How to Keep Students Motivated to Learn English
As any teacher will tell you, motivating students is one of the most important – and oftentimes most difficult – parts of the job.
Once you motivate your students, and keep them motivated, they will learn the language more easily.
Don’t just expect this motivation to appear out of the thin classroom air. Luckily, instructors have quite a few tricks up their sleeve to motivate students to learn.
Plan Motivation into Your Lessons
First, show the context where the target language could be used. For example, the language might be ‘polite requests’ and the where might be ‘the post office.’ Do this at the start of the lesson.
Later, when drawing your visuals – a dialog or structure chart on the marker board, perhaps – elicit as much language as possible from the students. The more language that actually comes from the students, the more interesting it will be for them.
When you are executing the “Production” or “Activation” part of your lesson plan, encourage your students to use the target language to discuss their hobbies, emotions, and daily life. When they link the lesson to their personal lives, they will be more enthusiastic to talk. As you’ll realize at many a cocktail party – most people just love talking about themselves.
Keep it Real—Keep it Relevant
Relevance is another component in student motivation.
When you have adult students, you should plan your lessons around grown-up issues. Children will blossom talking about kid things, and teenagers need to learn from classes that are relevant to their age group. Keeping your class demographic in mind will help you ratchet up their interest in the lesson.
Sometimes you may need additional materials or tangential lesson plans to make this work in addition to the coursebook. For example, one popular English book for young learners has lessons on purchasing automobiles and booking plane tickets – issues the students won’t have to worry about for years to come. A lesson on choosing toys at a toy shop or on the latest video game would prove much more motivating to kids.
The use of real-world items in lessons (in TEFL jargon we call them “realia”) also promotes interest. If you have a lesson on your schedule about fruit, why not stop by the store and bring some actual fruit to class. In the same vein, if you’re teaching Business English, then using real-world documents from their office will help students realize English does have relevance and importance in their daily life.
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