How can we personalise language lessons for young learners? And how can we adapt coursebook content so it connects with students’ own lives?
Teacher trainer Matt Courtois and I discuss what personalisation means in the classroom and why it matters. We talk about localising topics such as food, festivals, weather and places, asking questions that let students express real preferences, and giving learners choices in how they complete activities.
Personalization for Young Learners - Transcript
Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute podcast everyone, I'm Ross Thorburn and on this week's episode my guest Matt Courtois and I are going to be talking about personalising language lessons for young learners. You'll hear Matt and I talking about what personalisation means to us, why it's important, how to localise content from coursebooks, things like food, weather and festivals, and also how to incorporate students' preferences both for what they want to talk about in class and also how they want to learn English. Enjoy the episode! Matt Courtois, welcome back.
Always a pleasure. It is indeed. So, we're talking about personalisation today.
In a nutshell, how would you describe it? One way I've described it to teachers before was saying that, like, so many teachers look at the coursebook and the activities in it as the lesson, but in my eyes the lesson is all the human beings that are in that classroom and the interactions that they have and the experience that they have. The coursebook is a good outline or guide or something. Yeah, it's a good guide for what to do in the lesson.
So, maybe it's a bit like taking a guidebook on holiday or something and you're not going to do everything in the guidebook. You're going to do things that are in there, you're going to leave some things out, and you're going to probably do things that are not in there at all based on your own interests and preferences and stuff like that. Exactly.
I think for me it's how to get the students to relate to the language that they're learning. And obviously you brought up this idea of coursebooks, and I think the problem with coursebooks a lot of the time is that they're made for this global market. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, you can use the same materials, but of course students' lives are different in every place, in every country.
So, I guess that's sort of this idea of localizing materials, which we'll get into as well. But then there's also this idea that if we're learning about pets, then maybe one of the kids in the class has a cat and someone else has a dog and that's great and that's in the coursebook, but maybe someone else has a lizard and that's not in there. And we need to be able to take account of that.
If you look at those conversations that appear in a coursebook as your guide, right, like you want the students in your classroom to be able to have a conversation similar to that about their lives. And so that does require some additions to the target language sometimes. Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head there.
So, the idea is for students to be able to use English to describe their lives. And obviously their lives might differ considerably from the characters or the models in the coursebook. One that I think is really obvious is food.
It's something that obviously changes depending on what part of the world you're in. And I think just everyone has a preference on what food they like. I think this is something that's really easy to supplement what's in the coursebook.
I mean, if you're teaching hamburger, pizza, fries, I don't know why it always seems like the language in coursebook is junk food. Have you found that as well? Yeah. Maybe salad gets thrown in there.
Well, as an American as well, I think it leaves the impression that all we eat is burgers and pizza. So, I think with this, right, my sort of tip here is that you can still teach what's in the coursebook. And I think it's important to remember that for exams, probably what's in the coursebook will get tested, but there's no harm in asking students, what else do you eat? Or, you know, if it's pets, what other pets do you know or that you like that are not in the coursebook? And then you can get students to try and describe them.
If you speak the same first language as the students, you can try and translate those things. And I think for some of them, yeah, if there's no equivalent words in English, then you can maybe teach them how to describe it. But as you were saying earlier, I think it's really important that students are not coming to English class and learning to talk about a bunch of food that they've maybe never even eaten before.
And they never plan to eat, right? Right. Another example outside of food is holidays. A lot of English teachers and a lot of English coursebooks will have things about Christmas and Halloween and Valentine's Day.
Easter, Mother's Day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very western holidays.
But they aren't celebrated everywhere in the world. And I do think there's value in introducing what is Christmas or what we were saying earlier about food. What is a hamburger? And introducing these bits of Western culture into their lives and maybe spark their curiosity about the culture behind the language.
But they're not going to have to explain in English, outside of an English classroom, what a hamburger is or what Christmas is. Unless they become an English teacher using that coursebook. Exactly.
But they will probably. There will be situations where they're asked about Chinese New Year or Tunesweeping Day. Right.
So I think that's a really good point. And I think one of my favorite ways to make localization happen in the classroom is if you do have this content about some festival that your students are not familiar with, you can almost treat that as input. And then when it comes to getting the students to do some talking or for higher levels, getting the students to do some writing, you can say, all right, you read about this festival.
Now I want you to write a similar profile of a festival that you're familiar with and then get students to use that template of the writing maybe for whatever they read about Christmas and then just change the topic slightly. And hopefully they can use a lot of the same language, but they're then describing a festival that they're familiar with. I've also seen not just using localizing regarding the target language, but regarding the context of the lesson.
So a lot of times, like, let's go back to food, right? Like whenever people are sitting in a restaurant and ordering food, there's a story of that in the coursebook. I've seen teachers before where they say, okay, we're in the McDonald's downstairs. I want you to close your eyes and imagine the smells of McDonald's.
And then you ask a student, does it smell good? Like, what do you want to eat there? And then what sounds do you hear? And so you're really localizing it to that restaurant that they all know because it's downstairs from your school or whatever. I love that. That reminds me of seeing a lesson a few years ago.
