3702. How to Get Your Students Pull Their Chestnuts Out of the Fire - Some Hints

 I teach English to adults, but what I’m telling you today I guess it could be also applied to teens. 

I just said I teach English, and it’s so, but also I ought to help my students learn that wonderful language. It’s thus because it’s them who ultimately have to learn English, or French, or … 

More often now than before I tell my students that they have to be very active at learning English, as old H. D. Brown said (1989). Say, it’s them who have to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. We also in Spanish use that phrase, to pull your chestnuts out of the fire. 

I’m not going to do it myself. Better said, I should not do it myself. 

Sometimes when at the end of each lesson I assign some homework, I tell them they can do this and this but also they could do that, just if they wish to do. It’s them who have to feel what they need most, what they have to do to advance at learning English. 

Moreover, about the graded readers or unabridged novels we read, work, and discuss about, I tell them they may read at their own pace – I have learned quite much English by reading on my own, and Stephen Krashen, old Stephen Krashen, said that you may learn a lot of lexis and grammar just by reading books. Well you also have to practice the other language skills, listening, speaking, and writing. 

They have to work on their own, the more they do, the more they’ll advance. 

Also because we teachers cannot be super-protectors, yet in class we have to set things clear: speaking and explaining things in clear English, a bit above the students’ level. 

The ball is on their roof, they’ve got to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. 

At the beginning of the school year, and ever, you teacher can say to your learners: I may sometimes not specify what is expected from you or what you have to do, but something you must do, ok? 

Even sometimes you teacher might not give all the bite munched – they have to use their teeth, they have to draw their own conclusions. And we can in some way monitor them at this latter point. And they usually give a positive response, believe me. Have a nice day.

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