With 23% of the vote, the most popular writing challenge was: ‘My students don’t want to write’. Many teachers felt that demotivation lay at the heart of this challenge, with students unable to see the importance of writing beyond the classroom.
Martina in the Czech Republic said: “Lack of motivation is hard to break. (Students) say they don’t need to write in their lives and what they need is to be able to speak English. They even say they’ve forgotten how to write by hand, and they don’t have computers in class.”
Maja in Croatia faces a similar challenge: “My students find writing boring because it usually takes longer than other tasks and they do not feel it is important, since they are not used to writing in their own language. They feel it is something they have to do for school and not something they would do in everyday life.”
Close behind with 21% of the vote, the second most popular challenge was: ‘My students keep making the same mistakes’. Jolinda in the Netherlands emphasised how frustrating this can be: “It seems to me that students do not refer to corrected work which makes me feel like my work is more or less superfluous. The students do not learn from their mistakes.”
Lenka in the Czech Republic was also able to relate to this challenge: “I feel that the more meticulously I correct my students´ writing, the more mistakes they make, even if I write examples at the bottom of the paper.”
The final challenge that made it into our top 3 with 14% of the vote was: ‘It’s hard to find enough class time for writing’. Silvina in Argentina explains: “It’s difficult to dedicate enough time to written activities with only two lessons a week and groups of thirty students. We usually do as much as we can, but I know that the weaker students don’t get enough guidance or scaffolding from me, and sometimes peers are unwilling to help them.”
Hanna in Ukraine faces similar limitations: “The hours given for English classes are minimal, so writing is usually given as a home task, so checking it is rather complicated. I usually use some extra hours at home and use additional tools like Skype, email or blogs to check this writing.”
Join us as we dedicate a month to each of these three challenges. Through a series of webinars and blog posts, Oxford’s top teacher trainers will cover a range of strategies and ideas which you can use in the classroom straight away.
| Challenge | Webinar (session 1) | Webinar (session 2) | Teacher trainer | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| My students keep making the same mistakes | 24th Feb | 26th Feb | Olha Madylus | ||
| My students don’t want to write | 19th Mar | 20th Mar | Gareth Davies | ||
| It’s hard to find enough class time for writing | 21st Apr | 23rd Apr | TBC | ||