How can we encourage English learners to feel self-confident?

Jeanne Perrett
A group of students in a classroom sat at their desks, smiling and looking towards their teacher at the front

Encouraging learners to feel more confident in the classroom is a problem often faced by teachers. Below are five simple things you can adopt in your classroom to encourage learners to feel self-confident.

The small things

Let¡¯s start with the physical comfort of our students. Having the room adequately heated or cooled, asking if they would like the window open, making sure everyone has had some water or checking to see if anyone needs to go to the bathroom or wash their hands only takes a minute at the beginning of the lesson. It helps our children to know that their welfare is our concern.

Then, make sure that everyone has their books and praise them for being organized or having their pencils sharpened and ready. These things seem trivial, but they count. They count because we are acknowledging the fact that it isn¡¯t always easy to get up and ready for school every morning, day after day and that just managing that well is an achievement.

So, starting by checking the small things helps to give our students a feeling of well-being before the lesson has even begun.

Clarity and familiarity

Be clear. Be clear about what you are all going to do and why you are going to do it. There is no such thing as ¡®the obvious¡¯ when it comes to learning. For example, you know that English is spoken internationally, but primary-aged students may have no concept of what ¡®internationally¡¯ means.

They may never have considered the concept of language itself. So, we must state the ¡®obvious¡¯ and do it in ways which are meaningful to the children, through videos, pictures and relatable examples. This goes for everything; what a verb is, how we form negative statements, what question marks indicate and what today¡¯s lesson aims are.

Whatever they need to know, we need to state it clearly and when they have forgotten, we tell them again without ever making them feel that they ¡®should¡¯ have remembered. They forget ¨C we remind. That¡¯s our job.

Then there is the familiarity of a routine. Apart from making us feel reassured that we know what is happening, routines also feed into the innate need for repetition. Young children want their favorite bedtime stories told to them exactly the same way each night and will pop their heads up to correct us if we do something differently. That repetition is part of practice; doing, saying or hearing something repeatedly until we are completely sure we know it.

Most teachers don¡¯t need reminding of this, but it might be helpful to remember that within that routine, one can also have surprises.

A five-minute ¡®something different¡¯ slot could be built into your routine. This could be a fun quiz, game or song and dance. A straightforward way of managing this is to write the names of different ¡®surprise activities¡¯ on pieces of card, put them into a pot and let a different student pick a card each day.

Room to maneuver

We all feel more confident if we know that we are free to experiment and, within that experimentation, to make mistakes. It can¡¯t be stated often enough that we will only ever learn something by doing it wrong, often many times, before we do it right.

This message may be even more important nowadays when we see and hear perfect versions of whatever has been created - music, cookery and writing to name but a few - especially on social media.

The learning process is not brought to our attention as often as the result, and the results are often digitally altered to look more impressive. We need to remind our children of this and make them feel good about their efforts, however small and halting.

Peer pressure often contributes to a lack of self-confidence; you only need one mocking ¡®friend¡¯ to put you off. So, we must be vigilant in noticing little glances or whispered asides and praise the majority of the students who are quietly accepting or encouraging.

Space to flourish

Finally, confidence in our language learning abilities will soar when we know we can make the language our own and use it however we want.

This goes beyond personalizing activities, which can be done at any level ("What¡¯s your favorite food?" "Do you like tomatoes?") and is dependent on the teacher noticing and accepting what individual children are really interested in. So, for example, if we continue with the example of food, a sporty child might be interested in what famous sports people have for breakfast or which foods give us stamina.

A child who is interested in nature might want to know what birds and animals eat. For this to happen, first we need to notice their interests, show enthusiasm for what they are finding out and encourage them to share what they have learnt with the class.

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  • A group of children looking engaged on a task whist their teacher is sat near them

    3 opportunities for using mediation with young learners

    By Tim Goodier

    Mediation in the CEFR

    The addition of ¡®can do¡¯ descriptors for mediation in the CEFR Companion Volume is certainly generating a lot of discussion. The CEFR levels A1 to C2 are a reference point to organise learning, teaching and assessment, and they are used in primary and secondary programs worldwide. Teachers of young learners aligning their courses to the CEFR may wonder if they should therefore be ¡®teaching¡¯ mediation as a standard to follow. Is this really the case? And what might ¡®teaching¡¯ mediation mean?

