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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The Young Learners Issue #1 – Alexandra

What My Young Learners Have Taught MeAlexandraChistyakova150x150

I started teaching kids very early in my teaching career. At that time I wasn’t a certified English teacher yet but just a linguistics graduate. That’s why I had no idea how to teach and just copied the techniques my university teachers had used.  When it came to teaching kids, it was a completely unexplored domain for me too. At first, I tried to teach them as I taught adults but very soon I realized it was a mistake: it just didn’t work.  I still haven’t got any formal training on teaching languages to kids but thanks to my six-years of experience, I think I’m doing it much better than I did at the beginning: my young learners have taught me how to teach them right. Here are some lessons they taught me.

Lesson #1 – Every Kid Is Unique
The cornerstone idea of teaching English to young learners is that every kid is unique. This seemingly simple idea threads through everything and has several practical consequences.First of all, not every kid has learnt yet how to behave appropriately in a classroom:  they act naturally in the way they do at home. So sudden tantrums or burst of tears shouldn’t be a surprise: kids are just showing their true personalities and don’t know how to hold back.  Secondly, being natural and sincere, kids subconsciously expect the same from their teacher. So there is no point in pretending or trying to distance yourself from the kids – they will immediately feel it and will lose interest in your lessons and trust in you.  Thirdly, you can never be sure that what worked well with one kid will work with another. Kids have absolutely different characters and preferences in everything: games, fairytale characters, cartoons, animals, classroom activities and pastimes!  So it’s very important to learn about your learners as much as possible. Every piece of information is valuable as you can exploit it or, on the contrary, avoid using in your lessons. It will influence the choice of classroom activities and topics kids will be most engaged in and thus the choice of activities, which are most productive in terms of learning.

Lesson #2 – Active Participation
Another aspect of teaching young learners is their active participation in the lesson. Let kids be active and initiative, let them change an activity or a game in the way they want – if they do so, this is a good sign of kids’ genuine interest and true involvement in the activity. So even if your meticulously elaborated lesson plan is going down the drain because the kids want to do tasks their own way, don’t be upset too much: the most important thing here is that they WANT to do the activities and thus they learn!

Lesson #3 – Exploit The Surroundings
Another thing I’ve learnt from my young learners is that a teacher should exploit the surroundings as much as possible. If you teach kids at their home, there are lots of things such as favourite toys, pets, sometimes even parents that can be happily integrated into a lesson. For example, when I was teaching a 10-year-old girl who had a pet cat, I decided to involve it in our lessons to remove stress and boredom and bring in some relaxation and fun. Here is the photo of Tyoma the Cat helping my student Katya to do her school homework.

Alexandra Image1

If kids come to your classroom or house, ask them to bring their favourite toys, but make sure that these toys foster but not hinder the learning. Otherwise, toys might become a serious destruction.

Lesson #4 – There Aren’t Bad Kids
There is one more thing about teaching young learners: there aren’t bad kids, though there are probably some kids that might be experiencing some problems. If this is the case, never hesitate to contact parents about the issue because everything concerning a little kid is important. But before turning to parents for help, try to solve the problem directly with the kid – they will appreciate it and will definitely feel more valued and grown-up.

Still Learning
These are the main lessons I’ve learnt from my young learners. But my learning is still going on because every other lesson with my little students is a new lesson to me. I know I haven’t completely mastered the skill. And, to be honest, I don’t actually think there couldn’t be any limit to perfection. So, for those who have never taught kids and feel a bit scared about this, I could say, “Give it a go” and you will see how much fun it could be and how much you can learn about people skills and teaching in general. So, give it a go!