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.

“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 21^st 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 20^th 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!

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 19^th-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!

“Games,” defined as activities with goals and rules but which are amusing or designed for pleasure, have been used in EFL and ESL classrooms for decades now, and have spawned a wide range of useful and very creative books, workbooks and articles.

What is still relatively new, however, but making great strides in the wider fields of marketing, training and now education is the concept of “gamification” (ugly word, I know), which, although integrating them on occasion, should not be confused with “games. “

What is gamification exactly? Different things to different people, as with any new development, but at its heart gamification is an approach that takes challenge dynamics, motivational tools and feedback mechanisms from the world of videogames and applies them to new, real-life areas.

On some levels, gamification has been happening for years without our realizing it, and it has indeed already started to change and shape our behavior. Take the fidelity points or “air miles” you earn by flying with certain airlines. Yes, we recognize them as purchase incentive programs, but if we look at them more closely we see that they are built with a myriad of game-like structures and reward loops: you need to accumulate a certain number of points; the way you can accumulate and spend them varies with flight, season, etc (enabling you to “game the system” if you are so inclined); you can combine points with real money in various ways to create a range of outcomes; and you “move up” in levels (blue, silver, gold) according to how many points you accumulate, with each level bringing you new status and privileges.

In reality, teachers have used crude forms of “gamification” for years: the classic bronze, silver and gold star stickers on commendable class work or homework, for example. What modern-day gamification does, however, is to digitize these mechanisms and make them far more personalized, graduated and social than anyone ever thought possible.

To be taken seriously, however, gamification applied to education should embody the pedagogical insight that learners react better to educational methods based on cognitive neuroscience rather than those based on a “body-of-knowledge-to-be-absorbed” approach. This vision recognizes that:

• Meaning is more important than information
• Emotion is the gatekeeper to learning
• Intelligence is a function of experience
• The brain is social
• Learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by stress
• The more stimulation, the more likely long-term memory is created

From this starting point, educational gamification then needs to then do two things:

(a) apply the videogame “ethos” to learning so that learning starts to feel like less of a chore and more like an entertaining, enriching and personally relevant pastime, and

(b) create a game-like reward eco-system that utilizes web 2.0 technology to make the motivational mechanisms employed as immediate, clear and social as possible.

What can we learn (and adopt) from Video Games?

In terms of (a), the videogame “ethos” applied to learning, the key points to keep in mind are to understand how people actually achieve success in videogames, and how (and why) people will continue to play a videogame over and over until they achieve their objective.

• Failure is, by design, part of the game; you advance by failing, by understanding why you failed, and by taking corrective action on your next attempt (e.g. try and try again without stigma)
• Repetition breeds competence; it is not a function of intelligence
• Positive reinforcement all the time
• Positive stress (the thrill of challenge) vs. negative stress (the embarrassment of a low or failing grade)
• Level design: progress to the next level of a videogame is always a challenge, but an achievable one by anyone if enough time is spent on it
• Progress in the game = status enhancement within the game environment
• Social tools amplify the challenge and status advantages of progressing within the game (multiplayer gaming; leader boards; in-game chat; challenge-a-friend)

What are the key gamification components?

In terms of (b) above, the gamification ecosystem, this should include:

• Points and achievement levels (instead of grades)
• A progressive difficulty curve (easy to “play,” difficult to master)
• Missions/ tasks / badges, so that most activity results in a reward
• Feeback that errs on the side of reinforcement and avoids creating stress
• Social sharing of rewards and challenge mechanisms among friends

Why does gamification often work better than classic educational feedback mechanisms?

Gamification allows the learner to benefit from a gradual but constantly forward-moving approach to the subject matter. Let’s take grades as an example, contrasting them with a points-based approach. In a conventional educational setting, if you take a test (itself a stressful experience) and score 20/100, you will feel terrible about it. Assuming you want to re-take the test, and you expend a lot of effort studying for it, and are able to actually double your score to 40/100, you will still end up with a “fail” grade, and will inevitably feel demotivated.

However, in a gamified framework, assuming you score those same 20 points (out of a possible 100) in a game, then double it to 40 points next time, you have still accumulated 60 points towards your goal. Even if the goal in question is, say, 1,000 points to get the next level, the “system” has neither (twice) labeled you a failure, nor has it shown you that your efforts have (twice) provided you with no traction at all. There has been progress, albeit slow, and effort has not been wasted. This builds motivation.

Gamification in EFL: English Attack!

