These and many other questions were discussed at English UK’s annual Teachers’ Conference, which took place in London on Saturday. More than 270 delegates were at the conference, including 230 teachers.

The opening session came from Maurice Claypole, author of two recent books challenging assumptions in current English language teaching. “I would argue that the chaotic nature of our language should be reflected in our teaching. I think the consequences of this for ELT are far reaching,” he challenged. “Not only lexis but syntax and structures need to be treated as a complex system.”

In practice, he said, this meant that if a rule didn’t work, it should be thrown out. He suggested that multiple choice questions could be reformulated so that only one of the potential answers was wrong, thus giving students the knowledge of more correct answers. “It should be useful to learn rather than easy to teach,” he said.

Professor Michael McCarthy, closing the day, gave an overview of how the English Profile Project is pulling together evidence from students from all over the world to find out more about how people learn the language. “If a student is [level] B1 for example, how many words will they know? How many words should be they expected to recognise? They’re rhetorical questions. It requires research to look across the world at large numbers of students and to ask these questions.”

He showed delegates what he called the “Harry Potter hat” curve which showed a large increase in student errors in certain grammar at around B1/B2. This showed, he said, that learners were trying out the language more at this point.

“Hopefully it will enable us to see what people can do with grammar at any certain level,” he said.

She recommended asking them to give the shopping channel treatment to bizarre items

The day included 24 elective sessions covering a wide variety of subjects. They including Jonathan Seath explaining what British Council inspectors look for when they observe teachers in the classroom, and teacher Karen Harris on how to liven up lessons by “keeping it surreal”. She recommended setting students to work with a copy of the Innovations catalogue, asking them to give the shopping channel treatment to bizarre items, or getting them to write the worst problem page answers they could think of.

Delegates were full of praise for the conference. Lucy Pereira, academic manager of One to One English, who was at the conference for the first time, said she was interested in finding out what was going on in EL teaching. “I’ve found it very useful. It’s nice to meet people, to network and ask questions, and there have been some useful sessions and a good mix. There are a lot of things I would have liked to have gone to. Maurice Claypole was very interesting.”

“We’ve had speakers covering a wide range of interests, high quality presenters, and people are clearly genuinely interested,” said Nicole de Lalouvière, acting deputy chief executive of English UK, commenting that delegates had given up their weekend to be there.

Tom Weatherley, professional services manager of English UK, said that numbers attending were very impressive as many centres were currently concentrating on preparation for ISI inspections.