Five ways to promote friendship in your English language classroom

Pearson Languages
a young boy and a young girl sat at desks in a classroom, smiling and looking at another child in front of them

There is a strong link between well-being and friendship, which is just as accurate for children as it is for adults. Studies have found that children with stable friendships are happier, more able to cope with stress, and have higher self-esteem. Moreover, school friendships impact academic achievement too, and children who experience friendship adjust more easily to school and perform better academically. School friendships are also a valuable way of learning social skills like sharing, resolving conflict, and engaging with peers positively.

Having friends is an important part of school life, and teachers can play a significant role in creating a positive classroom culture and helping children and young people to form friendships. How can you promote friendships between your students? Here are some ideas:

1. Make friendship a central theme in your classes

If there is an example of a good friendship in a book you are reading with students or in your lesson materials, draw your students’ attention to it. For instance, The Jungle Book is an excellent example of a story about friendship. Encourage your students to think critically about the friendships that they read about. You can ask questions like:

  • What are some things a good friend does?
  • What are the qualities of a good friend?
  • What words do you associate with friendship?

By discussing friendship regularly in the classroom, your students will learn about the behavior and characteristics of being a good friend.

2. Create opportunities for interaction

You can create lots of opportunities for students to build friendships with one another during class time. Design activities that call for pair or group work, and include at least one or two in every lesson. Focusing on a common goal or problem is a great way to encourage your students to bond with one another. As a bonus, this collaborative way of working promotes important 21st century skills like communication and problem-solving.

Another way of promoting friendships between different groups of students is moving them around. Adjust your seating plan regularly to ensure that all your students interact with and work alongside different classmates, to promote positive, friendly classroom vibes.

3. Discuss and model good behavior

Friendship is a social skill that children need to learn – and you can help by teaching them. Be explicit about exactly what you expect from them. Saying, “Be kind” is an abstract, vague concept that children might struggle to put into practice. Instead, give them concrete examples of behavior, such as:

  • take turns when playing
  • speak respectfully
  • share pens or other resources

When you see a student engaging in these behaviors, draw attention to them and praise them.

But to really convey the importance of school friendships and kind behavior, it’s not enough to tell them. As the teacher, you must model the behavior you’d like to see in your students. Be consistently positive and upbeat in your interactions with students, thank your learners when they offer help with something, and try to refrain from sounding impatient (even when you are!). All these steps will help to build a positive classroom culture where students feel secure, supported and happy.

4. Help to navigate difficult situations

Conflict is an inevitable part of school life, but you can help students to navigate arguments and other difficult situations in the classroom. If two students argue, you can help them to resolve it with the following steps:

  • Separate the students to give them time to calm down.
  • Have a conversation with them. Ask for their perspective on the conflict, and find out how their day has been in general. Sometimes, you can better understand a student’s reaction when you look at the bigger picture. Ask them how they feel, and how they could resolve the situation.
  • Bring the students together again to discuss things and find a resolution together. Reconciliation is the goal.

Following these simple steps teaches children a framework for resolving conflict and gives them the tools to process strong emotions.

5. Do some friendship-focused activities

An excellent way to promote a positive classroom culture is to do friendship-focused activities with your students:

You could do a Venn diagram activity, where students work in pairs to discuss and write down things they have in common and areas of difference. It’s good to pair students who don’t spend much time together for this activity.

Another positive activity is a 'Honey Roast'. Give students enough squares of paper to have one for each of their classmates. Get them to write their classmates’ names on the paper, and then, on the other side, write down a compliment or something they like about that person, for example, “I like your handwriting”, or “You always use kind words”. Collect the pieces of paper and read out some nice examples to the class. Alternatively, give them directly to the students to read to themselves.

More blogs from Pearson

  • Children sat at desks at computers in a classroom

    21st-century skills and the English language classroom

    By Pearson Languages

    Are you teaching in a 21st-century classroom? Chances are, If you are an English educator working in the classroom today, you have already moved well ahead of your peers and colleagues teaching math, science, and good old-fashioned grammar. Now that you know you are a 21st-century teacher, what does that mean? And how do you know if you have moved ahead of the curve to embrace what we call 21st-century skills?

    Actually, "21st-century skills" is a bit of a misnomer. The prized skills of this age have existed in teaching and learning as long as we have been teaching and learning. In a modern-day class, Socrates and Aristotle would feel right at home (although maybe underdressed).

    The phrase itself is meant to imply a classroom ready for the upcoming STEM needs of employment that will allow for innovation, development and significant advances across tech and non-tech industries. Yet, the skills themselves do not imply a highly technological classroom. A modern 21st-century class can be a surprisingly low-budget place.

