The Problem of Finding Interesting Input for the Language Classroom

(TESOL Ideas--My Opinions)

For many years, one of my favorite rants to go off on in the teachers' staffroom was to complain about how studying English didn't have to be boring, but we made it boring.

The rant went something like this:

Foreign Language study is unique among all school subjects in that it doesn't actually have to be boring.

All other school subjects have to be boring, at least to a certain degree.  I mean, I know teachers do their best--they bring in games, they tell jokes, they try and make the subject fun, but... the subject itself is usually inherently boring, and at a certain point, there's just no getting away from it.  Sooner or later the students just have to memorize the chemical formulas or learn the equations.  

But language study alone is exempt from this.  Language study doesn't actually have to be boring.  You can study language through any medium you want.  When you learn English, you can use an epic fantasy adventure story as the reading text.  Or a sexy vampire romance.  You can do the listening practice by listening to a space opera. Or a zany comedy.  You have infinite choices of interesting material which you can use as the reading or listening text in the language classroom.  There is no rule that says that you must learn English by reading boring high-brow topics, or serious sociology.  You can learn English just as well by immersing yourself in fun pulpy adventure or romance stories.

But, despite having this wonderful opportunity to make language instruction interesting, the English Language Teaching industry insists on making it as boring as possible.  Open any mainstream textbook.  Look at the reading texts and listen to the listening exercises.  It is all dreadfully boring stuff.  (I've kept an index over here of all the textbooks I've supplemented over the past 8 years.  Every single one of them has consisted of terribly bland and boring reading and listening texts.)

After a few drinks, I used to passionately exclaim to my colleagues: "Why do we feel like we have to make English so boring, when actually we don't have to make English so boring!"

But I no longer go on this rant.  I have now resigned myself to the fact that the reading and listening texts in the classroom probably just have to be boring.

The reason that the textbooks are so boring is well documented.  Textbook publishers want the textbooks to be as bland as possible in order to avoid offending anybody.  (Textbook publishers want their textbooks to be global--to be marketable in Communist China as well as Islamic Saudi Arabia.)  In Beyond the Sentence, Scott Thornbury reveals that textbook writers even have an acronym for all the subjects they are supposed to avoid: PARSNIP (politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, isms and pork).  

But in addition to this, there's the problem that textbook writers just aren't as entertaining as people in the professional entertainment industry, because of course they're not.  

For example, many textbooks have video supplements nowadays, but the textbooks are never going to produce anything as entertaining as Star Wars because they're not going to spend 10 years desperately trying to get a passion project filmed just for the next edition of "Speak English 5".

Now, teachers can of course supplement the textbook with outside material from the wider world of entertainment, and I have done this often in the past.  (See my collection of movie worksheets here, and my collection of Storybooks here).  But for copyright reasons, this can only be done unofficially by the teacher.  A big English school can't actually make Star Wars part of its curriculum without getting into some sort of legal trouble.  
And, in my subjective impression, it's getting harder and harder for teachers to deviate from the curriculum these days.  I've worked for a number of schools over the years, and I feel like more and more, the schools want to have concrete programs that they can sell to the students for marketing reasons, and they want the teacher to follow this curriculum closely so that the students are getting exactly what they signed up for.

But even putting all that aside, even in situations where teachers do have complete freedom over what materials to use, the biggest problem is that no one agrees on what is interesting.  I'm interested in science fiction, you're interested in romance novels.  I'm interested in history, you're interested in science.  Etc.

Now, this next part again relates to my subjective experience, but in my subjective experience, I had the best outcome when using animated movies and comic books for students aged 8 to 12.  I did this for a few years at my previous job, and I had a great time, and the students had a great time.

...but, around about the time that my students started to graduate into the teens program, I started to have trouble.  They didn't want to do the cartoons and comic books anymore.  They wanted to get into more age appropriate materials.  But they all had different ideas about what they wanted to do.  Some of the boys wanted action movies, some of the girls wanted romance movies, some liked science fiction, some liked dramas, etc.  Eventually, the whole thing fell apart.

I've had similar experiences with a few different classes.  From these experience, I've decided that when the children are younger (e.g. 8 to 12), it's possible to find material that appeals to all of them.  But around the time they get into their teens, they start to develop niche interests.  And then they only want to do material that reflects their own niche interests, and it becomes very hard to find something that appeals to the whole class.  

(They can, of course, pursue their niche interests in extensive reading and extensive listening homework, but I'm talking here about what to do for in-class reading and listening.)

Part of the problem was that the students knew that I was bringing in the supplemental material myself, and thus was in charge of making the decisions.