Our vision for English Attack!, at the end of 2008, was to build and launch the first online EFL/ESL service integrating solid ELT pedagogical principles (the lexical and communicative approaches, for example) and the triple combination of cognitive neuroscience principles; a videogame “achievement ethos” and the right gamification components. We also wanted to create something for a demographic segment that seemed to us to be under-served: the “digital natives” (those born after 1995) who are fast losing patience with linear, rules-based, textbook-focused teaching methods.

We thus borrowed from our media and videogaming backgrounds to create content units based on film, television and music entertainment; created a range of learning games made for the memory reinforcement of seen content; devised a reward system of instant exercise feedback, points, levels, achievement badges, and coins; and situated the whole in a social network of learners where information sharing, commentary and other uses of English are encouraged and rewarded.

After 12 months of Beta testing involving 25,000 learners from 70 different countries, we officially launched the site at the end of June and have so far been encouraged by the enthusiasm of the learners who use the site; their comments on (and sharing via social network of) the various content units; and their apparent engagement with the points, levels and coins system put in place. It is frankly too early to tell whether we are achieving the kind of personalized, goal-driven behavior aimed at improving one’s English that we are shooting for, but the first signs are positive and we look forward to this Autumn and the next stage of site development when we introduce the tools and systems that will allow teachers and schools to integrate English Attack! into their programs as an out-of-classroom educational platform.

The last few years have witnessed an explosion of interest in how technology – from interactive whiteboards to podcasts to e-learning platforms like Moodle — can be used to enrich the classroom experience for learners of English.

Much less attention, however, has been paid to how technology can be used outside the classroom — where learners spend 98% of their time — to accelerate, enhance or otherwise improve the learning of English. With learners – particularly teen and young adult “digital natives” who have grown up with digital devices and the internet – increasingly using these tools and resources for home assignments in their other school subjects (not to mention for information, entertainment and social interactivity ) we owe it to ourselves, as well as to our learners, to fully investigate how digital platforms can provide a true “second front” in EFL/ESL pedagogy.

In a recent talk I gave at the IATEFL annual conference, I called homework the “Final Frontier” in EFL/ESL because in many ways this subject has become the last virtually unexplored space in English Language Teaching. In the past 40 years we’ve seen huge, tectonic shifts in the theory of how English can more effectively be taught to speakers of other languages, from the rigid, rule-centric Grammar Translation view of the world, passing via the fad-driven transitional phases of the Audio Lingual, Structural / Situational, and Cognitive theories, to arrive at the more pragmatic and learner-centric Communicative and Lexical approaches we have adopted more recently. Similarly, in terms of classroom approaches and resources, we’ve seen a healthy widening out of scope from pure textbook-driven, teacher-centric teaching to task-based learning, group work, learning games, physical movement, roleplay, and similar evolved approaches which respect the learner as a stimulation-hungry, social human being rather than only as a potential repository of received knowledge.

As soon as the learner steps outside the classroom, however, it’s another story: he or she is essentially “on their own.” With notable exceptions, it’s fair to say that many if not most EFL and ESL teachers out there still see homework as a necessary evil, liquidated with end-of-class instructions to complete some pages in a workbook. Some might even casually recognize the importance of greater exposure to the language outside of class by exhorting their learners to “read a magazine article” in Time or Newsweek, or “watch a movie in English,” or some similarly vague and unsupported task, the execution of which tends to be unverified.

Googling “EFL Homework” and permutations of similar terms results in a paltry collection of 12-year old academic papers, a homespun teacher tip or two, and that’s about it. Similarly, an appeal to my Twitter PLN, an article on the English Attack! blog asking for input, and an open question posted on a sprinkling of LinkedIn ELT groups for thoughts and experiences on the subject resulted in no more than a couple dozen comments, all very appreciated and insightful (thank you Henrick Opera, Adam, Marisa Pavan, Cecilia Lemos, Valeria Franca, Alice M, Bete Thes, Sean, and others) but nevertheless thin on the ground. Why the seeming lack of interest?

Before we delve further into the subject, this is a good time to re-examine the fundamental role of homework in general, and to refresh our thoughts on what it might be able to achieve specifically within the context of EFL/ESL. First, let’s see what the academics have to say about the concept of homework itself:

Homework is formally defined as “… tasks assigned to students by schoolteachers that are intended to be carried out during non-school hours” (Cooper, 2001, p. 3). It said to be the instructional strategy influenced by more factors than any other.

