What to Do with Hung-Over EFL Students

There's nothing more "gratifying" to an EFL teacher than to see your students' eyes close in front of you or see their heads drop down on their chest. I was scared that my lessons were so boring that students were falling asleep. Finally, I asked them and they said it had nothing to do with the lessons; it was due to Paceville.

So what is Paceville? It's the place in Malta where students (and locals) go to dance and get drunk-really drunk-meet up, get beaten up, etc. Students told me that they often came home at 5 or 6 AM; school starts at 9 AM. Need I say more about their conditions? And this happened to as many females as males.

No point, of course, about lecturing the students on coming to school too hung-over or tired to learn English. So I decided to use their fatigue and transform it into some lessons/activities. Here are a few of them:

Where Would You Rather Be?
In this activity, I tell students I'm tired, too, and I can understand that they're having a hard time today (particularly on Mondays). So I ask them to tell me what else they would rather be doing at this moment than learning English. This is a great way to start the students talking about themselves without even realizing it. Many even perk up to say they would rather be at the beach or back in bed or in some other country because their parents "forced" them to learn English in the summer.

The Fatigue Scale
I draw a line across the board, putting alert at one end and drop-dead tired at the other. I ask each student to tell me how tired he/she is today. They describe their fatigue along this scale. And, of course, we get a lot of phrases and words to describe fatigue in between the two extremes. This not only gets the students talking about something that is relevant to them, but also introduces or "revisits" words, expressions and idioms related to fatigue.

The Anatomy Lesson
There is a lesson I do with EFL students on naming the parts of the body-including many of the internal organs-heart, lungs, kidneys, etc. This worked well with one class of hung-over students who had all been to Paceville until the early morning before class. I took out the chart of the body and asked them to tell me which parts were affected by Paceville (this would work with upper intermediate and advanced students). They pointed out the head (for headache), stomach (for feeling sick), ears (for too much noise), lungs (for smoking), liver (for drinking) and heart (for a variety of things including falling in love-which was, of course, proposed by a French student).

So even if your students are dropping in front of you, you can still make them learn something.

Ilene Springer teaches EFL in Malta and is author of An-American-in-Malta.com