5 Ways to Energize Your TEFL Students

If your students spend more time gazing out of the window than they do speaking English, it’s time to inject a little energy into your TEFL classes. After all, you don’t want to be that boring teacher whose lessons everyone dreads, do you? Thought not. So, here are five tried and tested ways to energize your students.

1) Games  

Games are the adrenaline shots of the TEFL world – they say to your students that English is fun and frolics, not tests and tenses. Used properly, they can help your classes build their speaking confidence and even practise specific language. For ideas of good activities and games try this post from in-house tutor Emma: http://www.onlinetefl.com/tefl-chalkboard/emmafoers/posts/971-games-games-and-more-games or download her free eBook, 20 Classroom Activities for Elementary Learners: http://www.onlinetefl.com/activities-book/. Just keep in mind that you can’t play games for the sake of playing games: always keep your target language in mind.

2) A points system

This is a great one for kids especially – when you first take on a class split them into teams of around six students. Let them pick a team name and stick sheets up on the classroom wall for all your teams. Each team then gets points for good behaviour, winning an activity etc and points deducted for handing in homework late, not speaking English in class etc. Because it’s a team effort you’ll find peer pressure helps keep your students motivated – just make sure you stick to the rules you set, otherwise you could find yourself with all-out mutiny on your hands!

3) Music

While a lot of pop songs have totally nonsensical lyrics, if you find one that makes sense and even better, tells some kind of story (e.g. Stan by Eminem), hold onto it! It’s a great way to get your students interested in learning new words and making sense of different grammatical structures. You can start off with a gap fill exercise, having them listen to the song and fill in missing words. Alternatively, cut out lyric strips and have them rearrange them into the correct order. If your students are more advanced and the song has a story you could have them write what they think would happen after the song ends.

4) Video

Depending on how hi-tech your classroom is, video can be a fantastic way to improve your students’ comprehension skills and work on specific vocabulary. Chalkboard user Halidemine had a fantastic idea around this in using subtitled trailers of movies your students haven’t seen: first asking them questions about the trailer, then asking what might happen at the end. It’s a good way to practice different tenses – ‘What will happen in the movie’ (future) and ‘What could happen in the movie’ (conditional). Check out Halidemine’s post here: http://www.onlinetefl.com/tefl-chalkboard/halidemine/posts/2341-using-trailers

5) Being energetic yourself

No matter how many jazzy elements your lessons have, if you act bored, your students will pick up on this and think your classes are boring. Excitement is infectious – if you at least pretend that you find the past participle the most thrilling thing since time began, a little bit of that excitement will rub off on your students and you’ll soon find them more energized and engaged, no matter what you’re teaching.

What do you think? How do you energize your students?

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