    It can be summarized by the 4Cs:

    • Communication
    • Critical Thinking
    • Creativity
    • Collaboration

    Reading through this list, you may think, "Hey, those are my classroom goals as an English language teacher!" Finally, the rest of the world has caught up with the modern English language classroom. Of course, when describing these skills, we aren't just talking about teaching English, but skills that can be used to prepare learners for the modern age. This means we want our students to be able to:

    • Perform independently and with groups in a highly technologically advanced atmosphere.
    • Be ready for daily, global interaction.
    • Be capable of adaptive, flexible and creative thinking.
    • Understand how to plan for, build, and include collaboration with peers who are colleagues and experts in the field.

    Students and 21st-century skills

    This goes a bit above and beyond the basics of the walls of the English language classroom. And yet, preparing our students for the 21st century doesn't require a classroom resembling a science fiction movie set. Several teachers have proved that you can embed these skills by utilizing the most important resource available in the classroom.

    Your students.

    Sergio Correra is an inspired young teacher at the Jose Urbina Lopez Primary School on the US Border with Mexico. After a year of teaching uninspired curriculum to disengaged students, he returned to the drawing board. He spent time researching ways to improve student engagement and performance and stumbled across exciting research that could be boiled down to one question: Why? Or rather, getting students to ask the question: "Why?" At the beginning of his next school year, he arranged the desk in a circle, sat his students down and asked: "What do you want to learn about?".

    Using this as the jumping-off point, he encouraged students to ask questions, seek out more information, and find more questions to answer.

    Over the next year, he saw his students' test scores rise, the engagement and enthusiasm improved and he received approval from his principal and fellow educators. With few resources and limited access to technology, he found his students shifting from the lowest testing group in the nation to being ranked among the highest for their performance on standardized tests in the country. One of his students was the highest-performing maths student in the country.

    Mr. Correra was inspired by research and reports based on the work of the Indian educator Sugata Mitra. The principle behind Mr. Mitra's approach is to drive student's curiosity by letting them carry out their own learning. In one of his most famous examples, he walked into a classroom in India with computers loaded with information. He explained to the students, now curious about the big shining boxes that held inside something interesting.

    And then he left the students to it.

    In the course of a year, students had taught themselves everything from English to molecular biology, all without the guidance of a teacher. Rather, they were driven by their natural curiosity, playing off of each other's discoveries to go farther and learn more. Embodying what it means to be self-guided, innovative, collaborative and curious learners.

    Keeping your curriculum up to date

    These students who were given freedom are much more likely to ask questions out of curiosity, motivate themselves and learn without guidance. And while this may be wonderful for learners, this isn't exactly helpful for teachers. To get to the 21st-century skills and inspire motivation, do we have to throw away our syllabus and books and trust only in our learners to motivate themselves?

    Fortunately for those of us who have chosen a career in education, that is not the case. We as educators can take lessons from Mr. Correra and Mr. Mitra and use these as a way to inspire interest and engagement in our own classroom while building these skills in our learners.

    As language teachers, it's a matter of blending the 4Cs more thoughtfully into a student-centered classroom where learners can engage in high-interest content that is relevant, useful, and promotes innovation.

    Take your average prepositions lesson as an example. Even in the best communicative classroom, a teacher may still spend time explaining the rules, setting up the activity and delivering instruction. By applying the 4Cs we can turn this lesson a bit more on its head, making a typical ELL grammar lesson magical.

    For example:

    Collaborate: Start by handing out magazines or picture books. Have the students work together and choose a picture.

    Communication, critical thinking, and creativity: Ask your students to work together to create two ways to give directions. One set of directions for a student who is blind. Another set of directions for a student who is deaf.

    Encourage students to think outside the box and think about ways to give directions using a computer, a mobile phone, a television, or a YouTube video. While there may be some L1 use in the classroom, the goal is for the final product to be in English. Stand back and watch your learners go.

    Another way to engage with 21st-century skills using a typical ELL lesson: the "What's your favorite food lesson?" At some point, we have all experienced it.

    Collaborate: In groups, have students create a survey to assess classroom interest in 10 different foods representing different types of meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert).

    Communication: Once finished, have learners use the information to create a pie or bar graph to communicate the results and determine which meals are the favorite.

    Critical thinking: Have the students compare their answers with answers from other groups. How many differences are there in the reporting? Is the information consistent with the same foods or does it change drastically? Have students compare their results with other teams. Then ask the groups to create a short written or spoken piece to explain how their results differed from other students.

    Creativity: Using the information collected from the class and after analyzing data from other students, have groups work together to create an advertising campaign that will make the foods that students liked least into foods students may like more. For example, if the survey said that most students did not like kim-chi-chigae for breakfast, the group would need to work together to create an advertising campaign to make kim-chi-chigae seem like a tasty choice for breakfast. To do this students should consider what makes certain foods more popular in the class.

