Should We Even Teach Language in the Classroom?

What is our job as language teachers?

Mar 28, 2020

Or should we be teaching language learning skills and providing motivation? What is our job, really?

In many schools, teachers act as gatekeepers, doling out a few breadcrumbs of knowledge and artificial activities for a mere couple of hours a week. Students attend because they have to and leave uncaring. They won’t think to use English until the next lesson.

We all want to find a way to make English fun for our students. Can we make it more fun than not doing English?

How can they do what they find engaging in English? How can we relate their interests to English so that they spend time outside the classroom doing it and being exposed to real-life English?

Finding the key to their motivation will make their learning much faster, more effective and more enjoyable.

“…Let us say therefore that given motivation, it is inevitable that a human being will learn a second language if he is exposed to the language data.”
Pit Corder (1967:164)

I believe it’s our job to show our students (or their parents, if they’re young learners) how to learn and give them the why to want to do so.

How do you increase your students’ motivation?

Reference:

Corder, S.P. The Significance of Learner’s Errors (1967)

See you again in two weeks.

Whenever you're ready, there are three ways I can help you:

1. Learn how to plan better, faster and stress-free with my book Lesson Planning for Language Teachers (90 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).

2. Develop calm students, a relaxed mind and a classroom full of learning with my book Essential Classroom Management (16 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).

3. Improve your teaching in five minutes daily with my Reflective Teaching Practice Journal (4 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).

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