Teachers, do you have/have you had those moments in your teaching career when you say “I wouldn’t do that kind of activity in class”? If so, and I’m assuming you do/have, are such decisions mainly based on what you think students would accept, the effectiveness of such an activity, your own character (too shy, not confident enough, uncomfortable, etc. to present certain activities in class) or other?
Can you think of ESL-based exercises and activities that you would definitely not do in class?
And would you “not be caught dead” doing such an activity as “laughter yoga”?
My ESL students are largely mature adults and want nothing to do with games. They find them an inefficient way to learn language principles, and I agree with them. So I would use games with children, but not with adults.
In the US, and in some other English-speaking countries, the ESL field is dominated by women, mainly women who were originally trained to teach children, and this remains their orientation. This has a negative effect in the classroom, because they tend to treat their adult students as if they were children. Some of them go so far as to play “boys against the girls” games with them, bring in plastic farm animals to play with, etc. In a children’s class this is acceptable, but it’s inefficient and embarrassing in a class full of doctors, nurses, engineers, lawyers, graduate students and business people who are hard-nosed and serious about learning as much English as they can in the shortest possible time. These people have their dignity and should not be treated like children.
This feminine, child-oriented attitude toward adult language learning also ruins some textbooks when too many of the exercises involve oblique explanations and a lot of guessing. Usually the guessing exercises aren’t effective if the student doesn’t guess along the lines that the author thinks. This kind of exercise also wastes a lot of time, because the student has to focus more on psychoanalyzing the author or instructor than on acquiring the vocabulary or structures at issue. The exercises remind me of a wife dropping hints all over the house before her birthday instead of just telling her husband what she wants. It’s better just to give students the words or structure directly and have them practice using them.
I hated to sing in language classes, so I don’t inflict that on my ESL students, even though I think it’s a productive activity. I recommend they sing at home or in the car.
No, I’m not, but I don’t find many cases in which professional-level ESL students want to engage in them.
It’s one thing in some other country where they don’t really have to depend on English for their well-being, and the class is a sort of leisure activity. However, here, where English means wealth or poverty, or sometimes life or death, for the students, when that lady pulls out the plastic farm animals or has the men line up on one side of the room and the women on the other, the students may cooperate, but I can tell you with certainty that they want to punch that teacher’s lights out.
Stop asking me for definitions of things you already know the meaning of.
To some degree, and at least half of the employees consider them an embarrassing waste of time.
They obviously ARE mature adult students, because they cooperate and don’t complain, even though they want to strangle the instructor for wasting so much of their time. That instructor never hears about it, but I do later.
All you need to do is convince upper management that it’s worthwhile, and everyone in the company is forced to take it.
No. That kind of instructor is usually too sensitive (although not very sensitive to the dignity of her students).
Usually, yes. There’s a whole industry built around convincing upper management to pay for “emperor’s new clothes” type seminars for everyone in their companies.
Nearly always. ESL instructors are nearly always women in the US, and since few men are attracted to using such activities, it’s safe to say it’s going to be a woman.
Then you should probably look into sexism in the ESL publishing industry, if that’s your obsession. Besides, most ESL books in the US are an adaptation of some British book or other.
