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 siteElementary 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.
Check out this wonderful cinema-quality advertisement from CCAA, the Brazilian chain of English language schools – the biggest English-teaching organization in South America in fact – with over 400,000 students.
The big-name actors (did you ever in your wildest dreams think you’d see Mike Tyson in a commercial about learning English?), sky-high production values and humor on display go some way towards helping us understand how big a business English is in South America. But what it also does is to afford a refreshing glimpse of how industry players in other parts of the world sometimes show a far more playful, creative and emotion-driven approach to communicating English proficiency as a goal, as compared with the usual “prepare for your TOEIC (or other standardized test) so you can get a job” pitch seen all too often in Europe and Asia.
Whatever you think of CCAA itself as a school, from a pure communications point of view we could do with a lot more of this type of marketing from the English-teaching industry. Muito bom!
Chicago, January 9th, 2012: Entertainment Learning, the pioneering education-via-entertainment company, announced its partnership with Kinney & Associates today for the launch, marketing and business development of its flagship language learning service, English Attack!, (www.english-attack.com) in the United States.
English Attack! allows learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in the United States – an audience some estimate to be as large as 50 million individuals – to improve their English contextually with video clips from blockbuster movies, hit TV series, music videos and television news reports ; online games ; and thematic visual dictionaries. English Attack engages participatants and allows them to practice their developing English language skills with a global social network of learners of English. Users have a choice between an English-language interface and a version with navigation, help texts, tutorials, a dictionary, and other resources in 19 other languages. These include Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Romanian, Polish and Korean, allowing easier access to the site’s unique pedagogical approach.
Said Paul Maglione, Co-founder of Entertainment Learning : “The US is of course a special market for English language learning, due to the tens of millions of immigrants or first-generation citizens that need to improve their English to maximize their academic, professional and social potential in their country of adoption. We needed to find a partner who had not just an excellent reputation in the national education industry but also one who also shared our vision of a language-learning experience transformed by web 2.0 functionalities. We finally found what we were looking for in Kinney & Associates and are confident that they will help us make this vision a reality here in the United States.
Said David Kinney of Kinney & Associates: “ English Attack offers an engaging and powerful resource for schools, community organizations, companies and colleges. It is unique and fulfills the need to deliver innovative solutions for today’s digital generation. The school platform will allow instructors to easily track usage on data to insure accountability and success. Entertainment Learning has created a program that can have a major impact and create learning communities connecting English language learners around the world.“
About Kinney & Associates:
Kinney & Associates was established in 1994 by David Kinney, a former special education teacher, administrator and test consultant. His background in assessment and technology lead to developing one of the leading consulting and professional development companies utilizing a “data driven” model of school improvement. Kinney and Associates strives to offer the very latest programs and services that are both affordable and effective in helping to increase student achievement. As distributor for English Attack!, the company will deploy an array of marketing and consulting services, including grant writing, to deliver the product to schools, community organizations and agencies throughout the United States. Go to www.kinneyandassociates.com for more information.
Contact :
David Kinney, principal, Kinney & Associates david@english-attack.com
“Technology” has been one of the hottest buzzwords in the world of education for a couple of decades now. Teachers, education authorities, multinational companies, entrepreneurs and investors around the world are waking up to the transformative possibilities of digital and online technologies applied to the learning process.
Likewise, the EFL/ESL conference circuit has shown a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for any presentation involving online platforms, podcasts, tweets, blogs, or mobile devices. No TESOL or IATEFL national chapter meeting or global conference these days is complete without a smorgasbord of talks showing how teachers of English can use new sites and services to drag their lessons kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
So I would suggest it’s time to formally recognize the new opportunities these technologies bring to the domain of English language teaching, and to mark their pedagogical importance, with a collective label. For no other reason than its widespread identification with evolved (i.e. interactive, socially connected, hardware-agnostic) digital networks, I humbly suggest English 2.0.
