At its heart coaching is about helping students realise their own power; power to make choices about where, when and how they learn.

Options for practising listening were limited to classroom materials.

Where before the challenge for students was finding access to ways of learning, the challenge now is one of choice. Twenty years ago a learner would have been hard pushed to find any decent listening material on her own; she had to rely to a large extent on her teacher. Today, that same student may be bewildered by the millions of listening opportunities available to her. Is she any better off now?

Unless teachers are active English learners themselves (many are), we are probably not best placed to help learners through this maze of possibilities. Their classmates might be, though; they do have all sorts of techniques, websites, mental activities, apps and tools to share. One thing we can do is give students space in class to tell each other the things they do to learn and practise English.

Here is a lesson that does just that. I���ll be demonstrating it at this weekend���s InnovateELT conference in Barcelona. Do come along if you can.

1 The teacher shows the class a simple technique for practising language. This could be something you do in your head to practise a language you are learning, a dictionary app you use on your phone or a TV series you enjoy in that language. Then students mention a couple of things they do to help them practise English outside the class.

2 Students watch two learners, Elena and Juan Antonio, talking about things they do to practise English. They answer the questions:

What is the technique or tool they are describing?
How does it help their English?
Would you try it? Why? Why not?

3 Students prepare to talk about a technique or tool of their choosing, using the questions in 2 to guide them.

4 In groups, students share their learning practices. They are asked to choose at least one technique from what they hear to try out in the near future.

5 Whole class round-up. Students report the learning practice(s) they plan to try out and why.

But how do we know if these learning practices are any good? How can we evaluate ways of learning English?

At the Innovate conference, there won���t be just students and me in the class; I���m hoping a few teachers attending the conference will decide to come and see the lesson, too. So in the last twenty minutes, I���m going to get teachers to work with the students to think of some evaluative criteria to help us answer the question: what does a good learning technique have to do? Juan Antonio���s curiosity encourages him to read lots; Elena���s use of a voice recorder to read out loud helps her correct herself and improve her pronunciation. What other criteria can people think of that facilitate learning?

To some extent this is reinventing the wheel because a huge amount of research has gone into the ingredients of successful language learning. Scott Thornbury recently summarized this with a compilation of factors proven to matter in learning languages. Based on this list, I designed an evaluation form learners can use to identify what���s good about their learning techniques. Evaluate learning techniques.

I’ve tried this lesson with a total of nine students so far, all Spanish. Not particularly representative, I know, but what’s struck me since starting this project is that the techniques the students share with one another are often simple and relatively tech-free: talking to yourself, reading out loud, reading graded readers, language shadowing, watching TV series, and so on. I wonder if the innovative atmosphere of InnovateELT will bring out the more techie side in the students.

Thanks to Elena and Juan Antonio for being pioneers in this project! Thanks also to Simon for letting me try the lesson out at Active Language. And to Dan and his students for welcoming me into their class.