Behind a simple definition, one can say, hides one of the most complex educational tools, in the sense that homework goes beyond the school walls and invades the physical and familiar environment of each learner. Teachers, parents and particularly students, are the trilogy in the homework issue, its main vectors and actors (Cooper, 2001; Walberg & Paik, 2000).

To this, Zimmerman, in a paper from 2000, adds the remarkable insight that:

Becoming self-regulated implies students’ metacognitive, motivational and behavioral active participation in their own learning process.

So here we start to see a coming together of homework’s specificity, in terms of time, place and supervision (or the lack thereof); which neatly start to coincide with elements of EFL/ESL pedagogy that are increasingly seen as crucial, i.e.

• Learner Autonomy

• Individualized Learning

• Motivation

It would seem to me that any ESL / EFL educational tactic or tool that helped to tackle this trio would deserve a lot of respect in teacher training seminars and industry conferences. So again: why the deafening silence?

Let’s first look closer at the obstacles: why Homework doesn’t play the role that it really should in EFL. Then we can explore how online technology can mesh wonderfully with a modern pedagogical approach to overcome these obstacles.

A first obstacle, I believe, has been the fact that until now technology has not really been ripe to allow an evolved approach to homework. Clearly, if you have only linear materials to hand, it’s rather difficult to create an out-of-classroom departure from a lesson-type assignment.

Another obstacle has historically been the fundamental pedagogy schism between those who see homework as a “consolidating” tactic for what has been previously learned (or, at least, taught) in class; and those who see homework as “something else,” i.e. complementary to the classroom experience but with its own unique role in the language learning process.

Third, homework is tricky for teachers because it’s unpopular. By its very nature, assigned homework is less motivating that what it is competing with in the home: relaxation time, television, and, especially, for teens and young adults, online entertainment and social networking. And learners know that teachers are on the back foot here: by and large, students enrolled in a language course know that attendance in class and a minimum degree of attention to the teacher in front of them is compulsory; for homework, however, they’re aware that only very rarely does non-compliance have meaningful consequences.

Finally, even for those teachers that recognize that homework can result in opportunities for autonomous, individualized learning, there has until now been a heavy price to pay: the additional workload of designing homework tasks appropriate for individual learners, and the labor-intensive follow-up that it requires in terms of monitoring whether it has been done and providing feedback on the completed work.

So we see that one of the things holding back homework as a popular and researched ELT topic is that it is, on the surface, a more or less losing proposition for teachers, no matter how valuable it can be as a component of the overall learning journey.

So what I’d like to do now is to look at those drawbacks we mentioned, one by one, and show how online technology changes the game to the point where we can revisit homework as a potentially powerful adjunct to classroom teaching.

How does technology help us get over the answers-in-a-workbook model? That’s the easiest one to address: clearly, online, multimedia platforms have the capability of delivering a homework experience much more lively, interactive and involving than any workbook. If the problem until now has been that learners find workbook-based homework assignments tedious and uninspiring, this is clearly a hurdle we can vault over quite easily with what we can do nowadays on the web.

Tacking the second issue, the schism between homework-as-consolidation and homework-as-different experience, is a lot more difficult. Both sides have very valid points. Clearly, the more hours that are dedicated to a task, regardless of where that happens, the more learning will occur. That’s the whole principle of repetition, which is, on the surface paradoxically, one of the main tenets of a TEFL approach that enlists the lessons of cognitive neuroscience. However, as Andy Mallory wrote in comments to a blog post by Paula Swenson on the subject of homework, “if the student is only doing the work because you told them or because you will be angry if they don’t, then the benefit is very limited. Students will cheat, do the minimum and not engage with the task fully, defeating the purpose. Homework that means more work for you than for the students is not a good use of your time.”

And that is, I’m afraid, where the pro-consolidation camp’s arguments run out of steam.

For me, the analogy with learning how to play tennis is not far fetched. Your tennis instructor might spend 45 minutes one day teaching you the (rather convoluted, for a beginner) mechanics of the backhand swing. He would hardly expect you, however, to go over those mechanics on your own the next day, in your own time, breaking down your swing to perfect it in its component parts as pictured in a manual or seen on a videotape. He would hope, rather, that you got in the habit of playing a few hours of tennis with a friend in between weekly lessons, and that from time to time you had occasion to use the newly learned swing, even if imperfectly.

