Using what teenagers know to teach them what they don’t

From Jacqueline Wilson’s Tracey Beaker to Harry Enfield’s Kevin, we all know what teenagers are like and how they are represented in today’s media; yes, lazy, uninterested and slightly annoying. However, the questions we are interested in are: What is it like to teach teenagers? What issues arise when teaching them? And, how can we overcome these challenges?

To tackle these questions, we need to begin at the core of how teens live their daily lives and take a serious look at what it is generally like to live as a teenager.

Throughout the westernised world, teenagers are consuming more media and information at a faster rate than we as teachers care to realise. They are bombarded with thousands of emails, text messages each day from friends, advertisements and invitations. This can distract them immensely from their education or more importantly, in our eyes, their second language learning. These distractions do not bode well for the average TESOL teacher and are beginning to spark a rethink in terms of language education around the globe.

Of course, we all know that different TESOL curricula have different aims and goals for their learners. Many may want to steer their students towards a final exam, whereas some may be constantly reassessing throughout a course, and even a few may be in favour of a more general English conversation base. Whatever your curriculum targets are, it is motivation that remains key to learner linguistic progression.

The key word here, as previously mentioned is, of course, motivation; and the questions we have to constantly ask ourselves are: How can we keep our teenage students motivated to learn English or any second language for that matter when they are bombarded and somewhat infatuated with this ridiculous amount of media consumption? And, what methods are there out there to help us spark more interest in learning languages?

What is motivation?

Defining what exactly motivation is can be rather tricky. However, when concerning teenage motivation in language learning, we may be able to analyse Gardner’s (1982) Socio-Educational Model which defines motivation in three separate elements: desire, effort and affect. Desire demonstrates how and in what way the student wants to benefit from his or her language learning. Effort denotes the time students spend studying, and the overall drive of the learner. Affect emulates areas of the student’s emotional tie with his or her language proficiency (Norris-Holt, 2001). In general terms, motivation can be seen as why people decide to do something, how long they are willing to sustain the activity, and how hard they are going to pursue it (Dörnyei, 2014: 519). Therefore, knowing about these subareas of motivation can help teachers plan accordingly and adjust areas of the curriculum that may help shape teenagers’ linguistic ability further, i.e. by knowing these factors, we are able to ask ourselves what the best method of channelling this knowledge of motivation into our teaching is.

Possible solutions

I teach English in an Austrian upper-secondary school. Therefore, I teach solely teenagers from the ages of 14–19, preparing students for a standardised final English exam known as the Matura (equivalent to the British A-levels).

The Matura, which is put together by a governing board, is sent out to all secondary schools in Austria to be completed by all pupils on the same day (Austria Education, 2016).

“Throughout the westernised world, teenagers are consuming more media and information at a faster rate than we as teachers care to realise. They are bombarded with thousands of emails, text messages each day from friends, advertisements and invitations.”

Our primary goal as teachers of English is to prepare students for this standardised final exam from the ages of 14 all the way up to 18–19. This includes improving students’ listening, reading, writing and speaking whilst focusing simultaneously on the standardised examination question formats. This can sometimes be a challenge as improving students’ language usage can become masked by constant attention to standardised question formats, i.e. constant repetition of exercises that have been designed to look like Matura exam exercises. However, through teaching teens on a daily basis, I have tried and tested a number of methods that teachers may be able to use when teaching adolescents. Some of the methods I have found useful are to use those so-called distractions, i.e. their media consumption, within lesson planning. I have found it rather effective to use the odd Meme or Facebook post, or WhatsApp chat messaging examples when teaching grammar, vocabulary and colloquial language. By projecting a WhatsApp message on the whiteboard, it is possible to analyse areas of colloquial language and focus on idiomatic phrases. These expressions can then be embedded in other messages in other contexts to offer the students further practice. These new media not only support teaching but offer students the sort of distraction they enjoy. Another way we can keep the level of motivation up is by using the internet to steer our lessons into active discussion. Using YouTube and other visual aids to support discussion and writing tasks for a number of topics, together with perhaps songs and lyrics to explain a certain grammatical function can help motivate students to listen and watch English-speaking media themselves. Examples I have used are the difference between Beyoncé’s If I were a boy and Justin Bieber’s If I was your boyfriend, to explain the difference of subjunctive use. This has proved rather beneficial when explaining the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammarians.

