Teaching teens: 3 ways to embrace mobile phones in class

app Languages
Two young people looking over phone together in a room with large wooden cabinets

Teaching teenagers can be a rewarding yet challenging experience.

When planning classes, we need to consider the environment in which the students are growing up. Most of our teenage students do not know a life without the internet, instant messaging or Google.

Commonly referred to as (or Gen Z), they are the most tech-savvy generation to date; this should be reflected in how we teach them.

However, not all of us have access to computer labs, interactive whiteboards or class tablets. But there is something that many of our teens bring to class in their pockets and bags every day.

You’ve guessed it - a phone.

By bringing students’ phones into your classes, you can bridge the technology gap between the learners and the curriculum, keep them engaged for longer and make them feel more empowered at the same time.

Here are four low-tech activities that use phones in class.

1. Review target language with your very own quizzes

Activity requirements: one phone per student (or group of students) and a pre-made quiz.

is an app designed to help you create quizzes online, which can be a fun, engaging way to challenge your learners in the classroom.

Quizzes are an ideal activity to use at the start of a class to recycle previous vocabulary or to pre-teach new language.

For example, you could choose 10 British English phrases or idioms. Write a series of four possible definitions for each word, phrase, or idiom (with only one correct answer).

In class, ask your students to take out their phones, find the app, and link to the quiz.

Tell the students that they must vote for the definition they think is correct. They can keep track of their scores directly on the app while competing with their friends.

Not only will it immediately engage your learners and help them interact with what’s being learned, but they’ll also have a lot of fun.

2. Become expert translators using Google Translate

Activity requirements: a phone with the Google Translate app installed and a pen and paper per pair.

Did you know Google Translate has a feature where you can ? This is a perfect tool for text that you might find on a poster, in a book or uses an alphabet which you are unfamiliar with.

Bring in samples of different languages to class – the more complex, the better. If you don’t have anything suitable at home, find something online and print it out.

Get one student to take a photo of the text using the app and with their finger, select the section of the text they’d like to translate from the original language to English. (Note: if you download the Google Translate language file to your phone, it will translate everything automatically).

Then, have them dictate what it says to their partner, who has to write it down.

Finally, they work together to improve the English translation. After all, everyone knows Google’s English isn’t perfect (not yet, anyway).

3. Take photos outside the classroom to use in class

Activity requirements: a mobile phone with a camera per student.

Do your students love taking photos? Tap into their love of photography and make activities more exciting by incorporating the photos on their phones into your classes.

Adapt speaking activities from common exams such as the B2 Cambridge First. Instead of using the pictures in the book, put the students in pairs and get them each to choose a more relevant photo from their phones. You may find they have more to say and will communicate naturally while still practicing the necessary language and skills required in the exam.

Another idea is to get students to take photos of things they encounter in English in the street. This could be on a sign outside a restaurant or in their favorite clothing shop. Use these photos to start the next class with a discussion about where they saw it, what it means and if the English is correct.

You could also nominate one student each week to bring a photo they took that weekend. Share it with the class and get everyone to write Instagram captions. You wouldn’t believe how many already do this in English, so why not help them?

Keeping your teens on task with mobile tech

If you are worried about the misuse of mobile devices in your class – don’t be! Here are our top three strategies to help avoid students getting distracted:

  • Create a class contract. At the start of the course speak to them about when it is acceptable (e.g. during one of the activities above or to check the meaning of a new word on ) or not (e.g. during an exam or when you are explaining something) to use their phones. Then have someone write down everything you’ve talked about, get the whole class to sign it and stick it to the wall where everyone can see.
  • Give them a tech break. Halfway through the class, allow students 60 seconds to check their notifications to relieve their anxiety.
  • Reward good use. If you see they’ve been using their phones appropriately, reward them by playing their favorite game. The more you punish or tell them not to do something, the more they’ll want to do it.

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    How to measure critical thinking

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    Critical thinking is a term often thrown around the teacher’s lounge. You often hear, “Of course, teaching critical thinking is essential.” However, in that same space, we may also hear the question, “But how?”

    Teaching students to think critically involves helping them to develop a critical mindset. What exactly does that mean, and how can we do that?

    What does it mean to think critically?

    Critical thinking is a complex process that involves students reflecting, analyzing and evaluating ideas. Building a community of critical thinkers in our classrooms involves going beyond the cognitive domains and building the affective domains.

    The cognitive domain concerns subject knowledge and intellectual skills, whereas the affective domain involves emotional engagement with an idea or learning material.

    This deliberate teaching of critical thinking needs to be part of our teaching toolkit. We need to develop a mindset around it in and out of our classrooms.

    How can teachers develop a critical-thinking mindset?

    Consider all the questions we pose to students during our classes. Do we expect a yes or no answer, or have we established a classroom environment where students offer considered reasons for their responses?

    By following some guiding principles, we can get into the practice of naturally expecting deeper answers:

    1. Students need to engage in critical thinking tasks/activities at all levels.
    2. Teachers need to provide space/time in the classroom to build critical thinking learning opportunities.
    3. Practicing critical thinking must be incorporated throughout the course, increasing complexity as students improve their critical thinking ability.
    4. Students must be given opportunities to practice transferring critical thinking skills to other contexts.

    Activities to foster critical thinking in the classroom

    Activity/Strategy #1: Categorizing

    Provide a set of vocabulary terms or grammatical structures on the board (or pictures for true beginners). Ask your students to gather in pairs or small groups and have them categorize the list. Ask them to be creative and see how diverse the categories can be.

    Example:

    Desk, computer, pencil, stove, dishes, forks, novel, cookbook, sink, shelf

    • Made from trees: pencil, novel, cookbook, desk.
    • Made from metal: fork, stove, sink, etc.