Your tennis instructor would know that, over time, you would become more confident with the swing and use it more often when the ball came to that side of the court rather than running around it to hit it with your forehand. And that, grossly oversimplified, is what autonomy is all about: discovering that instructed behavior can be employed usefully in the “real world,” and done so with increasing frequency until the behavior becomes truly learned. No extra points, then, for guessing that I come down on the side of the homework-as-different-experience. Homework, in my opinion, can be a form of “practice” which does indeed end up consolidating the “instruction” to which the learner is exposed in class. But rather than immediate cause-and-effect, this view of homework sees consolidation happening over time, informally, but in an ultimately more self-reinforcing manner.

What about the unpopularity problem? Students just don’t like homework, let’s face it. OK, fine, let’s deal with that. They certainly don’t like forms of homework that have the same look and feel as class work, but which intrude on their precious home and leisure time.

But what if “homework” could in fact be very similar to what they actually do enjoy doing in their free time? What if, instead of artificial situations and gap-filling exercises, the starting point was popular culture: video clips, online games; and social networking? What if they got the chance to use their creativity, their resourcefulness, or their sense of humor? What if the unpleasant anticipation of teacher marking could be replaced with the satisfaction of sharing the results of your efforts with your friends?

In other words, what if homework can be transformed “from a chore to a learning challenge,” as Daniel Monaghan wrote in an article in the Guardian a few years ago? A challenge that employs the values, rewards and peer dynamics of the learner’s own life, entertainment preferences and social circle rather than those of the classroom? With online platforms, this definitely becomes possible, allowing us to re-label “homework” as “practice” or “self-study,” which gives it greater perceived value and relevance in the eyes of the learner.

Finally, let’s address the workload issue. If we accept the premise that homework can be “something else,” something that is more akin to free-form practice than to consolidation drills, then we can also accept that designing the homework and checking compliance can be vastly simplified: a simple deep-link into a favored creativity or practice website might be sufficient as far as instructions on what to do; or, even better, why not respect to the full the spirit of the new possibilities and, if we have the right resource on the other end, allow learners to gravitate to whatever content or activity motivates them the most? Monitoring for compliance is just as simple: rather than get bogged in the tedium of checking whether specific homework assignments have been completed, the adoption of a game-like scoring system, with scores and achievement badges visible to all, favors a performance “pull” by the learner rather than a compliance “push” by the teacher.

These new possibilities work well enough when we adopt a traditional view of homework as extra work that is to be done after class. But we have the opportunity to stand this model on its head, which makes it more interesting for both learners and teachers. Let’s have homework spill over into classroom work, as opposed to only the other way around. Let’s have learners find content they really like, have them absorb it, and then talk about it in class, perhaps asking clarification as to specific language usages encountered. Again, a show-and-tell strategy reverses the compliance burden from the teacher back to the learner, to the benefit of both.

But we can do even more. We can go beyond seeing the world in bipolar fashion, either inside or outside of the classroom. Online platforms can constitute a “third dimension,” connecting the first, collective one – the classroom – with the second, solitary one – work done at home – in a way that allows classroom dialogue around stimulating, authentic source material and user-generated content to happen on a continuous and place-agnostic basis. Learners can pick up on an item of vocabulary, or usage, seen at home in an authentic-language video clip, and ask questions about it in class, leading to a fruitful group discussion of the item. Collaborative projects, like, say, a 3D storyline created with Xtranormal, can start off on a laptop in the bedroom and be finished in pairs or group work in a language lab. Word trees and mind maps can originate in one place, and branch out, with inputs from classmates, to new areas. Truly, the only limits are the limits of our own imagination.

Online resources that facilitate an evolved approach to EFL/ESL homework include:

- Xtranormal → 3D video making, using avatars
- Voicethread → show & tell using videos, pics, & commentary
- Lino It → brainstorming wall, can also be collaborative
- Glogster → great, popular poster-making tool
- Zimmer Twins → simple cartoon-making tool. Also: ToonDoo.
- Classik TV → make up your own movie subtitles
- MessageHop → add your photos and comment on them
- Bubblr → slideshow tool based on photos from Flickr
- Fotobabble → post a photo and provide audio comment
- Voki → customizable, talking avatars
- English Attack! → EFL through online entertainment, including movie clips, thematic visual dictionaries, games, and social networking.

What constitutes useful, creative and stimulating homework in the context of EFL/ESL? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

- Don’t simply replicate what’s being done in class. Stimulating out-of-classroom assignments have to look and feel different to classroom work. Otherwise, learners will tend to consider it as just a burden and an imposition. Remember that as soon as the learners get home, these tasks are competing with the web, television, MP3 players, after-school sports, and any hobbies they might have.

