There were usually about eighteen in the group, but sometimes fewer. The group met twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays in a school near Paddington Station. The oldest learner was about sixty. The youngest was about seventeen. All the learners came from the city of Mostar and all of them had been living in welfare hostels and hotels in the Bayswater and Paddington area. Various teachers had taught the group, all on a voluntary basis. The teachers complained that student-centred techniques did not work well with group. One explanation the teachers offered was that perhaps the members of the group were suffering from trauma experienced before and during their flight from Mostar. One woman in the group - a former judge ? had seen her husband executed in front of her. Other members of the group had had similar experiences. I did not doubt that these experiences had certainly scarred many members of the group, but I came to a radically different conclusion about why student-centred techniques did not work well with the group

Although the learners had been living in London for more than six months, they had learned no English. They did not know how to count in English. They did not know the days of the week in English. They did not understand words like 'right' 'left' 'come' 'go' 'stop'. They knew no English and the teachers who had taught them - or had tried to teach them - before had not taught them any English. The reason , in my opinion, was that the teachers concerned did not understand what it means to be a complete beginner, and nothing in their training had prepared them to understand this. They relied exclusively on elicitation and pair-work. However, there was no English to elicit. Zero beginners desperately need comprehensible input and one valuable ? sometimes almost the only ? source of this in the very early stages of learning is a teacher talking to them in the target language, demonstrating what words mean, giving examples of how they are used and explaining the different meanings these words have in different contexts.

Although L1 acquisition and L2 learning are very different processes, there is general agreement among L1 researchers that 'at a very basic level caretaker speech is all important; if children are not exposed to languages, they will not learn them.' In L2 learning, pair work and elicitation begin to be useful only when learners have learned enough English to do simple (and usually highly structured) pair-work exercises. Even then, I believe that pair-work and other typical 'student-centred' exercises are not always or even usually better than so-called 'teacher-centred' or 'teacher-fronted' exercises. Learners need input and intake, especially when they are zero beginners. It is not necessary to accept all of Krashen's 'comprehensible-input' theory to accept this. All that is necessary is to have been a zero-beginner yourself in a foreign language, and to have tried repeatedly to understand that foreign language or make yourself understood in it ? an experience which I believe is invaluable for all language-teachers, and which can profoundly change your assumptions about learning or teaching a foreign language.