Understanding Your Learners

1. Understanding Your Learners Motivation and Anxiety

2. Motivation When did you begin learning English? What was your motivation for learning English at that time? (e.g. want to communicate with foreigners, school requirement, want to get a better job in the future, pressure from parents)

3. Motivation When did you begin learning English? What was your motivation for learning English at that time? What’s your motivation for learning English now?

4. Two Types of Motivation

5. Intrinsic Motivation • Drive to learn the language comes from within the learner (e.g. interest, desire to communicate, enjoyment) • Reward are things like feeling competent or successfully communicating • Example of intrinsic motivation: I study Khmer so that I can communicate with people more easily where I live.

6. Extrinsic Motivation • Drive to learn the language comes from an outside the learner (e.g. parents, school requirements, grades, money) • Rewards are things like high grades or happy parents • Example of extrinsic motivation: My brother took Spanish because our high school required two years of a foreign language.

7. Intrinsic motivation produces more successful results in terms of language learning than extrinsic motivation. • WHY?

8. Discussion • Is your motivation to learn English intrinsic or extrinsic? • How can you help your learners gain more intrinsic motivation to learn English?

9. Motivation through Personalization • Personalize your lessons to make the language and topics relevant to your students. • Find out what people, music, TV, books, movies, food, drinks, websites, etc. that they are interested in and include these in your lessons. • Give student opportunities to talk or write about themselves as they practice the language.

10. Motivation through Personalization Think of an activity you could do in the classroom that personalizes the lesson for students? Example: Have students talk about hobbies they do every day to practice present simple

11. Motivation by thinking about variouslearning styles • Vary your activities so that they tap into different learning styles. • What are the different learning styles?

12. Learning Styles Survey • Take the survey & find out your learning style • What learning style does this survey activity appeal to? • What could we add to appeal to the other learning styles?

13. Anxiety • Have you ever felt nervous or stressed about using English? • Did feeling nervoushelp you learn better and try harder, or did it prevent you from learning?

14. Two Types of Anxiety • Facilitative anxiety: helpful anxiety Preparing a lot for a presentation because you’re nervous about giving it in front of the whole class. • Debilitative anxiety: harmful anxiety Being too nervous and shy to try speaking in class or talking to foreigners.

15. Pre Activity Discussion • How can we help our students feel less debilitative anxiety? • Remind Ss making mistakes is part of language learning • Correct errors selectively • Allowed time to prepare answers • Scaffold activities and learning (this mean simplifying tasks by breaking them down into smaller steps) • Build classroom community

16. Activity with Anneka!

17. Post Activity Discussion • How would this activity help your students feel less anxiety about language learning?