- Evolved EFL/ESL homework needs to be far less linear and structured than classroom lessons. Without choice, there will be no autonomy, and without autonomy, there will be very little motivation. Many “e-learning” platforms make this mistake.

- Important: unlike classroom work, homework has no time constraints and learners should proceed at their own pace. Thus, homework should be relaxing, not stressful. The way in which compliance and performance is monitored can help or hinder homework as a non-stressful learning opportunity.

- When designing EFL/ESL homework, ask yourself: is the homework experience enriching? Does it add another dimension to what is learned in class? Does it allow learners to zero in on something that they can really get passionate about? That they can or would want to share?

- Another question to ask yourself: is there continuity in the homework, or does it just feel like disjointed tasks and exercises without a goal, without building towards an achievement or a completion? Is there an end-goal, a reward? More mature adults naturally see homework as an achievement-related activity, whereas for teens and younger adults, homework may be an activity performed at great cost (the opportunity cost of not doing more fun activities) with no foreseen immediate or long-term benefits.

So, in conclusion:

I. Homework is a neglected but vital and potentially transforming subject. If active learning is central to language acquisition, then setting effective and motivating homework should be a key skill.

II. Homework serves to reinforce precisely those areas that are difficult to strengthen in class:

- Learner Autonomy
- Individualized Learning
- Motivation

III. Online technology gives us the tools and platforms to vault Homework directly from the 19th into the 21st Century, casting away the historic reasons for which it was a problem for teachers and making it appealing for learners as well as pragmatic for teachers.

IV. Online platforms used for Homework can furthermore go beyond what we currently would like it to do, constituting a “third place” between the classroom and the home, a social, communicative space. In short, homework can encourage learners to make their own links between the classroom and opportunities for talking outside it.

One last word: given how unpopular the topic has been, I was fearing a low turnout for my talk on the topic at the IATEFL conference last week in Brighton. The room, however, was filled to what seemed like 200% of capacity, which somewhat undermined my point as to what a marginalized subject it was. There is clearly much more teacher and school administrator interest in out-of-classroom learning than I originally thought, so perhaps this is one of those rare areas of technology where a problem has indeed been looking for a solution, rather than the other way around.

One of EFL / ESL’s favorite debates is the old “accuracy vs fluency” argument. Generations of teachers and linguists have lined up on either side of the divide, grammarians eye-to-eye with communicative theorists, each politely conceding minor points to the other while maintaining an iron conviction that their focus is the fundamental one in helping learners to master the English language.

Amidst the heat of battle, however, the real world has continued to evolve; and it has done so in a way that injects a new twist in the old debate. The increasing “casualization” of the English language means that an amazing amount of conversational, communicative English these days is built around catch-phrases, slang, idioms, cultural references, and common collocations used in such an ubiquitous fashion as to constitute essential “language chunks” to anyone wishing to understand or use the language. This began to be driven home for me when we started creating language exercises around video clips from current movies, TV series, television news reports and music videos for English Attack!, and I started to notice that the transcripts for these short clips featured one of these forms of language in virtually every uttered or sung phrase or sentence.

It occurs to me that this is a quite important but under-reported (and under-analyzed) change in English language usage in the past few years. Whereas before – let’s say, until the 1980’s — an idiom or item of slang used to be the exception, used on special occasions and/or in casual situations only, today the use of such forms and formulae is fully expected in nearly all situations… so much so, that their “plain language” equivalents sound awkward and contrived.

Should we thus boost the presence of this “vocabulary-plus” in our teaching approach? Consider the following:

An intermediate-level learner of English, having overslept and thus having had to rush his usual morning routine, wishes to pre-emptively apologize his being badly coiffed upon arriving at work. In standard English-with-a –focus-on-accuracy, we might end up with him adopting a structure from another similar situation, leading him to say “I apologize for the appearance of my hair.” If we have favored fluency over accuracy, he might come up with something less stilted that gets the message across, such as “Sorry but I have not been able to brush my hair correctly this morning,” or words to that effect. Both statements will elicit mild amusement, or embarrassed silence at best, from the native speakers with whom our spike-haired learner is trying to communicate. If we have taught him, on the other hand, the essential lifestyle language chunk “Having a bad hair day,” his meaning will instantly be understood and in all likelihood will elicit sympathetic commiserations.

