Giving Students a Why and a How for Learning English

What would it look like for EFL students to have a vision of themselves as successful language learners, to be able to articulate the benefits of being bilingual and the ways they need to act to reach their goals? This term I came across 2 resources that got me started on this journey: Some lesson plans in Larry Ferlazzo’s book The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools, and Activities for Teaching English Language Learners of All Levels and a poster “Being Bilingual Is My Superpower” from Centre for  Educators of BMLs (see below). 

Benefits of being bilingual in Ferlazzo’s unit:

• Increase job opportunities and income
• Increase brain power: flexibility, learning, memory, multitasking, problem solving
• Delay onset of Alzheimer’s disease

Characteristics of a successful language learner in Ferlazzo’s unit:

• Takes risks
• Learns from mistakes
• Perseveres/has an appetite for learning
• Teaches others

It’s a good unit with activities that engage students in thinking, talking, reading, notetaking, writing, presenting, listening, goal-setting, interviewing, and reflecting. I recommend the book just for these lessons (though there’s lots more). My students wrote their personal goals for why they wanted to learn English, made them into posters, and we hung them in the classroom (see photo above).  

And this summer I’m planning to do some more research--because there’s lots more out there, and I need to know more than my students about benefits and characteristics so I can keep emphasizing this motivational aspect of language learning. I just did a Google search on “benefits of being bilingual” and “characteristics of a successful language learner,” and here’s what happened:

Searching “benefits of being bilingual” got 32,700,000 results in 0.54 seconds, including the following:

• “The amazing benefits of being bilingual” (BBC Future)
• “The Cognitive Benefits of Being Bilingual” (The Dana Foundation), “8 Hidden Benefits of Being Bilingual” (Oxford House Language Courses)
• “The Benefits of Being Bilingual” (US Department of Education) 

Searching “characteristics of a successful language learner” got 21,900,000 results in 0.53 seconds, including the following: 

• “The ‘Good Language Learner’” (University of Birmingham)
• “10 Characteristics of A ‘Good Language Learner’” (Oxford House Language Courses)
• “10 Characteristics of a Good Language Learner” (Owlcation).  

So this summer, I’m going to read some of those articles I just found, and I’m going to read the book Bilingual and Multilingual Learners from the Inside-Out: Elevating Expertise in Classrooms and Beyond. I'm going to see how I can continue to help my EFL students have a vision of themselves as successful language learners, articulate the benefits of being bilingual, and understand and implement the characteristics that will help them achieve their goal.

https://educatorsofbmls.com/product/being-bilingual-is-my-superpower-poster-english/ Note: I bought the poster and modified it to read 127 million Japanese speakers. The originals are for Spanish and French.