TeachingEnglish
English as a foreign language
Submitted by Nadejda on 8 February, 2009 - 11:51
There is a huge (!) problem to teach English for a students who aren't interested in learning. They don't use or speak English anywhere except school. But even these 40 minutes of lesson they spend doing nothing. This doesn't consern all the students of course. But there is a half of the lesson's visitors. They came and sit trying to disturb those ones who come to learn. They also sit playing on their mobile phones untill I make them put the phones on my table. All these points disturb the lesson prosses and reduse my willing to do the lessons more creative and interesting.
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Occasionally, we have the same problem here with some troublesome students. Experience shows that anyone who attends English classes has a goal. Some come just to fill their extra time and nowadays, unfortunately, there are parents who would like to spend their time leisurely or doing shopping and they do not know how to get rid of their naughty boy, so they send him to a class just to make sure He is in a safe place to fill the time. Sometimes institutes managers ignore it as long as they pay their tuitions. In my opinion this is a heavy burden on teachers and not only wastes other students' time but will result in corrupting English institutes reputations and therefore must be avoided.
Best wishes
Ali asghar Mazinanian
You are right, sometimes children and teenagers may take English classes as free time to do anything else than paying attention.
It is not quite easy to manage those type of pupils, but I always show them that English is also important when they would like to listen to an English song or playing in the Internet, as most of the games are initiated in the English language. I also ask the students to put all mobiles in a basket located at the entrance of the class, so they forget about it during class.
Maybe you can try this type of activities, so that you can avoid disturbance.
What sort of media do you have access to in the classroom?
There was some interesting research recently about the importance of listening activities.
If some children will not participate in the class, can you let them opt in to listening activities instead? - so freeing your valuable classroom time for children who need your attention.
I agree that this is the reality, especially in rural areas where some students cannot see the point of learning English. My solution is to make extensive use of Youtube - I am lucky to work at a school with good technology - and present lessons loaded with visuals and music. The other thing that seems to work is to have the different levels of competency & keeness in different classes - those not interested or low in learning abilities do fall for simple and easy lessons whereas those keen to learn get more challenging lessons. But I think we need more sophisticated research on how to deal with this situation - motivation is a great factor - how to motivate learners who do not like the hard work of learning a second language. Where there is no will there is no way ... you can bring a donkey to the water but you can't make it drink ...
And then perhaps the possibility to choose between a wider selection of languages as second language - students should be forced to take English, they should not feel they MUST learn ENGLISH - there are other world languages too afterall.