D - Psychological Tips for Learner Engagement

Summary

Learner engagement refers to the degree and quality of learners’ active participation and use of language in class. It is not just about how much they actively do, but how much they do this with heart and mind – having interest in tasks, concentrating and investing effort. Without engagement, learning cannot happen.

• 60 Engage students through prediction tasks

• 61 Avoid overloading students with too much new information

• 62 Plan with motivation in mind

• 63 Use free flow writing activities

• 64 Make space for creativity

• 65 Frame tasks and instructions positively

• 66 Use stories regularly

• 67 Increase wait time

• 68 Explain your rationale for certain tasks

• 69 Think about the impact of your question format

• 70 Pair learners to maximize effort

• 71 Use cold calling but do it with care

• 72 Pay attention to the attractiveness of materials

• 73 Unclutter the classroom space

60 Engage students through prediction tasks

Prediction tasks are fun, engaging, and trigger a lot of language use.

Research has established that one of the key competences of the human mind is the ability to make predictions. ‘Minds exist to predict what will happen next. They mine the present for clues they refine with help from the past … to anticipate the immediate future’ (Boyd, 2010, p. 134).

Involving learners regularly in making predictions has several advantages: it is engaging because it gets them to activate schema and think ahead and it awakens curiosity to know if their prediction was correct or not. It also offers multiple opportunities for language use. There is a wide range of ways we can involve students in making predictions:

• • Ask them to read a story – but only up to a certain point. Then, working in pairs/groups, they predict what's going to happen next. Optionally, give them six to eight words from the remainder of the story and ask them to use these words in their prediction. Students can also be given the title or plot outlines to predict from. The same task can be done with videos.

• • Project a dialogue, line by line. At each line, ask students to predict what the next one might be, then reveal it.

• • Search online for famous film lines, e.g., ‘My mama always said, life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’ (Eric Roth, Forrest Gump, 1994).