One of the readings that we were assigned this week is a short book by Jones (2007) called "The student-centred classroom." It discusses topics like autonomous learning, classroom management, motivation, fluency and accuracy, the teacher as a facilitator, and different activities that teachers can use in their lessons to increase student engagement. It also describes the necessary shift from teacher-led activities to those which promote learner autonomy.

One of the concepts that resonated with me was student engagement in activities used in the classroom. Jones (2007) argues that most types of activities can be adapted for pair and/or group work. Pair and group work allows students to collaborate together to complete and discuss activities and tasks, as well as encourage target language use amongst students. The author states that students are more engaged in lessons when they have opportunities to interact with others and are not just receiving input from their teacher (Jones, 2007).

Brown and Lee (2015) also discuss student engagement within the context of classroom interaction. The authors define interaction as "the collaborative exchange of thoughts, feelings, or ideas between two or more people in an L2 classroom" (p. 633). Interactive pair work activities can take the forms of practicing dialogues, question and answer exercises, short brainstorming activities, and checking written work while interactive group work activities can take the form of games, role-playing, simulations, drama, group projects, interviews, brainstorming, information gap and jigsaw activities, problem solving, decision making, and exchanging opinions (Brown and Lee, 2015).

This concept resonated with me because it is my responsibility as a teacher to create lesson plans and activities that engage my students in the learning process. I would feel disheartened if my students thought that my classes were boring and/or felt like they were not learning anything. I think that the suggestions presented in the readings about how to improve student engagement and develop interactive activities are useful. However, it is not clear to me whether they would be equally as suitable for adult ESL literacy students. This is because one of the main goals of this type of teaching is to help students develop their own learning strategies so that they can gradually let go of their reliance on classroom literacy supports and can complete the same tasks as mainstream ESL students. I think that too much focus on interaction in the classroom can impede the development of these skills for individuals. However, student engagement in what is happening in the classroom does not require them to always work in pairs or in groups and that they can also interact individually with the task at hand.

The teacher of the ESL classroom that I volunteer in often facilitates this type of individual interaction with learning materials in the worksheets that he uses. Some worksheets require students to take vocabulary words from a word bank and combine them with target sentence forms to create sentences. Other worksheets require students to look at scrambled words and unscramble them to reveal vocabulary words or look at the outline shape of the letters in a word and to write the letters of the correct vocabulary word in each box. These types of worksheets provide students with opportunities to problem solve and interact individually with the materials. I plan to incorporate similar activities in the materials for my own teaching.

References

Brown, H. D., & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy (4th ed.). White Plains, NJ: Pearson Education.

Jones, L. (2007). The Student-Centered Classroom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
 

Oksmith. (2018, February 23). Studying together [Digital image]. Retrieved from https://openclipart.org/detail/297158/studying-together