Sáng kiến kinh nghiệm Enhancing students’ engagement through personalized activities

NGHEAN DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING 
 NAM DAN 1 HIGH SCHOOL 
 TEACHING EXPERIENCE 
 ENHANCING 
 STUDENTS’ ENGAGEMENT 
 THROUGH PERSONALIZED ACTIVITIES 
(TĂNG CƯỜNG SỰ THAM GIA CỦA HỌC SINH 
 THÔNG QUA CÁC HOẠT ĐỘNG CÁ NHÂN) 
 Field: Foreign language 
 Subject: English 
 Writer: Phan Thị Vinh 
 Group: Literature - English 
 Year of experiment: 2022 - 2023 
 Cellphone: 0919568682 
 PART 1 INTRODUCTION 
I. RATIONALE 
 English is becoming increasingly vital in our modern life. It is not simply a 
compulsory subject in the national curriculum, but also plays a key role in 
preparing students for integrating with the English speaking world. Therefore, 
teachers are making every effort to innovate the teaching methods to achieve the 
goals of the new curriculum, one of which is to ensure that students will be able to 
use English as a means of communication at a certain level of proficiency in four 
macro skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. 
 However, it can easily be seen from the result of GCSE examination every 
year that this expected outcome for English learners seems to be far-fetched as the 
majority of high school students are found to be at very low level of English 
proficiency. Numerous reasons may be to blame for this problem. Firstly, students 
of all grades, especially high school students have struggled to meet the 
requirements of the new curriculum. Not only do they have to be good at grammar, 
vocabulary well enough to pass the GCSE examination but they also have to 
master the four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The more they feel 
overwhelmed, the less they are motivated to engage in the lessons. Moreover, 
when working in pairs or in groups, frequently used activities in most of English 
lessons, more advanced learners tend to participate more actively while weaker 
learners seem to be too dependent on them to complete the task. In other words, the 
stronger students even dominate whereas the weaker ones do not even try, which 
may result in their frustration, boredom, loss of concentration or disruptive 
behaviors. 
 For these reasons, it is important for the teacher to encourage students to be 
aware of their responsibilities and actively involved in all activities. Learning is a 
fluid activity, no student learns the same way or at the same pace. Personalized 
activities empower each student to take responsibility for their learning, which 
means that they will spend more time learning and actually absorb the materials. 
Therefore, it will also enhance and improve their engagement. Additionally, 
greater engagement also leads to high levels of motivation within students. This 
motivation will also prevent distractions, disengagement from learning materials, 
and overall poor performance in their studies. 
 From the reasons above, I have seen the need to create personalized 
activities to enhance students’ motivation and engagement and therefore would 
like to do a research entitled: “Enhancing students’ engagement through 
personalized activities” 
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 PART 2 CONTENT 
I. THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL BACKGROUND 
1. What is a personalized activity? 
 A teacher can group their students in many different ways. One option is to 
have the students work alone. A large amount of research early on 
personalized or individualized productivity with various conclusion. Johnson 
and Johnson (1984) defined personalized work as a concept: pupils have to 
―work independently on their own learning goals at their own pace and in 
their own space to achieve a preset criterion of excellence‖. The task bases on 
the acquisition of simple skills or knowledge or on specific facts. No 
interdependence is supposed to occur among students and they all expect to be 
left alone by their classmates, every leaner has his/her own separated space; 
therefore, the teacher is the main assistant, each student has the needed material at 
his/her own disposal. The evaluation implies some objectives that any pupil can 
reach individually. The term can be used to speak about a product (e.g. a personal 
production), an activity (e.g. an individualized exercise), a moment (e.g. period 
of separation during group activities) or a situation (e.g. working on your own). 
2. Benefits of personalized activities in foreign language teaching and 
learning. 
 ―All students can learn and succeed, but not in the same way and not in the 
same day‖ Spady, W. (2005). I have been considering this quotation as a principle 
applied to students in my classrooms. According to this quote, what works best for 
some students may not always be the most effective approach. As a result, many of 
them may give up trying because of considering themselves not being ―good at‖ 
certain subjects. Simply lecturing and then assigning homework from the textbook 
likely will not reach the vast majority of our students. Students not only learn in 
different ways, but they learn at different rates. Some students learn concepts 
easily the first time around, while others require more time and attention. 
Therefore, if we really want no child to be left behind, we need to focus on making 
changes in teaching methods rather than placing much emphasis on standardized 
tests. For these reasons, personalized activities can be a great help for teachers. 