The term has an immediate weakness, which I am the first to admit: that of implying that the set of teaching advances represented by English 2.0 is solely focused on technology; on the medium. In this case, Marshall McLuhan was only partially right. The medium is indeed part of the message, but not all of it. I will explain why.
It has by now become a cliché to say that technology is just an educational enabler, not the objective of digitally enhanced teaching. Nevertheless, it’s healthy to remind ourselves that sound pedagogy must always be at the heart of the teaching endeavor. Always, always, we must maintain our focus on how technology can help implement those pedagogical principles, not substitute for them. If we can use that as our starting point, and if we think laterally about all the new things we can now do in language teaching instead of vertically about how technology can merely improve what we are already doing in the classroom, we can consider English 2.0 as following on from Grammar Translation, Audio Lingual / Structural Situational, Cognitive Code, and more recently the Communicative and Lexical approaches not as the latest in a series of pedagogical fads, but rather as a further step in our understanding of how additional languages are learned and what we can do to empower and facilitate that process.
Of course, there is always the temptation to over-reach, to ascribe to a new vision foundations that have in fact already been in place for some time. At its heart, even though so much of what it can achieve in scale is unprecedented, English 2.0 is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. As a pedagogical orientation, it builds on the more valid elements of those ELT methodologies that preceded it, in particular the Communicative and Lexical approaches.
This deep nod to Mssrs Chomsky, Nunan, Widdowson, Krashen, and Lewis (and even, in a way, to their distinguished critics, like Michael Swan) is reflected in the fact that English 2.0 is best understood as providing new, unprecedented facilitation and acceleration to the best of the past four decades of pedagogical advances in EFL/ESL; as well as adding new dimensions to them.
Some of these concepts – immediate personalized feedback and continuous positive reinforcement, to take two examples – have been seen and appreciated in the past, but were hitherto used only in small-class or tutoring contexts and thus unavailable to the majority of learners. Other dimensions encompassed by English 2.0, on the other hand, are totally new, such as the ability to connect the learner with a quasi-unlimited choice of current authentic input; the extent to which new online and mobile teaching platforms can extend EFL/ESL education to a vast “anywhere/anytime” arena, including transforming the whole notion of homework; and the ease with which these platforms can foster autonomy and intrinsic motivation in the learner. Another new dimension created by English 2.0 is the ability to effectively “gamify” EFL/ESL for learners, thus allowing the educator to replace the learning-unfriendly stress brought on by grades and pass/fail marks with learning-enhancing game-like reward systems and the social sharing of learning achievement.
There is one aspect to English 2.0 that might seem counter-intuitive at first. It is that this vision for language learning can completely and comfortably embrace stripped-down, “unplugged,” high-touch teaching methods like Dogme, which often are positioned in direct opposition to a learning-with-technology approach.
Unplugged ELT: not at all in opposition to English 2.0
This is because English 2.0 fully recognizes that some things are best done by a human being spending time with other human beings in a physical space, such as a classroom. These areas include person-to-person unscripted discussion (i.e. “talking”); gentle pronunciation guidance; or communicated centered on local and present topics relevant to the learner and teacher.
Learners can only spend so much time in a fixed location with a teacher, however, and thus if we want to make the learning process faster and deeper we need to add out-of-classroom learning into the mix. It seems fair to say that this is where the new generation of networked, interactive digital resources and platforms can make a real difference. Compared with the textbooks of old, we can now give learners access to vast collections of authentic language samples (which in turn allows much lexical and grammar work to be contextual); allow them to explore language in a non-linear fashion; and achieve levels of intake frequency and repetition-with-variation that allow them to better lock vocabulary items and language usage principles into long-term memory.
In fact, there is more than mere parallelism to the relationship between online resources and Dogme-style teaching. It is precisely the ability to shift lesson components like Presentation and Drilling away from the classroom that allows more if not all classroom time to be dedicated to the high-touch methods and human-interactions principles on which the Dogme concept is based.
So we see that English 2.0 is not just a collection of technology tools, but rather a way of using assets like time, place and the teacher-learner (and learner-learner) relationship in new, more flexible, more creative and more productive ways.
