Why Minecraft?

This is the second extension to my session prezi on using Minecraft in Bratislava, 1st SKA International EFL Conference:

You might want to know who I am and why you would want to listen to me. I’m a freelance EFL teacher, an edupreneur, if you like, in a very small town in Hungary. Freelancing means that I help anywhere I’m needed (for money). Sometimes I’m needed in the local high school, sometimes I’m needed as a teacher-clown to entertain a group of two-year-olds in English, sometimes I’m needed as a blogger, but who need me really badly are parents whose children don’t do very well at school. What they want me to do is to help struggling children to get better grades in English. And if don’t do well enough, I lose clients.

I wrote ‘struggling’. Perhaps you visualize poor, tired kids who work hard, do their best, spend all their free time hunching over English Grammar in Use, but no use... You may visualize little pale-faced skinny creatures trying to climb the tall ladder of EFL. Well, not really.

Kids who have better sub-skills, natural acquirers don’t struggle. Those whose ability to abstract develops earlier don’t struggle either. They seem to be good ‘learners’, but I would propose it is not the case.

My struggling ones are those who don’t find English progress tests easy, they can’t find meaning in their foreign language instruction a school at all. They can’t see how they might have agency or control over their progress or at least their progress test results. They find their school lessons boring, they see no clear goals (other than better test results). The worst thing is that they don’t see English as a means of communication that will one day open doors for them.

Part of the problem is an imbalanced approach to language instruction in terms of language content, skills development and testing. Teachers follow syllabuses. The syllabuses seem to be tailored to certain coursebooks, coursebooks are chosen by teachers. Teachers choose books that make sense to them, also that provide materials easy to test. What is the easiest thing to test? Grammar, vocabulary.

So What do we have? Syllabuses, outcomes or progress measured by comfy tests, some learners not doing well. What do teachers do? They choose coursebooks that look even simpler, with even clearer grammar and further reduced vocabulary, they focus even more on grammar because that is testable. And guess what? As a result, these typical delinquents do even worse!

Let’s take a closer look at these ‘strugglers’. No, they are not the skinny, pale, fellows who do their best all the time. They are often the cool guys, the ones who can’t sit still, who can’t concentrate, who need constant entertainment, the so called multitaskers, the ones who are often labelled (and often falsely) ADHD. The ones who have been brought up with 100 TV channels and touch-screen devices, the ones who attend after-school classes that range from sailing to hip-hop dance, all organized by for-profit units who compete for the target age group and offer super-fun time.

Do you know what these kids’ problem really is? That syllabus! Seemingly built on CEFR descriptors, but somehow reduced to a grammar-vocab skeleton, which is BOOOOOORING!

Moreover, they see no point, no smart goal, no peer recognition, no agency. They can’t just concentrate and after a time they don’t want to. They are the ones who can’t wait 5 seconds for the video to buffer. Who can’t do only one thing. One of my colleagues has recently said that she lets her students play with the Rubik’s Cube in lessons, in this way they can listen to her. Otherwise they tend to find something  more ‘meaningful’. And let me go back to the word ‘meaningful’ a bit later.

So, for these guys, what they learn in English lessons is not interesting, not inspiring, irrelevant, meaningless, random, annoying. That English has absolutely nothing to do with their own life. Their life is Violetta (a popular soap opera currently on TV) and GTA San Andreas, it’s funny fail videos on YouTube, football, water polo, the Rubik’s Cube, clever magnetic putty, pizza, Lamborghinis and iPhones.

But it makes no difference to the fact that I (the small-town edupreneur) am hired to do something to them that will improve their English GRADES. (My intention to facilitate their becoming competent users of English is often seen as my own hobbyhorse, just my eccentricity.)

So when I meet them in the afternoon, after their 6-7 lessons, the first of which usually starts at 7.45 (this is just to say that I have tired learners and I’d better be entertaining and serve them something cool), I don’t really have the traditional carrot and stick motivation tools, on top of all that I have this personality which means they are everything but in awe of me.

So my strategy is to get that freaking hidden syllabus of merely grammar and vocabulary and put something interesting behind it. Sometimes it’s magic tricks, video projects, cooking, throwing things, in this case it is a game they are familiar with and usually enjoy, something that has meaning and something that might make them want to use English: Minecraft.