34 ¦ Q&A: School refusers, young learners and restructuring our syllabus for motivation

I'm named printer and this is the Motivated Classroom. Hello Falcha, welcome, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos to this episode number 34 of the Motivated Classroom. Can you believe it? 34 episodes. I was just looking a little bit at the figures of this. It's crazy. Eight months now, 34 episodes, over 35,000 downloads and growing every day, and 24 patrons of the podcast all since last July. So a huge thank you to everyone for supporting the podcast, for telling your friends, for passing at other people, and for all your lovely kind messages and comments. It only takes a second to write these things, but it means a huge amount to me to see these messages that it's having an impact on your practice, your students are enjoying these new techniques. So thank you so much and I'm just glad I'm able to get some of this research I've been doing for the last five or six years out into teachers' ears. And with that, I think it's really important for us to start today, as always, with our Irish expression for today. But today, our Irish expression is "Guramila, Sheila". Now, that is an expression that literally translates as "Thank you, a thousand Sheila's". Now, Sheila is a name that we use in Ireland a lot. It's an Irish name, Sheila, spelled S-I with a little accent over the top, L-E. So slightly different spelling to how you may have seen it written down with S-H-E-I-L-A. We spell it S-I-Father, Father's the word for an accent in Irish L-E. And when we say "Guramila, Sheila", it's kind of like a slang-y way to say "Thank some million", because "Mila and Sheila rhyme together", it's got nothing to do with anyone called Sheila, really. It just means "Thank some million, thank you so much". So there you go. That's the Irish for today. Now, today we have a question and answer episode. And whenever I put out a twist or an Instagram message looking for questions for the motivated classroom podcast, I always get so many amazing questions and I always feel kind of bad that there's just no way I'm going to get all these great questions. So I'll do my best today to get to some of the main ones that have come out. We're going to look at a little bit stuff to do with reluctant learners, young learners and how we restructure the syllabus a little bit to fit more with a Comprehensible Input approach rather than a linear approach with lists of vocabulary and grammar by theme and going topic by topic in a textbook. Now many of you listen to this maybe, well, that's kind of how I have to go because my school go that way. And I hope I'll address that a little bit today. And again, I really want to remind people listening to this. I am absolutely not on a pedestal telling you you must change and do things a different way. No way. Please do not take it like that. I'm merely trying to share ways that I have found in the research that are very motivating for learners of languages so that we can reach more students. That is simply the goal. But if you are doing things that are working for you and you're listening going, well, hang on a second. Liam, I do this thing and you're just after saying it doesn't work, but it works really well in my class. Then that's absolutely fine. It all comes down to the teacher and the way the teacher does things. But I'm hopefully sharing with you what I would consider the best bets from the research. Because that the research says, well, if we try these out, hopefully we're going to motivate more learners. So there we go. All right, so let's go straight into it then. The first question came in from Louise Ballantine. And Louise writes, "I'd love to know more about motivating and engaging reluctant learners, school refusers, students for whom their first language of English is such a struggle that they say absolutely no relevance or purpose to learning languages. Any advice would be much welcomed." And she also says, "PS, love the wee bit of Irish in your podcast." So there you go. Gurmi Lashila. So thank you so much Louise. This is a wonderful question. Reluctant learners, students who we just feel like we cannot get through to no matter what we try. So I think when I'm thinking about my own context and those students I've also had, believe me, just because I've done a doctorate in motivation does not mean that every student is automatically motivated. Trust me. That is not the case. I am with you every step of the way and every teacher who is listening to this. I have those same issues too. For me when we're thinking about intrinsic motivation and how we can increase that, I think we should all concentrate first and foremost on the basic psychological need of autonomy. Now, I know sometimes we can feel squeezed by a curriculum or we can think we have to do this and we must do this and we have to get to this exam. So therefore I don't have time to do an activity where I learn about the students. And I guess I would encourage you to try and make that time. Whatever you need to do, take out a reading you did last year, take out a worksheet, take out some grammar exercise or a test, take it out and try and figure out, put an extra 40 or 45 minutes in of learning about what drives the students. Although there are three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness for intrinsic motivation, according to many studies, autonomy is actually kind of a level above the other needs of