Six Ideas and Tips - Blog Worth to Read

There are several reasons why our students reject (or deliberately forget to do) their homework. If you are teaching adults who are happy to save their time for your lesson, you more or less do not even expect them to spend hours with their homework. So why don’t they do homework? I suggest three reasons.
• Lack of time
• Not interested enough to open the book or notebook (lack of motivation)
• Monotonous exercises (tasks not meaningful or relevant )
When designing or setting the homework, try to keep in mind that one kind of activity does not have to fit the needs and interests of all your students. You can’t avoid that, but keep changing the style! Things I keep in mind are 1) Multiple intelligences theory (logic, visual, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal… not only “fill in the gaps”-type activities) 2) Avoiding complicated instructions 3) Relating it to real life.
And here comes the list of my favourite homework tasks:
1. DO WHAT YOU USUALLY DO – IN ENGLISH (read your horoscope, crossword, quiz, read the morning news online, make notes on your shopping list). Students are supposed to either keep track of their use of English or recap orally in the next lesson.
2. CHALLENGE – give them a riddle, race or puzzle to solve for the next lesson. I tend to award my students (even adults!) with stickers (“Well done!” and this sort of thing). Dogs are trained best when you count on their curiosity. And so are we .
3. BROWSE THE WEB – send your students a link to something interesting, provocative, awakening or entertaining on the internet. Work with headlines, brief news, videos or anything they can manage during their coffee break. Ask for their opinion, comment or specific task. I ask my students to reply to my emails. On Thanksgiving Day, I sent my students a link to the following video. Their task was to remember at least ten out of 50 things mentioned. I was really pleased to hear that they watched it several times to understand more than 10 things. I knew that it’s not difficult to recognize 10 things but asking for 50 could have been de-motivating for some of them. I Avoid traditional project works that are usually pretty time-consuming and result in copying of texts from the internet.
4. ENGLISH AT HOME – we usually work with English materials and forgot about the vast range of sources of material in the mother language of our students. Try doing things vice versa. Do you have a favourite song in your language? Try to translate it! Are you watching new dubbed episode of C.S.I. Miami or your daily soap opera? Sacrifice few minutes and translate the dialogues simultaneously in your head or aloud (if alone at home). Have you bought a product with instructions only in your mother tongue? Translate or create a new label for it in English.
5. I SPEND MY TIME ON IT ANYWAY – do what you like to do in English – it is usually connected with watching TV, reading books or newspapers. It is an easy, painless way of learning that creates associations. I love watching Sci-Fi TV series and even though I learn pretty useless words like Warp drive or Roger that! , I keep learning many slang phrases and very common expressions. Many of my students love watching the Discovery Channel because there is always something interesting. They can watch short episodes on YouTube as well, see here for example.
6. KEEP A RECORD OF YOUR FINDINGS – however, it is necessary that your students report back on what they’ve done every week or so. You can choose to do it in the form of a warm up group discussion or through writing. My students write diaries. They are allowed to write anything there, but there is a condition that they must at least write something by the next lesson. They can write down their notes on any of the above-mentioned tasks or just write their reflections from the day. It is up to them what they choose but they know they have to keep a record of their progress.
Finally, ALWAYS FINISH WITH FEEDBACK – the golden rule of feedback is MEDAL AND MISSION (give praise and set a new task, to work on their weaknesses).

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