This week’s guest post is by Jan Pierce, currently a 4th-grade teacher who has over 20 years of experience in the classroom. Her interests include educational technology and online learning. She also runs the site Elementary Education Degree, for students interested in earning a degree in elementary education.

When it comes to teaching ESL classes, teens are perhaps the hardest group to motivate. However, with a few innovative techniques, you can get teens excited about learning English while connecting with them on a deeper level. Here are some suggestions for motivating teen English learners.

1. Pop Culture – Most teens will have a strong interest in music, movies, and television, which means they’ll be more willing to discuss Beyonce’s latest hit or the new Twilight movie than the headlines in the news. This is a good way to use descriptive words, express opinions, and use the past tense, and it will help you learn more about your teen students.

2. Competition – Teens are just as competitive (or even more so) than little kids. Harnessing this sense of competition is a great way to motivate them in English classes. You can incorporate games into almost any type of lesson or activity. For example, a game for vocabulary practice could involve having them write down as many words they can think of related to a specific topic in one minute.

3. Talents – Learning about your students’ talents is another great way to connect with them. These talents can become the basis for creative English lessons. If a student plays the guitar, he/she could play a popular song while the rest of the students sing the English lyrics. An artistic student could draw a picture for the class to make up a story about.

4. Pen Pals – It can often be difficult to motivate teen students to write. One way to do this is to give them each a pen pal. This could with an ESL class in another school in your district or on the other side of the globe. You can easily find ways to connect with other ESL classes online, and this also makes the process go a lot faster than sending letters.

5. Appropriate Reading – No teenager wants to read dated stories about Dick and Jane that don’t apply to their lives. Find reading that interests them, such as stories about teens, celebrities, or sports. It’s also important to make sure the reading is at the right level for them – if it’s too easy, they’ll be bored, and if it’s too hard, they won’t want to do it.

6. Music – Teens don’t really want to listen to the audio practices that come with English courses, but they love listening to music. Play songs they like and go over the lyrics together (as long as they don’t have inappropriate words). You could even make worksheets for them to fill in certain words as the song plays.

7. Videos – Like songs, videos are a great teaching tool for teens in an English class. Thanks to YouTube, it’s easy to access everything from movie trailers and music videos to funny home movies. These can be great materials for discussion and comprehension.

8. WebQuest – Teens love to surf on the internet and are very good at finding information on the web. WebQuest is a tool that creates activities or “quests” that have students search for specific information based on links their teachers give them. Then they make a PowerPoint about what they found out. WebQuests can even be designed based on reading level, which makes them easy to adapt to any ESL class.

9. Games – As mentioned above, teens thrive on competition. Games are a great teaching tool as well because it makes students forget that they’re learning when they’re having so much fun. Games that work well in classrooms include quiz games, like Jeopardy, or a guessing game like 20 Questions.

10. Life Connections – Connecting to students’ lives in a tangible way can help them understand why learning English is important for them. You could go on trips to their favorite places like shopping centers or sports arenas and practice giving directions. You could also have them bring some of their favorite objects into class and talk about themselves.

Paris, France, February 7, 2012: English Attack! has been named official pedagogical partner and content supplier to English By Yourself (www.englishbyyourself.fr), the national online portal for English language learning developed by the French Education Ministry and launched today at a press event in Paris by French Education Minister Luc Chatel.

The portal has been created and will be operated by the Centre National d’Enseignement a Distance (Cned), the French Education Ministry’s distance-learning unit. Like English Attack!, the Cned is active in the promotion of informal, lifelong education and autonomous learning for a wide audience.

Every day, English By Yourself will feature feature freshly updated content from English Attack!, specifically:

• The Video Booster of the Day – an interactive language exercise based on a clip from a current movie, TV series episode, or music video and designed to develop listening, comprehension, reading, vocabulary and grammar skills. A new Video Booster will be promoted on the home page of the Ministry’s portal every 24 hours.
• The Verb Dash learning game, developed to help learners to master the various forms of irregular verbs in English. The game will be a permanent feature of the English By Yourself portal
• The Photo Vocab of the Day – a themed visual dictionary on a wide range of topics. Each Photo Vocab contains 15 to 20 lexical items related to the theme, including vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and cultural references like commonly used acronyms.

English Attack! has been created in consultation with linguists and Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, and implements a novel pedagogical approach to language learning based on cognitive neuroscience. It is accessible to learners of any level, and incorporates the following pedagogical principles:

• Proficiency is driven by regular exposure to current, authentic English. This frequency of exposure is arrived at by motivating learners to use the service often, via enjoyable content units based on topics of widespread general interest – for example a movie currently playing in local cinemas, or a visual dictionary providing vocabulary on a major event in the news.
• Learning effectiveness is enhanced by lessons that are always situated in a specific meaningful context, are of short duration, and illustrated via a video clip or a selection of photos.
• Storage of newly aquired language in long-term memory can only be acheived by sufficient repetition of the learned content at appropriate intervals. English Attack! encourages varied repetition of learned items via its range of five learning games, which are dynamically driven by the site’s video-based and photo-based content.
• Errors are not to be penalized, but rather – as in videogames – they must be seen as a natural consequence of attempting a task, getting something wrong, and trying again integrating the learning arrived at via the error. This principle is reinforced by a supportive reward ecosystem consisting of constant positive feedback, points scored for every activity, and badges awarded for completing specific learning tasks.
• The practice of communicative skills is best encouraged by meaningful interaction with others. In the case of English Attack! this is achieved by learner participation in (and communication within) the site’s international social network of learners of English.

About the Cned:
The Centre National d’Enseignement a Distance (Cned) is a national public sector organization appointed by the French Ministries of Education and Higher Learning, and is tasked with the promotion and enabling of distance learning, in particular via information and communication techologies.