Alexandra Chistyakova

Challenges in Teaching – Alexandra Chistyakova

Reaching Challenging Learners

Alexandra Chistyakova

– Alexandra Chistyakova                                    

To many teachers the most challenging learners are those who take an English course only because someone else wants them to learn the language. These people could be employees whose boss insists on their professional development; or these could be children and teenagers who are forced by their parents. In both cases, the learners can clearly understand the benefits of learning English but as long as they don’t need it today, they lack the necessary persistence and determination. In such a situation a good way to grasp the learners’ attention and whet their appetite for learning is to make lessons more engaging and fun.

However, the learning situation might be much more complicated than this if an unmotivated learner has some special needs.

Some time ago I had to teach a 15-year-old boy who has an absent-mindedness problem. During a lesson, the boy used to suddenly switch off and withdraw into himself, completely losing the track of the lesson and not noticing what was happening around him. Even more so, the boy was aware of his problem but he didn’t seem to even try to make the slightest attempt to collect himself and focus on the task.

As it was the first time I had to deal with such a specific learning situation, I had to accumulate the whole arsenal of teaching techniques I knew. Through try and error, I singled out the types of activities that can work well for absent-minded learners. The activities fall into three categories.

First, there are activities and games designed for kinesthetic learners, where a student has to do something instead of just listening, reading or doing exercises in a worksheet. These activities may range from board games, tasks with vocabulary or phrase cards (such as sorting out cards or placing them in order) to total physical response activities (such as miming, acting, or moving around).

Second, computer games can be a great help: successful completion of a game requires concentration and some physical response (such as eye-hand coordination). Computer games can be easily exploited for teaching and practicing grammar, vocabulary or phonetics.

Third, when it comes to the speaking practice, be prepared to discover that your absent-minded learner forgets everything you taught and practiced before and slips to his or her “favourite” mistakes. If this is the case, a teacher (or other students) can register mistakes the learner makes. This activity can be turned into a sort of a game: Hangman, for example. In the case with my student, we imagined that he was playing a computer game where he had to go through a number of levels to win. However, if he made a particular number of mistakes, he automatically was placed onto a lower level. My student liked this activity because the idea of game levels resonated with his computer games addiction. This game helped him to focus and successfully complete a task.

All in all, if you happen to teach learners with the problems of attention concentration, you can raise their alertness and help them strengthen their memory by letting them learn though doing and moving and through using real-life objects. Furthermore, you can increase the effectiveness of lessons by decreasing the length of activities, making tasks more manageable, easier to focus on and more dynamic for the learners. ~ Alexandra

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Alexandra Chistyakova

Alexandra Chistyakova is an English teacher at the Physics faculty of Moscow State University, Russia. She also works as a freelance teacher giving one-to-one English lessons to the large range of learners: from preschoolers to senior adults. She's always been engaged in the continuing professional development, taking various teacher-training courses, reading specialized literature and participating in ELT conferences and seminars. She received her CELTA at BKC-in, Moscow, in 2011. Her professional interests include: professional development, classroom management techniques, motivating the non-developers, teaching English to young and very young learners, integrating web 2.0 tools in the classroom. She believes that no success can be achieved without motivation and that there is no better source of motivation for teachers as being part of the vibrant international ELT community. Apart from her job, Alexandra has a fascination for astronomy, nature, travelling and meeting new people.

4 thoughts on “Challenges in Teaching – Alexandra Chistyakova”

  1. You’re right! Basically any activity can be gamified, this is increasingly the language of today’s students, 30-40ish included 😀 Thanks 🙂

  2. Thank you so much for touching this particular challenge. I loved your suggestions and I will use them for sure. 🙂

  3. Being an absent-minded person myself, I found your post really interesting. Kudos for spotting what your student’s problem was and then caring enough about it to try and revise your teaching to suit his needs. Most teachers might get to the noticing bit but most would deem it the student’s fault and not help, rather penalise being absent-minded.
    I forgot what else I wanted to say 😉 Thanks for the great post

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