 Personalized or individualized activities help students to develop the 
capacity to learn without always relying on others. This can lead to some sense of 
learner autonomy, which is a critical goal of many teachers. As students rely on 
their own resources, it strengthens them in learning to work on their own. 
Moreover, these activities allow teachers to create students’ individual profiles and 
work out measures to improve their grades. After a noisy whole-class or group 
project experience, individual work can be used as a classroom efficient tool for 
students to reinforce and evaluate their knowledge. 
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 claimed the aim of personalized learning is to help them meet their ―potential,‖ and 
to ―educate the whole child‖. To do this, the Hanover Research Group (2012) 
placed a strong emphasis on the application of technology to enhance the learning 
opportunities in personalized language practice as it supports personalized learning 
in three distinct ways. Firstly, technology allows students to utilize interactive, 
innovative teaching software to learn at their own pace. Secondly, it enables 
assessment and monitoring of student progress in real-time. Finally, this can be 
used as a tool to give students the opportunity to increase engagement with class 
materials and enables learning to take place at any time, from anywhere. 
Technology associated with personalized learning is readily used as a teaching tool 
to increase student motivation and achievement (Brookfield, 2017). 
 With the help of advanced technology, there’s been a rise in the number of a 
free websites which provides learning tools for students including game modes or 
online assignments such as Khahoot, Quizziz, Quizlet, liveworksheet, Wordwall, 
etc. Thanks to these wonderful modern educational tools, we can create our own 
language practices, which allow each individual student to review the targeted 
language in an exciting way. They provide an engaging way for students of all ages 
to study essential lesson materials while remaining active participants. We have a 
number of choices; however, in order not to make it so confusing for students, I 
chose two among these websites: Wordwall.net and liveworksheet.com. 
  Wordwall games 
 Wordwall is an interactive activity maker which allows teachers to make 
dynamic interactive games and educational activities. You can use them on an 
interactive whiteboard, or just with a projector. Wordwall can be used to create 
both interactive and printable activities. Interactives are played on any web-
enabled device, like a computer, tablet, phone or interactive whiteboard. They can 
be played individually by students, or be teacher-led with students taking turns at 
the front of the class. Pintables can be printed out directly or downloaded as a PDF 
file. They can be used as a companion to the interactive or as stand-alone activities. 
There are currently 30 templates available for free and over 30 types of games and 
activities for upgraded account, with every one of them fully customizable with 
your own content. 
 The following are free Wordwall games and their description: 
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 Wordwall activities can be used as student-completed assignments. When a 
teacher sets an assignment, students are linked to that one activity without the 
distraction of visiting the main activity page. This feature can be used in-class 
where students have access to their own devices, or as a way of setting homework. 
Each student's results are recorded and made available to the teacher. 
 Summary of students’ results 
 Steps to apply Wordwall games: 
Step 1: Access the website: https://wordwall.net/ 
Step 2: 
- Click “Sign up” with your email address to register. 
- Click “Log in” with your email, or name if you have signed up. 
Step 3: Click “Create Activity” to create the new task. 
Step 4: Choose the game type you prefer 
Step 5: 
- Design the questions by typing or inserting a picture. 
- Click “Add more questions‖ to continue. 
Step 6: Click “Done” to complete the quiz. 
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Step 8: Click “Copy” and send it to your students. 
Step 9: Click “My result” to see students’ performance. 
  Live worksheet 
 Liveworksheets is a tool that allows you to transform your traditional 
printable worksheets (doc, pdf, jpg...) into interactive online exercises with self-
correction, which we call "interactive worksheets". Students can do the worksheets 
online and send their answers to the teacher. This is motivating for the students, 
saves a lots of time for the teacher and friendly for the environment as it saves a 
huge amount of paper. 
 Additionally, the interactive worksheets take full advantage of the new 
technologies applied to education since they may include sounds, videos, drag and 
drop exercises, join with arrows, multiple choices... and even speaking exercises, 
that the students must do using the microphone. You can use liveworksheets to 
make your own interactive worksheets or you can use the ones shared by other 
teachers. This websites has a collection of thousands of interactive worksheets that 
cover lots of languages and subjects. 
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 For example, for multiple choice questions: draw a box -> type : choose:*A/B/C/D 
(put a * before the right answer) 
For gap filling exercises: draw a box -> type the answer 
If you want more detailed instructions, follow this link: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5AM_qToJyc 
Step 6: Click “Custom link” and then send it to your students 
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