The communicative and social importance of these forms increases exponentially the younger the learner. ESL students in my teenage daughter’s international school soon learn that multi-situational responses like “Fail” or “Awesome,” are much more useful, and gain them more group acceptance, than more conventional words or phrases. Young non-native English speaking employees in U.S.-based multinational companies soon catch on that cultural references like “It’s Miller Time” or “We need a home run” are essential in understanding their bosses and colleagues. Nearly every foreign exchange student enrolled in an American high school will soon adopt a language survival toolkit consisting of items like “No way” or “What’s Up?” or “Take it easy,” which tend not to be front-runners in EFL textbooks.

No, the objective is not to teach English language learners to sound like denizens of the San Fernando Valley. But we need to evolve our conception of what useful vocabulary is to include these “instant allies” which help make the learner not only understood but also socially accepted.

This evolution holds for oral discourse, of course, but equally – and increasingly – for written communication as well. News reports, business analysis, and even presidential state-of-the-union speeches groan under the weight of idioms, acronyms, and, alas, clichés. Not to mention the new platforms for the written word – Facebook, Instant Messenger, Twitter, SMS – which are essentially conversational and reward telegraphic accuracy-of-meaning (itself, today, a form of fluency) over style or structure. Right on cue, the fingers-on-the-pulse crew at the Oxford English Dictionary has just this week recognized the importance of terms like FYI, OMG and LOL by incorporating them into their latest edition.

As Stephen Krashen once said, “Language acquisition… occurs when comprehension of real messages occurs, and when the acquirer is not “on the defensive.” I submit that one of the best ways to create the conditions both for this comprehension, and for the avoidance of defensiveness, is to impart to learners this wider view of vocabulary, this expanded definition of “language chunks,” without which, in their everyday conversations and even written communication with native English speakers, they will be neither truly fluent or accurate. In short: I am recommending that we expand our view of the lexical method to embrace, wholeheartedly and in any case much more than we do at present, common expressions, collocations, slang, idioms, and cultural references. By doing so, we sidestep at least part of the accuracy vs. fluency debate by providing learners with language chunks that facilitate both, with social acceptability thrown in for free.

IATEFL Brighton Update: Paul Maglione will be addressing the issue of using Homework in EFL more effectively (The Final Frontier?) at 2pm on Saturday, April 16th, in Room 9. See you there!

They say to practice what you preach, and as I’ve been banging on for a couple years now about introducing web 2.0 approaches and social networking into the language learning process, I’ve decided to try partially crowd-sourcing my upcoming talk at the IATEFL conference in Brighton in April. Having started that process with a few ESL and EFL groups on LinkedIn, I’m now widening out my scope by inviting my Twitter PLN to weigh in (via comments to this blog post) on the subject of homework with their thoughts, experiences and ideas. All contributions welcome!

The last few years have witnessed an explosion of interest in how “edtech” technology – from interactive whiteboards to video to games to e-learning platforms like Moodle — can be used to enhance the classroom experience for learners of English. The ensuing debate has seen some teachers embrace the technology; others take up a refusenik stance; and yet others tempted by the new tools but unable to fully adopt them for budgetary or practical reasons.

Much less attention, however, has been paid to how technology can be used outside the classroom — where learners spend 99% of their time — to accelerate, enhance or otherwise improve the learning of English. As learners – particularly teen and young adult “digital natives” who have grown up with digital devices and the internet – increasingly use these tools and resources for home assignments in their other school subjects, the teaching of English risks being left behind in the shift towards greater learner autonomy, self-motivation, and self-learning unless the new opportunities on the “home front” are addressed just as seriously as those in the classroom.

We need first to think hard about the appropriate role for homework in EFL teaching. Is it just there to consolidate what has been taught in class, or should it be used to help develop a pattern of self-learning? Can the homework experience be enriching, can it add another dimension to what is learned in class? Can it be used to increase and enhance input and intake of English, so that class time can be better dedicated to interactive discussion and constructive error correction? And how can homework spill over into classroom work, creating new opportunities for dialogue, rather than just the other way around?

Next, what are the available platforms and tools for out-of-classroom English language learning? Is a shift of format something to be seeking, e.g. if they use workbooks in class, will they want to do more of the same outside of it? Should teachers track homework compliance, or not? And if they do, should they correct it all, and is there time to do that? Can e-Learning platforms be a solution, or are they too cumbersome to be used in this regard?

