Focusing on Engagement

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I’m obsessed with the brain. How it works and maybe even more so by how it doesn’t work. Whilst brain research has made headway in the past 15-20 years, there is still a lot we do not know about the brain. However, one thing we can say for sure is that our students’ brain certainly does not recall everything we teach! Teaching something does not mean automatically that our students learn it. I’m sure you have noticed.

We might believe this is the case because some learners are simply not that motivated to learn English, but even if they were motivated research has shown that motivation alone is not enough. As Mercer (2019) puts it nicely “motivation is necessary for preparing the deal, but engagement is indispensable for sealing the deal.”

Motivation is of great importance for the learning journey, however, the question is how much influence we teachers actually have on learners’ motivation. Yes, we can offer rewards or decide on consequences which might make learners behave in a certain way, however, for sustained learning to happen intrinsic motivation is paramount and all we can do as teachers is to create conditions in our classroom to foster this kind of motivation.

Being motivated, having taken the decision to act, can be regarded as step one in the learning process, but it still isn’t the same as learning. Whereas being motivated could be regarded as a rather passive stage, for learning to happen learners need to be actively involved in the learning process. Mercer & Dörnyei (2020) define engagement as active participation and involvement in the learning process. And effective learning heavily depends on the level of engagement in classroom learning activities. So how can we go about engaging our learners in order to realise students’ motivation in the language classroom?

Mercer & Dörnyei highlight that there are 3 different stages which overlap and are non-sequential.

These stages require slightly different strategies from us, teachers, to make them happen so the easy of it, let’s talk about them one by one.

Step 1- laying the foundation for engagement

Engagement doesn’t only depend on the kind of activities and opportunities we offer for language learning in the lesson. It’s not all about ensuring topics and tasks are relevant, interesting and active, first we need to create the conditions for our brain that enable learners to engage. First of all, learners need to believe that they can succeed and progress, in other words, we need to create facilitative mindsets. Next, we need to focus on interpersonal factors, developing a positive relationship between you and the learners is key as well as creating a positive classroom culture so learners can feel safe and have a sense of belonging.  These 3 aspects are key if we want to enable the brain to focus on learning.  

Step 2 – getting them hooked

Now we’ve created the conditions for engagement, we need to make our learners want to do the learning! To form any kind of memory, which learning is, paying attention is essential. This means that we need to grab their attention first, however, we are all the time competing for our students’ attention with a whole load of distractions, such as their mobile phones, things on their minds, etc and our brain only has limited attention available. The challenge is to get students’ brain to focus on the learning in front of them and we can do this by offering topics and tasks that are of fundamental interest to our learners, but that’s not always possible so we need to trigger their curiosity, get them active and highlight how what we do in the classroom can be meaningful to them or their community.

Step 3 – keeping them engaged

Once we have created the right kind of foundations for the classroom for learners to be willing and able to engage and we have caught their attention and successfully got them involved in the learning task now all we need to do is maintain their attention in the face of competing distraction. We need to keep ensuring that the activities we offer are of a level of challenges that are doable for our learners, which might mean providing some scaffolding of differentiation. And keep working on logical sequencing in your lessons so we can enable learners step-by-step to successfully achieve the learning objectives. And finally think about how you can maximise their engagement and keep boredom at bay, consider using engaging Apps and multi-media.

Let me just highlight that we do not create learning, we can only create the condition within which our learners create learning (William, 2010). So, I’m going to leave you with some guiding questions for planning so can do our utmost best to create the conditions for learning, trigger their engagement and do our best to maintain it:

References

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