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Twelve Things to Keep in Mind when Teaching Teenagers

It seems that all teenagers are interested in pop songs, so exploit that interest by
bringing music – and the feelings that can be expressed through songs – into the
classroom.

Teenagers (perhaps especially the current need-to-know generation) like to be seen as


cool and up-to-date, so bring in topics of current interest from IT, sport, entertainment
and media, and English-speaking cultures that is personally relevant to your learners.

Teenagers are discovering (often with difficulty) a different relationship with others and
group work allows individuals to interact with different classmates in a less stressful,
collaborative atmosphere.

Teenagers are starting to define their proper personalities (sometimes it seems they
have multiple personalities!) and role-play activities can allow them to try to express
different feelings behind non-threatening, face-saving masks.

Part of growing up is taking responsibility for one's acts and, in school, for one's
learning, so a measure of learner autonomy and individual choice can be helpful for
teenagers.

It's amazing how some teenagers will have an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of a
particular field, so let individual students bring their outside interests and knowledge
into the classroom through cross-curricular work.

Variety – including surprise and humour – is the spice of classroom life (perhaps
particularly with teenagers and their infamous short attention span), so try out different
warmers, starters and fillers to change the pace and enliven the organisation of your
lessons.

Teenagers are discovering their (often awkward) bodies so use movement by giving
students an opportunity to move around during class.

Teaching in secondary school often means teaching multi-level classes, but effective
classroom management can help even with very large classes.

Use of the mother tongue can not only steer a whole class activity away from
misunderstanding, confrontation and potential discipline problems (always a risk with
teenagers), but also help avoid pressure on an individual by removing the impression
that one person is being tested and put on the spot.

Games can provide not only purposeful contexts in which to use language but they also
stimulate interaction, provide competition and are fun – as long as rules are clear and
clearly followed by all participants.

Project work offers each individual a chance to use their individual talent to do
something personally meaningful and motivating with the language they are learning –
and the resulting posters and other visuals can be displayed around the classroom (just
as teenagers decorate their rooms at home).

What do you have to keep in mind when teaching teenagers?

“Be sensitive… to both intensive and


extensive reading”
by Gary Anderson
In their future professional and personal lives, your teenage students of today are going
to need to be able to read English in a variety of ways:
 text books and articles for their studies;
 reports, manuals, memos and e-mails for their jobs;
 tourist brochures and guides in their free time;
 Internet sites (the majority of which will continue to be in English) for both work
and pleasure.

Of course as teachers we know that the challenge of reading can be either a reading
problem - most teenagers don't read much that isn't assigned schoolwork - or an
educational problem - they don't know how to read properly in their native language let
alone in a foreign language where the language is sometimes too difficult or where the
necessary vocabulary or background information is often lacking. So we need not only
to teach our adolescent students active, productive reading strategies for shorter
intensive texts, but also get them interested in extensive, or pleasure, reading because
studies show that the best way of becoming a good reader is by reading, i.e. we learn to
read by reading a lot.

Below are a few suggestions of ways to be sensitive to both the intensive and extensive
reading needs of your teenage students and to help them progress towards becoming
better independent readers both in and outside class.

Intensive reading strategies


 Pre-reading prediction activities: Before reading an article in a magazine or
newspaper, you usually form some idea of what it is about from the
accompanying photo or headline. So to heighten interest before starting to read
a text in class with your students, use the picture or title to brainstorm and elicit
possible vocabulary (that you can put on the blackboard) or just to discuss what
the article is about: Who exactly is the person jumping off that tower on page 40
of English in Mind 2 and what does it have to do with Growing up?
 Reading for gist or 'skimming' for main ideas: Intensive reading texts in English
in Mind start with pre-reading tasks or questions to focus students' attention on
the main ideas in the text during a first, quick 'diagonal' reading about the topic.
Teach your students 'skimmed milk' and relate reading for gist to 'skimming' the
best part, the cream off the top of a bottle of milk. Get your students into the
habit of reading the questions first and then using a finger to guide their eyes
quickly over the texts - and to look up, close their books or raise their hands
when they have found the answers.
 Reading for specific information or 'scanning': Intensive reading texts in English
in Mind are accompanied by exercises which ask your students to read closely to
find (only) the information necessary to answer specific questions. This is also
called 'scanning', so use the image of a scanner in a hospital that is looking for a
particular point or problem in the body - and doesn't stop to wonder about other
parts. Have your students use their eyes and a finger to shift the focus of their
'scanner' from individual questions to the specific point in the text where they
can find the answer. They can even place their finger on that part of the text
while writing the answer or discussing with a classmate.
 Ask your students to try out the techniques presented in the 'Reading tips' from
the 'Skills in Mind' sections of their English in Mind workbook with reading
assignments in history or other school subjects - and then to report back on how
this 'transfer of skills' and 'cross-curricular' approach worked.
 Remember to be flexible and change the ways you present an intensive reading
text. All of the texts which start the units of English in Mind are recorded on the
accompanying class cassettes or audio CDs, so you might have weaker classes
listen to the recording while following in their books the first time they read a
text; or have your stronger class first listen to the recording with their books
closed and then read the text. You might also try playing background music
while the class is reading: not only can you use the song to time the exercise,
but it can also have a calming, focusing effect.
 And why not have your students share some of their own techniques and
strategies on how they read? Their classmates might listen more closely to them
than to you - and you might learn something to help out students in other
classes.

Extensive reading activities


If you're especially interested in extensive reading, an excellent comprehensive book is
Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom by Richard Day and Julien
Bamford in the Cambridge Language Education series- and look out for their
forthcoming Extensive Reading Activities for Language Teaching in the Cambridge
Handbooks for Language Teachers series.

 Build up a class 'library' (at the beginning it might just be a cardboard box in the
corner of the classroom) of books in English, such as a set of graded reader
titles at the language level of your class from the Cambridge English Readers
series, and have every student choose a title on their own that they want to
read for pleasure and fun in their free time.
 Have your students tell each other (probably first in small groups and later in
front of the whole class) why they chose a particular title: because of the cover
picture, the summary blurb on the back, or just because it's the type, or 'genre',
of book they like - romance, science fiction, horror, mystery thriller.
 Set aside fifteen or twenty minutes of class time occasionally for silent reading in
class. Have your students take out the book in English that they are reading
and, well, just read - perhaps with some background music (soft jazz works
nicely). And to set the example, don't forget your own novel!
 Studies show that to become a good reader, the best thing to do after reading
one book is . . . to read another book! But in your teaching situation you might
also want to ask your students to do post-reading activities:
o Design a poster or bookmark to advertise the book to the rest of the
class.
o Share their views about their favourite characters or read favourite parts
aloud in a small group of classmates.
o If it's a title in the Cambridge English Readers series, send feedback on
their favourite title to www.cambridge.org/elt/readers - and perhaps see
it posted and published on the Web.
 Have your students talk about their individual strategies when they come across
a word or expression that they don't know: Do they try to guess the meaning
from context? Do they use a bilingual or monolingual learner's dictionary? Or do
they just go on reading because they're interested in the story? Whatever their
personal strategy, ask your students to copy interesting and memorable words
and expressions into their vocabulary notebooks - so they can help out a
classmate who chooses to read the same book.
 To exploit the interesting topics in English in Mind, invite the whole class, or
assign individual students who you know were interested in the subject, to look
on the Internet for background on, for example, Culture in Mind topics and then
to report back on sites and follow-up information they found while 'surfing' - and
reading in English - on the Web.

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