Two final observations: in his book on Lesson Design Scott Thornbury writes “…think of AI as an assistant – an incredibly fast and resourceful one admittedly – but not the creative genius capable of designing a lesson for a particular group of students on a particular day…” (Thornbury, S 2024:62). At a forum in Edinburgh Sandy Millin , exasperated by the obsessive focus on AI in a multi-topic question and answer session protested “Can’t we stop talking about just AI? There are so many other things to talk about in education!” (those probably weren’t her actual words so I hope she’ll forgive me, but that’s the message I heard!)

Now it’s over to you. Where do you stand on the subject of AI? Brave New World or End of the world? Angel or devil?

References:

Collins, C (2025)  Using AI to develop an extensive reading curriculum. (Paper presented at the IATEFL conference, Edinburgh)

Harmer, J (2025) When we sing together (Workshop presented at the IATEFL conference Edinburgh)

Hockly, N (2024) 30 Essentials for Using Artificial Intellgence. Cambridge University Press and Assessment.

Mackenzie, A (2025) The future of CPD? (Paper presented at the IATEFL Conference, Edinburgh)

Tenelli, R & Kastka, I (2024) International Journal of TESOL Studies (2024)
Vol. 6 (3) 77-94 https://doi.org/10.58304/ijts.20240306  

Thornbury, S (2024) 66 Essentials of Lesson Design. Cambridge university press and Assessment