Designing new learning experiences for your English language learners

Ehsan Gorji
Ehsan Gorji
A teacher stood in front of his class with students looking at him,
Reading time: 6 minutes

Ehsan Gorji is an Iranian teacher and educator with 18 years of experience in English language education. He collaborates on various ELT projects with different language schools around the globe. Ehsan currently owns and manages THink™ Languages and also works as a TED-Ed Student Talks Leader.

Learning has always been an interesting topic to explore in the language education industry. Every week, a lot of webinars are delivered on how learning another language could be more successful, lots of articles are written on how to maximize learning, and many discussions take place between teaching colleagues about how they could surprise their language learners with more amazing tasks and games. In our lesson plans, too, we put learners into focus and try to write learning objectives that will benefit them in the real world.

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But is it the whole picture? What if we wear our critical glasses and review what has happened? Think about your recent classroom teaching face-to-face or online, and reflect on what actually happened:

  1. Did learning actually take place, and did each student learn something?
  2. Did everyone learn the same way, or were things different as they were personalizing the lesson?
  3. Did I want my learners to learn one thing, or did I look forward to them employing the lesson in their own way?
  4. Did they manage to learn right away, or did some of my learners fail to learn the way they were expected to?
  5. Did learning finish in class, or did my students get motivated to continue with what they just practiced?

Learning might not be the whole thing, learning is individual, made with our own learner agency, affected by our choices as we learn, scaffolded by teachers’ techniques and principles, and some of which will succeed and others which might not. Learning experiences are more realistic in that they recognize learners as the ones who should learn, who are the agents of this experience and go through it, and therefore who live the experience in the world around them. As teachers, we usually do our best to help the class create their various learning experiences within one lesson; experiences which might be different in size, shape, joy and productivity.

Learning experiences are what learners love their classes for. They do not necessarily fancy the learning we provide them; they are vulnerable human beings, with all their strengths and weaknesses, hopes and disappointments, good and bad days, and falls and rises throughout their learning journey. From their point of view, exciting stages of lessons give them a chance to deepen their learning, and useful assessments take them to the next stages of exploring. Meaningful education prepares them for different ages of life.

Soft skills help learning experiences to grow

Soft skills can be fitted into any educational context. They fill the gaps between the huge training pieces as the lesson progresses. We call them life skills since they can be transferred to living experiences outside of the classroom. We call them future skills because they follow a lifelong learning pattern and develop endlessly. We call them power skills because they act as powerful tools to help learning experiences grow as they bring what is real in the world around them.

Imagine a reading lesson in which the soft skill of critical thinking is also scaffolded within tasks and subtasks. Think about a writing class where learners learn how to analyze problems and extend reasoning. Consider an interactive online grammar practice that respects learners’ creativity and does not accept only one answer.  Think of opportunities your classes have to become familiar with, practice and follow up with such power skills: Like when learners discover the full potential of a foreign language as they leave meaningful messages under a post in social media, as they practice time management and meeting deadlines through classroom projects, when they realize what good feedback is like and practice receiving and delivering it in groupwork, etc.

Soft skills provide learning experiences with the added value of broadening other related skills. Now that learning has become a learning experience that respects learners' abilities, soft skills can help ease the lesson and make it more enthusiastic. Moreover, soft skills can be transferred to other classes, at home, in college and at work. Learning experiences, too, if accompanied by the correct soft skills as they are accumulating, can find their way through study life, career journey, and more importantly, life as a whole. The common concept that believes English for employability deals with business English needs a revision here: English for employability is the fruitful English language usage and package of soft skills which together make jobs more interesting and offices and companies more desirable to work in.

Learning experiences should be designed

The challenge is that learning experiences are not created easily. We must bridge the gap between what will be conveyed (the language systems and skills) and who will experience them (language learners), which is a careful and thoughtful thing called design. Learning experience designs have 10 features in common:

A. They ask for creativity from the experiencer (or learner).

B. They are simple and fun.

C. They are fully planned but are flexible toward learners’ failure or low pace.

D. They are minimal and have huge white space for learners to glow.

E. They call for soft skills in presentation, practice and production.

F. They work best if assessed for learning, not of learning.

G. They are more enjoyable once learners’ daily routines, such as digital gadgets, online presence, etc., are employed.

H. They do not negate teachers’ roles but level them up to enablers for each learner’s growth capacity.

I. They continue outside classroom walls or screens.

J. They are co-created with learners as agents for their own learning.

Where should you start when designing new learning experiences for your English language learners? Here is a practical roadmap to the amazing domain of learning experience design.

  1. List all the lesson objectives your lesson tomorrow is oriented around. You want them to be realistic learning objectives, so check them with the GSE teacher toolkit here.
  2. In another column on the right, write down the soft skills you want to call for in your lesson.
  3. Next to each soft skill, write down if you would like your learners to know (K), recall (R), adopt (A) or transfer (T) them. (Learn more from 'Teaching soft skills in young learners’ language classes', Ehsan Gorji, IATEFL Voices 298, May-June 2024)
  4. Decide if the materials and tasks in different stages of your lesson are scaffolding the learning objectives and soft skills you have written in 1, 2, and 3.
  5. Plan how to best use your tasks, reorder them to create more learning experiences for your class, and add more value for you.
  6. Leave enough space for learners to apply, analyze, and synthesize. Be open to failure. Feedback, and have alternatives to offer in your lesson plan.
  7. Teach the lesson and take notes on your learning objectives and life skills. Assign appropriate homework in this regard.
  8. Reflect on the lesson and decide how the learning experiences can be strengthened in the next classes and topics.

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