Demand High Teaching

A challenge to complacency in communicative language classrooms, launched by Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill at IATEFL Glasgow in 2012. The core provocation: much contemporary ELT has settled into comfortable but undemanding routines — teachers facilitate activities fluently but fail to push learners toward genuine learning within those activities. Activities have become ends in themselves rather than vehicles for language development.

The Problem

Scrivener and Underhill argued that Communicative Language Teaching had "painted itself into a corner," producing classrooms characterised by:

• Smooth activity flow with minimal real engagement with language
• Teachers who manage tasks efficiently but rarely intervene to deepen learning
• Learners who complete activities at a superficial level — getting the right answer without stretching their language
• "Coasting" — both teachers and learners operating well within their comfort zones
• A reluctance to deal with the "dirty" work of attending to language form within communicative tasks

Core Principles

Demand High is not a method. It proposes no new activity types, materials, or syllabi. Instead, it asks teachers to adjust what they already do:

• Squeeze more from every interaction: When a student gives a correct answer, do not simply move on. Push for better pronunciation, more precise vocabulary, a fuller sentence, a reformulation.
• Raise the bar in real time: Respond to what learners produce by raising expectations in the moment — "Good. Now say it more naturally." "Can you use a different word?" "What's the noun form?"
• Make the familiar strange: Re-examine routine activities. A gap-fill exercise can be a genuine learning moment if the teacher follows up on answers rather than just checking them.
• Value struggle: Learning happens at the edge of competence. If every activity feels easy and comfortable, demand is too low.

Practical Techniques

• After a correct answer, ask "Can you say that again more fluently?"
• After pair work, pick up on specific language points that arose
• Use Corrective Feedback not just to fix errors but to push for better output
• Extend exchanges rather than accepting minimal responses
• Challenge learners to notice and self-correct

Criticisms

The concept attracted both enthusiasm and scepticism. Critics noted that the ideas were not new — good teachers have always pushed learners — and that "Demand High" risked being a label without substance. Others questioned whether the emphasis on teacher intervention conflicted with Learner Autonomy and learner-centred principles. Scrivener and Underhill responded that the approach was intentionally a "meme" rather than a method — a conversation starter about teaching quality rather than a prescriptive framework.

Significance

Demand High Teaching serves as a useful corrective to the risk of CLT becoming formulaic. Its lasting contribution is the question it places at the centre of lesson evaluation: not "Did the activity work?" but "Did learning happen?"