Motivation and Discovering Students' Attitudes

Reading through the section and thinking about how to discover which aspects of the English classroom the students like and which ones they do not like as well I had two thoughts:  One, that many of our students are a bit young to just give them a survey and English and expect to get something meaningful out of it, and two, that the parents can be a potential resource for discovering which aspects of English learning the students like and dislike the most.  A thing we can do as teachers is to keep a journal like we discussed today in training with regards to active reflection, and make sure to keep notes on student engagement for different activities in class and compare across time to see if any patterns emerge.  We can then ask ourselves questions about what it is about the activities student's like that keeps them so engaged and what it is about the activities they don't like that is frustrating their desire to learn.  Some potential situations are teachers getting too far from student-centered activities and students tuning out when they can't fully understand a teacher trying to explain grammar, or students having different learning style preferences, and switching activities to accomodate those learners who are not responding well to certain writing or singing activities for example.  Sometimes introducing an element of competition can be engaging for the students but sometimes a couple students may react negatively to more competitive activities and the teacher will need to find more cooperative or at the very least non-confrontational activities so that the students can muster enough confidence enough to fully engage.

I stated above that a straight-up questionnaire may not work for our students, but that doesn't mean we can't get information from them directly by asking the questions, "do you like learning English?" "do you like speaking English?"  "do you like reading English?"  If the answer is yes, no, no then there is something about coming to class and interacting with their peers and teachers that they enjoy, but they may find focusing primarily on the language without the context of a game or activity a boring prospect, or if the first answer is 'no' they may be able to let us know whether it's pressure to learn quickly, or lack of confidence in productive ability, or what have you that is giving them a negative impression.