Making Comprehensible and Communicative Language Teaching Easy and Sustainable: Boosting Motivation with Simple Daily Practices

This week’s post is about discovering how simple daily actions can build the trust and rapport that fuel student engagement. I’m tackling the cornerstone of any thriving world language class: motivation.

This week on Growing with Proficiency The Podcast, I’m also starting a new series called “Comprehensible and Communicative Language Teaching Made Easy” with this  information. Listen above, on your favorite podcast player, or here. 

When we see motivation and engagement dropping in our students, we start feeling a bit disappointed because we spend many hours trying to create that perfect lesson plan for our students that will help. However, you may find that it’s just not working. We talk a lot about this topic in the Growing with Proficiency the Spanish Teacher Academy. In this post, I’m sharing ideas to boost your students’ motivation. 

Three Ideas to Boost Motivation

Social Emotional Learning Checks

First, you should be doing social emotional learning checks every day. Asking your students how they’re doing, and truly listening to them, is so important. By listening to them, we are going to really be able to make those connections that we want to create with our students. 

If you ask how are you doing today, and a kid says, “I am super nervous because I have a test later today.”, the next day, you can ask them how their test went. When you do this, you’re going to start building those connections. It just takes one question and for you to take the time to listen. I like to ask these questions through the slides that I have created over the years. I talk more about this in episode 59. 

It may sound simple, but I know this works for student motivation because at the end of the year, I ask my students, “What is one of the activities that had the most impact on you?” And they say, “When you ask us every day, how we are. We have never seen that before.” 

Co-Creating Content with Your Students

I’ve spoken about the power of story-asking in my last Spanish episode. This strategy involves you and your students creating a story together, asking questions about a character, their problem, and the solution – all in the target language. Keeping it simple builds confidence and continuity.

When you’re talking about the character, you only really need three or four questions about the character. Again, I like to create PowerPoint slides, and I have the questions listed with some options. 

You can also do a “write and discuss” activity. This activity has transformed my classes! You can do this after any oral input. It could be calendar talk, social emotional learning checks, etc. After those chats, I turn to my students and say, “Okay, what was my character? Was my character nice or mean?” Then, they’ll respond nice because I’m giving them their answers. I’m giving them their options. Then, I start writing the content.

I’m modeling good language and good writing, while also modeling organizations. We end up having a co-created text that is comprehensible and compelling. This takes very little prep and is simple. We are working as a team. We’re together doing this together. I discuss how to prep this activity with 10 questions also in episode 59. 

Checking our Beliefs to Boost Motivation

This can be bit challenging, checking our beliefs about our students. It has also been work that I try to do on a regular basis in my class. If we start believing that our students absolutely don’t care about the class, that they are absolutely lazy, that they are not invested, and they will never be, that repetitive thought is going to be called a belief and it becomes true in our mind.

It is also going to affect how we act and how we behave in our class in an unconscious way. My best strategy for this, and this is very difficult, is to start finding evidence of the positive of the opposite. So when we have that class and think that they never care, that they’re never motivated, and that they are absolutely lazy, try to find some evidence that it’s not true. 

How we connect with our students will have a great impact on their level of engagement and motivation. And, it doesn’t require a lot of prep, but it does require consistency and intention. By checking in with our students, creating content with them, and listening to their feedback, we can build that classroom culture that is going to allow that. It is going to boost their motivation and engagement.

We also need to check when that doesn’t happen. Because, we will have students and classes that are going to be challenging on most days. When that happens, remember to find evidence of the opposite. Find evidence of the positivity!