Making Writing Relevant: LearnEnglishTeens

What students learn—and how they grow—is largely controlled by trillions of neural connections in their brain, a brain making and insurmountable amount of decisions every second. One of those decisions? Whether or not what they are being told is useful. Nobel-prize winning immunologist George Edelman, in his research, has compared the human brain to a harsh “jungle,” in which only information deemed useful and relevant survives (Slavkin 2004).

In my cooperating teacher’s and my classes, our students are constantly asking us, “Why are we doing this?,” or sharing that they believe they will never use the information they are learning. Students have told me they are not going to college, are going to be in the NFL, and even that they are going to be a Youtube Star and thus do not need to know how to write. How can I make writing relevant for today's students?

One tool is the website LearnEnglishTeens, which contains a number of activities to help students improve their writing and reading comprehension. What makes LearnEnglishTeens so useful is that it provides relevant and current examples. Its articles for reading comprehension talk about current events, internet phenomena, or teen culture. Its writing samples are blog posts, cover letters, website reviews, and emails—all styles of writing that today's students will be able to understand, even if they do not go to college or enter a writing-heavy career. Students might not be need to write a persuasive essay in their future job, but they will need to write a cover letter, which has a lot of the same elements as a persuasive essay.

LearnEnglishTeens is excellent because it has optional quizzes, fill-in-the-blank activities, and activities to check for comprehension or to practice skills at the end of each article or writing sample. Each article or writing sample also contains a comments section so that students can comment on the articles, ask questions, or post writing brief writing examples. LearnEnglishTeens is also helpful for ELL students and struggling writers, as many of its writing exercises contain sentence frames. Additionally, LearnEnglishTeens provides a free diagnostic test that determines a student’s “level” of English proficiency, so that they can select articles and exercises appropriate for their level.

References

LearnEnglishTeens.britishcouncil.org

Slavkin, M. L. (2004). Authentic learning. Maryland: Scarecrow Education.