the only thing that helps our students to find their motivation to learn? Our students are often pessimistic about their ability to use spoken or written English. How many times haven’ t we heard such remarks as: I will never be able to use the present perfect correctly!, I don’ t understand it!, This word is impossible to pronounce! etc.
What strategies can we develop to grab our students’ attention and keep them involved in the learning situation? The teacher is often both facilitator and motivator. The students are exposed to various learning situations and they are encouraged to use the target language as often as possible. Our students are mostly motivated by extrinsic factors. Technological high school students are not very keen on studying foreign languages. And this is an enormous challenge for the teacher. So, we must find the right reasons or rewards for them besides the interesting activities and topics we choose. Most of them learn English because they know they will need it to get a good job in the competitive labour market. We can involve them in short communicative activities with achievable goals. We should praise and encourage them to raise motivation.
We very often act as observers and monitors. We offer help if needed and ensure an atmosphere of cooperation and competition encouraging the students to get involved in the task as much as possible. I will further describe an example of an activity that helped me increase my students’ learning motivation. I did this activity with three different groups of students and they all loved it.
KLICKITAT STREET
This is in fact a puzzle activity which involves the students working together in order to find missing information and complete a chart or a story. Each student is given one piece of information and he / she must cooperate with his / her classmates in order to accomplish a common task. The elements of the puzzle are not single words but items of information. Intermediate students respond very well to this kind of task. The example is an adaptation of Friederike Klippel’ s“ Baker Street.” I chose a more attractive street name and I explained to my students that it was a street in Portland, Oregon, USA and it came from the name of a native tribe in the region. This can be done either as a warm-up activity or as a roundup communicative fluency activity and it can be very easily integrated in a grammar practice lesson in order to open the doors to communication among the students and increase learning motivation.
Preparation
The activity must be prepared in advance. One copy of the handout is needed. It will be cut into strips( see below). We can work with the whole class or we can work with two groups doing the same task simultaneously. I have tried both variants. They both work perfectly. The activity takes about fifteen-twenty minutes.
Procedure: Stage 1 The teacher shows the diagram in the picture below to the students and presents the situation:“ These are five houses in Klickitat Street. One person lives in each house. The purpose of the activity is to find out each person’ s name, whether he or she is married or not, what pet he or she owns, which books he or she likes and what he or she likes to drink. At the end, think of one extra piece of information you might add to the chart and report the result to your colleagues.” e. g.“ I think Miss Dud can ride a bicycle.” Or“ She shouldn’ t drink beer when she drives a car.
Each of them will get a strip of paper( or two or three if the group is smaller than twenty) with some information on it. The students share what they know and try to fill in the chart. The teacher’ s role is to remind the students to speak English. Each student reads
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