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Teaching students without discipline | ||
Tags: Language Teaching | Motivation | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Languages & Work |  | |
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5390 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 1 of 15 15 August 2012 at 4:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Does anyone have tips for how to help an adult student who's motivated, wants to learn a
language, does fairly well in classes but has very little discipline to work on the language on their own time? This is the kind of student who is aware that he/she should do more and will feel guilty but best intentions always fall through. Obviously to a certain point the student just needs to work on their own discipline issues but as a teacher/tutor what can be done to help instill some good habits? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 15 15 August 2012 at 6:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Hmm, I've never worked with students. But I was once a chronically undisciplined
language learner, who never made it past week 2. Things which helped: 1) Studying French 20 minutes per day for 30 days, no excuses (specifically, one Assimil passive wave lesson). This was hard. But that 30 day project is now over 1700 days old without a break. 2) A Seinfeld calendar. Get a year-at-a-glance calendar, and mark each day you study in red. Try not to break the chain. 30 days & Seinfeld calendars (lots more here) Note that this sometimes means sacrificing other important stuff to study foreign languages. For example, I was hit with a wicked case of procrastination last night, and didn't finish studying until 3am. This is actually really rare for me (studying French is normally automatic and painless). But nonetheless, even though studying might only take 20 minutes, it's sacrosanct. Basically, like most language students, your student's biggest problem is self discipline. They're going to have to tackle that directly and they're ultimately going to have to do it themselves. You can, of course, offer tools and accountability. But this is the single thing that will make or break their project. (I just realized: You're essentially a personal trainer for foreign languages!) 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4846 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 3 of 15 15 August 2012 at 6:16am | IP Logged | ||
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It's hard. I taught two adult students English for 8 months, but aside from our weekly
hour-long sessions, they hardly studied. I probably in retrospect should have assigned more homework. At least they would have something to complete before class. If they don't have any self-discipline, I think the only thing we as teachers can do is to try to make it appeal to them as much as we can. Make it interesting. Play music in the target language, show pictures, etc. Do games. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 4 of 15 15 August 2012 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Perhaps find together a way how the student can easily study instead of putting the
time in usual timeeaters. Ajatt speaks of doing everything in the target language. That is an extremy only few people are capable of (but it must work like a miracle). But what about finding a good tv series your student could watch instead of something else in the tv? That would do miracles for his/her listening comprehension, which is often a trouble. It worked perfectly for me. Or reading short things instead of browsing the internet (BDs and similar things can be used from quite early levels). Perhaps Memrise could help with the vocab as it is quite addictive for many people, and if the student puts it as the home page of his/her browser, it should make him do a bit every day. For anything else, I have found that giving myself goals like "one page every day" or "two exercises every day" works much, much better than "30 minutes every day". But you must put reasonably high goals, too high ones might be contraproductive when the main goal is to become more consistent. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5555 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 5 of 15 15 August 2012 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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@emk
20 minutes of French every day for 4-5 years without a break. Now that's self-discipline! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 15 15 August 2012 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
Sadly, it wasn't all 20 minutes the whole way through. As noted elsewhere, there was a two-year maintenance period which might have been 5 minutes of Le Monde, a few SRS cards, and typically an hour of listening to my wife speak to the kids in French. If you make a really long-term commitment, it will tend to shrink as the years pass. As your interest waxes and wanes, you'll be tempted to gradually replace goals like "learn 20 new words in my SRS deck" with goals like "review some SRS cards every day". Still, even a pathetic commitment will help prevent you from losing ground, and you can always "reboot" it with a larger, more specific goal when you feel ready. I think it's really great that sctroyenne is focusing on teaching people how to learn a language. And I really think that obstacle #1 is teaching them how to study consistently. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Michel1020 Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5016 days ago 365 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch | Message 7 of 15 15 August 2012 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | ||
If you are the teacher how do you know he has little discipline to work on his onw when you say he is doing fairly well in the class ? None of my language teachers ever told me how to learn a language. This could be a first step. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5555 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 8 of 15 15 August 2012 at 6:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm generally quite undisciplined and averse to routine. So what's really helping me at the moment is to start my daily slot reserved for study with 5-10 minutes of a language activity where I have few expectations and experience little or no stress (e.g. I'm currently learning how to read Latin at a slow and steady pace just for fun).
By trying not to break the chain, as emk mentioned above, I get into the habit of doing at least something in my language learning schedule every day, even if that's just 5-10 minutes. However, once I've started and overcome this initial inertia, and the cognitive wheels are already in motion, I find it actually becomes much easier to continue on to a longer session in a primary language. This at least is something that works for me. Edited by Teango on 15 August 2012 at 6:14pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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