relatedness and competence. Essentially, if we meet the need of autonomy, then the relatedness will kind of come on its own. Essentially, if we meet that need of autonomy, students have some ownership, they feel like they have some direction and what's going on. And therefore the relatedness comes from that, the relationship with the teacher because you are giving a little bit of power away, you're giving it to the students and allowing them to direct things. And so the research would show that this need of autonomy is really important, but it's the one that we actually neglect the most. So Dinsor and Al in their recent meta-analysis of various studies, they showed that autonomy is kind of a level above and same with Ryan and Dessie in their 2020 update of the self-determination theory research, 20 years of research, they also show that if we can concentrate on the autonomy aspect, then relatedness will come and competence will also come because they'll feel like they are doing better because their ideas are being inserted into stories or they're being inserted into bits of the class or they're having some direction as to what is going on. And then therefore they feel a bit more competent with what they're doing. So how can we actually raise autonomy in the language classroom? Well, I've spoken a lot about the special person interview is one way. So you can interview a student in your class and have the rest of the class write down things that they have learned about that student. And that is a really great way to bring in things to learn about them, but also to practice language that you want to practice in the class and that you want them to be able to learn a bit more of and acquire that language through more and more repetitions. So that is one way that we can definitely increase autonomy in our classroom. Other ways of course are by providing some choice and direction as to what they're allowed to do. So if you've got a project that you typically do, maybe you can slightly adapt that project and say that the students can choose the way that they're going to present that project. They don't have to do it as a presentation, let's say they can choose a different way. Or they can choose their own theme or they can invent or create their own new product or anything which allows some creativity for the students, but that has parameters. We don't want to just give them a blank slate and say do it everyone. I'm just going to put my feet up. You guys get on with learning Spanish there. Absolutely not. That is not what we're talking about. And actually inquiry based learning, although I am quite for inquiry based learning, I think it's great. There has to be a balance there of inquiry based learning and direct instruction. And the research would show this again. There's a recent, I think it was 2017, McKinsey reports about the most effective ways of instruction. This was actually looking at the PISA test results across various countries. So kind of huge quantitative studies. And they found that schools that had a balance of inquiry based and direct instruction really came out the best. So inquiry based is great. And I like it. I like the students go off and look things up themselves and what is interesting to them. But as language acquisition students, we are the source of the language for them for the most particularly for beginners. Yes, there is material out there online for beginners, but you know what they know if that makes sense. As in you know what you've taught them, you know what they know already and you can control your language so that you're not overloading them and going into that cognitive load theory. If we give them way too much and expect too much of them, then really we're just overloading their brains and they're going to switch off. So we are their best resource and for beginners, we can really control those aspects a little bit. I'm kind of going off in a tangent here a little bit, I'm essentially we need to try and give them more autonomy. I hope that answers your question a little bit. I think another way that you can actually encourage those reluctant learners or as you like to call them school refusers is changing the way you speak to them. Use the language that you use when you talk to those students. So by not using controlling language, we are actually helping their autonomy and that comes out in a variety of studies around self-determination theory. If we use language that is very inclusive and supportive rather than controlling and telling them what they must do or you have to do this, then actually those students will begin to feel more autonomy and their intrinsic motivation will go up. So using words like linguist and learner as opposed to saying things like students and homework and you're learning at home or you're in contact with the language as opposed to saying this is your work you have to do, you must submit it by this date. And again, I'm sure this teacher is listening on but hold on, if I don't give them a due date, it's never going to get handed in and that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying of course you can have parameters there and of course there's due dates for work. We're just slightly adapting our language so it's less controlling and less autonomy is suppressive. So we don't want to use things like you must, you have to, you have to do this and I am the person in control, you listen to me and you do what I say. That the research