This is the key thing to understand about English 2.0. It is a combination of the best of past pedagogical breakthroughs in linguistics; of a better understanding of how learners actually learn (including the latest advances in cognitive neuroscience); of a re-valued and enhanced role for the teacher and what his or her core function needs to be; and, yes, of technology to increase and optimize time spent learning. More than yet another “approach,” it is a spirit of openness, of adaptability, of trust in the learner’s capacity to become engaged in the learning process; and of ambition that we can harness the new communications tools and social networks around us to make learning a new language more enjoyable, effective and efficient. It is also a spirit of democratic access to learning, made possible by digital technology. For the first time ever, the ability to learn the global language of opportunity does not depend uniquely on the presence of qualified teachers in one’s school or home town, nor on the ability to afford language courses and expensive textbooks.
There is one additional facet of English 2.0 that is worth emphasizing. The digital revolution of the past 20 years has unfolded in the context of increasing globalization. Soon, if it hasn’t happened already, the number of speakers of English as a foreign or second language will surpass those who speak it as their native tongue. English 2.0 belongs to those born in the midst of this technology revolution. Digital natives tend not to have a marked preference for British English or American English, because all imaginable variants of English are reflected in the terabytes of input material now available to learners and reflected in the reality of everyday digital communication among speakers and learners of English across satellites and the Internet.
Learners today know that they want to be at least capable of understanding all forms and regional variants of English, from formal written business texts to the most informal verbal, regional slang, including idioms, acronyms and cultural references that will tend to pop up as they expand their roster of entertainment references and their circle of English-language conversation partners. Most of these learners will never develop a Texas drawl or even attempt to affect a Cockney’s dropped consonants, but they will benefit from knowing that one seldom actually “takes a bull by the horns” these days, and that being invited over to a London friend’s “Mickey Mouse” does not imply paying a visit to a Disney character. English 2.0 is World English. Not some neutered “globish” version of the language, but an all-inclusive appreciation for the vastness of English that encourages recognition and understanding of all its manifestations, even if we don’t use them ourselves in everyday discourse.
There is one last extraordinarily significant aspect of English 2.0, true to the significance of the “2.0” label, that bears mentioning: the extent to which blogs, Twitter, webinars, Facebook fan pages, and LinkedIn professional groups have allowed teachers everywhere to create Personal Learning Networks that help them become better teaching professionals as well as forming productive friendships with other educators. Whereas once a teacher in a small town might only hear about a new pronunciation approach or classroom management technique months or years after it had first been introduced somewhere, that information now reaches hundreds of thousands of EFL/ESL professionals around the world in seconds. Where once information was power; now it is the sharing of that information that confers status on the person sharing it. We have thus moved into an era where good teaching ideas circulate faster, productive experiments can be brought into practice more quickly, and great educational resources can be made available to both learners and teachers instantly and regardless of physical location.
A facet of English 2.0: Powerful Teacher Training and Sharing via PLN's
So, in conclusion, as we glide into 2012 and the 20th anniversary of the internet’s reaching “adulthood” via the standardization of the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) in 1982, let’s honor this landmark event in the history of human evolution via lending part of its nomenclature to the way we can finally start teaching English to reach the hundreds of millions of people who thirst for it, keeping all that is great about the best in EFL/ESL pedagogy; communicating it and sharing it among ourselves collaboratively; and amplifying it through the power of personalization, context, creativity, emotion, choice, speed, interactivity, motivation, and community. Think “twice as good.” Think 2.0!
As is my wont, I have once again preferred to let my thoughts settle a bit after a TESOL conference, rather than post immediate re-caps and impressions right after the sessions have ended. I like to let the old synapses do some sifting and filtering before putting cursor to WordPress, as it were, to see what remains as having had a particular impact on me. It’s rather like a process of gentle, simmering reduction – like a good French sauce – from a large casserole full of quality ingredients (two and a half days of great events, talks and conversations).
