Category Archives: *MOTIVATING ESL STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

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

• A Surprisingly Simple Quality that Students Want in Their Teachers

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It was early in my teaching career, and I had recently started teaching for the first time in Asia. My students were a total pleasure to work with. But I wondered what they were looking for in me, their teacher. The director of our program seemed like a thoughtful Asian man, so I believed that he could give me some insights. I wasn’t disappointed.

What he told me seemed so simple, but the more I thought about it throughout my teaching career, the more impactful it became. Also, when I reflected back on the characteristics of my favorite teachers in the past, his insight was spot on.

Here is what he told me when I asked him, “What are students looking for in their teacher?”

Here is what he told me in one simple sentence when I asked him, “What are students looking for in their teacher?”

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• Making a Connection With Each Student: Research-Based Technique

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(This posting includes a handout link at the end of this post which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

Early in one term, I was starting a conferencing session with a new student, Anja. As she was sitting down next to me, she said, “David, I heard that you grew up in Chicago. I just had a homestay there!” I noticed that I immediately felt a connection to Anja that stayed with me from that day on.

There is some amazing research that explains how we make connections with others. And best of all, there are ways that we can apply this to building positive relationships with our students.

In their book Click: The Power of Instant Connections the authors, Ori and Rom Brafman, describe some enlightening experiments. In one study, some people volunteered for a made-up study about creativity. The researchers secretly set it up so that as half the volunteers left the researchers’ lab, someone wearing a badge with the same first name as the volunteers approached them asking for a donation to a charity. For example, if Cindy had just left the lab, she would be approached by a charity worker wearing a name tag that showed that her name, also, was Cindy.  Likewise, Susan would meet someone named Susan. The other half of the subjects were approached by someone with no badge. Now this is what I found remarkable. The first group whose same first names were on badges donated twice as much as the second group who saw a badge with a different name.

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• Introducing any ESL Lesson: FIVE Effective Ways

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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 10th 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.

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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.

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• LINCS Topic 3: What can you recommend for offering effective feedback on writing? How can teachers manage the amount of time it takes to give feedback?

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Cover 3 Feedback REV

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

This posting is a more detailed response to my interview question on Day 3 .LINCS Discussion: Student-Centered Approach to Teaching Writing Skills. .

Below in blue, you’ll find the details that I’ve added to the Day 3 LINCS’ posting.

Giving feedback to students on their writing is such a rewarding aspect of our job.

However, it’s important to do it in a way that is meaningful to students yet user-friendly for the teacher. Here is how we can do it.

Giving meaningful feedback in in a manner that is time and energy efficient

In general, we’d like to give three types of feedback on a piece of writing:
1) Indicate what they did well.
2) Lead them to discover their grammar mistakes.
3) Point out where they could improve their content.

1) Indicate what they did well.

Imagine that you are a student and just received your paper with this positive feedback from the instructor at the end of the essay:

This was a good essay.  Your ideas were interesting.  You used advanced sentence styles, and some of your examples helped me understand your main points.

Will these comments actually help you, as a student, apply how you wrote to future writing tasks?  Which specific ideas were interesting?  Which specific sentences was the teacher referring to as advanced and which examples were helpful?

A time-consuming alternative that some teachers turn to is to write the comments in the margin next to noteworthy places in the essay.  The drawback to this, especially when commenting on paper, is that it is time consuming, there is little space to write them, and the handwriting needs to be clear.  Also, one wonders whether students will actually read the comments.

Before describing an easy, efficient and effective method for giving focused positive feedback, it’s important to understand the reason why we want to give positive feedback.  What we are trying to do is to encourage them to continue to use writing techniques which have made their writing assignments coherent, cohesive and interesting.

This means we’d like to point out, for example, where they have effectively used…

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