Situations and experiences That Threaten Students' Learning

The kinds of situations and experiences (internal and external) that potentially threaten students and their capacity to learn:

•  Not interested in subject
•  Don't like the teacher
•  Doesn’t / didn’t understand something
• Doesn’t understand for what purpose this subject is necessary and if it will be useful in pupil’s current or future life
•  Have some personal problems (e.g. with peers, at home etc.)
•  Too distractive environment (especially with mobile phones and at university, with notebooks too). This can seriously hamper the learning process.

Matching Cards

Print in special paper and cut the cards. Students have to match the card with the image and the word. As an extra activity, you can ask students to make up sentences or start up a discussion related to the activity. Many ESL websites matching card games and you can create your own.

Lining Up

Lining up can be used as break ing ice activities or as teaching snaps.

Procedure: Ask the students to stand up, line up, and face the person in front of them.

Ask them to ask their partners about a specific thing, food preferences, for example.

Then students are asked to move three places in the line and are asked to tell their new partners about the food preferences of their previous partners.

A variation of moving three places is mingling.

Polls for Icebreakers

Memory Games

Memory games are a good way to recycle vocabulary, revise materials and energize the class. Besides being an energizing activity, it really helps students memorize as the cards act as visual aids. In typical memory games, students can be asked to pick up the matching pictures.

Procedure:
Put all of the first group of words together shuffled and face down on the floor. The second group of paper are written on different colored papers and also put on the ground.

The students match them up. Remember the level of the students, whether they are elementary, pre- intermediate,
Upper-intermediate or advanced. Memory games can be adapted to suit all levels.

Playing Sick

Playing sick is a nice warm up. write an illness and a piece of advice. Illnesses and sicknesses are shuffled. Students mime or act the illness and the partner says the advice in his paper which sis most of the time irrelevant.

Students have to mingle the right illness with the right piece of advice.

Impressive Quote

The question is not so much " How can I teach?" as it is
'' How can I help these people learn?"