WE are ignoring a useful and readily available resource when we close the classroom door on the popular culture interests of our young learners.

The motivation and engagement of young learners in the ELT classroom is one of the greatest challenges facing their teachers. Motivation is most likely to occur when learning tasks are related to children’s everyday lives. So why don’t we want popular culture in our classrooms?

There is a prevailing notion among parents and teachers that engaging with popular culture is how children waste their time when they should be doing their homework. “Proper” learning happens in schools; texts that children themselves choose to read or view must be substandard. This reasoning underestimates the linguistic complexity of popular culture texts.

Then perhaps we think the authentic language is too complex and that is why we avoid it. This argument discounts the motivational power of popular culture where students are so keen to play the game, or read the book, or share their interests they persist in their efforts to read, retell and write. It is the combination of high challenge and high motivation that popular culture can provide that results in a dynamic learning environment and is in stark contrast to the low-challenge and low-motivation tasks often presented in course books.

If you are prepared to open the classroom door to the popular culture of your students then you can do this on a number of levels.

Close the generation gap and get to know what interests your young learners. Ask them what they like. Watch children’s TV. Read children’s books. Stop by the internet cafe and watch the games they play. Check out the toy catalogues.

Allow a “share and tell” time in your timetable, where learners can bring their English language popular culture into the classroom.

Use popular culture resources as models of text types and sentence structure and use the instructions of a game to look at imperatives, writing a story book based on a popular videogame.

Use popular culture concepts as the inspiration for more traditional language teaching.

The inclusion of popular culture into the classroom and the curriculum can motivate young learners who were previously uninterested in reading and writing activities.