shows that that is simply not effective when we want to increase motivation. Change your language and ask the student how can I help? What can I do to improve this for you? Is there a way I could do this better? what would you like to learn about? These type of changes in our language and using the word linguist and learner as opposed to, you know, you are a student and you do this, that is going to help their autonomy. So I hope Louise that answers that question a little bit for you and it's the thing we all face, these reluctant learners are school or fuzers as you say. It's sometimes it is a quite conversation with them, but if you can find the thing that really ticks for them, maybe she plays the drums and you can somehow bring that into class, a song that has lots of drums and who plays or you do, can you tell us a bit about that or maybe that student is really into athletics or gymnastics or maybe that student loves going to the cinema. Well can we bring that in somehow and then that student is going to feel more included in the class. For me this year I had a student who was one of those reluctant learners and I know he's really into skating. So it took me a while but I managed to bring skateboarding into the class and I talked about a famous Spanish skater and I showed a video and I asked who was into it and he got really into the lesson at that point and I asked him what he shared some videos of him skating and what were his best tricks and then we got the class to write down that he liked this and he could do this trick and he couldn't and he was trying to learn this one and there was a big change in that student after that. I think he felt valued and cared for and he started to bring a bit more effort in the class so that might be one approach that can help. Okay, 10, 11 minutes in and we're on question two. I'm telling you, I just love talking. This is why podcasts are so great for me and my fiance thinks the same. She's like, God, a podcast is just ideal for you. You locked in a soundproof room, talking essentially to yourself but I'm hoping that there's lots of you listening to this as well. So there we go. Question number two comes in from La Petite Colledue Fleur. So that is I presume a French teacher on Instagram and she asks about what are the tips that we can use with this approach. I presume in terms of comprehensive input and teaching with stories for very young children and young kids. That is a great question and actually quite a bit of the workshops and training that I've done with a variety of schools is with very young learners and I'm not a primary school teacher. I teach students typically from age 12 to 18. I taught adults as well but I've actually never taught in a primary classroom so I'm sure there's primary teachers out here who could help me much more with this question but I'll give it a go. So I have done lots of workshops with teachers who work with primary students and one of the biggest issues I found with this approach is it's an approach that is heavily reliant on reading. So what if your students are so young that they can just about read or they're just about reading in their first language? What do we do then? Well, I think the best way to think about it is this approach of comprehensive input of students understanding everything in the class and having their input into stories and the direction of the class and bringing their own loves and passions to the class is something that can work across all ages and can be highly motivating for both the teacher, the students, the adults, everybody. So how do we adapt it? I think what you'd need to do is rather than have texts that they're reading it could be a few words on the board that they're reading but with pictures above them. So if your story is let's say there's a man with a crazy mustache and he needs to it's shaped like a pencil. That's always my first story that he needs to get. He needs to get it shaved off and he's looking for a pencil sharpener. Well, maybe there's that sentence but with lots of different pictures for man and pencil sharpener. So they're learning to read but they're also learning with the pictures. So I think that is one way you can adapt it for use with very young children. The other thing with very young children is they get very excited. If you're asking them what is the name of the man who is in the shop for example? Then they're going to give you all these great ideas and how do you take an idea from one without upsetting another student and secondary I think they can take that a little bit better. It's about making them all feel included a little bit. So you might say oh lovely idea that is a great name. That name might come back in another part of the story but yes, you're right Maria. The name of the man is Luigi. Absolutely. And now at that stage I had this experience when I taught in primary at these workshops. They kind of looked at me and why didn't you pick my words? And then at this stage you can say no it's a really nice word. However in this story I can't change the facts of the story. The story is just the story. His name is Luigi and they're like oh and I just say it was just a really good guess. Like all right okay but you make sure that you include that other student or maybe they're an actor you give one of their ideas in the next part. How we keep their attention and keep it going of course is just by having shorter time limits. So in the secondary setting usually