Student engagement is a key factor for learning in any classroom, and each student has their own interests, reasons for learning, and preferred ways of doing things in lessons. Many teachers are reporting that in the age of social media and smartphones, it is becoming more and more difficult to hold students’ attention in activities in class. So how can we ensure that our students stay focused and involved in the lessons that we teach?
Engagement and motivation
There is a common confusion between these two terms. Often, teachers will assume that students do not show interest in what is happening in their lessons due to the fact that they are not ‘motivated’. However, this may not be true. A highly motivated student, who is genuinely interested in succeeding in assessments, or working towards a language goal outside of the classroom, may not be engaged in the specific activity that is being presented to them in class. This may be true for several reasons: the topic may not be interesting to them, the language in the task may be too easy or too difficult for them, or they may not see the activity as useful for them on their learning path - the reward for their efforts in class may not be felt strongly by that learner for their future.
By contrast, a learner who has low motivation levels, perhaps due to a perceived lack of relevance of the subject to their life, may be engaged by a specific classroom task because it focuses on a topic that they are interested in, or is presented as a fun activity that they enjoy. Engagement simply refers to the level of focus and investment that a student puts into classroom activity, and this can be harnessed for learning in several ways to help learners develop their knowledge and skills in English.
Increasing engagement through interaction
For a long time, the classes in all subjects were dominated by teachers. Teachers were seen as the seat of power in the room, as well as the source of all relevant knowledge, and it was their job to communicate this knowledge to students, so that students could ‘know’ the subject and report this knowledge in assessments, thus demonstrating their development across a period of study.
This traditional model was applied to academic subjects such as history or mathematics, as well as language study. This meant that the interaction in language classrooms was controlled by the teacher, and tended to be one-way; teachers explained at students, and it was up to the students to receive and apply the content given to them in assessments. This is one reason why it was such an effort for students to stay engaged in the artificial scripted dialogues, grammar structures and vocabulary lists used in traditional language study activity.
An alternative to this one-directional, or ‘monologic’ interaction is to bring the students into the dialogue of the classroom, encouraging them to share their real experiences, ideas and opinions to work with language being studied. This ‘dialogic’ approach appeals to learners’ lived experience and gives them more power over what is said and done in the classroom. With this increased agency comes an increase in engagement, as students feel heard and can express themselves authentically through interaction with the teacher and each other.
Peer sharing is one way to develop a dialogic approach to language study - as a routine, asking students to share their ideas before reporting back to class, or completing a task, will help them to engage with each other through the language being studied, and engage them in a less academic, performative way.
Collaborative tasks, where students genuinely work together to complete an activity work well to frame interaction and work with specific language. Information gap, blind dictation and post-task pair-checking tasks are all good opportunities for peer engagement, so planning these types of activity in to lessons can raise engagement levels significantly.
Raising engagement through cognition
Another kind of engagement that can work to focus learners and give them a sense of reward in classroom tasks is through cognitive engagement. Human brains thrive on the reward of figuring out challenging situations - this was a survival skill that evolved into our psychology from thousands of years ago. Creating task situations where learners have to solve a puzzle, find the missing information or work out a challenging point for themselves is likely to raise engagement levels in the classroom.
One way of applying this is through inductive methodology - using tasks which start off the learning process by setting a goal and providing the first steps towards working out a challenging problem. In the traditional classroom model outlined above, there was little opportunity for this kind of work, as all of the ideas and language patterns were dictated by the teacher. The only cognitive work required of students was to work out what things meant based on the teacher’s controlled examples.
To increase this kind of learner engagement, ‘top-down’ teaching routines work well, where learners are presented with a full text or audio recording, and they have to work with language presented in context, and decode meaning or usage patterns from the text by working through unknown examples from context. ’Noticing’ tasks are also useful, where a text or recording contains repeated uses of the same structure or type of phrase, and learners have to identify how and why they are used, and therefore how they can apply them in their own language.
More ways of making reading more engaging are outlined in our previous article here.
Raising engagement through appeal to learner preferences
However we work to engage our learners, it is essential that we consider their preferred ways of learning, and take their own learning strategies into account. By identifying how our learners prefer to work, we can design or apply task types that activate their specific engagement points, making it more likely that lesson content will be retained by them as they study.
It used to be thought that learners worked in three ways: there were ‘visual’ learners, ‘auditory’ learners and ‘kinaesthetic’ learners. However, this model of learning has been shown to be highly generalised and not at all an accurate representation of how people learn. As shown by models such as Multiple Intelligences theory, the range of ways in which people have their interest sparked is much wider than you may think, to it is essential to diversify the materials we use in class, to appeal to the widest range of ways of learning that we can.
Whatever we do in the language classroom, we need to take care not to make ourselves the dictator of the ideas, interactions and language that emerges from our students. Leaving space for authentic dialogue and peer interaction, as well as using tasks which appeal to a range of different types of engagement, will provide more opportunities for your learners to stay focused and enjoying your lessons in the long term.
Language Point Teacher Education Ltd. delivers the internationally recognised RQF level 5 Trinity CertTESOL over 12 weeks, part-time in an entirely online mode of study, and level 6 Trinity College Certificate for Practising Teachers, a contextually-informed teacher development qualification with specific courses which focus on online language education or online methodology, and can be used to develop your awareness of strategies for working with exam-focused classes.
If you are interested to know more about these qualifications, or you want take your teaching to a new level with our teacher development courses, contact us or see our course dates and fees for details.
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