Finally, how do we solve what Paula Swenson, in her excellent guest post on Alex Case’s blog, calls the Homework Conundrum? How can we get learners to see homework as a genuine learning opportunity rather than simply a chore? And why do some forms of homework assignment seem to fall flat with learners, while others actually manage to motivate them? (Alex Case himself provides some excellent answers to those questions here).

I call homework the “Final Frontier” of EFL because it is perhaps the area of EFL which has been least studied, and where pedagogical practices have been the least revisited, at least officially (there is clearly lots of clever experimentation and personalized approaches being applied by EFL teachers on their own initiative). So don’t be shy: share what works for you and we can perhaps start to codify our assembled insights into a useful Guide to Homework for EFL teachers everywhere.

Once again, I’ve been inspired to write a blog post by one of Scott Thornbury’s brilliant alphabet-soup essays. Specifically, I read his recent “R for Rules” and its refreshing point of view that using grammar terminology may not be the most effective way to get learners of English to understand and use proper grammatical forms of the language. It greatly comforted me in what I have often thought was my singular aversion to a rules-and-terminology approach to English grammar.

The topic is one close to my heart, as I grew up with the paradox of excelling in all aspects of English as a subject except – to the great frustration of both my teachers and parents — for any quiz or test question where I was asked to indicate or reproduce what were, to me, totally opaque references to “past participles” or “present subjunctives.” When given a sample sentence using the form, or having to fill in gaps in sentences requiring the correct forms, I had no trouble at all. My issue was with the terminology itself, which I was totally unable to retain and for which I could see no evidence of any possible utility later on in life (no adult I had ever met, except my English teacher, had ever uttered any of these terms).

So I was quick to take the tale of Scott’s Spanish teenagers on that bus as welcome evidence that the ineffectiveness of a rules-oriented approach to grammar, and of using grammar terminology in particular, is rather more of an issue than most of us might appreciate. How many native speakers of English, after all, would – if questioned on the street – be able to produce a sample sentence using something called the “present perfect indicative” form? I don’t recommend carrying out such a survey in your average pub on a Friday night. Yet almost every native English speaker uses the correct forms of the language every day without knowing what they are called nor the formal rules that govern their usages.

So why do we expect learners of English to spout terminology and rules that native speakers don’t attempt to learn or, even if forced to learn at some unhappy point of their childhood education, promptly forget? Many ESL and EFL teachers, in fact, freely admit that the first time they actively studied grammatical rules and tried to retain them was in training for a TEFL or TESOL qualification.

My first TEFL teacher was of the opinion that there’s no way to explain grammar using grammar terminology that doesn’t confuse the issue for the learner more than it clarifies it. The confusion, I’m convinced, can be similar to that produced in some students with no trouble in doing basic mathematics until words like “integer,” “denominator” and “factor” are thrown at them. They know what those things are there for, of course, but having to remember the technical names for them ultimately distracts from their ability to do the equations and often introduces a level of anxiety about the general subject that was totally absent until then.

So what’s the alternative to teaching English grammar using rules and grammar terminology? I’m no expert on the subject, as must be clear by now, but logically I would volunteer that an alternative approach would certainly include (1) lots of input, so that learners develop an “ear” for correct forms depending on the communication task just the way a small child starts to understand the difference between “I want” and “I’d like to have”, without having a rule book to explain the difference; (2) teaching grammar inductively, so that learners can absorb the logic of the forms not abstractly, but actually employed in context, with all the other language and situation information and cues buzzing around it, and learning from mistakes; and finally (3) employing simpler terms –everyday language that doesn’t obfuscate the issue — to explain the grammatical principle at hand. This last item is by no means an easy one to carry off, by the way. Explanations using everyday language often end up seeming verbose and pedantic compared to the seemingly clinical precision of a grammatical terminology-laden statement of rule. But they are, in my view, much more learner-friendly.

We’ve tried to adopt such an approach with English Attack! in the “Grammar Jungle” section of our Video Boosters (short movie clips enriched with a series of language exercises), where we focus on a single passage or phrase from the transcript of the video and attempt to explain, avoiding all use of grammar terminology, why that particular form was used. We then drill the point home via a choice of exercises (fill the gap, multiple choice, correct/incorrect, matching pairs) in which the learner is asked to use to illustrated form correctly. It’s not an exact science, and sometimes our layman’s language explanations can seem to use a half-dozen words where a simple “modal” or “subjunctive” might have done. But we’re firm believers in a less terminology driven approach to learning English grammar, and the great majority of our 18,000 Beta testers around the world seem happy with our approach. Let’s hope that we are on to something and that experts better qualified than we can actually start to codify English language usage into a “common sense, simple words” framework that all teachers of English can switch to at some point.

