Category Archives: *MOTIVATING ESL STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

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

• 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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• Tolerance for Ambiguity in Reading

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

One of my insecure students, Saki, wrote me this comment at the end of my “Reading Support” class: “I decided to take Psychology next term because of the readings in this course. I now have confidence to read the required “Pharmaceutical” book for me to get a higher paid job as a drug counselor all thanks to this course.”.

Thinking back on the Saki that I remember at the beginning of the class, I’m pretty sure I know what changed for her. I noticed that on her copy of the first article, she had tons of translations, even above words that there was no doubt she would know. She believed that the only way that she could feel confident that she was really understanding a passage was if she knew the meaning of absolutely every word. In other words, she lacked a tolerance for ambiguity.

She told me that she had lost her confidence after looking at the Pharmaceutical course book because there seemed to be so many words she didn’t recognize.

How Saki (and her classmates) gained her confidence by developing a tolerance for ambiguity in everything they read.

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

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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.) *

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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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 →