This is an article by Steven Starry for English teachers about teaching interesting English classes. How interesting can an English teacher really be? By definition, English teachers aren't so interesting as a group. In any case, my basic message is be yourself, be as authentic and excellent as you can be.
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I got a one-line email recently on Youtube from somebody saying that their students often say that their classes aren’t very interesting and asking what they could do to make them more so. The question got me thinking because it refers to something which, without a doubt, will be one of the most fundamental problems that all English teachers will be facing on a day-to-day basis.
In any case, I’m just a grunt trying to survive on the front lines. I’m usually juggling all kinds of stuff incoming at me from all sides, so I don’t have the luxury of having all sorts of time to think these things out like some guys like Andrew Wright who wrote “How to Be Entertaining,” which answers the question better than I can. If you still want to hear my two-cents worth, here goes:
The short answer is, “I don’t know.” Believe me, sometimes it’s not easy to keep students interested and entertained day-after-day. A few will be much easier than others all the time, but most will more slowly or quickly get more and more difficult to keep interested in your classes. After the “honeymoon” comes the reality. Getting “married” in the first place is just a tiny part of the problem. Judging by the number of dysfunctional marriages out there, many of which end up in divorce, I think it’s clear that people don’t always get along well together in their relationships over time. It takes two to tango.
Academy
Requires English Teachers
The many answers to the question of why people don’t get along together fill a lot of books. But, just take it for granted: “normal“ people don’t give up on each other suddenly without reasons. There’s a process at work there. Sometimes it’s as simple as your not being interesting or entertaining enough for the young prince, or princess. Unfortunately, some of my students do get bored from-time-to-time, what can I say? They tend to keep coming to my classes though. Actually, I’ve never had anybody tell me that my classes in general were boring or not interesting, though if they say so about a particular lesson, singer’s song or whatever, they’ll never get the same type of lesson again.
Actually, I agonize over the many non-verbal cues like what makes them yawn, look at their watches, stop smiling or get that far-away look in their eyes which tells me they’re somewhere else and not listening. On the other hand, I will also look for what makes students more interested. If they, hopefully, say they’re pleased with or interested in something, I’ll try to do more of it. I’ll usually put a lot of time and work into it. It’s up to you to look at this effort either as wasting your time or just postponing the inevitable, the glass half-empty, or as work-in-progress on the way to becoming a super-teacher capable of churning out legions of super-students, the glass half-full.
In fact, I think that most students really appreciate it if you bother to relate to them as individual human beings - or not, and I think that they do unconsciously want to see some evidence that you suffer a bit over them because you’re trying to make things easier for them and help them learn English and help them with their problems and so on.
By the way, the person I mentioned before who sent me the email sent just one line. That’s it. They didn’t give any other background information which would have been helpful and I didn’t ask. There are all kinds of classes. What type do you teach? Normally, when I get one-line emails like that, I just delete them because if the writer couldn’t be bothered to set up the request with some good background information, then I won’t be bothered to find the time to write them for more information. If you can’t be bothered to properly set up an email, can you be bothered to prepare a proper class?
So, although I’m answering the emailer’s question, I could just as easily have deleted it. But, neither saint nor devil am I and neither will be most of your students, many of whom could just as easily delete you. And yet classes are never “until death do us part.” And when they do break up, it should in some way feel like a small death. The best teachers, in my opinion, will suffer somewhat from Stockholm Syndrome. But, unlike the story-teller character in One Thousand and One Nights, we always get the axe at the end of the school year at the latest, maybe to be reborn from the ashes in the fall, maybe not.
In other words, we’re working in a service industry and your job as an English teacher is to provide a quality service. If you think that that means always just following a textbook page-by-page from cover to cover, you’re sadly mistaken. No, no, no, no, that’s not it at all. Your students won’t always let you get away with it that easily, not forever, and not in most cases anyway. More so with beginners, in fact, than with more advanced students. And you may even get fed up with them before they do.
The main problem with textbooks is that they are designed to teach an “average student” who doesn’t exist in the real world beyond an elementary level. The topics are really general in nature, and the textbooks are usually deliberately designed to be non-controversial and risk-free, they’re sometimes a bit pedantic, and they almost always lack immediacy. Also, sometimes your students will reject particular lessons from a textbook though both the authors and you will have found them relevant; sometimes because they’ll have already done them elsewhere; other times, because they’ll think the language presented is too easy for them, possibly because of the “elementary-looking” presentation, even when you can see it’s useful because they’re not using the language correctly.
