A popular term among the foreign teaching community in China is “white monkey”. It basically refers to the emphasis that many schools put in having foreign teachers entertain kids, with actual education being a distant second. Many teachers resent having to “entertain”, since learning English is not always a rollercoaster ride. But that doesn’t mean your lessons have to be all mind-numbing grammar exercise from a book. Today I’m going to share some basic in-class ways of striking a balance between fun and informative classes when teaching English in China.

Use short media clips  

The cliché of the teacher who doesn’t care showing their students movies all day has attached some undue stigma to using videos in class. However, short media clips can make an English lesson more engaging while providing a great many benefits to the students.
A. You can use short clips of TV shows to help build the context in which the vocabulary you’ve introduced is used.
B. You can create skimming listening practices with animated short stories or segments of classic shows.
C. You can use video to tailor your lessons to a specific student or students with certain areas of interest.
D. You can expose students to slang, native pronunciation and idioms they wouldn’t normally see in ESL textbooks.
E. You can use videos as part of a game or quiz to make sure the students understand the target vocabulary.
These are a few of the simplest suggestions of how to use video to make your lessons more engaging when teaching English in China, but the keyword for all of them is “short”. Anything longer than five minutes will defeat the purpose of having a teacher in the room in the first place.

Gap-fills with popular songs

Another quick and easy way to make a lesson more engaging is the use of songs. A quick internet search and editing session of a sheet of lyrics makes for an easy gap-fill that can help the students with their listening, introduce target language and tap into native speaking culture.

Also, everyone loves karaoke in China, so why not have the students sing along? This helps to relieve the boredom of listening to horrible specially-constructed ESL dialogues.

Be mindful of your students’ level when picking songs, however. A fast-paced rap or incomprehensible metal tune might make their heads explode.

Kinesthetics

This is a buzzword that people love to throw around to prove they’re modern and professional teachers. It basically means “movement”, the idea being that if you can incorporate some form of movement into your lessons, it will help engage students with different learning styles. Whether or not this is true I can’t say, but I can speak to the effectiveness of adding movement to lessons, especially for younger kids.

The most common type of kinesthetics used in english lessons for kids are games, but there are even simpler ways if you don’t have time, are teaching an older crowd or simply hate games (you monster).
A. Have your students answer questions by standing up to write on the board.
B. Have teams brainstorm ideas on the board.
C. Choose students to answer questions by having them throw a ball to each other.
D. Have partners stand to talk and rotate multiple partners in a line.
The only limit is your imagination, but even something as simple as throwing a ball for answering dry grammatical questions can take your lesson from bland to fun. At the very least, you can watch students who don’t pay attention get hit in the face with a ball.

The challenges and benefits of group work

To teach some topics, a lecture-based method is required. However, language is a skill and therefore requires practice in order to develop. Thus, partner and group work represent a great opportunity for students to practice.

You can turn anything into group work, from reading to answering questions. You can also extend this even further to set entire classes or semester-long projects based off group-work, depending on the age and level of your students. This allows students to use the language they’ve learnt to solve problems without the all-knowing eye of the teacher bearing down on them. It can also help develop student confidence.

However, there are a few drawbacks to this method when teaching English in China. One is that group work can be time consuming if you have a large number of students or class-management issues. The other is that, especially younger learners in China, will have close to no experience doing partner or group work, as neither are commonly used in a normal Chinese curriculum.

This can often lead to the students staring at each other vacantly waiting for someone to do all the work for them or, worse yet, students refusing to work with each other because “they don’t like their team”. Despite these drawbacks, it’s totally worth it, especially if your students are going to study abroad, since partner and group work are integral to Western university, as well as later professional, life.

Roleplaying 

Just yelling “Make a sentence!” in front of your class often freaks out lower level or shy speakers, increases the amount of teacher talking time and decreases participation for the rest of the class. That’s where roleplaying comes in.

The teacher creates a situation, whether it’s greeting a new student or buying fruit, which helps create context and a reason for using the target language of your lesson. Roleplaying also lends itself to partner and group work, with all the benefits stated above, and is a great last activity at the end of a class.

You now have all the basics to go out and turn your classes into a wonderland of engaging educational experiences. Go forward and shape the minds of China’s budding English speakers!

Any more tips for making lessons more engaging when teaching English in China? Drop them in the comments box below…

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