How To Explain English Concepts to Students from North Carolina Lifestyle Blogger Adventures of Frugal Mom

Explaining literary devices to students, and keeping them engaged, can be a difficult task. There are a couple of different approaches you can use as well as different assignments and activities you can choose to help you make your point in a way that helps every student learn. The more diverse your students, the harder it can be to find just one approach that works for everyone. This means that you will need to find the right way to explain the concept that caters to your students and helps all of you have fun with learning.

Choosing an Approach

The best way to approach a problem is from multiple angles, this holds true in teaching literary devices and English concept as well. You can take a direct approach by telling students the definition of a literary term and then ask them to identify examples in a sample test. You can also take the approach of turning it into a game. For instance, if you are studying irony, then you can see which students can pick out the most examples of each type of ironic statement in songs and other media.

Catering to Your Students

There are seven main ways that students learn including visual, physical and solitary. Knowing these learning styles and how to apply them to teaching your students can make all the difference. The smaller your class size, the easier it can be to cater teaching to how your students learn; however, you can incorporate a number of the most common learning styles into your everyday lessons without having to spend too much time on any one subject. For instance, you can use verbal teaching techniques with slides and a lecture, add aural teaching with a relevant song and social learning techniques by dividing the class into small study groups for an activity.

Having Fun With It

The more fun you have with lessons, the more engaged your students are. This can help them learn difficult concepts without realizing that they are putting in the brain work. Many teachers will start class with a writing prompt, reading section or even a pop quiz, but what if you started your class with a game. For instance, you can have a reading section on the screen and hand out bingo cards with literary devices on them. Your students could then fill in their cards based on the reading and earn points without realizing that you just quizzed them.

Another way to have fun with teaching literary devices is to make it relevant to pop culture. This can look like letting students choose a favorite song or movie to dissect, playing songs in class as examples and much more.

Literary devices and other English writing concepts are very important for your students to learn for a variety of reasons, but they are not always easy to teach. By choosing the correct approaches, catering lessons to your students and having fun with it, you can better engage your students. You can find resources online to help you make the most of every lesson and incorporate a variety of activities to help make it fun to learn.