Music To Their Ears

How to gain students\’ attention without losing engagement

When you’re teaching in a classroom, necessity demands that the teacher have a way to draw attention back to themselves at certain points during the lesson. This is especially needed during transition periods, when the teacher wants to shift from pair work to teaching instruction or shuffle around partners during group work.

When they don’t have a tool or method readily available, a lot of teachers will resort to raising their voices above those of their students, or clapping their hands in a certain pattern. A voice-based method is what I would consider the least effective. First, even if the teacher is nearly yelling, it can be difficult for students to pick out their voice in a room full of other voices. Second, the transition method is jarring and introduces negative energy into the classroom; for many students, having someone raise their voice at them is associated with anger or punishment directed at them. It can be a trigger that causes their affective filter to shoot up instantly, and shut down any progress in language production they were making as their brain instead focuses on avoiding danger.

Clapping patterns can avoid triggering this voice-based response, but it still retains the weakness of interruption. This weakness can be overcome by a shift in awareness on the part of the teacher. When you’re having a conversation with someone, whether in your native language or an L2 (a non-native language), wouldn’t you be irked to have someone cut in and tell you to stop talking just when it felt like you were making a connection with someone or discussing something of interest? While it might not be as bad as triggering a defense mechanism, this jarring transition can also raise the affective filter through annoyance with the teacher or the feeling that the student’s language production doesn’t actually matter; what matters to the teacher is getting through the lesson on time.

The strength of clapping patterns is that they create a meaning-based response in students, similar to Pavlovian classical conditioning. Once the students establish an “if-then” understanding between a stimulus and an expected behavior, they will internalize it until it becomes muscle memory. For example, the teacher introduces a clapping pattern and teaches students that when they hear that clapping pattern, they should immediately become silent (sometimes having the students repeat a pattern in response to reinforce the stimulus). The more times the stimulus-behavior action is performed, the more it is strengthened in the students’ minds.

So, to keep the meaning-based response effect, but eliminate the other effects that raise affective filter, I introduced a triangle instrument into my classroom (cheap at the dollar store!). At the start of the semester, I teach students that when they hear the ringing of the triangle, they should finish up their current conversation in a natural way and then quietly turn their attention to me. The result is that sometimes it takes 5 to 10 seconds for the room to become quiet, but it has the advantage of respecting the students’ learner autonomy and language production time. They don’t have to drop their conversations mid-sentence and make things awkward with their speaking partners, or lose their train of thought. Ideally, the affective filter stays low or perhaps even lowers a bit more.

Furthermore, the noise of the triangle is on a different sonic frequency than human voices are. That’s why another human voice in the muddle of dozens of others is hard to hear, even when yelling, but the ringing sound of a triangle can cut through the noise of a crowded room with a clear, calming sound.

The students in my college class in Japan seemed to enjoy the presence of the triangle and associated with me as a personal symbol. The meaning-based response was at one point so strongly reinforced that all it took was me picking up the triangle for nearby students to finish their conversations and look at me expectantly. I even sometimes let them ring the triangle, which they took as its own small reward.

— Gordon