Engaging and motivating students through visible progress

We spend a lot of time learning, studying, and researching new ways of boosting student motivation, applying new methods and activities to make classes more and more interesting, supporting student engagement, and figuring out the individual motivators for our learners and so on and so forth.

We feel like it’s only our responsibility to keep our students motivated, to measure their progress, to provide progress reports, etc. Tests and all will always be there, but, how about the learners themselves? Don’t they need to take responsibility for their learning? Shouldn’t they pitch into their progress? Can’t they measure the progress on their own?

A lot of you will agree that they can. We simply need to provide them with the means to do so and the guidance through the process.

Here we will look at three ways and ideas on how to motivate students by showing them their progress and teaching them how to see and record their progress on their own.

Learning Logs

One of my favourite things in engaging the learners in their own studies and progress is to ask them to create learning logs. Let’s say, you have a language learner of A2+ competency who struggles in seeing his or her progress and improvements throughout earning and results. They feel like they’re not going anywhere, they can’t measure their progress. Language is not an exact science, its results are not tangible and it brings the student down to the point they don’t believe in ever achieving B2 level competency. What to do?

Take the students’ minds off the metric and get them to focus on the activities they do

You can see an example log we’ve been using below:

This way the student has a chance to see the exact things they do to improve their language competency, they have a documented list of activities they can return to any time, they take responsibility for their learning by creating a ‘database’ of their language exposures and finally, they have some tangible results.

The ‘useful language’ section is my personal favourite, as it categorises the topic and the language associated with it. It’s much easier to remember information in chunks rather than separately.

This log can include not just video activities but any other things students undertake for their individual studies. A similar log can be created for pronunciation.

By the end of every lesson (every other lesson), I conduct a pronunciation slot with my learners, working on the words they have been mispronouncing. Students then have a task to copy these words into a log and look through them from time to time. In a couple of lessons, they already see how much they have improved by merely reading the list of the earlier mispronounced words.

Develop Autonomy

Another interesting activity that has been working very well during my classes is asking the students to conduct a session without my help. To run it smoothly, I normally assign each student to prepare a specific part of the lesson and be ready to teach it to the rest of the class. It works the best if you focus on speaking and vocabulary sessions rather than grammar and listening slots, as this way students have more chances to use their language and deliver results. Before the session you can have a short meeting with your students to answer any questions, if there is a need for that.

This strategy has proved to be very helpful to me in these days of teaching online. Once a month, I ask the students to prepare some news reports from the news website here.

Here’s a recent task for B1 level of learners after a month of study:

Choose 1 news from the link here.

In your presentation you should:

1. Teach us 5 words from the article you’ve read.
2. Tell us what the news was about, in detail, use the new words in your speech.
3. Tell what you think about the article (agree/disagree if relevant.)
4. Make your presentation more interactive by keeping the audience’s attention.

I have witnessed students running very productive sessions by presenting their news articles, teaching new words to each other, developing a follow-up discussion, and so on.

The best part is that I have my camera and sound switched off. I take language notes, while they drive the whole lesson. By the end of the first session, they were surprised with how much they had done, how long they had been using English as a communication language, how they could overcome challenging situations, etc. They saw tangible progress in their use of English and the ease they were doing it with.

The only rule you should have to run this smoothly is to forbid the students to use their L1.

Reflections

Another tested way of showing students the progress they’d made, is to ask them to reflect on their learning. How? By creating a speaking diary. Here is the one I’ve been using for quite some time:

Students need to take notes on the following questions and be as specific as possible. First of all, it helps them summarize the week and the knowledge they’d acquired. Secondly, when they go back to read their diaries, they will see the improvement of their writing at hand.

Helping students understand the importance of self-study is a crucial thing to do, as we are not always going to be there to assign tasks to them. They need to boost their self-organizational and self-management skills for their own sake.

Let us know what you do to show your students their progress and help them feel more confident in their studies.