Most importantly, textbooks tend to be full of reading, writing and listening activities when what I think most students really want to do is to be stimulated to speak and be corrected and responded to. There are loads of reading, listening and grammar resources which they could use and do outside of class, if you could get them to do even a fraction of it, in which case your focusing on speaking in the class would make a lot more sense and be a lot more efficient use of your teaching time.
You will find, however, that students will from time-to-time ask for or require specific grammar lessons in class, which they’ll react to better if they are drilled and practiced orally rather than in writing or on paper. Also, they’ll almost always prefer you to lead on to freer speaking activities based on the grammar points they’ve studied rather than do a writing-based activity. If you study the futures “will,” “going to,” and so on, for example, they’ll react better if you ask them questions that are pertinent to them specifically. In this case, if your students find that they are actually learning something which will be useful for them, they may well get more interested in it. If they’re businessmen or engineers, you might end up asking them questions about the future of the economy or energy.
Part 2:
When they make mistakes during the conversation, you can refer back to the grammar points you’ve taught them. Students tend to have studied the grammar, but to not have fully acquired it until they’ve made enough mistakes and been corrected and gotten repeated reminders, and so on. For example, they may continue to use “will” instead of other structures for all speaking about the future. The point here is to provoke the mistakes in action and then refer back to the lessons and explanations to get them to more fully acquire the language enough to use it correctly.
Textbooks are great for activities using grammar points to lead into speaking, but students will eventually need to practice presentations-type speaking at length about topics they’re interested in, which might not favor one grammar structure over another. (This might include situational English. i.e. telephone English, which does tend to favor some key grammar points.) The problem is that they will not be able to handle speaking correctly about these topics in the beginning and you’ll have to build them up to it over time.
Another fundamental problem of purely “conversational” classes is that you usually end up covering the same territory again and again, due perhaps to the participants’ limited range of interests, and becoming stale and boring unless you do some planning (and have some cooperation). For elementary students the solution is almost always to follow a textbook, preferably one like OUP’s “New English File” which is easy to use to lead into a lot of oral activities and is also easy to modify. The solution for more advanced students might just mean reading the paper every day or two or The Economist every week looking for a variety of items that you can bait students with. On the other hand, as I said before, a few students are centered on one or two topics only, meaning that over time you’ll have to do some research to become an expert on them if you want to keep the classes for very long.
By the way, sometimes a one-to-one student will make it really difficult to teach them because they won’t like either to talk about much of anything or for you to teach them lessons from a textbook, really complicating your ambitions to keep your classes dynamic. Staying interesting and witty for very long in this context is almost impossible.
What this all basically means is that if I know that one of my students won’t let me teach him much grammar and will be talking only about food all the time because he’s a fanatical connoisseur, I’ll have to constantly find new things to get him to talk about at length if we’ve already thoroughly explored the topic with them. Each time we talk about the subject, I’ll want to make sure I explore it from a new angle. After we’ve talked about what they usually eat, the restaurants they go to, what they eat there, etc. etc. I might ask them what kinds of seafood they eat or cook, or what sorts of nuts or snacks they eat or cook and when they eat or cook them, or I might ask them if they’ve ever eaten or cooked any insects and what insects. (In Spain, they love to talk about their love of snails at this point.) Notice that there are all sorts of vocabulary words involved and the novelty and revulsion factor usually seems to increase interest in the conversation. Trying to find or brainstorm questions on the topic beforehand can be really helpful with keeping the students on track for longer in order to exploit the subject more fully without gutting it out completely. The list of possibilities is virtually endless, as long as the student is cooperative.
If you see the student can’t handle complex structures like the perfect tenses and past conditional and so on and is barely able to handle simple tenses like the present and past simple, stick to the simple structures as much as possible and otherwise simplify your vocabulary and speed and clarify your pronunciation. If you, on the other hand, find the students are starting to handle those complex structures with just a few errors when using the simple tenses, let them have it.
And don’t be afraid to go off track if the students are really motivated to do so. You couldn’t stop some students talking if you tried, by the way. (I wish they all had that problem. The only problem there is is when they don’t let their classmates get a word in edgewise.) Just remember to try to get them back on track when they’ve wound down somewhat. Also, if the students reject your lists of questions, you’ll have to memorize them so as to have more flexibility.
Also, seek out opportunities to lead on to any other language work when you wrap up the class, if they’ll allow you or if it’s really relevant. You might notice that they constantly mispronounce words like: “this,” “that,” “they,” “them,” “there,” “these” and “those” as “dis,” “dat,” “day,” “dem,” “dare,” “dese” and “dose.” Well, in the last ten minutes of class you might drill them correctly.
