Strategies for Dealing with Unmotivated ESL Students

I receive letters and emails regularly from new teachers asking for advice dealing with students. I try to help them as much as possible by sharing my experience with them. Here is one reply I sent recently to a beginner  ESL teacher in Korea.

" Motivating students who do not want to learn is a timeless problem for teachers all over the world. It was a problem for me when I first started teaching but as I got more experienced, I was able to apply different strategies to help my students to learn. We still have problems at the VBS camp each year and we try many different things to get them interested.

I would like to share some of the strategies I used in the past with beginning teachers and lay people involved in teaching children in vacation bible school. Hopefully they can try and adopt them in their teaching:

1.       Must know the students background

-          One of the reasons Ontario does not have standard textbooks or standard lessons for teachers is the belief that all our students are different culturally, geographically, economically and socially. Therefore, as a teacher, we must get to know our students and see what their interests and what they can relate to so that our lessons can be meaningful to them.

-          If your students are from rural/ farming communities – then your lessons need to reflect their backgrounds.  We cannot have one set of standard lessons for all the students regardless of their background.

-           

You can get to know your students’ likes and interests by doing a student survey. You may need to have it translated and give it in bilingual language.

I always find that the topical approach teaching method may work better for students who are less interested. For instance, I may plan a unit of lessons if I know a lot of my students are from a small farming community e.g. on Visiting a Farm – then all my teaching material, vocabulary, activities, pictures, resources would be to do with farming or animals.  Animals is always a popular topic among students.




I know Koreans love Sports, so you may want to do a unit of lessons on the topic of different sports – they are crazy about soccer as Koreans made it to the World Cup and Canadian Koreans were crazy in Toronto when the Korean team played on the day.  

Your students don’t want to learn English as they may not see themselves leaving their hometown going to far away places like America.

How about showing them some Olympic / World Cup clips on sports where Korean team, and athletes were featured. Talk about one day maybe they would travel to see their country to compete and cheer on them. English would come in handy when travelling.

2.       Friendly competitions among students is healthy – Divide students in groups according to their ability of English and prepare different level of activities for each group. Reward the first group of students when that group can follow instructions and work on their activities.

 The reward can be class time for some board games, time on computer and an occasional treat from the teacher .

There has to be some students in a class who want to learn. Group these students together and have them work on activities to their level and reward these students.

Pay attention to the students who are doing well and are listening to you. Your attention is also their reward. Hopefully, their positive attitude would start influencing the others.

3.       Student of the Week – I did reward students at the end of the week and recognize not just those who were the best but those who have shown improvement. I made up a letter and sent it home to the parents informing them that their child was chosen Student of the Week/ Month.

You would have to write that letter in both English and Korean so that parents can understand.

You need to sign it or put a special stamp on it or something. This system worked really week for me and saved my neck in my first year teaching Special Education students."

R.T.
Director - TECA
Toronto Education &
Communications Associates
Toronto
Canada

Picture credit - Google Clip art