Hey there!
If you struggle to keep your one-to-one students motivated, we have listed some tips that might help.
Show interest
This could be as simple as starting the lesson with: What was the most difficult thing you had to do this week? orWhat is the thing you are most proud of this week? Also, make sure you respond to their opinions and ideas, don’t just say ‘OK’ and move on. Ask follow-up questions and encourage your student to do the same when you share your point of view. Never underestimate having a good rapport with your student!
Set realistic goals
Students sometimes lose motivation because it’s difficult for them to see any progress. Solution: set goals. Here are some examples of realistic goals that you and your student can set together based on what the course content is:
- feel confident when talking about the past,
- be able to use vocabulary related to work,
- use new vocabulary while speaking in the lesson,
- understand the difference between different conditional sentences,
- explain what a video, an article or a story was about using your own words, etc.
Return to those regularly with your student, tick the ones that they have achieved, and add more.
Offer choices
It might seem silly but if we are given a choice of what we do or how we do it, we get more excited about the activity. So you might ask your student to choose one of two topics that you will cover in the following lesson. They could choose whether they want their homework to be a gap-filling activity to revise the learned vocabulary or more of an open-ended task (e.g. to find more information about what you discussed in class). You can also offer a choice or revision, warm-up, and/or filler tasks.
Use varied tasks
We often stick to a set of tasks we do repeatedly in every lesson. But it is really worth doing something different from time to time. It might turn out that a task you thought was ineffective is actually something that a particular student enjoys and that helps them. When was the last time you tried the following with your student: create a sentence with the target word, ask your teacher five questions about their weekend, tell a story using the listed words, picture dictation (draw what I describe or describe so that I can draw it)?
What do you think about that? Share with us your stories of dealing with unmotivated students!
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