Category Archives: 10 ❖ APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY IN TEACHING ESL

• Common Teacher Myth: Students Don’t Like to See Red Marks on Their Papers.

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This posting is discussed in this short video: Myth: Students Don’t Like to See Red Marks on Their Papers.

I conducted a survey of 48 students to find out how they felt about getting red marks, which indicated grammar mistakes, on their writing assignments.  I was motivated to do this after some colleagues had told me students get upset or dejected when they see these, so they only marked a few mistakes, and one even changed to a different color, thinking that, like her, students associated red marks with something negative.

Three types of marks on students papers

When I give students feedback on their writing assignments, I want them to notice three things:

  1. Good writing points.  These are ideas, details, examples, expressions, sentence styles, grammar that they did well.  I underline these in GREEN to indicate good.  (See Students’ Positive Responses to this Teacher Technique  for more details.)
  2. Weak grammar points.  These are grammar mistakes or wordings that they should revise to improve their papers.  I try to indicate these in a way that seem like a puzzle that can be stimulating for students to discover. I use RED to indicate these.  (See Most Effective Technique for Marking Grammar on Essays to Develop Self-Editing Skills  for more details.)
  3. Places to improve content.  These are places where students could improve their papers by adding details and/or including examples. I use BLUE to indicate these.    (See “Wow” is not Necessarily the Goal in Students’ Essays and The Huge Advantage International Student Writers Have Over Their American Classmates for more details.)

The survey question to students: If you could only have one type of mark on your papers, which one would you choose?

Color code survey

If those colleagues who thought students were upset by red marks (grammar mistakes) were right, then it would seem that the students would not choose that option, and in fact, probably prefer the Green (good parts) option.   Spoiler Alert: that didn’t happen.

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• Advice: Don’t Say These 4 Things to Your Students

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Cover Advice don't say these 4 things shot

YouTube This posting is discussed on my YouTube video Don’t Say These 4 Things to Your ESL Students

Everything that we say to our students can have a big impact.  For us ESL instructors that can be exhilarating, but it’s also a big responsibility.  Unfortunately, without realizing it, some instructors are sending the wrong message to students with “innocent” comments.  These are four statements that are in this category.

1) Teacher’s statement: The teacher doesn’t want students to feel stress, so just before handing out the quiz, she says, “This quiz will be easy.”
Message that students get: If a student starts the quiz and notices that it isn’t easy, he’s likely to think, “Wow!  I must be stupid.  This quiz is supposed to be easy.  My classmates probably know all this.”
What the message should be: This is what we can say instead to help them understand the purpose of the quiz: “This quiz will help us see how well you’ve developed your skills so far and what we’ll need to practice more.”

2) Teacher’s statement: The teacher wants to reward students, so he says, “You have all worked so hard this week, so I won’t give you any homework.  I want you all to just enjoy your weekend.”
Message that students get: “Homework is painful.  It just interferes with free time.  It’s best if we can avoid it.”
What the message should be: What we really want to do is give students confidence in our homework assignments, so we can say, “I’ve prepared a homework assignment that will lead you to developing your skills more.  It’s going to help you do well on our assignments  next week and in the class that you will be in next term.”

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• Most Important Motivator of Students: How You Can Use It

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Workshop Cover shot

This posting includes sample lessons that give students a lot of autonomy.*

YouTube This posting is discussed on my YouTube video ESL Writing Workshop Approach

The most important ingredient for motivating students is autonomy. 1 The sense of being autonomous can produce a very positive effect on students’ attitude, focus and their performance.  Best of all, it’s very effective and quite easy to include this in ESL classes.

Having autonomy doesn’t mean that students decide what is taught in a lesson.  Instead, students can experience autonomy if the lesson is set up so that they can individually choose which exercise to do first, second etc., how fast to work, when to ask the teacher a question or for help and even when to take a break.

A lesson plan template that gives students autonomy (Writing Workshop)

Teachers can organize their lesson in a Writing Workshop using many different types of materials, but it works best when using inductive exercises.  That is because inductive exercises require little or no time taken up with teacher lectures.

These are General Steps for a Writing Workshop and Sample Specific Lesson with handouts

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• Non-Credible Rationale for What Teachers Teach

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non credible reason

“I just feel that this is what students need to learn.”
“When I was in college, we had to do that.”

After the second day of a term, a distraught colleague told me that her high-intermediate level writing-students were totally unprepared for her course.   Her course was supposed to build on what they had learned the previous level, but she discovered that the students had little awareness of what a thesis statement was or what topic sentences were.  Many had trouble writing cohesive sentences.

We asked their previous instructor if he had followed the curriculum and worked on these with the students.  He replied that he had decided to have them write a research paper instead.  His reason: “When I was in college, I had to write research papers, so I decide that it was important that they know how to do that.”

Another instructor who was supposed to teach discussion skills for students to use in small groups, instead spent half the term having the student do presentations.  Her reason: “I just felt that it was good for them to do this since they will probably have to do presentations in the future.”

Why these reasons have little or no credibility concerning what/how we should teach ESL

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