Category Archives: 10 ❖ APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY IN TEACHING ESL

• ESL Students’ Positive Responses to this Teacher Technique (REVISITED)

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“I feel proud of myself when I see these.”

“They are helpful because I feel that you are encouraging me and understand what I’m writing.”

These are two of the comments students wrote in response to my survey question: “On your essays, I underline in GREEN words, expressions, sentences, ideas, details and examples that were good. Are these GREEN underlines helpful to you?”

Most Writing instructors like to give students positive feedback on their essays in addition to indications of where they have grammar mistakes or where they have content problems. These positive comments often are in the form of a message at the end of the essay. However, there are a few problems with giving feedback in this end-of-the-essay manner.

First, it takes time and extra mental energy to write these in a style that will be meaningful to students.

Second, they are usually too general to be of much use for students to apply to future writing assignments.

And third, it requires the teacher to write with clear handwriting, something that many of us don’t have a talent for.

In one program, on their essay rubrics, they now “include a section where students can earn points for successful language use rather than being strictly penalized for only misuses.” This is admirable, but it (1) involves extra work and calculations for the teacher and (2) doesn’t specify exactly what the student did successfully in the essay.

The technique of using green underlines is very user-friendly time-wise and energy-wise for the teacher to use.

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• Introverts Find Their Call Teaching ESL

I was ready to start class. Unlike previous days when I left my door open, I slowly closed it because I didn’t want any administrators walking down the halls to see what I was doing with my students. I was afraid that I might get fired.

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• Surprising Insight: Avoiding Eye-Contact can Improve Comprehension (REVISITED)

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A good reason not to be upset if students don’t look directly at you during a lesson or conversation.

While explaining a writing technique to my students, I noticed that one of them, Emily, was staring off to the side. Thinking that she was daydreaming, I wondered whether I should say her name or ask her a question to “bring her back” to the classroom.

Recently, I learned that I didn’t necessarily need to be concerned about Emily’s lack of eye contact with me. In fact, surprisingly, research suggests that other students might have benefited from doing just what Emily was doing — gazing away from me.

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

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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 →