From the Winter issue of the TESOL France Teaching Times, published this week.

The world of English Language Teaching has yet to fully get its arms around a central pedagogical paradox: that teens and young adult learners – who in terms of neuro-linguistics are at the peak of their ability to absorb, retain, and reproduce sophisticated language structures – often make such unmotivated language learners.

It is an experience so common as to have virtually driven EFL teaching specialization to either margin of the great ‘teen divide’: young learners (ages 12 and below) to one side; and adult/business English to the other. Why does the profession seem to have given up on finding the right specific approach for these kids? Part of the answer, I believe, lies in the all-too-comfortable stereotype of teens as going through life changes that make them difficult to teach. But that is lazy thinking at best. We owe it to ourselves, and especially to our learners, to make the effort to figure out how best to reach them, based on a more thorough understanding of how they are evolving as human beings.

To begin with, their brains are going through physiological changes that require specific pedagogical approaches for each phase of maturity. The teenage brain is significantly different from that of a child or an adult. During the approximately 11 years from early adolescence to young adulthood, this teenage brain goes through evolutionary changes that start with a heightened re-activeness to emotion, social connection and issues of self- and group identity. At the other end of the maturation process, the young adult brain is finally able to reason, control impulses, and organize and prioritize information. During all this time, the teenage brain is selectively strengthening or pruning neurons on the basis of those synapses which are used, respectively, the most or the least. And concurrent with this weeding-out process, the teenage brain is increasing its raw processing capacity to an extent equivalent to a 3,000-fold increase in digital network bandwidth.

Going hand-in-hand with these physiological changes is a societal change – one might even call it an evolution in human development – which means that this specific demographic cohort acts, learns and
self-motivates differently than any other preceding it. We are now in the era of the Digital Native; and for the time being – until those born in the mid 1990’s start to enter the teaching profession themselves – the teaching profession exists in a bi-polar frame of reference: digital immigrants teaching digital natives. We, as the older generation, are simply incapable of understanding – or, truth be told, accepting – the newer generation’s relationship with digital technology; with social hyper activity; and with 24/7 connectivity. Attempting to reach out and ‘touch’ these digital natives using mainly 19th century tools like textbooks, workbooks, blackboards and traditional teacher-led classroom settings is already delivering diminishing returns.

The good news is that the answers to these challenges are already with us, and are being used by progressive EFL / ESL teachers in hundreds of locations. There is no silver bullet, no miracle solution, but rather teachers will have to mix and match those new digital tools that fit their learners (and their own teaching styles) best.

Part of that array of tools is English Attack!, a web service set up in 2009 by entertainment professionals specifically to address the lack of motivation in teen and young adult EFL learners. Our solution is to embed EFL exercises into a range of online entertainment (clips from movies, TV series, global news channels; music videos; thematic visual dictionaries; professionally produced games; social networking; and a game-like system of points, levels, badges, and virtual currency) and to motivate self-learning by providing choice and encouragement in a fun, non-stressful, learning-through-media immersion environment. This ‘edutainment’ superstructure is supported by pedagogical principles which pull together those elements of the latest EFL thinking most appropriate to this age group (and to the way young people around the world are increasingly learning ‘World English’) formally or casually, including the Lexical and Communicative approaches; manageable chunks; authentic materials; reward loops; drilling; fluency over accuracy; and above all the importance of input.

From Day 1, we designed English Attack! to be fully complementary to the classroom teaching of EFL / ESL, never in competition with them. As opposed to some turnkey ‘e-learning’ approaches, at English Attack! we feel that nothing can replace teacher-to-learner, face-to-face interaction in areas like discussion, coaxing shy learners, and situation-sensitive error correction. That is all the more reason why precious class time should not be taken up by exposing learners to input, and with lexical exercises, drilling, and other tasks that now, thanks to digital platforms, can be done more efficiently outside of class time.

English Attack!, currently in worldwide Beta with over 13,000 testers helping us improve the service, will launch in France in early March 2011. We are delighted to invite all TESOL France members and other ESL / EFL teachers around the world to register for the Beta in order to qualify for free Teacher status ahead of the launch; and to join the English Attack! teacher community bringing together teachers from around the world with a common interest in fulfilling the huge English language learning potential of teens and young adults.