Sáng kiến kinh nghiệm How to arouse students' interest in learning English

er key of the above game
 3.3.9. Slap the board:
 The teacher can organize the game after presenting the new words so as to help students remember the new words better in a ralaxing way. 
+ The teacher writes the new words or sticks the prepared pictures onto the board.
+ He calls on two groups to go to the board (Each group has four or five students).
+ Each group stands in the same distance.
+The teacher says aloud the words in Vietnamese if the words on the board are in English and vice versa. He says the words in English if using the pictures).
+ The students of the two groups will go to the board and slap the word said aloud.
+The teacher gives marks to the group that can slap the words correctly and more quickly.
+ The groups with more marks will be the winner.
 Find someone who:
+ The teacher writes the table on the board and has students write it on their notebooks
 Sports activities 
 Names
Roller- skate
 Nam
Skip rope
Play soccer
Play basketball
Swim
Play baseball
Roller- blade
Play tennis
The game has been used as the lead-in part of one lesson of Unit 13- TIẾNG ANH 7
+ He has students make yes-no questions for the words in the left column 
(e.g. Can you roller-skate?/ Can you skip rope?)
+ He gives the model with a student by asking the student a question (e.g. Can you roller-skate, Nam?). If the student answer “Yes”, write his name on the column “Names”. 
+ Students go around the class and ask other students to find the names to fill in the table. The names must be different. The student who can fill all the blanks first is the winner.
3.3.11. Simon says:
The teacher designs the game as follows:
+ The teacher says aloud orders. Students just perform the teacher’s orders if the teacher begins with, “Simon says”
+ If the teacher says, “Simon says: stand up”, the students will stand up
+ If the teacher says, “stand up”, the students will not stand up
+ The students who make mistakes will be punished in some funny ways.
3.3.12. Pelmanism:
+The teacher prepares some cards and writes the content that need to be practised on one side of each card (e.g. the content is to practise the verbs of the base form and the past tense form). 
+ He writes 10 verbs of the base form on ten cards and sticks them on the left of the board.Then he writes the past tense form of the verbs on other ten cards and stick them on the right of the board. The side of each card which is blank must be shown.
+ He divides the class into 2 groups and gets each group to choose 2 cards in turn.
+ Each group turns up the chosen cards if they belong to the same verb (e.g. eat – ate), that group will get marks. If not, the group turns down the cards and sticks them on the original positions. The game continues until all the cards are turned up.
+ The groups with more marks will be the winner.
3.3.13. Noughts and crosses:
+ A table of nine squares is drawn. Each square contains a word or a picture.
EX:
Supermarket
Souvenir shop
School
Post office
Bookstore
Village
Hotel
Street
School
+The class is divided into 2 groups: one is “Noughts” (O) and the other is “Crosses” (X)
+The groups choose the words in the squares and make sentences with the words (e.g. There is a post office near my house.)
+ The group with a correct sentence will receive an “O” or an “ X”
+ The group with “O O O” or “X X X” in the same vertical line, diagonal line or horizontal line first will be the winner.
3.3.14. Crossword puzzles:
This is the illustrative example of Unit 7(A1,2)- TIẾNG ANH 6
 3.3.15. “Composing Stories”: 
 This game can be played by the whole class or in groups. The purpose of this game is to cultivate students’ reading comprehension and memory. For example, the teacher delivers ten disordered sentences of a paragraph from a text which students have learned. The winner will be the group who can rearrange them correctly and the fastest.
 3.3.16. Miming:
+ The class is divided into groups.
+ The representatives of the groups will go to the front of the class to mime a job or an action in turn.
+ Each correct answer will be given 1 mark. The group that has the student who mimes and can give the correct answer will be given 2 marks. The group 
with more marks will be the winner. 
 3.3.17. The teacher can also design games which are similar to popular games on television such as “Chung sức”, “Rung chuông vàng”, “Đường lên đỉnh Olympia”, etc. (Instead of using Vietnamese in these games, we will use English)
The following example is the game which is similar to the game “Chung sức”:
+ The teacher divides the class into 2 groups.
+ He says: “I had a survey on 100 students and got 10 answers to this question. If you give one of those answers, you will receive the marks which are equivalent to the numbers of the students giving that answer.”
