Grundtvig Course - Motivating Activities for Language Learning

Today it's been our first day of the course Motivating Activities for Language Learning in Totnes, Devon (UK). It was a good start because we went straight-forward to very practical activities to teach to students of a foreign or L2, which is what I was really looking for.

We have focused in aspects of the teaching like motivation and in activities involving personal information about both teacher and learners.

NAME GAMES

We've started the morning with "Name games and ice-breakers" activities like:

1. Answering questions about your name (Pair activity). One student asks another things like why you were called Noelia? What´s the meaning of your name? Do you like it? Did you think on changing it at some point in your life?. Then the teacher can ask everyone what they got of their partners or just ask if anyone want to share something surprising or memorable.
2. Games with balls. A - one says their name when passing the ball to another student. B - one says the name of the person to whom he throughs the ball.
3. Getting to know each other - Each student thinks of a question he would like to do to someone. All students up go asking each of the others their question and take notes of the name and the response to the question, i.e., to the question: What do you find is the most difficult thing to teach about English Language to your students? - Eva: She finds difficult to teach pronunciation, above all sounds /r/ or /th/. In a second stage each students tries to find out all the responses for one specific person and in the end each person tells the class what they found out about this person.

MOTIVATION

We reflected on this important aspect of learning, talking about the importance of finding out what our learners prefer to learn, the need to try many different things as each class is very different and what it might work in one could not work in another one.

We talked about different dimensions of motivation: motivation about attending classes, about learning the language and about classroom activities themselves. Nick explained how we can affect or do mor about the last one. About activities, we have an important tool to motivate on this. Following the author Jeremy Harmer we reviewed that motivation can be trigger from:

• Activities
• Agency (empowerment of students about their learning)
• Affect (emotional factors)
• Adaptation
• Attitude