Tag Archives: engaging students

• They Don’t Want To Stop Talking During This Activity

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

The lights in the classroom are off, but many of the students in pairs continue talking—in the dark!

For most of this class time, students were engaged in a special conversation-skill activity. The class was almost over, so I wanted to get everyone’s attention, “We’ll need to stop in three minutes.” No one seemed to notice me. After three minutes I said that it was time to stop. But hardly anyone flinched. After another three minutes, I turned the lights on and off. Still most continued to talk. So finally, I turned the lights off. Even then in the dark, some pairs continued talking.

This same phenomenon occurs when I’ve presenting this activity at ESL teacher conferences—to NATIVE-ENGLISH SPEAKERS!! Like my ESL students, the teachers continue to talk IN THE DARK!!

One of them even told me after a session, “I wish I could get my husband and son to use this!”

This activity is not only engaging, but it is also developing one of the most important conversation skills. (Below, I’ll attach a link to the activity that you can use to download and use with your students.)

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• More Than Just Talking

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

I was so proud of myself (for a moment).  All the students in my conversation class were talking in pairs. Yes! My activity was working!  But then it wasn’t.

I noticed a similar pattern over the next few classes. I put them in pairs—Student A and B with different questions on their handouts. The energy and noise level in the class increase immediately. But then I noticed one pair briefly changing to a different language; another pair stopping and looking at one of their papers together; in another pair, one was doing most of the talking while the other just nodded their head. Soon a pair finished before the majority were still only half finished and just sat there.

These activities were missing the most important goal of any conversation activity: to help students develop specific techniques that they can use to keep communication flowing.

Beyond just talking

Since that realization, I’ve focused on building complete, ready-to-use activities that help students develop the ability to:

• Actively engage by reacting, asking follow-up questions, and responding with details.
• Keep a conversation going even when the topic is a challenge.
• Use simple signals to let others know how well they understand what is being said.
• Politely interrupt, correct others, or make requests and excuses.
• Participate fully in group discussions by sharing opinions and requesting details.

Continuing to Pay it Forward

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• 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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• Entering a Lesson with Predictions (Part 1: Pre-Listening Activities) (Updated)

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Cover pre listening Pt 1 slide

(This article was originally published in MET (Modern English Teaching) in Spring 1986.)  MET website

It may come as a surprise to any number of teachers to realize that most students do not view their ESL class as the number one preoccupation in their lives. Students come into the class with a myriad number of matters on their minds: weekend plans, family problems, the test in the next class. To foster a classroom atmosphere conducive to students’ leaving behind their outside world and to their focusing attention on the lesson at hand (not to speak of their becoming personally involved in the subject material!) can be an exacting task. Many of us as teachers have seen the otherwise well-planned lesson go “awry”, or just not fulfill our expectations. It may always remain open to speculation as to the reasons why, but most would probably agree that a thoughtfully-prepared lesson does indeed deserve a proper “entry”.

In order to help students to focus on a particular day’s material and to become personally involved in its content, I have found a “prediction process” useful as just such an “entry” into listening and speaking activities. In brief, in the “prediction procedure,” my students make predictions about the content of an upcoming activity and then share their predictions, first in small groups and then with the class as a whole. By so doing, students end up not only focusing on the topic of the material at hand, but also investing a part of themselves in it; they have a “stake” in what follows

Following are detailed examples of this procedure as it was used in four actual classroom settings.  In this Part 1. the two  examples portray the “prediction procedure” acting as an “entry” to listening activities.

In my next posting, Part 2, the two examples describe the procedure as it leads into discussion activities.

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