Maintaining concentration with young learners
Studies show that students aged from 5 – 15 have an average concentration span of 15 – 60 minutes. It’s our duty as ESL teachers to plan our lessons based on our students’ capability to concentrate.
Let’s have a look at some strategies to help improve or maintain concentration in classroom.
1. The value of exit tickets
If you’re familiar with exit tickets, you’ll know that they’re used at the end of class to assess if your students are paying attention or if they might not understand the material they are learning. This ticket can hold crucial information on how you can adapt your lesson plan to keep your students engaged and focused if you ask the right questions.
Before they leave your class, each students needs to give you an “exit ticket” with their answer of a question, for example:
Did you understand today’s lesson?
What was the most important thing you’ve learned today?
What topic would you like to learn more about?
Student feedback is valuable!
2. Decorated classrooms
We all love pretty decor in our classroom; it makes a class feel vibrant and more at home. Be careful though! Studies have shown that students lose their concentration quicker if the classroom is heavily decorated.
3. Short lessons
Consider keeping your lessons short if you’re teaching young learners. You don’t necessarily need to use short lessons, but break the original down into chunks so it’s easier for your students to maintain focus while you’re teaching. Remember students of 10-year age lose their focus after 20 – 30 min.
4. Check on your students
With time, you’ll slowly learn which students struggle more with concentration through their work than others. Make sure you’re engaging with students throughout an activity and let them show you their work. This is an effective strategy to keep easily-distracted students focused on their work and through interacting with them you can now clarify if they understand or need some help if they had any questions to ask.
5. Mindfulness practice
The best way to get your students to focus is to practice it daily! There are a lot of mindfulness activities for young students that can be implemented in the classroom and it also comes with its benefits like improving concentration, getting rid of stress or anxiety etc. It would be great if you could add a 5-10 min mindfulness practice.
6. Chewing gum
All right, I know chewing gum has been the natural enemy of teachers for decades now, but studies have proven that it’s an effective solution in helping students stay focused for longer. Don’t be too hard on them if you see them chewing.
7. Activity games to keep students engaged
There’s a lot of exciting ESL activities available to keep students engaged in the classroom. They’re known in the ESL community as classroom warmers/fillers and they’re great at getting young learners focused and engaged in the lesson plan.
We all want our students to concentrate and focus in class, we hope these tips and strategies will help you accomplish just that!