Or, you might get them to recall some of the vocabulary words or grammar points they learned during the class. You might emphasize a couple you find particularly important. They’ll usually find language work like this relevant if it’s based on vocabulary and grammar points that they needed in action and couldn’t easily access. You might even get requests for more work on a particular grammar point, which will then give you the opportunity to teach a proper text-book-based grammar lesson in the next class.
Used correctly, which might mean sparingly or with a focus on using them to lead into oral activities, textbooks can be a useful tool and if you can get students to follow good ones, these almost always succeed in getting them to learn English well. And let me point out that it will definitely make your job a whole lot easier if you can just follow a textbook. In any case, it’s always easier to get larger groups to follow one more closely, especially when the classes are not on-site in the students own territory. What’s more is that individual students attending large classes in an “important” academy wouldn’t dream of requesting a complete method change mid-stream. “Take it or leave it,” might be the teacher’s or academy’s justified, but blunt response.
Teaching in-company classes is usually a little different from teaching academy classes in that the classes are usually smaller and you’re in the students’ territory. If you’ve got just one student in your class, you’d do very well to pay very close attention to them when they tell you what they want especially verbally, but also non-verbally.
Let me give you a couple of examples of how I’m managing to survive so far in a couple of my own company classes so as to clarify what I mean.
I’ve got a really representative one-to-one student now who’s made it very clear to me several times that he wants to speak, be listened to and be corrected. Several times, when I’ve tried to use prepared lessons, he has also reminded me of what happened to the last teacher who didn’t abide with this. You might think, “Great! A conversation class, that’s easy!” But, I have to prepare a lot more in other ways as he only has two main subjects of interest: soccer and travelling to small towns in Spain, and he has a particularly poignant glare with which he rejects alternative topics as easily as he does textbooks and methods. Imagine having to do this for years. That basically means that I have to spend a few hours every week researching these subjects in order to find things that’ll interest him and which may also produce interesting vocabulary and grammar usage, and then try to use those topics as bait to get him talking at length so I can use his mistakes as an excuse to teach him what English I can orally in action.
Part 3:
Normally, as nobody likes either a know-it-all or an ignoramus for very long (and because it’s really hard for either one to keep students talking), I feign just enough ignorance, and interest, about topics to keep my students talking, but I find that it’s hard to find good questions unless you know just enough to even suspect the questions exist in the first place. Sometimes my ignorance is not feigned. This is most evident when you somehow spark off a debate amongst engineer students of English, for example, and they start talking about things with plenty of technical vocabulary words that you had no idea even existed. Just about all you can do is stand aside and let it happen. Thankfully, I’m enough of a techno-geek that I’m really interested in exploring a lot of topics like these.
Fundamentally, I find I have to be an opportunist. For example, I have some engineer students who were doing a textbook at pre-intermediate level they seemed to become increasingly dissatisfied with (or maybe it was me that did so). Basically, because their speaking level was lower than their reading and vocabulary level (as is usual with students who have to read a lot of technical material in English), I was able to spark off enough of these successfully handled interesting debates and parallel activities such as complicated songs for me to see the opportunity to move them on to a higher level course based on texts from The Economist’s technology section, and so on.
Let me point out that a move like this - a drastic change in materials and what might seem to be a huge leap forward in level - is super risky and a lot more work for me to prepare. Every one of the texts has 40-50 vocabulary words for them to study and mp3 recording to listen to, but the reason they’ll be willing to put up with it is an abundant amount of motivation and interest. It’s right down their line. They suddenly find themselves doing exactly what they wanted to be able to do in the first place from a professional point of view. What’s more is that a year ago most of them wouldn’t have been able to do it. However, you can never be sure how things will work out and only time will tell if moving on to The Economist was a smart move. My feeling is it might be a little overwhelming for them and that I’ll have to back off for a more relaxing day every few classes at least to give them an occasional breather.
Taking risks every day in your classes is normal (as is learning, changing and growing). You have to push your luck a little all the time, and a lot just some of the time, but you’ve got to be able to know how to back off in time when you’re pushing too hard. Listen to any good comedian and meditate on that. Better yet, copy as much as you can get away with from them (students won’t understand a lot of jokes so be careful). Like circus jugglers, they take audacious risks with every single thing they say, which is part of what makes them interesting.
Students are more likely to smoke you because you don’t have any opinions, “you’re boring,” rather than if you have an occasional one that they totally disagree with, “you’re an opinionated ignoramus.” The main point is that they’ll usually want to talk about real things going on in the real world.