France TESOL has a special place in my heart, of course, as the very first EFL event at which I ever gave a talk. This was in distant 2009, as we were just beginning the coding of the prototype English Attack! website. So I guess it was fitting that, three years later, we would unveil our Teacher and Schools platform at the same event, in our home town of Paris, on the occasion of TESOL France’s 30th anniversary annual Colloquium.
The first talk that motivated me to take notes (a major caveat: I was unable to attend many talks that I would have liked to, so this list is hardly exhaustive nor representative of the fascinating topics and brilliant speakers in Paris) was Stephen Brewer’s keynote on Friday evening, during which he introduced the notion of learner “habits” they need to acquire in order to maximize their learning potential. It’s a notion I had not come across before, for all the talk of autonomy and intrinsic motivation, for habits are something slightly different: actions you perhaps force yourself into at first, or have forced on you, but which are then done routinely and automatically, without coercion or even self-coercion, simply because we know it’s good for us and we function better that way. The notion also feeds into my interest in frequency, out-of-classroom learning and in using web 2.0 principles to foster more involvement by the learner in the learning process. How can we, as teachers, suggest techniques, resources, approaches and exercises that will survive the “coercion” phase, imposed by us in a regulated environment, to eventually become ingrained, useful, and totally voluntary habits? Can imposed reading become reading for pleasure, as so often happens in a learner’s L1 early in life? Can increased exposure to authentic English, through online video assigned as homework for example, result into habitual browsing of YouTube clips in English for the pure pleasure of it? It’s a fascinating subject, and one that merits further consideration and sharing of ideas.
The second talk that made an impact on me was David A. Hill’s presentation “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” on how the same topics can look very different according to your national perspective. Towards the end of his talk, he handed out sheets with the lyrics of the Pink Floyd song “Time,” and played the song from his laptop. I’ve always been a Pink Floyd fan, and have heard this particular song and even sung along to it (badly!) dozens of times, but David’s highlighting of the significance of the lyrics was the first time I had ever truly understood them, and it was a wonderful demonstration of how song lyrics can illustrate and expand upon a rather amorphous concept like “time,” not just in terms of its measurement in seconds, minutes and hours, but also its deeper related consequences, such as opportunity, regret, wasting time, trying to catch up with its passing, and so on. A brilliant exposé by someone who has such an easygoing yet thorough mastery of all things EFL that he should be required listening for all pre-service teachers in training.
My talk on Saturday, The Challenges (and Rewards) of Motivating Teens in EFL, involved a great discussion with the delegates present on what we loved most, and hated most, about being that age. It’s not my usual style to start off a talk by involving the audience in defining and fleshing out the topic, but it’s something that I enjoyed and shall be doing more of in the future.
Finally, my TESOL France 30th Annual Colloquium concluded with our introduction and demo of English Attack! for Teachers and Schools, for which all conference delegates received a voucher entitling them, together with 30 learners, to three months’ free use of the platform. The presentation resulted in several France-based teachers now already using the platform, including the various teacher and class management tools, with their learners across a range of high schools, language institutes and businesses in various cities across the country. For anyone reading this having questions on how to use the voucher, or on our Teachers and Schools platform generally, just contact me at paul.maglione@english-attack.com.
So, in conclusion, hats off to Bethany Cagnol and the entire TESOL France staff and volunteers for yet another great annual event, this one more international than ever with visitors and presenters from as far afield as Brazil, Taiwan, Japan, the United States and Turkey. Would I like to attend and speak at the event next year? You bet. It would be an honor.
For the second year in a row, English Attack! has been named a Finalist in the Education category of the prestigious Tech Crunch Europas awards competition.
The annual competition gathers the best startup companies across Europe in various product and service categories, as determined by a panel of journalists, tech entrepreneurs and venture capital executives. Winning the Europas is then determined by popular vote. You can help us win by voting for us via the link below (just scroll down to the Education category, and you’ll find us). Thanks everyone!
