Interest

Summary

Time and work invested in making the lesson interesting is well worth the effort. A class of students interested in the tasks you give will try harder, learn better, and is likely to be easier and more pleasant to work with.

• 50 Don't worry about the topic

• 51 Keep activities short and varied

• 52 Tell students what the goals are

• 53 Use higher-order thinking skills

• 54 Personalize

• 55 Use visual materials

50 Don't worry about the topic

A good topic helps, of course, to arouse interest, but it's not as vital as you might think. It's all too easy to kill a fascinating topic, and to bring to life an apparently uninteresting one: it's the task that matters.

It's quite difficult to give a recipe for a good topic. In general, topics that are relevant to students’ lives, or culture, or personal experience are likely to be interesting (see Tip 54); but sometimes ones that engage students’ fantasies or imaginations, totally removed from their own reality, can be just as good. Your best guide here is your own knowledge of your students, and your intuitive ‘feel’ for what they will relate to with interest.

But in any case, even after you’ve found a topic that is interesting to most of the members of the class, this will help to engage them only at the beginning of the activity or text. Interest will be maintained only if the treatment of the subject is interesting as well. If the topic is, for example, ‘football’ – when you know most of the class play it and eagerly support the local team – then this is likely to raise students’ motivation to participate. However, if the content of the text is merely a description of the rules of football, or if the activity consists of learning vocabulary items connected to the game, then students are likely to lose interest. A topic such as ‘numbers’, in contrast, looks boring: but if you ask each student to write down a number that is personally significant to them, and then share it with their classmates, they’ll continue to be motivated to say and understand numbers in spite of the apparently uninteresting nature of the subject (see also Tip 99).

So by all means look for topics that interest your class, but remember that the important thing is not what they are, but what you do with them.