A useful classroom practice is teaching students about the meta-cognitive skills involved in language acquisition and learning. What follows is the outline of a lesson I have taught many times with the intention of teaching students about why they are successful in learning English so that they can do it more effectively.

Learning Intention: To discover why I’m a good language learner so that I can become a better one.

Success Criteria: Choose three new activities I can do that will improve my English.

Focus Question: How and where do I come into contact with English?

I wrote the focus question like this knowing that students will not understand it. I use this as a teaching moment for instructing them how to give good feedback that lets me know exactly what the problem is. [There will be a number of posts on feedback as a part of my Routines series, one is due next week after SPaCE edu. I’ll add links here as they are posted.]

After eliciting the problem in the question (come into contact with), I demonstrate contact and then move on to translating the question into something they understand more readily.

Rewritten Focus Question:

1. How and where do I hear English?
2. How and where do I see English?
3. How and where do I make English?
4. How and where do I think about English?

I then check their understanding by getting them to translate the key words into the four skills plus think about (metacognition), then elicit some examples before putting them into groups to come up with a list of answers that don’t involve school, language courses, homework or formal study in any way. They should be things that they actually do, not what they think they should do, and they should be things they enjoy and choose to do without anyone telling them to.

Next step is to list all the different things they do on the board and then pick one for analysis.  Note that I list them as single noun descriptions; “Movies” not “Watching Movies”, or “Songs” not “Listen to Music”. The first analysis is a worked example with class input led by the teacher, try to elicit as many responses from the class as possible and then fill out the list with your own ideas. I usually choose movies or songs.

Here’s a sample for movies:

1. Listen to the dialogue while reading the subtitles in Bahasa Indonesia.
2. Listen to the dialogue while reading the subtitles in English.
3. Listen to the dialogue without reading subtitles.
4. Search for files with subtitles on the internet, in English or Bahasa Indonesia.
5. Notice shortcomings or mistakes in the subtitles. (ex: swear words are never translated accurately, pirated films often have very bad mistakes in the subtitles.)
6. Repeat lines of dialogue from the movie.
7. Memorise lines of dialogue from the movie.
8. Act out a scene or part of a scene. Either by myself or with my friends.
9. Practice the pronunciation of new words.
10. Check the pronunciation of new words by listening to myself speak and comparing it to the actor.
11. Record myself saying the new words for more accurate checking of the pronunciation.
12. Follow the plot of the story from either the English subtitles or dialogue.
13. Predict what will happen next/how the film will end.
14. Identify the themes of the film from the dialogue or English subtitles.
15. Learn the meaning of new words
    1. Context clues.
    2. Look it up in a dictionary.
    3. Ask someone else.
16. Talk about the film with my friends in English
17. Talk about the film with my friends in Bahasa Indonesia.
18. Write a Facebook post in Bahasa Indonesia about the film (or comment on one).
19. Write a Facebook post about the film in English (or comment on one).
20. Write in my journal or diary about the film or my trip to the cinema etc.
21. Write a review of the film in English (using the text type from GBL)
22. Write a review of the film in Bahasa Indonesia.
23. Translate the English film review into Bahasa Indonesia (a twelve year old boy did this; his English was probably the most sophisticated that I have come across in Indonesia… no one told him to do this, he does it because he loves to)
24. Imagine/talk about what happened before the film/what will happen after it.

Note: All of these have actually been suggested by real students although the wording is my own and I *try* to list them in a logical progression.

After the list is complete, go through the list item by item and find out who does each of these; have the students put up their hands and look around the room to see who does what. Record how many students do each (Ex: one tick for some, two for about half, three for almost everyone and four for everyone). This is an important step, students are often poor judges of their own learning but good judges of each other’s, they often have a precise ranking system and are able to place each other in numerical order even without knowing each other’s marks. They will see that the students who do most or all of the items on their lists will probably also be the best speakers of English. Analyse several of the list items for the skills they include: listening, reading, speaking, writing and thinking about. It’s important to uncover just how complex the activities they are doing actually are.

Next up group work.

Have them choose an item from the class list and analyse it in the same way. Have a few quick reports from the groups, potentially recording another analysis on the board if many groups have chosen the same item (often “songs” or if there are lots of boys “games”).

At this point I like to connect this to a brief plenary on acquisition and learning. That’s a topic for another post.

Worked examples of the Success Criteria to help students write their own.
Students MUST come up with their own individualised Success Criteria answers.

The underlying message of this post is that I believe (and the evidence supports me) that an important part of our job is to show students how they learn and why they succeed. They need to think about and understand the processes involved in successful learning. As teachers we should be continuously analysing how and what we are trying to teach in order to work out how to give students direct instruction on the meta-cognitive processes connected to learning.

Don’t simply copy this lesson idea; apply the principles that underpin it to your general teaching. Teaching content isn’t enough, we have to teach our students how to make the most of that content and that means sacrificing some time to teaching them meta-cognitive skills at the cost of curriculum mandated content.