For all the excellent progress in ELT pedagogical theory and practice over the past 30 years, there are two areas that remain, one could argue, fairly untouched. One of them, out-of-classroom learning, I addressed with a talk at this year’s IATEFL conference in Brighton. The other, which I’d like to go into here, is the concept of Frequency.
Most language-teaching methods tend to take a quantity-driven approach to advancing towards the goal of fluency: have the learner do the required number of “learning units,” lessons, courses, hours, or levels, and he or she will surely reach the Promised Land. We start with this mentality as soon as English is introduced as a Foreign or Second Language in primary school, parceling out English lessons in weekly doses, accumulating over the school year, then successive years, until the point where, somewhere between Middle School and Secondary School or even University, depending on which school systems we are talking about, the learner is felt to have received “enough” instruction to have, it is expected, achieved a certain level of English language proficiency. We test this, evaluate it, and declare whether the learner’s level is commensurate with “where he or she should be” given the amount of time logged in the classroom and/or the language lab.
Insofar as components of learning go, quantity and duration of instruction is certainly a valid parameter: one can hardly expect to learn how to play the piano flawlessly in three lessons. However, like learning how to play the piano, the notion of frequency is just as important to achieving fluidity and, not least, confidence in one’s ability. The notion of frequency also allows for a dynamic which the sum-total view does not: that of potential regression if a degree of frequency is not maintained. As Vladimir Horowitz famously put it, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.”
So what does the academic literature say about frequency of instruction in English, and, no less important, frequency of exposure to English? You guessed it: not a lot.
In a paper published last year, Elena Lieven of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (imagine the business card!) summarized the state of evidence:
Psycholinguistic research demonstrates adult language processing to be sensitive to frequency effects at all levels of language processing (Bod et al., 2003; Bybee and Hopper, 2001; Ellis, 2002) and this is also true in studies of children’s production and comprehension. The frequency of experiencing an event affects such diverse aspects of behaviour as our speed of recognition, our ability to recognise or recall whether we have encountered an event before and our ability to encode novel but similar items.
Most linguists concur that target vocabulary needs to be seen a number of times (the minimum requirement ranges from 11 to 18, depending on the study quoted) in order to pass from input to intake to long-term memory, but these conclusions reflect an accumulative theory of language acquisition, without relating it to ongoing frequency. The literature on the effects of frequency in relation to achieving a feel for usage or grammatical structures is far more shaky; and there seems to have been no work at all on self-confidence or motivation in language learning in relation to frequency.
In fact, the best piece of writing and thinking that I found on this topic was not at all on the subject of English language learning, but came instead from a blog about learning Japanese. In it, the author, an American who became fluent in Japanese through total immersion without taking a single lesson in the language, describes the notion of “Critical Frequency.” He postulates that even very short periods of exposure to a language can build to proficiency as long as the time in between those periods is kept short. Ideally, according to the blogger, who goes by the name of Khatzumoto, exposure sessions of as short as two or three minutes per hour can be effective, as long as this pace is kept up every hour (with allowances, I would imagine, being made for sleep). Traditional language teaching, of course, is exactly the opposite: a single hour-long weekly lesson, interrupted by six days and 23 hours of near-zero use or exposure.
Khazumoto-san’s insight is supported by neuroscience when it comes to the developing adolescent brain, what it seems to retain, and why. Teenage brains undergo a rather dramatic “clean-out” period during which brain grey matter is lost due to a selective strengthening or pruning of brain cells based on whether they are used often or not. Brain synapses continually used will flourish; those that are not wither away.
It seems a given that anything remotely in the vicinity of Khatzumoto-level frequency – and the strengthening of the neural synapses that go with it — can only be achieved outside of the classroom. Let’s assume we are shooting for a reasonable daily average expsosue / use of 15 minutes, every day, with the learner living in a country where English is not commonly heard or spoken. From a purely logistics point of view, and with that goal in mind, it seems obvious that we need to wholeheartedly embrace media, online communications, social networks, and social learning as tools with which to trigger this cadence of exposure.. It is here that we circle back to the point I made at IATEFL about the need for this out-of-classroom learning to be something very different to the work done in class. Tasks and materials which can be enforced in the classroom setting are quite simply non-starters in a home or free-time context, and thus we need to use a very different set of resources to entice the learner to come into contact with English as often as we’d like.