    This short answer is that this is not the case ¨C the CEFR is a reference work, not a curriculum. So the ¡®can do¡¯ statements for each level are an optional resource to use selectively as we see fit. This is particularly true for young learners, where ¡®can do¡¯ statements may be selected, adapted and simplified in a way that is accessible and meaningful to them. This approach is demonstrated in the many European Language Portfolios (ELPs) for young learners that were validated by the Council of Europe following the launch of the CEFR and ELP.?

    So let¡¯s recap what is meant by mediation in the CEFR. The new scales deal with three main areas:??

    • Mediating a text: taking things you have understood and communicating them in your own words to help others understand.?
    • Mediating concepts: collaborating with others to talk through ideas and solutions and reach new conclusions.??
    • Mediating communication: supporting the acceptance of different cultural viewpoints.

    Focusing on mediation with young learners

    Mediation activities may involve aspects of cognitive demand, general social competencies and literacy development that are too challenging for a given target age group or level. These factors need to be carefully considered when designing tasks. However, with the proper guidance it is possible that young learners can engage in mediation activities in a simple way appropriate to age, ability and context. of the potential relevance of the new descriptors to age groups 7 to 10 and 11 to 15.

    Opportunities for mediation in the young learner classroom

    It¡¯s fair to say that opportunities for mediation activities already regularly occur in the communicative young learner classroom. These can be identified and enhanced if we want to develop this area.??

    1. Collaboration?

    Many young learner courses adopt an enquiry-based learning approach, guiding learners to collaborate on tasks and reach conclusions through creative thinking. The CEFR provides ¡®can do¡¯ statements for collaborating in a group starting at A1:??

    • Can invite others¡¯ contributions to very simple tasks using short, simple phrases.?
    • Can indicate that he/she understands and ask whether others understand.?
    • Can express an idea with very simple words and ask what others think.

    Young learners at this level can build a basic repertoire of simple ¡®collaborative behaviors¡¯ with keywords and phrases connected to visual prompts e.g. posters. A routine can be set up before pair and share tasks to practice short phrases for asking what someone thinks, showing understanding, or saying you don¡¯t understand. This can also include paralanguage, modeled by the teacher, for showing interest and offering someone else the turn to speak.?

    It is important for young learners to be clear about what is expected of them and what will happen next, so such routines can effectively scaffold collaborative enquiry-based learning tasks.?

    2. Communication?

    ¡®Can do¡¯ statements for mediating communication, such as facilitating pluricultural space, can orient objectives for learners themselves to foster understanding between different cultures. Again young learners can develop their behaviors for welcoming, listening and indicating understanding with the help of visual prompts, stories and role-model characters.

    3. Discussion of texts??

    Young learners also spend a lot of time mediating texts because they enjoy talking about stories they have listened to, watched or read. Although there is only one statement for expressing a personal response to creative texts at A1: ¡®Can use simple words and phrases to say how a work made him/her feel¡¯, this can inspire a more conscious focus on classroom phases to talk about responses to texts and stories, and equipping learners with keywords and phrases to express their reactions. In this way, as they progress towards A2 young learners can develop the confidence to talk about different aspects of the story in their own words, such as characters and their feelings.?

    Moving forward

    Clearly, it is not obligatory to focus on mediation activities with young learners ¨C but the ¡®can do¡¯ statements are an interesting area to consider and reflect upon. There are some obvious parallels between mediation activities and 21st century skills or soft communication skills, and the CEFR ¡®can do¡¯ statements can help formulate manageable communicative learning objectives in this area. This, in turn, can inspire and orient classroom routines and tasks which prepare learners to be active communicators and social agents in the target language, developing their confidence to engage in mediation tasks as a feature of their lifelong learning pathways.