The issue here with teens is they are their most active when encouraged to participate actively in lessons. Simply handing out worksheets with the sole purpose of sedating teenagers for 30 minutes or more is doomed to fail. Teenagers simply cannot be mitigated; they need to remain active for 50+ minutes, and this is when you get the best out of them.

Interestingly, what I have found helps is asking students to find, say, articles, videos and pictures themselves on the topic you are teaching at the time, for example that topic might be the economy for advanced learners or the environment for intermediate learners, etc. Although this may seem rather simple, it can produce some fantastic results.

By doing this, students have to find something that interests them about the topic you wish to discuss with the class. For example, I recently had to cover the rather controversial topic of stem cell research with one of my classes, which proved useful as teenagers tend to like to dive into more provocative questions. Through this method, students will have to read an article or watch a video prior to the lesson thus picking up and learning any vocabulary they may not be a hundred per cent sure of. In the lesson, they are more often than not eager to explain in the L2 all about the article they have found, thus learning summarising techniques whilst recycling any vocabulary they had to previously look up before the lesson. This can be great news for English teachers, as it creates a sort of low preparation, high outcome lesson, which still manages to maintain a level of motivation from the learners.

Other areas we can use to maintain motivation include letting the students use their mobile phones and iPads in lessons to look up unfamiliar vocabulary. Clearly, using the students’ L1 in the TESOL classroom may spark a huge number of debates and emotions among TESOL teachers; however, through my own tested methods, I have found that allowing students to have access to their mobile phones in class helps them to actually stay engaged with the lessons. This can be particularly helpful in reading tasks as it may be that students do not know a word or idiom etc. in English and the teacher may not be able to explain the word or phrase a hundred per cent due to it not translating well into their L1. Therefore, in my view, dictionary usage from L1 to L2 can help to speed things along. If you prefer not to use the students’ L1 in the classroom, the use of a standard English dictionary app can also be mutually beneficial, or why not both?

“By projecting a WhatsApp message on the whiteboard, it is possible to analyse areas of colloquial language and focus on idiomatic phrases. These expressions can then be embedded in other messages in other contexts to offer the students further practice.”

Naturally, these new media cannot and should not be the sole area, or the be all and end all of your teaching. Nevertheless, being supported by something that teenagers know a lot about can bode well in keeping their level of motivation up which, in turn, can further their linguistic ability. Dörnyei (2014: 520) quotes that ‘a long-term learning process such as the mastery of a second language […] always depends on the level of motivation’. With this in mind, it is by using these new media that we can try to get (literally) on the same wavelength as our teenage students, and involve them in lessons which cater more directly to their linguistic and motivational needs. The simple idea behind these methods is to let the students take an active role in your planning procedures, let them do the thinking and take charge of the lesson once in a while. These methods can help keep motivation levels high and keep teenagers interested in the items you wish to teach, and sometimes, they’re not even aware of the fact they’re learning.

References

Austria Education (2016) Matura or Graduate Examination in Austria [online]. Available at: http://www.austriaeducation.info/Tests/K-12-Tests/Matura-in-Austria.html

Dörnyei Z (2014) Motivation in Second Language Learning. In M Celce-Murcia, DM Brinton & MA Snow (Eds) Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (4th edition) (pp518–513). Boston, MA: National Geographic Learning Heinle Cengage.

Gardner RC (1982) Language attitudes and language learning. In E Bouchard Ryan & H Giles Attitudes Towards Language Variation (pp132–147). London: Edward Arnold.

Norris-Holt J (2001) Motivation as a Contributing Factor in Second Language Acquisition. [online]. The Internet TESL Journal VII (6) (http://iteslj.org/Articles/ Norris-Motivation.html).