Two recent initiatives in external exams are having a most beneficial backwash effect in the methodology of English as a foreign language:
- PAAUS (the university entrance exam)
- Tests for the basic competencies administered to the whole school population of fourteen-year-olds and sixteen-year-olds.

Both tests included a listening comprehension section, a traditional request from the teachers of English. This is already having a dramatic change in the proportions of time assigned to oral skills in the foreign language classroom.

But there is still room for improvement

Despite the availability of classroom instruction, most adolescent and adult learning of foreign languages does not progress fast enough, even when motivation, intelligence and opportunity are not an issue. That leads to the diminishing credibility of many traditional instructional alternatives. The proportions of beginners and false beginners to finishers suggest that the successful student may learn through them or in spite of them.

Methods and approaches: a blurred picture, the weak link.

Perhaps there is too much grammar teaching, too much manipulative teaching of language; Structural syllabuses are still used in the vast majority of classrooms. Linguistic units, mainly morphological, are taught separately and step-by-step. The belief that language acquisition is a process of gradual accumulation of parts, until the whole structure of language has been built up, is still widely held. At any one time the learners are being exposed to a deliberately limited sample of language. Pedagogical materials and classroom procedures are designed to practice a series of linguistic items: focus on form.

For all the parties concerned, a structural syllabus might provide the impression of organisation and control, and it should not be ignored that that some grammar clarifications might be useful, particularly at the learners' request. But these syllabuses ignore the language-learning processes or assume discredited neo-behaviourist models, including the worst of them and excluding the skill development component. Most approaches rely heavily on:

• Linguistically simplified teaching materials
• Explicit grammar explanations
• Error correction

The simplistic notion that what you teach when you teach is what they learn leads teachers to force immediate production of the units previously taught. Having practised the present perfect tense followed by for and since, the teacher administers a test to check acquisition of the structure. Foreign language learning is slow, non-linear, non-categorical and immediate productive measures of any given instruction will not reflect the effectiveness of any teaching, but lead to great discouragement on the part of teacher and learner in the face of faulty and inaccurate production.

Proposals that might lead in the right direction

The alternative seems to be on more analytic syllabuses with focus on meaning and more effective teaching practice. Analytic syllabuses assume that learners are capable of analysing linguistic input and inducing rules so long as they are exposed to comprehensible target language samples. The essential claim is that people learn language best, inside or outside the classroom, not by treating it as an object of study, but by experiencing it as a medium of communication. Instruction should facilitate learners' interaction with the texts or with more proficient speakers. Through the negotiation of meaning, learners will develop the foreign language processing capacity. Occasional shifts of attention to linguistic code features- by teacher or students would be triggered by perceived problems of comprehension or production. The fundamental orientation should be to meaning and communication. The unit of instruction should be the task, ideally related to the future needs of the particular group of learners. The problem with some schoolteachers is that they TENOR (Teach English for not obvious reason). This situation does not facilitate the choice of tasks, though sensible teachers would identify certain common needs for certain kind of learners: Batxillerat students, for example, and even learners in the upper courses of compulsory education, need to develop dramatically their comprehension skills of academic texts to became competent undergraduates. Younger learners will also benefit with the widening of their understanding of oral texts to penetrate the teen musical culture they are so eager to join, to be able to read Harry Potter in the original, to manipulate their favourite computer game.

This might require the extra support of self-access style of learning, which is not easy in secondary schools today. Self-access might work if the whole school were to be envisaged as a self-access place – one huge cultural centre – but for the moment this is a dream. It also requires lots of extra work.

Effective teaching practice

Contrary to the scepticism of some educational researchers about the influence of schooling on learners' progress, there is an accumulating body of evidence on the importance of students' achievement over effective teaching. Outstanding teachers achieve superior pupil progress. Who are these teachers?

There are quite a few in Catalonia and, in contrast to what might be thought, some are not the ones on the limelight. They usually assume a very low profile; sometimes a bit ashamed that what they are doing is not politically correct according to the latest pedagogical fashion.

What are the main characteristics of the outstanding teachers and more concretely, the effective teachers of foreign languages? Just to name but a few of the most characteristic

Personal characteristics

• The teacher shows confidence in the ability of all and every learner to achieve a certain measure of progress.
• She holds learners accountable for their performance, setting very clear expectations and parameters.
• She gives every learner the chance to succeed in some way.
• She heads off possible disruptive behaviour before it breaks out in the classroom

In the foreign language classroom of the efficient teacher

• All learners are involved. None can escape the eagle eye of the teacher who seems to have eyes in the back of her head.
• The questioning techniques imply a continuous attention as no learner knows who is going to be asked to perform. It is called "class alarm" in which every single learner has to elaborate and rehearse the answer, thus creating an excellent chance of interacting with the text being practised.
• The input is rich but the demand put on the learners are achievable. The effective teacher really cares for his learners but maintains his authority making the classroom a space where learning can take place.