Category Archives: *MOTIVATING ESL STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

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

• I Stopped Trying to Catch AI Plagiarism. Here’s What I Do Instead.

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Dealing with students who plagiarize now seems like a piece of cake compared to ones who now use AI to write their papers. I could usually deter students from plagiarizing by demonstrating how easy it is for teachers to find it.

Early in a term, I would show this paragraph that may have been written by a student:

I’d ask them if they thought the writer had copied any of the sentences from a source. Unsurprisingly, they always spotted the last one. It was a clear signal: if a student can identify it, a teacher definitely can.

However, the rise of AI has shattered that approach.

Why the old technique doesn’t work anymore

Now, I can no long claim that it’s easy to find plagiarism using the sentence, “Aside from this caveat….” If a student plugged that into AI, it could come out as, “Even with this problem, I still think that learning the four skills together is the best way to study a foreign language.”

The vocabulary is simpler, the tone is conversational, and it is incredibly difficult to prove the student didn’t write it themselves.

According to reports from NPR and other outlets, many schools are spending thousands of dollars on AI-detection software. Yet, research shows these tools are far from reliable and frequently produce false positives. Few things are more discouraging for students than working hard on a paper and then being accused of not writing it themselves.

The “Incentive” Approach

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• Fun Activity To Reduce Irritating Classroom Behavior

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(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

 (This is a revision to an earlier posting: Enjoyable and Effective Awareness Activity for Changing ESL Students Classroom Behavior)

Most ESL students don’t do goofy things just to irritate the teacher. Usually, they are unaware of how they are coming across or unaware that they are acting differently from the other students or even what is expected of them.  These are some of the habits students tend to bring to our classes:

  • Chronically arriving to class late
  • Chatting with classmate
  • Text messaging during class
  • Not paying attention
  • Not participating in a group
  • Calling out answer before others get a chance
  • Sitting in the back of the room day-dreaming
  • No eye contact to teacher or classmates in a group
  • Speaking own language in a group
  • And more

An effective approach to circumventing these habits is one in which students become aware of the effects these habits have on the teacher and other students. In this post, I’ll explain how programs that I’ve taught in were able to help students see how their behavior is viewed by others. Not only was the process enjoyable for the students, but also, we noticed far fewer students engaging in these behaviors.

Here is how we did it. 

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• Motivating Students Through Flow Experiences

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It was a teacher-experience that I would have paid good money for. My students had been working individually. With one minute left in the class, I softly told them that it was time to stop for the day. Some of them sort of jumped when they heard my voice and looked at the clock. Then a few of them slowly started to pack up their stuff. But most of them continued to read and write, finally standing up a few minutes later.

On my way home, reflecting on what I had just observed in that class, I realized that my students were probably in a state of flow. Deconstructing the lesson, I noticed that it contained many of the characteristic that researchers say promote flow. And after seeing my students’ responses, I became determined to apply as much as I could to future lessons. And that is what I have tried to accomplish in the sample activities below.

Why should we care about flow? Research has found that people who reportedly experienced flow in an activity tend to spend more time doing it and do it better. Also, they do it for intrinsic reasons; in other words, they felt enjoyment and satisfaction from the activity itself.

My students who seemed to have been in a flow state were probably experiencing characteristic described by researchers. They lost a sense of time; what they were doing seemed effortless; and they were especially focused.

Setting up activities to encourage flow experiences Continue reading →

• A Case For Marking Every Mistake On Essays

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Lane was worried that her students would become discouraged if they saw a lot of mistakes marked on their papers. So to help them develop confidence in their writing skills, for the first essays that they turned in at the beginning of each term, she was very selective about which mistakes she marked. Thus, their first grades were all relatively high. Unfortunately, this approach had some less-than-desirable outcomes, not only for her students, but also for their teachers at the next level.

First of all, the message to the students was, “You don’t have to carefully edit—you can still get a good grade.”

Also, as the term progressed, she realized that several of the students were still making many mistakes, whether from poor editing and/or from lack of knowledge. At the end of the term, she had to decide to either fail those students, which would be a shock to them since they wouldn’t be expecting that, or pass them, which would be a burden for their next teacher, who would have to deal with students who didn’t have the skills necessary to be successful at that level.

A better approach has been to mark every mistake as long as the teacher is strategic when dealing with essays.

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