I need to start by making a confession. After I had been teaching ESL for about 10 years, I suddenly realized that I had become a bit careless about something important.

Here is what happened. As I mentioned, I was in my 10^th year of teaching ESL, and I was asked to teach a course to American university students who wanted to become ESL teachers. One day, I planned to demonstrate a lesson. The first thing I decided that I need to tell them is that it’s really important to have a good introduction to the lesson. You don’t just want to tell students, open your books to page 23. Your assignment is to do Ex 4 and 5.

But wait! That is exactly how I had been starting my ESL classes recently. I realized that in my effort to get the lesson started, I had stopped doing a very important first step. And as a result, I missed an opportunity to stimulate and motivate my student.

So as I prepared to show my teacher-training students ways that they could introduce lessons, I returned to my days as a beginning teacher and started to use them once again with my ESL students. And I have to tell you, the results were amazing. I could see it in my students’ faces how much more energized and eager they were to do the activities. And I felt not only excited about teaching them but also confident in the importance of the activities they were about to do.

Perhaps the greatest motivator for students is feeling like they are working toward something worthwhile and are doing something important. We can satisfy this need in students by explaining the reason for the assignment.

So here are four great techniques that you can use to introduce your lessons.

Technique 1

I used this introduction technique for this activity: • Simple Technique ESL Students can use to Impress Their Academic Instructors

Technique 2

I used this introduction technique for this activity: • Helping Students Overcome Hesitancy to Volunteer an Answer in Group Discussions

Technique 3

I used this introduction technique for this activity: • Teaching the Most Interesting Type of Essay Introduction (an Inductive Approach)

Technique 4

I used this introduction technique for this activity: • Most Stimulating and Engaging but Often Over-Looked Essay Mode

I also used this one to introduce and explain how this assignment will make them special: • Inductive Grammar: Why are there commas in these sentences? Here are some clues. What’s the rule?

Technique 5

I used this introduction technique for this activity: • Getting Students to Write More Interesting and Unique Ideas in Essays

As I mentioned at the start of this article, once I had started putting in more effort to my introductions to lessons, I noticed an increase in my students’ confidence, motivation and enthusiasm in the exercises. And, for myself, I found them to actually be a lot of fun and creative to put together.

David Kehe
Faculty Emeritus