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How not to be bored during our own lessons?

Practice of Present Perfect and Past Simple can also be fun - part I

Teaching in gimnazjum can be very difficult and disheartening for teachers because it seems impossible to stimulate motivation in students. Most teachers have tried varied methods and used numerous ideas, nevertheless eventually have ended in failure. Most lessons tend to be boring and come down to doing exercises in textbooks. The most important aim of teaching English in gimnazjum has become

Teaching in gimnazjum can be very difficult and disheartening for teachers because it seems impossible to stimulate motivation in students. Most teachers have tried varied methods and used numerous ideas, nevertheless eventually have ended in failure. Most lessons tend to be boring and come down to doing exercises in textbooks. The most important aim of teaching English in gimnazjum has become preparing students for the final examination.

The fact is that teenagers crave for attractive, motivating lessons and can see, even if vaguely, that they will need English in their future lives. Most of them would really like to speak it and await someone who would arouse their interest in English. The problem is that in every class there are some students whose ambition is only to ruin the lesson and because of them teachers prefer conducting boring lessons during which it is easier to maintain discipline and which are much more predictable. It is a very complex issue and I am not going to focus on it here. Another problem is that class level of advancement is uneven and teachers decide to prepare the weaker students to pass the examination, so they limit their invention to doing exercises. It is very difficult to prepare a lesson that could be useful both for more and less advanced students.

The aim of this article is to present some very easy ways of making a lesson more attractive and more practical. Some of them I came up with during the lessons when I sensed the boredom creeping, others I prepared at home but all of them are based on the following principles:

1. Communication rather than writing exercises

   Because of time and discipline problems practising new structures is limited to writing exercises. As a result students are tolerably well prepared to deal with tests and examinations, yet they fail in everyday communication. Activities based on talking are worth the eff ort as students not only use a new structure in a more practical way, but also learn it quicker – an issue connected with action is remembered by our brains easier than when we just read or write about it.

2. Teenagers like topics connected with their life experience

   Authors of gimnazjum textbooks know that really well! The characters are dressed like real teenagers, have similar problems and the topics are carefully chosen to interest gimnazjum students. However, learners still have difficulties in finding the motivation to study them. They seem to be interested more in talking about their own matters – so why not enable them to talk?

3. They like fun

   In fact everybody likes fun, but grown-ups have learned that there are lots of serious situations in life and they do not suff er so much if they have to leave fun for later. Gimnazjum students are not used to that and although they need to learn that there is time for fun and there is time for being serious, they really deserve a small portion of fun during tiring lessons as life is not easy for very many of them.

4. They like teachers to have fun with them

   Why not have fun as well? We also need it.

5. There are always very shy teenagers who do not like speaking in public or talking about themselves

   Although teenagers like topics connected with their own experience and consider their problems the most important, there are lots of introvert students, who do not like talking about themselves, especially in public. It is essential to keep balance between understanding and respecting that and involving shy students in talking activities in a well-thought-out and considerate way.

6. Gimnazjum students can always sense artificiality

   The situations practised during the lessons have to be authentic or probable. If they lose touch with reality students refuse to work on them or work reluctantly. That does not apply to absurd, which can be successfully used with some groups of teenagers. Students will also know if a teacher behaves in an unnatural way, so it is important to prepare lessons taking into account your temperament.

7. An attractive lesson does not need to be time-consuming to prepare

   Just a board, chalk and a piece of paper can be enough to conduct an attractive lesson if a teacher is creative and can make good use of situations that arouse during the lesson. This is not to discourage from preparing special materials before the lesson but to comfort busy teachers.

8. All students use the structures that are essential during the lesson, however there is a lot of space for individual language abilities within the topic

   The teacher focuses on a structure or issue that is to be practised during the lesson and makes sure that all the students have a chance to practise it. Students who are shy or whose language skills are limited do not need to go beyond that task. However, if anyone wants to use more complex structures and speak more, they should be encouraged to do that.

Having presented my main ideas of an attractive and practical lesson now I can give some examples of activities that follow the principles mentioned above. The following is one of them and more will be presented in successive articles.

Patrycja Lampart

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