Help your ESL/EFL Students Share their Language Learning Journeys

In your diverse classrooms, what is one thing all of your students have in common?  They are all trying to learn a language.  If you are like me, you often start your course with asking your students why they want to learn English and usually they all answer something along the lines of "I want to communicate with people all over the world." or "I want to travel/get a better job/study abroad..."  These answers are true but they don't really explain exactly what is motivating your students, how they feel about learning a language and what might be holding them back.

In my experience, learning a language is a lot more personal than learning other things.  Learning anything changes our brains and how we understand the world but learning a language can change the way we see ourselves in the world, the way people interact and perceive us, and it can even alter our identities.  It is often a political act in that languages are connected to cultures and even governments and what we learn can signal what side of a political debate we stand on and what side we shun.  No wonder so many people have strong feelings about learning a language.  

In order to teach a language effectively, it is important to explore the things that motivate students to learn as well as those things that we may feel trepidatious about.  One way to do this is to explore the stories of other people who have gone before us and learned languages.  Hearing about their experiences, challenges, strategies, misgivings, and thoughts can be inspiring.  It can also help students to understand their own feelings better.  They can find similarities and differences between how they are learning and feeling and how other people have felt.  

Where to Find Stories of Language Learning

1. How I Learned English edited by Tom Miller

I was delighted to find this book on the shelves of my favorite used book store in Flagstaff, Arizona.  It is a collection of 55 short essays by Latino language learners.  Many of the contributors are famous authors, television personalities and musicians.  Their stories touch on a wide range of topics that might be interesting to explore in your classes:

• attitudes towards learning English
• internal and external motivation
• learning strategies
• music, magazines, movies and other things that inspired language learning
• frustrations along the way
• rewards for learning a language
• How learning English changed the person's life/identity/way of thinking.

2.  Love is in the Air 

In this post I wrote about my own journey learning Spanish as well as other people's experiences learning Spanish and English.  Each story is told as if the person is having a relationship with the language they are studying.

3. Videos about learning a langauge

• Learning a Foreign Language Revealed a World I Never Knew Existed
• How I Learned English - by a Portuguese speaker
• How I Learned English - by a Korean speaker

4. Some Interesting TED talks about the Political/Cultural ramifications of language learning

• Patricia Ryan: Don't Insist on English - this video is about 10 minutes long. An English teacher in the UAE talks about how requiring so many people to learn English affects the world and the dangers of using English as a barrier to entry into the global community.
• Jay Walker: The World's English Mania - This video is under 5 minutes long.  It looks at how the world is learning English and what it represents to the world.
• Suzanne Talhou: Don't Kill your Language - This video is about 13 minutes long.  It is in Arabic with English subtitles and the presenter talks about how important languages are in conserving culture and how important it is not to lose a language.

How to Use these Resources in your Class
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Reading 

• Divide the class into several groups.
• Give all of the groups the same 5 or 6 essays but have each group focus on a different topic.
• Then have each group create a poster exploring the authors’ ideas about that topic and their own ideas/experiences.
• Then regroup the students so each new group has one representative from each former group.
• Give the groups 5 to 7 minutes at each poster so the person who was in that group can explain their work and answer questions.

Writing
Have students write their own essays about learning English and make a class book that everyone can read. Some questions students might find useful to think about before writing their essays are:

• When did you first come into contact with English?
• How did you feel about learning English before you started?
• What are some of the best/worst things about learning English?
• What are your top learning strategies?
• How has learning English changed you? (this could be either changed where/how you live or changed your identity)

Speaking

Ask students to record a video explaining one of the following things:

• The first time I heard English
• How I feel about learning English
• My best tip for learning English
• What I love about my native language.
• How my native language makes me feel.
• What becoming bilingual (or trilingual or more) means to me.

Listening

Listen to one of the videos about how people learned a language.

• Transcribe the first 30 seconds of the video in class stopping so that students can compare what they heard and try to figure it from grammar and context clues.  
• Ask students to draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper.  One one side of the paper, write what the speaker said.  On the other side of the paper, write one thing you can infer about the speaker based on what he/she said or did.  A lot of what is communicated is not directly stated. In our native languages we infer naturally, without being prompted but I have found that often language learners get so caught up in trying to understand what is literally being said, they forget to pay attention to things like tone, word choice and body language.  By bringing their attention back to those things, it helps them to better understand what is actually being communicated.
• Ask students to paraphrase what the speaker said, taking into account what they inferred about him or her.  

Have you tried any of these activities in your classes?  How did they go?  Do you have a story of learning a language?  Let me know in the comments, I would love to hear from you!

​Check out some of these other posts for more ideas!