This seems to be the topic of the week! For example, Aneta wrote in to ask:
Hi, Richard! 🙂
My question is: how to teach children English if they don’t want to do this?? I have few kids like this and I can’t encourage them to learn this language… 🙁
It depends on their age. If they are primary age then you can just do the regular Genki English lesson plans. The mixture of computers, games and actual language they want to learn gets them learning without them realising.
Ninja Tip: Make the TV screen big and put it at their eye level!
For older students, the key is to start talking about their hopes, dreams and future lives.
Do a few exercises to figure out what they want to be in life.
Tell them to dream BIG.
Then in virtually every case you can show how knowing English, and maybe Chinese, is vital for them to be the stars they want to be.
Very often students have never been shown this link before, and once you do, they’re usually hooked for life!
Be genki,
Richard
P.S. Ninja Trick: Net video is fantastic for this as you can find videos that will make them go “Wow!” for any passion they might have, be it dancing, setting up a company, travelling the world, maths, nursing, teaching, making a hit record, learning DNA or how to take care of people. They will be passionate about what you show them. And of course they have to know English in order to know what to search for! Check out this video from Chris Anderson on how the internet has completely changed the way we learn every passion, everywhere:
In my experience children will have had other opportunities to learn English before entering your class. If their previous teachers were boring, then they are going to believe that English itself is boring, and thus not worth their enthusiasm.
As a teacher (and I think everybody struggles with this from time to time) you have to convince them that YOU are different. Get them laughing and having fun and you can win them over. Push yourself to do something better than you’ve done it before.
Easier said than done? Definitely! But I don’t think there is any other option.
I’ve learned that it’s close to impossible to make someone do something they don’t want to do. The best that we can do is to influence someone to do something. Learning by example has worked for me. As I struggle to learn Japanese, the kids see this and they try harder. I’ll fumble with a Japanese phrase trying to describe an activity and the kids will laugh and tease me. I’m showing the kids that it’s okay to make mistakes and that learning can be fun. I often see the quiet kids perk right up when I plunder through something in Japanese. Even the tough kids will laugh and correct my Japanese. This often breaks the ice with the kids that don’t want to learn English. The parent has a lot to do with how the kids respond to learning something foreign. If a parent thinks, “Why does my kid need to learn English?” then the change in attitude needs to start at home. I’ve seen this change happen at our conversation school. Many of the smaller communities are close knitted. Everyone knows what everyone is doing. Parents talk to each other. One parent will talk about how well their kid is doing in school. The next parent wants the same for their kid. A competition starts. Before you know it, the parent that thought English was a waste of time, is enrolling their kid in English conversation school. The parents influenced each other. The cool thing is that everyone benefits from this.
Hello.
I think I know Aneta’s problem very well. I’ve been teaching English in Poland in private language school where usually come students with problems. Usually they don’t want to learn the language at all. It’s a huge problem for me as well, as I’m preparing different games, song, activities on IWB and sometimes nothing works, because they don’t need it or they have some kind of other problems with learning things of which I’m not aware because parents don’t share such things.