MOTIVATION & LEARNING

If we go back to the question of learning styles, you may find interesting to have a look at these motivating activities which suit to different kinds of learners. 

• Visual learners. They learn best by looking. They enjoy reading (and often prefer to see the words they are learning) and seeing pictures. So, a good activity for them would be to create a comic. In this activity, students have to write a new dialogue for short comic strips. Teachers take a black and white, three-panel comic strip and use white out to remove the current dialogue. Then, they make copies of several strips for their students and ask them to write a new dialogue. Students should remember to make the dialogue consistent with the pictures in each panel. Teachers can post all the new dialogues and allow their class to vote for their favourites. 
• Auditory learners. They learn best by listening. They work well with spoken instructions and learn quickly by listening to stories and songs. They will not need to see written words to learn. 
  
  Taking this information into account, teachers can show a Power Point story with audio narrative, for example, "Hamlet". Students listen to a short version of "Hamlet" and after checking that pupils have understood the play, they are assigned a character who has to be represented in front of the class.
• Kinaesthetic learners: They learn physically by moving around. For this reason, they are better suited to activities with Total Physical Response. As kinaesthetic learners are great at "doing", teachers could teach action verbs and their imperative form to these active learners by doing the action themselves. So, for this activity teachers prepare passages which include several imperative sentences and write the individual sentences on strips of paper. These can be conversations, sets of instructions or recipes.
  

  

  A conversation could start off like this: "Be quiet! I think I hear something. Come here. I heard it again! Listen carefully!". Students work in groups and each group should be given the strips of paper to complete one passage and work together to place sentences in the correct order. Since each group has a different passage, it may be fun to have students share and represent their passages to the class when the activity has been completed.