+The teacher writes on the board:
1. ____________ (20 students)
2. ____________ (17 students)
3. _____________(15 students)
4. ____________ (12 students)
5. _____________(11 students)
6. _____________(9 students)
7. _____________(7 students)
8. _____________(5 students)
9. _____________(3 students)
10. ____________(1 student)
+The representatives of the groups go to the front to slap the board to get the right to answer. 
+ The teacher asks the question: “What do you often do in your free time?”
+ The student who slaps the board first will get the right to answer first. Then each group will give one answer in turn.
Answers:
1. watching television (20 marks)
2. listening to music(17 marks)
 3. chatting on the phone(15 marks)
4. playing computer games(12 marks)
5. going shopping(11 marks)
6. reading books(9 marks)
7. playing sports(7 marks)
8. meeting friends(5 marks)
9. traveling(3 marks)
10. sleeping(1 mark)
+ After all of the ten answers are given, the group with more marks will be the winner.
 3.4. Role play:
 Role play is a way of bringing situations from the real life into the classroom. When teachers organize this classroom activities, they ask students to imagine. They may imagine:
- a role: in other words, they pretend to be a different person (e.g. a dentist)
- a situation: in other words, they pretend to be doing something different (e.g. making a plate of stir-fried beef)
- both a role and a situation (e.g. a dentist asking about a school boy’s toothache).
 In role play, students improvise. The situation is fixed, but they make up the exact words to say as they go along. ( So reading a dialogue aloud is not the same as role play.)
 Role play increases motivation. Always talking about the real life can become dull, and the chance to imagine different situations adds interest to the lesson. Children and even teenagers and adults often imgine themselves in different situations and roles when they play games, so by using role play in class, teachers are building on something that students naturally enjoy.
 When using role play, teachers bear in mind that the situations used for role play should be as far as possible within the experience of their students. In general, the more familiar a role or a situation is, the easier it will be.
 Suitable roles for school classes would be:
 * People familiar to students from everyday life such as parents, brothers, sisters, teachers, shopkeepers, police officers.
 * Characters from the textbook, and from other books or from television.
 Suitable situations:
 * Situations which students see or take part in in everyday life like shopping, going on holidays, using local transports, asking the way to places.
 * “Fantasy” situations from stories they read, or from the textbook.
 3.5. Using Language Lab: 
 To inspire students with great interest, teachers can teach them in a language lab. In fact, there are many benefits of using the lab to teach English, especially in 
teaching speaking and listening. In a language lab, the teacher can easily show a picture, a film, or play a song without taking a lot of time. Besides, the noise from 
films, songs or students’ activities will not cause any trouble for any surrounding classes. In addition, students can enjoy eye-catching pictures with wonderful soundtracks which make them feel much eager and give them more interest in learning the new lesson. For instance, to lead in unit 12/ A1 “TIẾNG ANH 7”, I showed my students a video clip of an English song called “I like the food” and to lead in Unit 13/A3“TIẾNG ANH 6”, I showed my students a video clip of an English song called “My favourite seasons”. After seeing the video clips together with my trasitional words or exercises, my students felt much more interested in getting ready for the new lesson. 
3.6. Using PowerPoint presentations
 PowerPoint presentation can make the class teaching much more interesting. It can help catch students' attention with the help of some vivid and proper pictures or sounds. The interesting sounds and flashes can cheer students up in class. Thus students may be more impressed and remember the vocabulary or the sentence patterns easily and can keep the memory longer.
 PowerPoint presentation is a great way of displaying pictures and linking to movie clips. It does break the monotony in the classroom and adds a variety. Teachers have access to many teaching tools when they can produce lesson plans with PowerPoint. Pictures of vocabulary words and recorded dialogues are just a few of the many features teachers can incorporate into PowerPoint lesson plans to make them engaging and informative to students. 
 Pictures: 
 Teachers could use photographs and clip arts to help explain the meaning of the words which are being taught. Students will have a better understanding of new words if they can see pictures to help them understand the meanings. Teachers should keep these pictures relevant and simple enough. However, there is no need to fill a slide up with photographs to help explain just a few words. 
 Recorded Audio: 
 Teachers can record the pronunciation of new words, dialogues, English songs or listening exercises for students to play at appropriate time during their lesson with a PowerPoint-presented lesson. Students will be able to hear authentic speech during the lesson. Teachers can send their lesson to students after class so that they can review the speech that they heard during the lesson on their own time and repeat it as many times as they think necessary to better understand it. 
