When teacher acts as controllers they are in charge of the class and of the activity taking place in a way that is subdtantially different from a situation where students are working on their own in groups. Controllers tell students things, organize drills, read aloud, and as such they exemplify the qualities of a teacher- fronted classroom. Teachers who view their job as the transmission of knowledge from themselves to their students are usually very comfortable with the images of themselves as controllers (inspire students through their knowledge and charisma)

Organizing students to do various activities such as giving the students information, telling them how they are going to do the activity (to get full advantage from the activity), putting them into pairs or groups (to avoid chaos), and finally closing things down when it is time to stop

Teachers usually expect an indication from their teachers of whether or not they are getting their English right. This is where we have to act as an assessor, offering feedback and correction and grading students in various ways. A teacher should be fair – when students are criticized or score poor grades and they then find that other students have suffered less criticism for an equally good or bad performance, they tend to be extremely unhappy. They don’t want to feel that they are being unfairly judged

Sometimes when students are involved in a role-play activity, for example, they lose the thread of what is going on, or they are ‘lost for words’ for lack of vocabulary. They may not be quite sure how to proceed. What should teachers do in these circumstances? Withhold and let them work things out for themselves or, instead, push them forward in a discreet and supportive way? If we opt for the latter, we are adopting some kind of a ‘prompting’ role

The traditional picture of teachers during student discussions, role-play, or group activities, is of people who ‘stand back’ from the activity, letting the learners get on with it and only intervening later to offer feedback and/or correct mistakes. However, there are also times when we might want to join in an activity not as a teacher, but also as a participant in our own right. The danger of teachers as participants is that they can easily dominate the events – the teacher is still frequently perceived of as ‘the teacher’ and tends to be listened to with greater attention than his/her students

In some activities the aforementioned roles can not, appropriately, be taken on by a teacher. Suppose that the students are involved in a piece of group writing, or that they are involved in preparation for a presentation they are to make to the class. In such situations having the teacher take part, or try to control them, or even turn up to prompt them might be entirely unwelcome. However, the students may still have need of their teacher as a resource. This is where a teacher might be one of the most important resources the students have

When students are working on longer projects, such as pieces of writing or preparations for a talk or a debate, we can act as a tutor, working with individuals or small groups, pointing them in directions they have not yet thought of taking. In such situations we are combining the roles of prompter and resource, acting as a tutor. Yet, we need to make sure that we do not intrude either too much (impedes learner autonomy) or too little (unhelpful)

We will want to observe what students do (especially in oral communicative activities) so that we can give them useful group and individual feedback. When observing students we should be careful not to be too intrusive by (1) holding on their every word, (2) getting too close to them, or (3) by officiously writing things down all the time. Teachers do not only observe students in order to give feedback. They also watch in order to judge the success of the different materials and activities that they take into lessons so that they can, if needed, make changes in the future