it'll be a five minute block where I'm teaching parts of the story. Maybe in primary you reduce that down to two or three minutes and you can still put them in little groups where they talk to each other. They might have pictures that they're describing. They're saying describe this picture and it's a picture of a man with a mustache. Describe it in French or German or Spanish with each other and you're walking around and you're checking that they're saying it. But remember as humans we are hired wired to learn by story and young children love stories. They love seeing what happened next. So lots of action, lots of drama, the use of images on the board to show your story but they also want to know what happens next in the story. They want to know that. If I remember correctly when I did some work with a school in Brussels on this I did a few classes with their primary kids and we did the building a character for our story and they came up with a car who the car was pink I think but it had like blue eyes and had a long flowing hair and the next class the first thing they did they ran in and they just wanted to talk about the car and what does happen where does it go what happens to the car who drives it is is it really a person or is it a car immediately they were so into it they had built this car and they wanted to know what happens next. So students want to know and it's actually trying to curb that enthusiasm a little bit in the primary school because they're so enthusiastic to just make sure that we always go back to our ground rules and if you have to stop the class and say the story can continue if everyone is speaking I'm the storyteller we need to listen and then you wait maybe you count down from five maybe you do the little two claps hand up and when your hand goes up their mouth's closed this type of thing can work with the younger learners but I would say absolutely teach with stories to your primary learners they want to learn by story they want to know what's happening next they'll get so lost in it they won't care about the grammar and how things end they just want to listen to the story and what happens next getting them to tell each other looking at the images describe the image all of this I think can be very very helpful and this actually segues very nicely into our next question now this question comes in from Jenny Fawson and Jenny asks what are the key structures that we should use for each level what structures can we use that will unite our curriculum and honor teacher autonomy so a wonderful question and it's a question I get quite often and actually another question came in that is quite similar from Joshua Cabral who is word languages teacher on Twitter who asks how do we integrate a story into an existing unit and I think those two questions are linked because they are about the key structures that we're teaching in each level and how do we integrate them into something we're already doing without completely overhauling the curriculum these are great questions and that is how I had to start when I came to the school I'm currently in and I was the only teacher really teaching in this comprehensible input manner so how do we go about it so I guess if I think of my beginners class and what are the key structures that I want them to master by the end of the first unit by the end of the first two months by the end of the year typically I want them to be able to communicate about things so I start with structures like wants has needs forgets is scared that's the kind of things that drive us in the class to begin with if past tense or future tense comes in quite naturally if I need to use went in a story or had then we just use it it comes up naturally but we're not going to go into long depths and worksheets all to do with you know the past tense absolutely not we don't even do that in the present tense to be honest it's just about communicating so the words that we use to communicate has one's goals those type of things right at the beginning and how you structure it really is you think I think mainly in that first year I concentrate on those structures as as the main thing to communicate a story he has he wants he goes and when we talk about places what does the place have what does it look like we do things like hides runs all the actions they're all part of our stories in that first year but as I say if past tense comes in naturally then we use it you know where did you go with the break we use went you know what did you do yesterday we use I did like played for example in terms of the structures in year two and year three I mean I do work with other colleagues who would maybe follow a more traditional structure where it's present tense in the first year and past tense in the second year and then more difficult past tense is in the third year and future and conditional tense is maybe in the third year so I will structure stories around those as a way to bring together the existing curriculum and my way of teaching integrating the story into existing units so if I have an existing unit that is the future and the conditional tense and we're talking about technology and products of the future well I'm going to think about a story there that will work for the future so my story for those third year students might be there is a man or a woman who is trying to find his other half or her other half and they want to know the future so they go to these fortune tellers and the