 Video: 
 A teacher can put a link to a You Tube video into a lesson if he wants to show a video. For example, if his lesson is about job interviews, he can show a short video on how to act during a job interview. Students can then discuss pre-determined questions the teacher has given, listen to new vocabulary the teacher has pre-taught, or perform their own job interviews after watching the video.
Games:
 I usually used games on PowerPoint and found that students were very interested. They love games all the time, especially those they had seen on TV.
 Teachers can use PowerPoint to create their own games to use in the classroom or they can download them. There are many exciting PowerPoint games on the Internet. For example, I can download teaching games from the web:  There are so many useful games there. After downloading, I can change the contents so that they are suitable for my lesson purpose.
 Using PowerPoint is a good way of teaching. However, there may be some danger in using it. Therefore, teachers should be very careful when making a PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint can help a lot in language teaching and learning as long as the teacher uses it properly.
 3.7. The teacher’s attitudes:
 To make students do their learning, the teacher must encourage his students to feel like learning. This encouragement involves all aspects of a teacher’s roles: a sympathetic attitude, not demanding beyond the students’capabilities, not overcorrecting, praising what has been well done.
 Some teachers always force students to learn their lessons and get angry if they don’t. What’s the use of forcing students to do what they do not like or cannot do?
That just gives students fear, stress and dislike in learning. Teachers should try to create a lively and pleasant classroom atmosphere with a smiling face, sense of humour, a sympathetic attitude, and interesting tasks so that students feel that they love to do their learning. But teachers should not be so easy-going. Sometimes they should be strict to manage students better.
 Some teachers say that their students always make mistakes and they have to correct them all the time. Neither teachers nor students should worry too much about small mistakes. The important thing is that students should understand and be understood. If a student asks the question “You want collect our books?” he should be corrected but at first and more importantly, he should also be praised – ‘Good, Well done”. The teacher should ask the question again so everyone can hear it – “Listen! Do you want to collect our books?”, “Now you ask the question again”, “Good”. In this way the form of the question has been corrected but the student has been given full credit for making himself understood. This method increases the student’s motivation, he will now be keen on trying again and not nervous about making mistakes. 
 The teacher should also give praise to his students even if they make very small progress. Use the encouraging words such as “Good” , “Ok”, “Clever” and use “Try” , “Do your best “, or “ I believe you can do better next time.” which 
can encourage students and help them build self-confidence instead of “No”, “You can’t”. Then the students can learn English harder and harder and get better achievement. Day by day the interest in learning English is brought up, and the students want to learn English self-consciously.
4. Results: 
 In order to see the differences in my students’ interest in learning English before and after using various interesting activities suitably and properly in my lessons, I would like to give out the following results of my surveys of asking the students the questions “Do you like learning English? Why/Why not?”
 * Before the application of the theme: approximatey 60% of my students said they were not keen on learning English because it is a difficult subject,
 * After a period of time of suitably applying various mentioned-above teaching activities, about 85% of my students are saying that they are much more interested in English because the lessons are much more vivid and interesting. Therefore, they have been involved in my lessons. As a result, my students’ results for English subject have been higher. 
 The table below clearly expresses the differences in the students’ understanding of some of my lessons with and without exciting teaching activities
Marks
Using various teaching activities suitably
The results of 45-minute test no. 3 
Not using a suitable combination of teaching activities 
The results of 45-minute test no. 1 
Numbers of students of my two classes 
%
Numbers of students of my two classes
%
9 – 10
4
5
2
2.5
8 – 9
10
12.5
4
5
7 – 8
18
22.5
14
17.5
6 – 7
32
40
8
10
5 – 6
12
15
32
40
Under 5
4
5
20
25
 These were the results of my survey carried out at the beginning of this school year, answering the questions: “Do you like learning English? Why /Why not?”
 These were the results of my survey carried out in March 2015, answering the questions: “Do you like learning English? Why /Why not?”
 III. Conclusion and recommendations:
Conclusion:
 Learning is a personal journey. Teachers are simply guides. Students have to do the traveling. A guide can’t force a tourist to see what he or she doesn’t want to see. Teachers organize a learning environment, but they can’t learn for the students. Students have to do the learning themselves. So teachers should teach essential things that motivate students. Besides, English lessons are like the medicine that students should take. They may still need to be sweetened with the sugar of enjoyment, fun, creativity and a sense of achievement. That is the reason why teachers should create activities that can arouse students’ interest in learning English. It may take plenty of time and energy to do so or teachers can get failure in the first few times. Don’t worry. It is said that “Cultivation of the soil serves ten years’ interest. Cultivation of the mind serves one hundred years’ interest”. And remember the English proverb: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”.