If the material had been part of a pre-determined curriculum (i.e. if it had been part of the assigned textbook), then they wouldn't have questioned it.  They know that the school curriculum is beyond my control.  But because they knew that the supplementary material was within my control, they refused to accept it when I brought in material that they didn't like.  

(I was also making myself vulnerable to student complaints when I brought in supplemental material.  If they complained to front office, and front office found out that I was deviating from the curriculum, and that the students didn't like it, then it reflects badly on me.  If, on the other hand, the students complain about the curriculum, but I'm just following the curriculum that the school has assigned to me, then it's no reflection on my judgement.)

Eventually, I just gave up and went back to the textbook.  

My new philosophy is: interesting input happens outside the classroom, with extensive reading and extensive listening.  Inside the classroom, we just do the boring stuff and follow the curriculum.

Some of the materials I've posted on this blog recently reflect this change in perspective.

For example, I've recently done workshops at my school on Engaging Activities that can be used for Any Reading Text and Engaging Activities for Any Listening Text.  The intent with these workshops is to try to focus on how you can make the activities interesting even when the text itself is not interesting.  (i.e. it doesn't matter how boring the text is, if you can find a way to gamify the activities, you can still make the class interesting.)

I have also started collecting Interesting Input plus Production Prompts, which are, admittedly, still based on trying to find interesting input.  (When will I learn?!) But which are also designed to be used for only one lesson--i.e. no more spreading one book or movie out over several weeks, just use it for one lesson, and then it's done.  If the students really hate it, then it doesn't matter.  It's only for one lesson.

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Like any teacher, I've had some successes, and some failures, when trying to find interesting material for my students.  
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was one of my biggest failures.  (I tried to do this as a class reader with my university students, and they hated it!  And then, they resented me for  making them read it.  I should have just stuck to the textbook.)

Sometimes, some material will work really well with one class, but not another class.  My best example of this is The Emperor's New Groove.  I had two classes that were the same age and the same level--one in the morning, one in the afternoon.  The morning class absolutely hated it.  (In fact, they even requested that the school change teachers, because they wanted a teacher who would just do the textbook like normal.)  But the afternoon class really loved it.  So you never can tell.

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Another option is to have the students select the movie, but in my experience this doesn't work either.  The students often pick movies that are not good for studying from.  Also, often the students can't agree on what movie they want to watch.  I've written about my experiences letting students pick the movie on previous posts here and here.  

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Of course, another problem is that even if you do succeed in finding input the students really like, it's only a temporary victory.  Once you've used that up, you're right back to the drawing board, and you have to struggle to find more materials.  This is a struggle I wrote about in this post here.  

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One of the reasons I was prompted to write this post is because of some recent staffroom which indicate to me that some of my colleagues are making the same mistake that I used to.

Recently, there was a discussion at my school about how to find interesting material for the students.  One of my colleagues noted that the National Geographic textbooks tend to focus on science and geography at the exclusion of all other topics, and he suggested that it would be really great to explore other topics, like 16th century warfare.

A different colleague, who was in this meeting, was incredulous that 16th century warfare was being presented as an interesting topic for students, and after the meeting was over, he vented to us about how unbelievable it was that this was even suggested.

And, I get where he's coming from.  (The average Vietnamese teenager is decidedly not interested in reading about 16th century warfare.)  But, I also kind of get why the suggestion was made in the first place.  I am, after all, a history geek myself.  I could really get into 16th century warfare as a topic.  And I suspect that's what the person was thinking when he suggested it.  But it was just a classic failure to recognize that not everyone is interested in the same stuff.  No one agrees on what "interesting" means.

Another example that springs to mind is from my former school in Cambodia.   At one point there was a push to do more with extensive reading by getting class readers assigned for each level--mostly graded reader versions of the classics.  I pushed for classic horror or classic adventure books: Frankenstein, Dracula, Treasure Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, etc.  These were books that seemed to me that they would appeal to our teenage learners.

I was therefore surprised to learn that for one of the levels, a graded reader of Wuthering Heights had been assigned.  I expressed my frustration about this to colleagues.  "Whose idea was it to choose Wuthering Heights?" I said.  "That's one of the most boring books ever.  Why are we forcing our students to read that?"

It turned out there was one teacher on the selection committee who was a big fan of Wuthering Heights and she had really pushed for it, and that's how the book landed on the curriculum.

In a way, it's fair enough, I guess.  Wuthering Heights does appeal to some people.  So maybe this teacher was one of those few who had really loved Wuthering Heights, and thought it would appeal to the students.

Personally, I can't imagine it as being interesting to the students, but then what do I know?  Perhaps some of the horror books or adventure books that I had pushed for would not be interesting for all of the students either.