In other words, have opinions, but don’t take yourself too seriously. They’ll take you a lot more seriously if you’re willing to admit your mistakes and take the opportunity to learn and grow if and when they challenge any of your long-held habits or beliefs.
You’ll be held responsible mainly for the English language content part of the class, and not so much so for all of the collective body of knowledge and culture of mankind. Students will more likely eat your lunch for making stupid language-related mistakes like “you stuck your feet in something” than for stupidly believing in a lost cause such as Republican compassion. For example, really advanced students may sometimes suspect they know more English than you when maybe you’ll doubt for a second, say, between “quiz show” and “game show” for referring to TV shows such as “The Price is Right.” Put enough of these little details together back-to-back and they’re likely to set up a revolution.
There are other ways, however, to tactlessly stick your foot in it and kill a class as you might, for example, commit a faux pas and say something witless like that you think drugs ought to be legalized when they recently told you that one of their best friends from high school died of heroin addiction. Which brings up the point that students will sometimes talk about some rather mature and seriously personal, otherwise taboo, topics such as the death of a loved one or taking care of seriously handicapped parents or grandparents. Can you handle it? It’s interesting for them, but it may be distressing for you. It is for me.
And maybe times like these won’t be the best of times to show off your copulous linguistic wit. In your intercourse with students, your thing may not always work well. It’s not always easy to figure out exactly what to do and exactly when to do it. You can negotiate with your students back and forth, up and down, and in and out. You might even stick your foot in it. You may not agree with or even understand what they want you to do, but try to make the best of their positions. The trade off for your time and work is usually higher or continued attendance, motivation and interest for all concerned. Hopefully, you can even culminate the course ecstatically at the end of the year.
Which brings me to another important point: don’t be afraid to play around with language. Intermediate and advanced students have a difficult time with the multiple meanings of vocabulary points. It’s not a bad idea to take advantage of every opportunity you have time for in the course of your class to make these apparent to them.
And, believe me, if you think my sense of humor and invented words are a wee bit silly, wait until you hear what your students come up with. Unlike Shakespeare’s famous quote, for English teachers making comparisons is not odorous if it makes the language more interesting, humorous and memorable for students.
In conclusion, I’ll reiterate that in my experience in just about all of my classes (mostly in Spain and a little in England), I’ve found that most students react best to an oral method where they are able to negotiate the content of the course. Even with beginners, it’s best if you try to get them to do as much as possible orally (by the way, it’s not a bad idea to practice a few amusing facial expressions like Benny Hill’s or Mr. Bean’s).
However, giving in to your students’ requests for something more challenging often ends in failure. For example, a group of elementary-level secretaries may request telephone English when you shouldn’t touch it till well into pre-intermediate level. Also, a pre-intermediate group may well fall flat big time with technology articles from the Economist.
Part 4:
Also, to get back to the original question, what do I think you need to do to stay interesting for most of your students? The main thing is just to rigorously do your homework and prepare yourself. This means reading about or researching the maximum number of topics that might be of interest to as many of your students as possible. A lot of what students will want to talk about is just general culture, which anybody can handle, but I find that when I have most gotten positive compliments and comments from students is when they’ve learned something new from me because I’ve gone out of my way to research the issue and think about it more deeply, especially with regard to finding questions to ask them.
You’ve got to remember that every student is vastly different and, for survival’s sake, you may want to adapt to these differences. I’ll go from listening to a student’s presentation on valves or heating and cooling systems to speaking about the economics of the rising prices of oil and electrical energy, to speaking about how a particular student’s new Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X handles curves so well, to practicing the past simple and speaking about a student’s last vacation, to speaking about places around the Community of Madrid that the students recommend for tourists like me to visit, to speaking about the evolution of a current political campaign somewhere, to listening to a Frank Zappa song and deconstructing the lyrics, and so on.
Obviously, you can’t prepare for everything under the sun. How can I prepare, or should I prepare, for classes on valves and heating systems? You can do the best you are able to each and every time, but your efforts won’t always pay off in each and every class in the short term. However, I do think that your students will appreciate the higher level of culture and flexibility that you’ll be acquiring in the long term.
This is an article by Steven Starry for English teachers about teaching interesting English classes. How interesting can an English teacher really be? By definition, English teachers aren't so interesting as a group. In any case, my basic message is be yourself, be as authentic and excellent as you can be.
Part 1:
Right click and select "save as" to download complete 4-part 459 Mb
