How can ESL teachers make students love English?

A great number of students told that they learnt English because they were required to learn this subject in their curriculum at school. Similarly, not many said that they learnt due to their love for English language. Obviously, no teachers can persuade their students to learn English like a favorite subject if students dislike English. Hence, to help students learn English better, it is important to make English become something special that impresses students.

This post will provide readers, especially those who are working as ESL (English as a second language) teacher with some useful techniques to attract students’ attention in English classroom and then make them love English language as well.

• Creating a friendly learning environment

How often do you begin and finish your lectures with too traditional teaching method? It means every day you go to your class, greet your students, ask them to open their book, do all the tasks of each unit, and then say goodbye and repeat the furthers lessons also in that old way?

It is suggested that teachers should create some Warming-up activities to fascinate students and get them out of their personal ignore. There are some very simple Warming-up activities that are easily and not time-consuming to carry out such as: playing games, singing, dancing, and watching short videos related to the content of the new units, doing crosswords or puzzles.

After Warming-up part, it is necessary for teachers to produce new collective activities related to the content of the unit so that students will be able to take part in the lesson and understand what they need to learn more effectively. Concretely, students ought to be encouraged to work in pairs or groups to find out the answers for difficult questions and practice their English language skills. Moreover, their teamwork skill needs improving so as to learn about the new theories or techniques by themselves. A good teacher may not speak too much but share the chance of discovering the lessons with her students.

• Constantly drawing new and exciting things in the classroom

You may think that it is very complicated and exhausting to attract students with cool things every lesson. However, let try very easy ones like changing the order of tables in the classroom or learning site based on the content of various lessons. For example, to create the atmosphere of a party, ask your students to rearrange tables and chairs into sets of 3 or 4 tables around the class. Besides, to help students understand clearly the situations of each English dialogue have students react those conversations in front of the class through the activities of rehearsing plays. By playing the role as the characters of each dialogue, students will understand the meaning and usage of the English language in that dialogue easily by themselves.

• Expressing belief in students’ efforts

A great number of students suppose that they can never learn and master English due to their limited English knowledge. Obviously, many students only learn English because they are obliged to learn English as a mandatory subject in their curriculum at school. This leads to the situation that most of students ignore English lessons in classroom. Hence, a teacher had better not blame students for their laziness in learning English since it is very hard to persuade a student to learn a subject that they dislike. What a teacher can do is to try to make students understand that they can completely learn English if they really want to. To do this, teachers should be patient enough to help their students make progress in learning English step-by-step. Students need giving compliments when they are successful to give a right answer or complete well their practice.

• Organizing some out-door activities in which English is used

To shorten the distance among students, organizing some outdoor activities in which students have opportunities to communicate in English is required. Teachers can hold some short trips to the museums and have students work as real tour guides. Similarly, some real situations like going shopping can be also carried out in which students can play the role of the sellers and foreign customers. These collective activities will give students chances to practice English and get closer to their classmates.

• Chatting with students

During and after each lesson, students should be given questions to check how much knowledge they have received. Teachers should know whether their students enjoy the lessons or not through observing their attitude and listening to their opinions. Surprisingly, students may contribute with more impressing ideas that teachers can use in further lessons.