learners to feel uncomfortable or disadvantaged. We hope our suggestions will
alert you to some ways around this.
We continue by offering some tips to help international students in particular.
When learners study away from home, they often find themselves in a very
different educational culture and climate, and may need some help to tune in to
their new environment.
We end this chapter by offering some suggestions on ways that you can find
out about the quality of your students’ learning experiences. Feedback from
learners can be really valuable, but it can also degenerate into routine ticked
boxes on questionnaires and surface level decision making. We hope that our
suggestions will help you to probe more deeply into your learners’ experiences,
and thereby will help you to continue to adjust and develop your own
approaches.
6 Responding to learning needs in the classroom
A language classroom isn’t just about helping learners to improve their
language. It’s also about trying to create a rich, supportive, memorable and life-
enhancing learning experience. The following suggestions will help you to think
about, and respond to, the needs of your students as social and learning human
beings.
1 Promote self-esteem. Everyone is motivated by praise and encouragement.
The more specific this can be, the better. For example, you could mention
particular areas of improvement when giving feedback to individual learners.
Personalized, detailed praise is likely to be most meaningful, since it is
clearly the product of some thought. There is thus more of a chance that it
will impact on learners’ self-esteem.
2 Provide cognitive challenge. Well-chosen topics can help learners to learn
far more than just language. Likewise, the tasks we ask them to do can
engage more cognitive abilities than strictly language learning ones. For
example, learners engaged in trying to work out a grammar ‘rule’ on the
basis of examples are developing inferential skills as well as improving their
language awareness.
3 Provide a feeling of security. Challenges are important, but they involve
the risk of being wrong; and sometimes it’s hard for learners to take this risk
in public. Learners’ requests for reliable rules may be one manifestation of
this anxiety. Certain activities—controlled practice, ‘rehearsals’ in pairs or
small groups—may help learners to feel safer. The use of interim rules,
intended to evolve as learners’ language develops, may also be reassuring.
4 Allow personal expression. Talking about ourselves seems to be a
universal human need, and the language classroom is a very good place to500 TIPS FOR TESOL 13