Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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 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).
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.
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.