 2. Recommendations:
 2.1. Recommendations to my school and the department of education and training:
- I recommend the department of education and training of Thanh Oai district to hold more sample teaching lessons, using various useful teaching techniques in an artistic way in order to attract students’ enthusiasm in learning English:
- I suggest that the managing board of my school buy more and more materials of methodology for the teachers of the school. As a result, the teachers should have a better chance to develop their job. 
 2.2 . Recommendations to other teachers: 
- In deed, I know that I am not really full of experience in teaching because the number of years I have involved in this job is still far smaller than some of my other colleagues. Therefore, I would need useful comments and supplements from experienced teachers so that my initiative ideas would be much better.
 Sincerely!
 The headmaster’s identification:
 Ha Noi, April 10th, 2015
I am sure that I myself has
written this experiential initiative. 
This document is not 
someone else’s copy.	
 The writer,
 Nguyễn Hồng Hạnh
 REFERENCE BOOKS
 Teach English, a training course for teachers, Adrian Doff, Cambridge University Press in association with The British Council. (1988 )
Teaching English through English, a course in classroom language and techniques, Jane Willis, Longman
 Thiết kế bài giảng TIẾNG ANH 6, TIẾNG ANH 7 
Material from Phạm Tấn, Ho Chi Minh University of Education Department of English.(2006)
ELT Methodolody from Nguyễn Thành Yến, Ho Chi Minh University of Education Department of English.(2000)
Teaching English as a second language, Harold B. Allen, university of Minnesota 
 ENTRIES
 Contents
Pages
I. Problem situation
Reasons for choosing the theme 
 1.1. Rationale of theory
 1.2. Rationale of practice
 1.3. Urgency
 1.4. My ability	
1
 2
2. Purpose of study
2
3. Researched knowledge
2
4. Researched participants
2
5. Ways to conduct the theme
2
6. Time and place for conducting the theme
2
II. Problem solutions
1. Logical basis
3
2. Practical basis
3
3. Some activities to arouse students’ interest in learning English
3
4. Results
28
III. Conclusion and recommendations
Conclusion
33
Recommendations
33
IV. REFERENCE BOOKS 
35
Ý KIẾN NHẬN XÉT, ĐÁNH GIÁ VÀ XẾP LOẠI
CỦA HỘI ĐỒNG KHOA HỌC CƠ SỞ
 Ngày tháng năm 2015
 Chủ tịch hội đồng
 (ký tên, đóng dấu)	 
 Ý KIẾN NHẬN XÉT, ĐÁNH GIÁ VÀ XẾP LOẠI
 CỦA HỘI ĐỒNG KHOA HỌC CẤP TRÊN 
 Ngày tháng năm 2015
 Chủ tịch hội đồng
 (ký tên, đóng dấu)	 
PHÒNG GDĐT HUYỆN THANH OAI CỘNG HÒA XÃ HỘI CHỦ NGHĨA VIỆT NAM
 Độc lập- Tự do- Hạnh phúc 
 BIÊN BẢN CHẤM VÀ XÉT DUYỆT SÁNG KIẾN KINH NGHIỆM
Tên SKKN: “How to arouse students’ interest in learning English”
Tác giả:
Môn: Tiếng Anh 
Đánh giá của Hội đồng chấm (Ghi tóm tắt những đánh giá chính):
 Tính sáng tạo: ./ 4 điểm
 Tính KH, SP : ./ 4 điểm
 Tính hiệu quả: ./ 6 điểm
 Tính phổ biến, ứng dụng: ./ 6 điểm
Xếp loại: ..
( Xếp loại A: Từ 17 đến 20 điểm
 Xếp loại B: Từ 14 đến < 17 điểm
 Xếp loại C: Từ 10 đến < 14 điểm
 Không xếp loại: < 10 điểm)
Người chấm 1 Người chấm 2 Ngày tháng năm 2015
(Ký, ghi rõ họ tên) (Ký, ghi rõ họ tên) Chủ tịch Hội đồng xét duyệt