Student Engagement - generating interest in English lessons

What is student engagement?

When we teach, we need to make sure students are engaged. Some people think that this means that we need to keep students interested at all times. But that's probably impossible! No lesson or teacher can be fascinating from start to finish! If we can interest our students, that's great, and that's a good personal aim to have, but if we aim to be non-stop fascinating, we'll almost certainly fail! The key with engagement is 'attention'. The question we need to ask ourselves is, "Are we doing enough to keep students' attention?"

Tips for engaging students

1. Starting: begin a lesson with something attention-grabbing that will get students thinking about talking about the topic for the day. This might be a funny statement, a short video or an arresting visual, but you want to try and get students' attention from the beginning of a lesson.

2. Intelligibility: while it's definitely important to challenge learners, if you don't grade the lesson appropriately to the students, you'll lose their attention fast. I know if I don't understand what's happening, I switch off very quickly. The same is true of students.

3. Novelty: if you do the same thing in every lesson and students know exactly what to expect, they are less likely to pay attention. Try new activity types and don't be afraid to experiment.

4. Variety: similar to the previous point, it's important to have variety within a lesson to keep students engaged. If students are working in pairs, consider changing pairings or interaction patterns so they're not always working with the same people. If students have a long reading text in the lesson, make sure that there are lots of other exercises and activities that don't involve reading.

5. Relevance: get to know your students and their interests and their lives! Sometimes, you'll come across a chapter in a textbook that just won't work with a certain group of students because it's not relevant to their lives. If a group isn't interested in sport, should you really do the long listening in the book about ice hockey?

6. Personalisation: if you give the students the chance to express their opinions on a subject, or to relate a topic to their own lives, they're much more likely to be engaged.

7. Monitoring: if you're not watching the students and listening to them, there is a danger you won't notice when they get bored with an exercise or when they're finished with a task. The closer attention you pay, the more likely you are to be aware of what is and isn't holding their attention.

These are just a few tips to get you started. If you're seeing your students nod off in lessons, or if you can't hold their attention, consider how the points above relate to your lessons.

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About the author:

Dr Connor O'Donoghue hails from Ireland and he started teaching English as a foreign language in Poland in 2003 and he became a CELTA trainer in 2008. He has taught and trained in Ireland, the UK, France, Italy, Slovenia, Macedonia, Poland, Russia, Kazakhstan and Vietnam. Connor also holds a Masters and a PhD in Education from Trinity College in Dublin. He has previously managed large teacher training centres in Vietnam and in London before founding DC Teacher Training.