A quiet classroom, only four students attended the English class held in the rainy morning. Beyond expectations, the other 16 students were absent. As a matter fact, previously, that Sunday morning was unanimously selected as the day of remedial class. Yet, more students seemingly disagreed with the chosen day that they eventually could not make it.

It was, indeed, completely reasonable that the four students did not look keen on the lesson at the beginning of the class as they felt upset with their 16 fellow students. Even, in the first five minutes, the class ran so quietly: no enthusiasm.

Nonetheless, the teacher seemed to have things up her sleeve; coming up with great ideas and showing exquisite work of creativity. The class then discussing materials which frequently make students fairly bored—on grammar and structure packed in jumbled sentences exercise—was carried out with full of challenges in which every single student (even though only four of them) was encouraged to actively involve.

So, what did the teacher actually do with the class driven mad with boredom? She turned out to implement an unusual technique and scoring system for a class activity usually applied by most language classes. She named this particular technique and scoring system “challenge”. Then, how did the “challenge” work?

At first, the teacher distributed material of jumbled sentence problems—consisting of ten numbers—to each student. The students had to do the exercise on their own. As they would surely compete for the best score later on (also due to participants surprisingly few in number), no discussions were strongly encouraged.

While each student was doing the exercise, the teacher was preparing the score capital for each of them. She wrote the following information on the board: Student W: $ 300, Student X: $ 300, Student Y: $ 300, and Student Z: $ 300. Thus, each student had the same score (money-like slips of paper).

Then, when the students finished the exercise, the teacher stated: “We would like to do something different to discuss this material. Everyone of you will have opportunities to challenge anyone to propose his / her best answer of a particular number of the jumbled sentence of your choice. We would like to name ‘the challenger’ as A, and the one ‘being challenged’ as B”.

 “Shortly speaking,” The teacher continued. “A will challenge B to give the best of his / her un-jumbled sentence of a certain problem A has randomly chosenwith a particular point bet(minimum $25, maximum $100).”

“Yet, as a matter of fact,” the teacher was still going on, “B has a privilege to negotiate or to bargain for the best price (point) s/he wants or even returns the problem to the challenger to answer. This way, B can choose to take the minimum point or the maximum one, or the point between $25 and $ 100, or even reject it; which means that the challenger must answer his / her own problem”.

The teacher also decided that by the time B takes up the challenge, it means that A will lose a particular point s/he bet—that will be directly transferred to B’s score—based on the opponent’s correct answer. Meanwhile, when B answers incorrectly, A will get a particular point as many as he bet from the teacher (acted as a jury) plus a half of the point bet ($25 is excluded, as it is considered to be the lowest bet) which is taken from B’s score.

In other words, when A, for instance, bets for $100 and B answered correctly, then A will surely lose that point taken from his score. Whilst, with the same situation, when B answered incorrectly, then B will only lose $50 (50% of $100 bet) added to A’s score plus $100 from the jury as A won the challenge. The same rule will apply when B returns the problem to A as he plays as the challenger.

Based on this procedure, someone might come up with a question: Why is B’s point taken only a half while A will lose the whole point s/he bet? This is due to the fact that A plays as ‘the challenger’; the one who would psychologically dominate and control B with a problem of his / her choice to handle. Thus, when B answers correctly, A will consequently lose the whole point taken from his / her score as s/he bet.

Whereas, B as the one who is being challenged might likely be under pressure with the problem posed by A that the point is eventually taken only a half of his / her point bet. Hence, s/he will not lose too many points. Whilst, A will surely get the whole points bet from the teacher.

The interesting part of this particular technique and scoring system is that it is emotionally appealing and, at the same time, the task is intellectually stimulating (Renandya, 2014) as it keeps the class in suspense as everyone has opportunity as well as threat at every single turn even if the chosen problem has never been corrected by anyone for a couple of turns. For this situation, teacher can only give three chances before s/he proposes the correct un-jumbled sentence.

Furthermore, the one with the lowest score will vigorously challenge those with higher ones while expecting to obtain as many points as s/he wants from the person s/he is challenging as well as from the jury.

The activity obviously stimulates strong motivation for studentsas the suspense builds up when the highest point is being bet while attempts for the correct version of the chosen sentence/s have not yet succeeded, and when the chosen number of problem is being rejected and returned to the challenger. This way, the activity will be full of intrigue among the participants as seen at the Sunday morning class.

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Have a nice try. J

By: Solihin Agyl

Reference:

Renandya, W.A. (in press). Motivation in the Language Classroom. Alexandria, Virginia: TESOL International Association.

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