Category Archives: 09 ❖ MOTIVATING ESL STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

These posting include techniques for motivating ESL students and perspectives for motivating teachers.

• Short, High-Interest Articles for Extensive Reading # 10:“Ants Who Stop Elephants and Help Lions”

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Ants Cover shot

(This posting includes a handout LINK AT THE END OF THIS POST which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

In Kenya, there was a type of tree called acacia trees which had a special relationship with a type of native ant. The trees helped the ants by providing food and a home for them. And similarly, the ants helped the trees by stopping animals, for example, elephants, from eating them. Whenever an elephant started to eat the leaves of a tree, these ants would rush up inside their trunks and bite them. Therefore, the elephants avoided trying to eat those leaves, and as a result, the grasslands continued to be covered with those acacia trees.

Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending for the ants and trees. (See complete article below.) 

For background information about these articles and for suggestions for how to use them with your students, see  • Introducing “Short, High-Interest Readings”  Also, I’ll be adding more of these articles in the right-hand column: ESL Reading> Short, High Interest Articles for Extensive Readings

Here is the 10th article. You can download the article for your students by clicking on the link at the end. Also included are three optional exercises: True-False Questions; Paraphrasing Exercise; Reflection Exercise.

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• A Technique For Getting Students To Perform Better On An Assignment (Research Based)

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Cover

In a study, researchers used a technique with half the participants but not with the other half (the control group). The results: the ones who experienced the technique made half as many mistakes on the task as the control group.

We teachers could apply a variation of this technique during our lesson-introductions as a way to motivate our students.

Here is how the study was carried out by a psychologist, Dan Ariely. The participants were asked to read words in a room with extremely bright lights. They were all give sunglasses, but half of them were told they were wearing expensive Ray-Ban sunglasses. The other half were told that theirs were just ordinary sunglasses. However, both groups were actually given the exact same type of sunglasses.

The researchers found that the participants who thought they were wearing the Ray-Ban sunglasses read twice as many words correctly as the “ordinary” sunglasses group. Also, they completed the task more quickly.

Scientists call this the expectation effect. People tend to perform better when they expect to do so.

In a similar study, half the participant were told that they were going to listen to a task through expensive headphones and half were told they had cheap ones. Actually, all the headphones were the same, but the expensive-headphone group performed much better at identifying distorted words than the cheap-headphone group.

Applying this technique to our classrooms Continue reading →

• Integrated vs Discrete Skills ESL Courses: Advantages of Discrete Skills (REVISITED)

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REVISIT COVER

For an extended discussion of this topic with links to some YouTube videos and downloadable exercises, see Four Part Series: Why, How And When to Teach ESL Integrated- and Discrete-Skills Courses. 

YouTube This posting is discussed on my YouTube video: YouTube about advantages of discrete-skills courses

After the first day at a college I had previously taught at, I noticed a long line of students outside our EAP (English for Academic Purposes) director’s office.  It was my first day teaching in this program, so, needless to say, I was curious.  It turns out these students all felt that they had not been placed in the right level.

I soon discovered that this was a common occurrence on the first day of each term in that program.

The courses in that EAP program were organized around integrated skills, so each student was placed into one of five levels for all five hours of instruction. 1 By the end of the first day, students were quick to notice that some of their classmates were weaker than they were in some skills (e.g. speaking) but higher in others (e.g. reading).  They also were aware that some of the activities during the course of the day, depending on the skill, were right at their level, but others were above or below.

It’s not too surprising that this would happen.  New students had been given a placement exam that tested multiple skills: reading, writing, speaking, listening and grammar.  The exam resulted in one score, and their level was determined by that one score.  That seemed to be the crux of the problem. 

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• Most Important Tool for Managing Classroom Behavior (Case two and Caveat) REVISITED

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Classroom management

“David, Please report to the Director’s office as soon as your class finishes.  He needs to talk to you.”  A program assistant handed me a note with those sentences on it.  Gulp!

In the early 1980s, my wife and I, without much thought, accepted teaching positions on the Greek island of Lesbos.  It was a Greek island, so what could possible go wrong?

It was a prep school that high school students attended in the late afternoons/evenings after high school to study English.  Shortly after arriving, we met one of the teachers whom we were replacing.  He told us that the school had a lot of discipline problems because many of the students didn’t want to be there.  He said that the teacher-turnover was quite high as a result.  In fact, a couple of teacher had just disappeared a few months earlier.

On the first day of class, as we walked down the hallway, we could see students literally chasing each other around the class rooms and jumping on the desks.  My first class was with 16 tenth-grade students.  Although most of the students paid little attention to me but instead continued to chat as I started the lesson, there were three female students sitting in the front row appearing eager to begin.  Those three became the focus of my attention.  Gradually, most of the others started to engage in the lesson, while a couple slept or doodled or looked out the window.

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