Using Twitter to increase motivation in adolescent ESL students

Since starting my new job teaching at a senior high school in September I've been thinking of ways to increase the students' overall motivation to learn English. I would not say that motivation is a problem at my school (thankfully!) but I'm up for anything that might give them that extra bit of interest. Many of my students are avid text messagers so I'm wondering if they might be ripe for an introduction to Twitter. 

Many ESL teachers already use regular blogs as a teaching aid and as a way of connecting with their students. There aren't that many teachers using Twitter at the moment and most of those are using it to connect with other ESL teachers and to post links to their ESL blog or site. (I've recently started following Chris Cotter of Heads Up English and Sean of EFL Geek 3.0 and I'm discovering more all the time.)  I've found all sorts of useful things by browsing ESL teachers' Twitter pages, but there doesn't seem to be much information out there about how ESL learners might be able to use Twitter.  I teach roughly 250 students a week. I think it would be pretty cool if I could get a proportion of them regularly posting tweets to each other in English, either from their phones (not in class!) or from the web. 

At present I have not really decided the best way to introduce Twitter to the students. I think I will do it in stages and gauge the students response as I go along. The first step will be to give them a quick survey about how they use the Internet and mobile phones. Then I will start a group blog so that I can post stuff that we've done in class as well as related material. As part of their homework each week I will ask students to post at least one photo (or link, video, etc.) on a given topic with a few lines of text and to leave a comment on another students' post. 

I am hoping the group blog will generate quite a few conversations on and offline and provide the starting point for a little expedition into Twitterland. Twitter would therefore be an extension of the group blog. Now it may well be that the students will simply not be all that interested in microblogging in English but I guess we won't know that until we give it a try. 

Wish me luck! If anyone has any experience using Twitter, or blogs in general, with adolescent ESL students, please leave a comment or contact me via Twitter/naruwan.

Chinese-language Taiwan blog: "Teacher Kuo"

All right , not technically a blog as promised, but the personal website of Kuo Chang-Chung ( 郭長成 ) a teacher at Chiayi Commercial Senior High School. I stumbled across this site quite by chance. Lucky find!

What it is:

A huge collection of photos taken by Teacher Kuo of trips he has taken with his students around Taiwan going back to 1998, as well as pictures of steam trains, plants, animals, temples and much more besides.

Click around and you'll turn up a lot of pictures of his students doing mundane things like sitting at computer terminals or being presented with awards and such like, BUT, and it's a big BUT, you'll also find plenty of interest, such as pictures of watermelon eating contests, people shelling snails complete with newspaper article about someone who got intestinal worms from eating under-cooked snails, a military air show at a base in Chiayi, a burning methane pond, and as mentioned above steam trains. Kuo is quite a steam train enthusiast in fact. Plenty more shots in the 四、我愛火車 section here. There's also a truly excellent collection of photos of animals and plants which just on its own would make for an impressive website.

Read his lengthy biographical details here. I love series of photos that show kids growing up from toddlers to young adults. Funny thing is, Kuo starts rather on the, er, tubby side and gets progressively trimmer as the years go by. Good for him!

I'll finish up with one of a superb series of shots of baby Malayan night herons (?).