To result in frequency of exposure, the materials we need to propose to the learner must incorporate most, if not all, of the following qualities:
Novelty. People are fascinated by the new, the fresh, the unexpected. That’s why we read newspapers, listen to news radio or watch the news on television; and check the news on the web every few hours of so: these media are, by their very nature, infinite streams of never-before-seen facts, sights and sounds. By leveraging news streams and the relentless parade of new entertainment releases, we turn the English-exposure chore into a never-ending and highly motivating flow of fresh opportunities to increase the learner’s familiarity with the language.
Emotion. Teens and young adults are largely the servants of their emotions during their development years, as demonstrated by the important role that emotion-stirring experiences like music, friends and romance play as their personae evolve. Thus, learners of English will be far more likely to increase their exposure to to the language if the target material triggers emotions, rather than consist of artificial texts or situations which they find sterile or irrelevant to their dreams and desires. Analysis of Google search data shows that the most popular English–language pages searched for by speakers of other languages are, by a wide margin, those bearing the lyrics of pop songs.
Connectivity: the frequency with which young people connect with each other, whether via text message, instant messenger, or social networks, can resemble that of a colony of red ants relentlessly rubbing antennae. Introducing English as a vehicle to add a new and interesting dimension to this interaction, through making friends with other English-speakers or English language learners from around the world, is a powerful way to “go with the flow” in terms of existing learner behaviors and preferences.
Autonomy: shaping frequency comes down to Motivation, and there is no better way to create the conditions favorable to motivation than to give learners freedom of choice and autonomy. Let them choose what English-language materials they practice with, and they will repay you with a much higher frequency of exposure than if the choice of materials is dictated.
Reward systems: currently, traditional language teaching does not actually reward out-of-classroom exposure to English, nor the frequency of that exposure. Some homework assignments may be given, but these are seldom-enforced and often half-hearted requests for compliance: the learner activity is not positively rewarded for doing the assignment, much less for going beyond it. We thus need to think about motivational systems that actually recognize frequency of exposure to English outside the classroom, and give tangible, open-ended rewards for this behavior.
The good news is that all of the above is packaged into English Attack, which was designed specifically to increase and enhance both the quantity and frequency of exposure to (and communicative use of) English in teen and young adult EFL learners. But the internet is a pretty big place, so if you don’t want the packaged approach you can also find the above qualities piecemeal across a range of sites and organizations.
Novelty, Emotion and Autonomy are nowadays available freely on tap from YouTube and other similar entertainment-streaming sites. Connectivity is at the core of what sites like Facebook are all about, and you will be hard-pressed to find a learner who doesn’t already have an account. The trick is to get that learner to join Groups and Pages that will lead him or her to take part in Facebook’s community features in English (there are dozens of Groups on Facebook dedicated to learning and practicing English; just type in “English” in the Facebook search bar and you will see a long list of them). The IH group of language schools recently launched an online community, presumably for graduates of its courses worldwide, and of course there is the always-excellent EnglishClub.com. As for Reward Systems, these are built in to most online gaming communities (Farmville, Cityville, or The Sims, all also on Facebook) where the operational language is mostly English.
We’ll conclude with another quote, this time from a rather underrated 19th-century English preacher, Frederick W. Robertson, who “got it” when it comes to today’s topic:
It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things until the truth in them becomes you.
So let us go forth frequently, brothers and sister EFL teachers, and in all earnestness!
As an entrepreneur in the online English language-learning business, I continue to be amazed at how the technology that underpins my livelihood – computers and the internet – has taken so much from the English language, appropriating it for itself, while contributing so little.