    This may require further follow-up interviewing to find out why students like one thing and not another; this information can then be used in the campaign. This lesson may play out over a few days, but in the end, everyone involved will have gotten much more out of the lesson than they had anticipated.

    Both of these examples represent the use of skills in the ELL classroom. Each lesson also embeds, in one way or another, critical STEM skills.

    In the preposition lesson, the students may use engineering and technology to find a better way to give directions. In our favorite foods lesson, students engage with science (and a bit of sociology) and mathematics. Altogether it becomes a rounded classroom experience where teachers have an active role as facilitators and students become inspired, self-guided learners who still manage to work inside of the confines of the curriculum.

    In the end, 21st-century skills, and using them in the classroom is not really about teaching at all. These skills are truly ones that will spell success for our learners in the future, leading them to be capable, Independent and curious individuals.

    Our real challenge as educators is to model a desire to embrace the known, the unknown, and the just plain unknowable. As Alwin Toffler, writer and futurist, put it: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

  • A woman standing at a whiteboard in a office with two others sat down.

    How to bring soft skills into the business English classroom

    By Pearson Languages

    Anyone who’s ever taught a business English class knows that their students are busy people. Sometimes they get sidetracked by their other tasks - even during class. This means we have to make the most of the time we have with our learners and focus on what they really need.

    How you do this depends on the sector your students work in (or plan to work in), their previous experiences studying English and their own strengths and weaknesses.

    Teachers often focus on teaching hard skills, such as writing reports or running meetings. We do this because it can be challenging for many business students to do these things in English and also because hard skills have an immediate and positive impact on their workdays.

    But, if there’s one thing that all business people can benefit from, it’s soft skills.

    Soft skills are interpersonal or people skills. They include things like active listening, teamwork, decision-making and influencing skills. Mastering these skills will help students progress more rapidly and become more independent learners. However, isolating the specific vocabulary or grammar structures that these skills use is complex and they often get overlooked in language learning classes as a result.  

  • University graduates in robes taking a group photo

    How an education degree can help you work anywhere in the world

    By Pearson Languages

    Are you thinking about embarking on a career in education? If so, you’ll be opening the door to an entire world of possibilities. An education degree can help you to work anywhere in the world, making it one of the most rewarding career paths you can choose. In this blog, we’ll delve deeper into just how this field of study can broaden your horizons more than you ever thought possible.

    Why choose an education degree?

    Without teachers, there are a lot of valuable life lessons that we just wouldn’t learn. Of course, learning isn’t just limited to the classroom, but educated teachers seem to consistently have the most impact on young people all over the world. This potential to change young lives is what makes studying for a teaching career desirable for many.

    Studying education will also enable you to work from anywhere that you like, as teaching jobs are widely available across the world. The opportunity to teach English to second-language learners in particular can be found in even the most remote locations. Teaching abroad frequently comes with perks, too, including free accommodation, assistance with travel, and the chance to meet people from all walks of life.

    Where can I work with an education degree?

    In short: almost anywhere. Some of the most popular places people immigrate to with an education degree include Australia, New Zealand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. The latter is particularly attractive, as international school teachers are paid well here, and frequently awarded free accommodation and travel.

    Saudi Arabia is also known for its vast riches, which they invest in building beautiful, gated communities for their expats. These often include air-conditioned housing and community pools. If you choose to relocate here, you’ll usually find yourself teaching a mixture of fellow expats and locals – most people find the exposure to such vastly different cultures particularly exciting. 

    Teaching schemes and programs are available to people with relevant education degrees and overseas teaching roles are always in demand, so it's not uncommon to see new programs pop up over time. Make sure to check out relevant embassy and government websites for up-to-date news on schemes that are running.

    If you find a program that interests you, make sure to do your research and find out from others who've participated to ensure its the right program for you. One person's experience teaching can be a lot different from someone else's. The kind of wage, accommodation and benefits can differ greatly depending on the scheme and where you work so its a good idea to research that, comparing it to the area's cost of living.

    What should I study alongside my education degree?

    If you’re choosing to study education you’re already on the right path to an enriching international career – however, you may wish to study other subjects alongside this to make sure that your future job applications stand out.

    An English degree complements education studies nicely. The English language teaching market created approximately £1.4 billion annually as of 2020, and this number continues to grow. Alternatively, subjects such as maths and computer science continue to be popular choices for hiring companies abroad.

    Education is generally seen as the precursor to a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education), which enables you to work abroad. In the UK alone you have the choice of 1,125 courses in Education as of 2023, so when it comes to getting started on your academic journey, the options are endless.

    Education: the key to the world

    Studying education at degree level will give you the key to the wider world, and is the first step towards a rewarding international career. If you choose to go down this route academically, you’ll have the opportunity to submerge yourself in vibrant global cultures. So, choosing to study for an education degree is sure to be the start of an exciting journey.