Do you remember what we were taught at college about what should the ratio be between students' and teachers' talking time? Yes, sustain theirs for as long as possible, while keeping ours to a minimum. Do you try to follow this advice or try to find excuses not to? In his brilliantly delivered presentation Hugh Dellar has demonstrated that under certain conditions we can, actually, should stretch the time we speak in class. In his words, "How much and what we say is very important." There is a relationship between the questions teachers asks and those students come up with in response and vice versa.

We can make good use of our TTT if it exposes students to grammar and vocabulary we want them to use and provides the students with comprehensive input. Possible ways of achieving these objectives include getting the language on the board as the students are talking, retelling the stories students tell to bring them back into the group in case they have some problem with pronunciation, for example, and providing them with more input rich talk. Something to remember is that you cannot do this with close questions What we should try to provide our students with are lexis rich activities with a lot of support for the students to talk.

Here is an example from Hugh Dellar's presentation to give you an idea about what goes onto the blackboard while students are talking: "We're still not... to each other. I want him to a... first." In other words, you write out sentences with blanks in place of the mistakes students made but containing the first letter of the word in which a mistake was made.