This was with adults, but I think you could do this with teenagers as well, where the whole class was about deciding which restaurant all the students were going to go to for lunch that day. And they compared menus from different restaurants in the shopping mall where the school was. Or in every textbook, there's a lesson about giving directions as well.
They have a map of this fictional city. And then you say, how do you get to the post office? It's well-suited for language to say, turn left, it's opposite the mall or whatever, right? But it makes it such a more interesting class whenever you can talk about this local area. Ask them, where's the closest bank to the school? And how can I get to that bank or post office or restaurant? Once I did something similar with students, but got them to do this for the school that we were in.
So our school had whatever, say 10 classrooms, and it had a bathroom and a little library and a teacher's office. And the whole class was about describing where these different rooms were. And at the end, we did a role play where half the students pretended to be parents, half of them were students.
We went to the front desk of the school and then got the students who were role playing as parents to say, oh, excuse me, can you help me? Like, I want to find this classroom or where's the bathroom? And the kids were then giving directions within the school. I think another thing that often doesn't get localised that sometimes annoys me is weather. And I've seen classes where students learn to say, my favourite season is winter.
I can play in snow and ice. And I've seen this actually in a class in a subtropical city where there is definitely no snow has ever fallen there since the last ice age. So I think for that, what teachers can do is teach things like wet season and dry season, and also do an interesting comparison, right? That could be a nice little writing task or a thinking task.
What's winter like here? What's winter like in this other place? How are they similar? How are they different? And just like with the festivals and holidays, I was saying, I guess you're in the position and I'm in the position where as teachers, you can walk in there and say, oh, in my country, this is what winter's like in my hometown. And for an online lesson as well, what a great way to spot a gap between your students. If you have one student in the subtropics and another student in the far north, right? You can have them comparing their winters.
And I think in an online lesson, you can really exploit the idea of localization to create information gaps. In terms of foods, holidays, it's a great way of creating meaningful exchanges between students as well, online especially, and in classrooms that have people of mixed cultures. So another thing I wanted to briefly mention is just the idea of changing some of the questions that we ask students to allow them to express a personal opinion.
And I think the personal opinions don't have to be very complicated, but it can just be remembering in class to ask students, what pet do you like? Or whatever the topic of the class is, instead of always doing, what is this? What is that? Asking students some questions where there's no right answer. It's just a preference. One other little point with this, the time that I actually found that students did this the most was when I've done translation surveys.
So we get students to go around in pairs. And I often tell the students that in this pair, one of you is the translator and the other one of you, you're the grandma or something, and you can't speak English. You can speak your first language.
And translator, you have to translate the question from someone else in the other pair and ask your granny. And I find when that happens, often you will get these words that come out that the students go, oh yeah, we don't know how to say this in English. And I think that's really, really good when that happens, because at the end of the activity, you'll be like, oh well, what words were there that you didn't know how to translate? Let's say we were talking about favourite foods.
Maybe some foods will come out that students actually do really like, but they don't know the word for in English. And that's when that gap in knowledge gets highlighted. And such an easy question to get your students involved in the class too, right? You're talking about school subjects.
Ask students to ask each other, what's your favourite subject? You're talking about seasons of the year. What's your favourite season? But I think there's also another way of personalising, which is not just personalising the content of the lesson, but also personalising how you do the lesson. Actually asking students about what they like and what they don't like in your classes.
What I've done with very, very low level students, like literally two and a half, three year olds, is made little double-sided flashcards with like happy face, sad face. And after an activity, ask students like, did you like that? Or did you not like that? Hold up the flashcard to get some immediate feedback. And with much higher level students, what I'd gotten students to do was like halfway through a course, complete these sentences.
In this class, I like dot, dot, dot. And this class would be better if dot, dot, dot. And gotten students to write some sentences around those and then share them.
And I found for me as a teacher, that was really, really useful to learn a bit more about what students like and don't like. One other nice way I heard of doing this was getting students to do a project in class, which is how do you use English outside of class? And getting students to, if they're too young to do a lot of writing, just draw a picture of how have you used English outside of class and then get students to talk about that. And I think that can be really interesting feedback for the teacher as well.
You reminded me of something else that I'd heard from another friend of the podcast, Jake Whitten. He shared something where you were saying like if they're too young to say it, have them draw it. But he had like a wheel in class where like you could draw it, act it out, say it or write it.
And basically you could come up with your task and then students could choose which method they would like to use in order to express and use the language that they've been studying. And it's such a great way of personalizing what do students want to do. And you don't necessarily have to have a formal survey of students asking like, what do you like? You can just have students who want to draw something about the target language, they can draw it.
Other ones who want to act out a play, they can do that activity. And they kind of design the activity themselves and personalize it for their own preferences as well. That's so cool.
Yeah, so it's not just that we're taking the class as like one monolithic block who have the same preferences and everything. We can actually decide for different groups of students in the one class and give them some choices, I guess, about what they want to do in the lesson. One more time, everyone, that was Matt Courtois.
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Goodbye.