5 tips to make your English classes go viral

A list of strategies to bring engagement and motivation to the EFL classroom

Virality is a key concept when it comes to the internet. According to Goel et al. (2016), when online content goes viral, it means not only that it has become popular, but also that this process has happened through a person-to-person contagion, as in a biological virus transmission. The secrets of virality are being investigated and incorporated by other fields, such as Marketing, which uses viral strategies to promote products and achieve brand awareness. In Education, especially in Language Teaching, we can also adopt the concept to try to make our classes more attractive, our students more engaged, and learning more motivating.

Here are some strategies to viralize your EFL classes:

1. Use memes!

Memes are a big hit on social networks. We like and share them because they are funny, light, sharp, comic. In other words, we like them so much because we can relate to them. In the language classroom, teachers can use memes in both reading and writing activities, exploring their characteristics, message, goal, tone, and target audience. Here are some websites to collect and create memes:

2. Gamify your classroom!

Gamification is the use and application of game elements and principles in other areas. The concept is majorly used in Business and Education with the aim of promoting engagement, autonomy, and motivation. In the language classroom, teachers can either use real games or gamify pedagogical activities. We can do that by using badges to grade students' tasks; creating leaderboards to stimulate attendance, behavior, and performance; creating online quizzes and polls to foster competition and challenges among students, and so forth.

Here are some links to some very useful web tools:

• Creating Badges:

• Creating Leaderboards:

• Creating quizzes:

3. Bring materials from different Social Networks!

Using materials from different social networks can be an effective method to work with different pieces of language and also motivating students. Different social networks contain texts that combine various semiotic modes (visual, verbal, written, gesture, musical etc) and, therefore, are valuable assets when exploring multimodal literacy. Besides, students use many different social networks in their free time and seeing things they are familiar with inside the classroom is surely a motivation injection.

Teachers can use materials from different social networks to help students:

• learn how to summarize ideas using tweets;
• learn how to group ideas and content by creating hashtags;
• practice writing skills by creating picture captions;
• critically discuss examples of content to like/dislike/share and profiles/pages to follow/unfollow;
• critically discuss personal exposure and privacy on social networks like Instagram and Snapchat;
• explore multimodality by analyzing examples of online language, such as emojis, stickers, avatars, among others.

4. Go mobile!

Students use cellphones all the time. TRUE! We use them all the time too. TRUE! A great part of the apps students use to play and have fun is in English. TRUE! It is pretty clear to me that we, as EFL professionals, can/should/have to use mobile devices in our teaching practices. There are a lot of lists with great apps for foreign language classrooms, like in here, and in here, and in here. However, I personally believe that the best way to find good apps and to have great ideas to use them in the classroom is to explore. So, let’s go mobile!

5. Create/Use lists!

The internet loves lists! There are tons of different lists about various themes popping up every second in the cyberspace. For some reason, they are so attractive that we just can't help… we automatically click and read them! In a very cool article, The Guardian brings 10 interesting facts that may explain our fascination with lists:

1. People will tend to remember the first thing on a list

2. The human brain may automatically structure information in list form (although it may not)

3. Lists take advantage of a limited attention span

4. You probably won’t remember all the things on a typical list

5. People are very good at grouping random things together, so lists can be about anything

6. Popular things can be listed

7. Lists fit the way humans tend to read

8. There are many popular types of list, not just on the internet

9. Some entries on a list are likely to be just padding

10. People will tend to remember the last thing on a list

In the language classroom, we can make use of this fascination to try to motivate students. Teachers can use lists (or create their own) to suggest the best apps to learn English, the greatest books to read, the most effective strategies to learn. Alternatively, we can also encourage students to make their own lists to practice reading, summarizing, and writing skills.

Here are some great lists to inspire you: