Teach English in Shangdian Zhen - Liaocheng Shi

It is an early Monday morning everywhere in the world once a week. Tired eyes are slowly opening. The first few thoughts and feelings in the morning can be summarized as “I want to stay in bed. Just for little bit longer”. But then you remember. School. Then you remember something else. Today was the day you were going to learn about animals and dinosaurs. And you like dinosaurs! Suddenly, you are not as tired, and the motivation is growing as you go about your morning routines. Motivation is such an important part of learning but can be difficult to achieve since the variation between people is big, but motivational factors also change for a single person depending on age. From a general perspective, many students enjoy anything out of the ordinary lesson routine. What I found the most enjoyable was doing field trips, when a teacher brought stuffed animals to teach us prepositions and a well-designed power point presentation with a lot of colourful pictures to illustrate the lessons topic rather than a lot of text. With young learners especially, their attention and focus can only be kept to something for a short period of time as they can quickly get bored. To plan a fun and varied lesson is a difficult task, but a good start is to ask the students, what motivates you? Do they have a specific hobby or dream they want to achieve? By getting to know them, what they enjoy and what their daily life looks like, you will be able to find topics or methods of teaching that motivates them to learn, because it is applicable to them. This is essentially how humans function, just think about yourself. We are selective with our intake of knowledge and focus on what we are interested in or know is important to remember, those are the things we will learn the quickest. Thus, it is essential to make sure students feel they are getting something out of the lessons that they can use in their everyday life. Motivation also encompass giving feedback, encouragement, inspire, building students confidence, making them feel welcome and relaxed around you as teacher, all the while having a mutual respect of your role in a classroom setting. I firmly believe that you can both be very friendly with students and have their earned respect at the same time. Motivation might make particularly young students very excited, but that motivation also makes a student willing to adjust, i.e. sitting still, being quiet etc. in order to gain that knowledge or experience they seek. If we think about the reverse situation, one can easily see that lack of motivation will make students act out by not listening to instructions from the teacher. Some might be passive or not paying any attention, because what they are supposed to learn is not something they want to know or feel they need to know. The trick here is to mask the less fun parts of learning a language by keeping lessons fun and varied as well as establishing a good rapport with students and giving them the confidence to ask questions. Sharing appropriate personal anecdotes will also help motivation as the students can feel that they may relate to your stories. Having a teacher that you are able to relate to is very important for both young learners adults alike. For young learners you become a role-model, someone to look up to, but also someone to relate to. Take for example a comic book hero, one of the reasons they resonate within children and young adults I believe is because they always have an element of “a normal person”, it could just has easily have been them in that position. By being a teacher that students can relate to, someone that also thought some things in life were hard when they were young or that you may have similar interests. Because the opposite situation is having a teacher you dislike, find boring or even fear. This will be detrimental to students’ motivation and learning. Going further it might even impact students’ confidence and overall life. Thus, a teacher has got a powerful position in many people’s lives and with that comes responsibility. Finally, to be able to motivate your students, you need to be motivated as a teacher. If you enjoy your job and wish to see students succeed that will shine through as a genuine interest in each student, to make them feel heard and seen. Again, motivation is all about interest, if teaching is not interesting for you, you will not be motivated and students will know, regardless of age. But if you are, you will be able to inspire through fun, cheerful and varied lessons with an interest in the students. That’s why I am writing this, because I have had many positive experiences with teachers having motivated me to go forth with my interests. Hopefully I can do the same for others cause I want others to suceed reaching their goals and dreams.