In the latest post from the authors of Interactive, Joanna Budden explores how we can encourage teens to spend their time outside the classroom improving their English… while still having fun.
Getting teenage students to improve their level of English outside the classroom can be a real challenge. For many of us, it’s hard enough to get our students to do the homework we assign them. But there are a few things that we can encourage our students to do in their free time which will help them learn English without even realising it.
Mobile
If your students have access to smartphones and tablets, there are a few things you can do to encourage them to spend some of this screen-time on improving their English.
- Encourage your students to change the language in their phone, tablet or even laptop settings to English for a week … or forever. They will already know their way around the device so it shouldn’t cause any technical problems for them to use it in English. They will naturally pick up new words such as password, settings, airplane mode, notification centre, wallpaper, brightness etc. If the idea is met with resistance, set it as a challenge to see who can keep their device operating in English for the longest time and who can create the best list of new words learnt.
- There are hundreds of apps that have been created to help learners improve their vocabulary and grammar whilst they’re on the move, but from my experience with teenagers here in Spain, students don’t tend to find them and install them without a bit of encouragement! Why not get your learners to search for language learning apps and to try a few (stick to the ones that are free or have free taster versions) and report back to the class which were the most or least useful or fun.
- If you need a starting point on the search for apps you could look at the Cambridge apps (a couple are free) and the British Council’s offer of apps . There is also the well known Duolingo which may appeal to some learners.
- If your students are keen on the idea of using apps to improve their English, you could get them to design their own, which would be a great group activity for the end of term or a summer course.
Music
Most of your teenage students are probably listening to a lot of music with English lyrics in their free time, without any encouragement. But with a few suggestions and pointers from you, they will be able to take this a step further and really use the song lyrics to expand their vocabulary.
- Talk to your students about how much music they listen to in English and how they listen to it. Do they just focus on the tune, or do they really listen to the lyrics and try to figure out what they’re all about? Song lyrics are easy to find on the internet, so encourage your students to look up the lyrics to their favourite songs and to pick out phrases and words they don’t understand. If they go from being passive consumers of songs to active listeners who are willing to do the detective work to figure out what the song is about, they can really improve their listening comprehension and their vocabulary. Singing aloud is great for pronunciation practice too.
- Some songs are a challenge for native speakers to understand, so it’s important to tell your students that they shouldn’t worry too much if they can’t understand every word. Also, some songs will contain words and phrases that may not be suitable or desirable for our learners to learn and use themselves. It’s important to raise awareness about inappropriate language, and helping your students sift out the quality language chunks from the less useful ones is a handy skill to develop.
- A simple activity to bring the songs your students listen to outside the classroom into your class, and to raise the issues mentioned above, is to ask each student to bring the music and lyrics to one of their favourite songs to the class. They should prepare the lyrics at home and make sure they’re familiar with the language. Listen to the song as a class; other students can then ask the student who chose the song and has actively studied the lyrics questions about any unknown language in the song. If you make this into a weekly activity and let one student choose a song every week, this makes for a very motivating extra task which can last all year and save you some valuable preparation time.
If you have any more suggestions on how we can make use of mobile devices and music to help our students improve their English outside of the classroom, please add them to the comments.