The Effective Learning / Teaching System That Will Inspire, Activate and Encourage Students to successfully Communicate in English

 The Inspire, Activate, and Encourage communication system is designed to help students to speak without self-consciousness. 

 1. Inspire

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, ‘motivate’ means “to make someone feel that they want to do something and can do it”. A good teacher is a person who can inspire their students to achieve great things through a variety of means and activities. The following are some tips for inspiring students:

Before you inspire others, you yourself should be inspired. You should be positive and enthusiastic at all times. Display your passion for teaching your Lead by example. If you want your students to speak well, then you should speak well as a way to inspire and motivate them.

Establish a good relationship with your students, be a positive influence for them. The more your students like you, the better they will learn and actively participate in activities.

Be an honest figure, someone who shares real experiences with them rather than just philosophies.

Always give comments of positive reinforcement. Use expressions such as “I’m proud of you” “ Excellent work”, “That's a good job” and “I liked your point of view very much.” “That's great, I never looked at it that way” “You are a very creative student.”

Always be positive. Instill confidence in your students. Tell them that it is easy to develop their speaking skills and make them believe your words. Make them believe that they have the potential to express themselves clearly in the target language.

Use strategies that do not threaten them. It is very important to learn and practice a language in a non-threatening environment.

2. Activate

The word ‘activate’ here means to make someone active or to cause someone to be productive. The statement “Ignite, fuel, sustain a fire in the mind of your student” best summarizes the meaning of the word. You can activate your students in many ways:

Enthuse and energize your students.

Create a friendly and conducive environment for students to speak and discuss topics and issues. The layout of the classroom, for example, matters a lot.

Make your students feel comfortable discussing any topic. Some topics may not arouse their interest at all. 

Recently, I gave the following topics for group discussion:

1. A Baby boy is a blessing and a baby girl is a curse.
2. Money is more important than values.
3. Smoking in public places should not be banned.
4. Most engineering students lack critical thinking skills.
5. Punking promotes friendship and unity among students and so it should be encouraged.
6. Social inequality is a blessing in disguise and so it should be strengthened.
7. Success in life comes from money.
8. Collecting capitation fees is the right of self-financing colleges.
9. Brain drain should be encouraged.
10. Politics and corruption do not go together.
11. Men are naturally superior to women.
12. Women are more emotionally intelligent than men.
13. Women should be encouraged and educated to run large corporations and make 
    important social decicions.

The controversial nature of the topics listed above made all students express their views. Even students with low levels of proficiency came forward to speak.

Encourage free discussion. The objective is to make your students speak fluently. At a later stage, you can train them to be coherent, logical, etc.

Tolerate their grammatical errors and correct them later. Are your students adults? If they are treat them as adults.

Allow judicious use of certain words and expressions in the students’ native language when they struggle to find the equivalents in English.

Even if your students violate the rule of speaking English, do not get angry with them. Gently tell them not to use their native language.

Give more pair work and group work. Most students are comfortable being part of a small group.

Add humor to your presentation and have fun with your students.

Make students sit face-to-face during group discussions. Direct eye contact helps students develop their communication skills. 

3. Engage

The third principle is to ‘engage’. It means to take part in an event or activity. It implies that the teacher should come down to the level of students. It is possible only if he undergoes a paradigm shift and has a positive attitude towards his students and adopts a result-producing approach.

Mingle with your students and participate in activities such as group discussions and role play.

Empathize with learners who need your special attention.

Know your students’ strengths and weaknesses.

Students’ role

The MAP formula is not for the teacher alone (Language mapping is the visualization of linguistic and language-related data in geographic space and, hence, the representation of correlations between geographic and linguistic facts). Students should also adopt the MAP formula for themselves. They should know how to motivate and activate themselves. After recharging themselves they should actively participate in tasks/activities that aim at promoting their communication skills.