Previous media/technology waves gave us completely new terms like atomic, radio, television, transistors, and frequencies (but not “broadcast,” originally a farming term referring to how seed was distributed in a field).
Digital technology, on the other hand, has preferred to co-opt everyday words having nothing to do with technology, and turning them into metaphors which today are just as powerful and instantly recognized as the source term – sometimes more so. For young people (“digital natives”… here we go!) learning English, we may sooner or later need an etymological guide to help them remember that the words and expressions they use everyday in a technology context were once – and mostly still are – also related to real (“3D”) items in the physical world.
I must admit this may sound all a bit fuddy-duddy: after all, I am old enough to remember when a printer was a rather harried-looking man working a big, dangerous-looking machine; when a mouse was something you bought a cat to get rid of; when a port was something ships headed for to load or unload cargo, and when a dock was something in a port that ships tied up against to stop them floating away. Notebooks were for school and tablets were something Moses carried around and harassed everyone about. Life was simple.
Then came the late 1970’s and the Apple II and, with it, hardware and software that usurped the meanings of words I’d grown up with. Now I had to worry about clutter across two separate and very different desktops. I had to remember to empty two trash cans, and organize my folders and files in both the real world and the one in the grey box on my desk. I had to remember that “program” could equally well describe “Star Trek” as it could a bunch of lines of spreadsheet code; that a “cache” could be something used for more than hiding weapons; and that “floppies” (already obsolete) referred to more than just rabbit ears. Alas, I even began to occasionally suffer from multiple meanings of the word “virus.”
The coming of age of the internet just made things worse, lexis-wise. Spiders were no longer kings of the web. They moved down in station to become, rather, underpaid minions of the “search engines.” Pages and browsing jumped ship from magazines to websites; and navigation was no longer something you only did with a sextant. Lately the “web” has moved to the “cloud,” which is now seen as the best place to “stream” stuff from. Try buying something online, and you’ll see that banners are no longer made of fabric; skyscrapers are a lot smaller than they used to be, cookies are something that follow you around, and shopping carts lack both wire and wheels. People still roam around in search of “hot spots,” though. Just not the same kind. Paper-based dictionaries around the world are begging for mercy.
The latest band of linguistic Vikings to rape and pillage are the social networks. Facebook is the biggest culprit, corrupting perfectly good words such as “like,” “poke” and “tag” to the point that they now seem intrusive and rather menacing. It is assisted by that little blue juvenile delinquent, Twitter, who has managed to subvert tweets away from the birds and followers away from the gurus.
What a world! It’s a place where some people just won’t do Windows; where an Apple is worth more than an International Business Machine, and where even Java can’t help you keep awake. Can our English language learners bear the linguistic duplication overload? I don’t know. I think I need to go home and reboot (and I don’t mean a change of shoes).
Based on an original idea by a friend, technology observer and visionary Robert Tercek.
Paris, September 1st, 2011: Launched at the end of June 2011, English Attack! has attracted its 100,000th registered user and has opened its 12th regional sales and marketing office.
Thanks to an innovative pedagogical approach combining elements of online entertainment, online social networks, and “gamification,” English Attack! (www.english-attack.com) is attracting an ever-increasing number of the “digital native” learners of English aged 13 to 35 for which is was designed.
“We are seeing excellent word-of-mouth among the target audience, which is contributing to our rapid user growth, both of registered users and of those hundreds of thousands of non-registered users who use the free version of the site,” said English Attack! co-founder Frederic Tibout. “We expect to see this growth accelerate further in the back-to-school season these next few weeks across Europe and parts of Asia.”
English Attack! is a global site created to help learners around the world improve their English, and is already available with a user interface in 13 languages. It recently announced the opening of its 12th regional sales and marketing office, in Mexico City, Mexico.
The site attracts learners from all over the world, with users in France, Brasil, Taiwan, Spain, Italy and China taking the top six slots in the site’s user statistics. The site’s heterogeneous mix of user nationalities contributes to its appeal as a community of learners for whom the only common language is the one they are trying to improve, English.
English Attack! website