fortune teller keep telling them to use these different apps and different technologies we're getting that vocab in there too but and they're using future tense like I will not pay you yes you will pay me no I won't pay you and then he goes here and all you will have are three children and you will live on this desert island and you need to go and look up this app where you will find out the new things by clicking here and doing this so that's how we bring it all into a story but how did I come up with those structures it's essentially by looking at what are the students supposed to be able to do according my existing curriculum by the end of the unit. And in my test or the test that my school uses or used to use, it's they need to be able to communicate in the future tense and they need to be able to write a letter using the future tense and the conditional tense and respond to these prompts. So if that's my test and I have to prepare for that, I'm going to work backwards and think how can I make it more interesting. And then we bring in the students, personal questions and answers, of course, where would you go, what would you do on your perfect day? How would you, how would you see yourself in 10 years? Where will you live in 2050? What would you do? Where will you be? And this can all come in. And of course, that might be one student as the special person and the rest of the class will write down what that other student thinks about their own future and who would go to a fortune teller anyway. All of this type of stuff would come in. So that's essentially how I marry the curriculum to the way that I like to teach with a comprehensive input approach because many of us do work within existing curriculum. That's just a reality. That is how it is. And we have to think a little bit about that. In terms of what are the actual key structures, I think Jenny, one of the best things you can do there is look as up the highest frequency structures in the language you teach. If that's French or Spanish or German or Mandarin or whatever it may be. And how can you get those structures into more interesting ways of doing the curriculum? But I think it's a starting point so it doesn't feel too scary. It's just look at what is already there. What are they supposed to do by the end of the unit? And work backwards. How can I build those structures into a story? If it's the future, of course, we will introduce the future tense with this story. But then we will do maybe some more traditional type things afterwards looking at other verbs in the future tense that are regular that we didn't look at in the story and work those into some conversation and work those into some other activities. So I hope that kind of answers your question a little bit. Okay, wow. We are 22 minutes in already. Now the last question that came in are actually such big questions and come in so frequently that I'm actually going to do an entire episode for you guys just about this topic. And the topic essentially is grading and assessment. Valene Moreno, she asked question about this. Kristen, I think it's Kristen, Eve Boone on Instagram. She also asked about this two or three other of my patrons from the Patreon page asked me about assessing and grading for proficiency. So I'm going to make that an entire episode next week. I hope that's okay with you guys grading, assessment, evaluation. That's all coming next week with this comprehensive input approach. So thank you so much for listening to this question and answer episode. I hope you found it useful. Please do keep sending me in your comments and your questions because it really helps me to plan these episodes. I have some really exciting guests coming up but I don't want to release who they are just yet. But there's some really great people that are going to be on the podcast very soon. I've actually recorded quite a few of these episodes already and it is very difficult not to tell you who they are. So hold tight. Also, of course, please do ahead on over to the Patreon page for the motivated classroom and look it up. And if you feel like becoming a patron, one of those 24 people who supports the podcast, if you're a regular listener and you think, do you know what, Liam? If I bumped into you, I'd buy you a coffee once a month just to say thanks for these four episodes. That would be brilliant. If you can't do that, you're not in a position to do that. That's absolutely fine. Please keep listening for free. There's no problem with that whatsoever. This is the whole point of this is to get to the masses. So just keep sharing it for me. If you do that, that is just as good as buying a coffee, I really appreciate it. And of course, I need to finish with our little bit of Irish, which today was Guramila Shila, a kind of colloquial way in Irish to say thanks a million. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to the motivated classroom Guramila Shila. I'll just slow on a while. The motivated classroom podcast is an original production by Liam Printer. I'm at Liam Printer on Twitter and my YouTube channel is Liam Printer, the motivated classroom. Full podcast notes with links to resources are available on my website, LiamPrinter.com. For more, find and follow the motivated classroom podcast on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Graphics and music are provided by Paul Mahan. Intro clips are thanks to the wonderful multilingual staff at the International School of Lausanne.