Archive Copy.
Motivating Low-Level Students
How can we motivate university students and adults who have studied English for years, but still cannot really communicate, to express themselves more positively? How can we help teenagers to use the English they learn at school more actively and communicatively? This presentation introduces techniques for achieving these aims – aims that have been heavily influenced by the constructivist ideas of George Kelly and Lev Vygotsky and have been successfully tried and tested in the classroom by many teachers.
The approach is based on puzzle-solving. A lesson is a series of puzzles, and the language targets are the keys that solve these puzzles. It is the students’ interest in finding solutions that motivates them to search for the language targets. The aim is for the students to be fully involved and having a lot of fun at every stage of a lesson, particularly when new language targets are introduced. If students encounter new targets in motivating, student-centered activities, they are much more likely to produce this language spontaneously in the activities that follow and in real-life situations.
Biographical sketch
David Paul founded David English House in an apartment in Hiroshima in 1982 and built it up to be one of the most respected schools in East Asia, with about 35 branches in Japan and franchises in Korea and Thailand.
David has spent a lot of time in Asian countries training teachers, representing distance MA programs, and helping both private schools and ministries of education to introduce more student-centered programs. He has also been a guest speaker at many conferences throughout the region. However, these days, when he is not teaching, he focuses almost entirely on training and supporting teachers at a grass-roots level in Japan.
He is the founder of ETJ (English Teachers in Japan), a volunteer association which now has nearly 10,000 members, and of the ETJ Expos. His latest project is Language Teaching Professionals, which he founded in 2010.
His books include: Communicate (Compass), Motivate (Compass), New Finding Out (Macmillan), Communication Strategies (Cengage), Teaching English to Children in Asia (Pearson).
David Paul is sponsored to KOTESOL 2012 by Compass Media
20-20 Session
What Is a Child-Centered Lesson?
Some teachers think a child-centered lesson is one where children are running around the room or jumping up and down. Others think it is one where children are working on projects. In fact, lessons that appear to be child-centered are often very teacher-centered. So what is a child-centered lesson? What elements do we need to include in our lessons to make them more child-centered?
Child-centered learning is more mental than physical, though it can be physical as well. The initial desire to learn something starts inside each child. We may choose a language target, but before the children learn it, we need to ensure that the children also feel it is important and genuinely want to learn it.
When we “teach,” we send a message to the children that they do not need to learn for themselves. When we focus on immediate facts and knowledge, and not on the process of learning, we send a message to the children that they cannot be natural human beings in our lessons. Children, by nature, are active learners. They are full of life and curiosity, and learning is at the very core of their existence. We need to find methods that trust and build on their natural desire to learn.
