In my view, the primary role of a language teacher is to facilitate learning. I recognize that my students cannot passively learn English from me, but instead must take an active role in their learning in order to successfully gain fluency. For that reason, I place huge emphasis on influencing student motivation in my classroom. While a student’s personal motivation for learning English is ultimately out of my control, I focus on influencing factors that affect motivation. The first step is to ensure that my classroom is a low-stakes and friendly environment. To me, a low-stakes class is where students do not feel shame in making errors, or worried errors will hinder their academic success. Not only are errors necessary for a learner to gain fluency, they indicate to me where the student is in their language learning process (Corder, 1967). For this reason, I do everything possible to lower students’ affective filters through building rapport and low-stakes language practice through playing games. I believe that the first week of class is the most important week because it sets the course of the class. In addition to learning students’ names, I learn their reasons for enrolling in my class and their broader interests and career goals. If they have pets or unique interests, I repeatedly use them in examples and activities as if they were inside jokes.
The next step is to build student confidence. Every language classroom has a range of students at varying levels. A mistake I made when I was a beginner teacher was prioritizing the more advanced students. I worried that not adequately challenging students would mean I’m not an adequate teacher. This in turn damaged the confidence of the lower level students. It’s been found that self-confidence and one’s internal emotional state has a large influence on a learner’s overall competence in a language (Hanton et al, 2004). In light of this, and after more experience teaching, I have now learned how to balance a lesson where I prioritize the lower level students’ needs, while still challenging the more advanced students. My secret is to provide subtle scaffolding to the lower students, while providing fast finisher tasks to the advanced students. Especially with reading activities, students finish at different rates. Instead of having the faster readers wait on the slower readers, I quietly ask them to underline the new vocabulary words in the reading. All students have gone over the new vocabulary as part of my pre-reading warm-up, but the new words are not highlighted or bolded in the text. If other students require even more time, I ask the faster readers to create a sentence from the new words. This way, the faster readers are still interacting with the text while the slower readers are not left behind. My ultimate goal is for all students to sufficiently engage with the material.
In line with providing subtle scaffolding, I place an emphasis on communicative learning, where the goal of an activity is to be understood, rather than perfect accuracy. When students interact with their peers in group work, they must negotiate meaning and construct their opinions in the target language (Brinton, 2003). I strategically place students of varying abilities in groups together, while maintaining the appearance of groups being randomly assigned. Or, in the case of shy students, I strategically place them with students they feel most comfortable around. This provides all students with a chance for breakdown in meaning to occur, and to negotiate meaning with the language they do know. This not only allows them to use language for meaning, but to also identify their gaps in knowledge. I often begin lessons with communicative tasks designed to identify a gap in their knowledge, to prime them for the topic of the lesson in which I will address those gaps. Of course, it isn’t possible to anticipate all gaps in their knowledge, which is where flexibility comes in. If we identify an important gap in their knowledge, I have no problem making time in class to spontaneously address students’ needs. If necessary, I use the newly identified knowledge gaps to inform the next lesson.
The last way I motivate students is fundamental to how I design lessons, through the use of authentic materials and task-based lessons. A task-based lesson should, “require [learners] to give primary attention to meaning and to make use of their own linguistic resources” (Ellis, 2003; as cited in Van den Branden, 2016). I create lessons to center around students’ needs and interests. To ensure this, I check-in with my class after each lesson to ask 1) how difficult they found the lesson and 2) how interesting they found the material. Nevertheless, I still use textbooks as a guideline, but I supplement them with recent, real-world articles or tasks. If many of my students are applying for a job where they must speak English, we will have a lesson where they write an email to a potential employer highlighting their CV. Or, if many students are interested in Space Exploration, I will find a current news article and base a lesson around it.
At the end of the day, a teacher cannot make a student learn. However, I aspire to use every resource at my disposal to spark students’ interest in my class.
References
Branden, K. V. (2016). Task-based language teaching. The Routledge Handbook of English
……………Language Teaching, 238–251. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315676203-21
Brinton, D. (2003). Content-Based Instruction. In Nunan, D. (Ed.), Practical English Language
……………Teaching. McGraw-Hill Contemporary
Corder, S.P. (1967). The Significance of Learner’s Errors. In: IRAL 5/1967. 161-170.
Hanton, S., Mellalieu, S. D., & Hall, R. (2004). Self-confidence and anxiety interpretation: A
………….qualitative investigation. Psychology of sport and exercise, 5(4), 477-495. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/S1469-0292(03)00040-2
