Does anyone have any suggestions on how to show the need to know English well? I feel that until I can make that apparent to them they'll never be willing to try.
Thx
motivation
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I_kill_cowboys
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Sat Dec 03, 2005 1:38 am
- Location: Yunnan, China
motivation
I'm going on my third year of teaching oral English to college students in China. The biggest problem I'm run into is motivating students to WANT to speak English. For most of them they have the attitude that it isn't important because they'll never use English in the future. As most of the students i teach are not English majors I can understand their feeling completely.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to show the need to know English well? I feel that until I can make that apparent to them they'll never be willing to try.
Thx
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to show the need to know English well? I feel that until I can make that apparent to them they'll never be willing to try.
Thx
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joshua2004
- Posts: 264
- Joined: Sat Nov 20, 2004 7:08 pm
- Location: Torreon, Mexico
Motivating students to speak is not actually difficult if the student has acquired enough English. The problem of most lower level students not speaking is not a problem of motivation. You just might be trying to motivate "water from stone;" often a low level student just hasn't acquired enough language to reach the point where lots of speech is emerging. You will always understand more of a language than you can speak. Thus you have to try to do the same for your students; get them understanding more and the speech will emerge on its own, given a worthwhile speaking task.
Generally, if students don't want to speak English, they might not be ready for an English class in English, and may benefit more from an English class with a non-native speaker. There are techniques for starting from zero in English, but usually it's better for everyone to just have direct-translation for a couple months beforehand.
I also had Chinese students, and one big issue was the idea of "face": Chinese people have an almost phobic fear of being looked down upon by others, and being looked down upon by foriegners is even worse. This fear is the biggest obstacle, in my experience, for Chinese students.
If you can get them to learn without triggering this fear, please feel free to pass it on. All my success from that job was in the non-Chinese students. The Chinese students just dropped out.
I also had Chinese students, and one big issue was the idea of "face": Chinese people have an almost phobic fear of being looked down upon by others, and being looked down upon by foriegners is even worse. This fear is the biggest obstacle, in my experience, for Chinese students.
If you can get them to learn without triggering this fear, please feel free to pass it on. All my success from that job was in the non-Chinese students. The Chinese students just dropped out.
possible help
Hi,
I suggest, if you want to get your students motivated, that you integrate characters and story lines from recent movies and magazines that the students find appealing or of interest to them. Find out what each student's interests and hobbies are and then use them in your teaching material. The only rule is it all has to be in English.
Keep them focused on the moment with prizes and games. Don't let them digress into why English is important. Who knows, oneday they may want to travel and English could be very usefull at that point, given that it is a universal language.
I suggest, if you want to get your students motivated, that you integrate characters and story lines from recent movies and magazines that the students find appealing or of interest to them. Find out what each student's interests and hobbies are and then use them in your teaching material. The only rule is it all has to be in English.
Keep them focused on the moment with prizes and games. Don't let them digress into why English is important. Who knows, oneday they may want to travel and English could be very usefull at that point, given that it is a universal language.
I am motivated to learn...
Japanese - to learn those anime movies, they are just funny.
Chinese - I have many friends that speak Mandarin chinese, it is cool if I can speak their language too.
English - Most of the websites are in english. You will miss 80% of the internet if you do not know english. When you go out of China, English is the language. It is also cool if you know more languages.
These are my motivations. I hope this will help your students learn English.
Japanese - to learn those anime movies, they are just funny.
Chinese - I have many friends that speak Mandarin chinese, it is cool if I can speak their language too.
English - Most of the websites are in english. You will miss 80% of the internet if you do not know english. When you go out of China, English is the language. It is also cool if you know more languages.
These are my motivations. I hope this will help your students learn English.