Google Scholar in the Classroom: More than Academic English

I remember when I was teaching one of my IELTS preparatory groups and we were talking about the dreaded part of Academic Writing. I casually mentioned Google Scholar and was absolutely surprised my students (who were about seventeen at that time) had no idea what I was talking about.

I asked them how they collected data needed for their school essays etc. and they told me “Well, Wikipedia works pretty well”. That’s when I told them about Google Scholar, showed them how to use it – and hopefully I made their academic life somewhat better.

And now I hope it’ll make your life easier – especially when you work with people who may benefit from using Scholar not only in your classroom.

What is Google Scholar and what does it do

Google Scholar is basically a slimmer Google option that helps you search for the keyword not on the entire world wide web, but in articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions. The sources are mainly from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities etc. To put it simply – the articles you get are mostly academic, while Wikipedia, brilliant as it is, may sometimes be prone to the editors’ viewpoint.

What you need to do is open scholar.google.com and type the keyword – let’s say, I want to know what are the thoughts and opinions about IELTS this year. If you add the date to the searched keyword, Google Scholar will show you the publications from the given year, so I look for IELTS 2022, and here’s what I get:

Quite intuitive, isn’t it? At the end of the post, I’ll share some external links to the sites that will show you extra tips on how to use this tool.

Academic English

How can we use Google Scholar in the EFL classroom? Well, first of all, as a brilliant tool to develop the Academic English – whether you prepare your students for IB, IELTS or language certificate, using Scholar will help broaden their horizons, enrich their vocabulary and learn something new. You can give your students 10-15 minutes and a simple problem (like the number of people speaking English vs the number of people speaking Chinese in 2010 vs 2020) and ask them to find the answer and some interesting facts. That will definitely help them with their reading and writing skills!

The power of research

But even if you don’t teach academically oriented students, you can still find Google Scholar a useful tool. You can use it during a heated debate to ask each party to learn more about the topic and prepare some facts for the next class (and that’s how you have your homework assigned + a problematic situation solved); it will be pretty useful during the research phase in your project work; it’s a great library of cultural knowledge (you can ask your students to do a research on a cultural topic you want to talk about). It’s like having a huge library that is absolutely free!

Digital natives? I don’t think so.

We can believe our students are digital natives and know everything about the internet, but it isn’t so – studies show young people are basically pushed into the ocean of the internet without learning the basic swimming moves. Quite often they are given their mobiles and laptops with a short “here, have fun”.

We can’t teach our students “how to Internet”, but we can show them the educational values, encourage their critical thinking, support their natural curiosity. And we can share with them the tools that will definitely make their lives easier!

Useful links

If you want to learn more about the tool, start with Google site explaining what Scholar actually is (click here!). I also found Paperpile and its ultimate guide particularly useful (click here!).

And of course, you can type Google Scholar in the Google Scholar to see what it tells you (click here!).

Enjoy!