    Activity/Strategy #2: What’s the problem?

    Provide students with a short reading or listening and have your students define a problem they read or hear.

    Tomas ran up the steps into Building A. The door was closed, but he opened it up. He was very late. He took his seat, feeling out of breath.

    • Determine why Tomas was late.
    • Underline verbs in the past tense.
    • Create a beginning or ending to the story.

    Activity/Strategy #3: Circles of possibility

    Present a problem or situation. Consider the problem presented in strategy #2 above: Ask the students to evaluate the situation from Tomas’ point of view, then, from the teacher’s point of view, and then from his classmate’s point of view.

    This activity generates many conversations, and even more critical thinking than you can imagine!

    Activity/Strategy #4: Draw connections

    Provide students with a list of topics or themes they have studied or are interested in. Place one in the center, and ask them to draw connections between each one.

    Afterward, they should explain their ideas. For example:

    “Energy and environment are affected by sports. Most sports do not harm the environment, but if you think about auto racing, it uses a lot of fuel. It can negatively impact the environment.”

    Activity/Strategy #5: What’s the rule?

    Play students an audio clip or provide them with a reading text. Draw students’ attention to a particular grammatical structure and ask them to deduce the rules.

    Activity/Strategy #5: Establishing context

    Show your class an image and put your students in small groups. Give each group a task. For example:

    The Jamestown settlement in the United States
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    Ask questions like this:

    • If this were in a movie, what would the movie be about?
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    • If this were a book, what would the book be about?

    There are many other wonderful strategies that can help build a classroom of critical thinkers. Getting your students accustomed to these types of tasks can increase their linguistic and affective competencies and critical thinking. In addition to these on-the-spot activities, consider building in project-based learning.

    How can you incorporate project-based learning into your classroom?

    Project-based learning often begins with a challenge or problem. Students explore and find answers over an extended period of time. These projects focus on building 21st Century Skills: Communication, Creativity, Collaboration, and Critical Thinking.

    They also represent what students are likely to encounter when they leave our English language classes.

    An example project

    Consider this project: Our cafeteria is outdated. It does not allow for food variety, or for guests to sit in groups of their desired size and activity level. Survey students who use the cafeteria. Follow up the survey with interviews. Determine how your group can reimagine the cafeteria. Prepare a proposal. Present your proposal.

    You can imagine the amount of language students will use working on this project, while, at the same time, building a critical mindset.

    Teaching critical thinking is all about building activities and strategies that become part of your teaching toolkit, and your students’ regular approach to problem-solving.

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    Many EAP courses lack the authenticity of the college classroom experience. Lectures are generally relatively short, only 5-10 minutes long. Reading is scaffolded, and the content is very structured, even overly structured. Then, our students move into their academic courses where they encounter two-hour lectures, 50+ pages of reading, and content that is far from scaffolded. So, how do we bridge these academic, linguistic and social gaps? Let’s look at some techniques to help students succeed in higher education.

    Bridging the linguistic gap

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    So, what does it mean to know a word? Well, according to linguistics scholar Paul Nation, a student needs to know the following:

    • The spoken and written form
    • The parts of the word that have meaning
    • The word's forms and their meanings
    • The concepts and vocabulary associated with the word
    • The grammatical function, any collocations
    • The register and frequency of the word

    That is a whole lot!

    To build this extensive knowledge, we need to do so in an intentional manner. We need to build various activities that develop and foster critical thinking skills and engage students.

    Here is an example:

    “Hello! I am so glad to see so many of you at our special lecture today. Today, I am going to describe how a mixed community is planned and built. First, let’s look at what a mixed purpose community is, and then we will discuss the planning and building. As many of you know, a mixed purpose community is a neighborhood that includes residential spaces, business spaces, services and green spaces. How about the planning? First, when planning mixed purpose communities, architects, city planners and builders work together to plan where everything will be located. Because they want the community to be a fully walkable one, they need to think about how far homes are from schools, services and other businesses. Then, they carefully look at what kinds of businesses and services are needed. Next, they must design sidewalks so people can easily get to anywhere in the community, and not worry about car traffic. Today, planners are even looking at including bicycle paths, as more and more people are riding bicycles to work. Lastly, they need to consider the different types of residential space they will need. They build homes and apartments to attract all a wide variety of residents. These communities are becoming more and more popular, but planning them still takes time and a team of people.”

    The terms mixed and community are bolded. You can engage students with a simple noticing activity of how these words are used, the forms they take, the words around them, their collocations and the concepts associated with these words. An exercise like this will help students develop a deep understanding of these words. And that deep understanding will enable students to make connections and draw conclusions around these terms.

    Bridging the academic gap

    EAP students move from very scaffolded EAP courses to courses where they must listen and take notes for 50 minutes or read 50+ pages before class. Additionally, their professors often do not build background knowledge, or scaffold learning, as they expect students to enter their classrooms with this understanding. And this can create an academic gap.

    When it comes to bridging this gap, content can be the vehicle for instruction. Exposing students to the language of academic disciplines early on can build background knowledge, and be highly motivating for students who crave more than rote language instruction.

    Bringing the social gap

    When students enter their university courses they will be expected to work with peers, engage in group activities, negotiate, take turns and assert their own ideas into a dialogue. These social skills require language which needs to be developed and practiced in their EAP courses.
    You can do this by building instructional tasks and learning around developing and practicing critical thinking skills. Consider introducing project-based learning to your class. In project-based learning, students must work with their peers, learning how to prioritize, negotiate and assign responsibility. Bringing in these types of tasks and activities helps develop soft and critical thinking skills.