Teaching Mixed Ability Groups : A Solution

One of the hardest types of course to deal with is one where the students are of mixed levels, of mixed learning ability, or even both. The teacher has to find a balance between catering for the faster, or higher level students, and losing the rest.

Not finding this balance can lead to problems :

• the stronger learners may feel they are being held back and get bored and frustrated with the content and progress of the course. At the same time, the weaker group may feel intimidated and over-stretched This can lead to a poor classroom dynamic and low motivation in both groups.
• whatever materials are being used, stronger learners will tend to work through them more quickly than weaker learners. if these "fast finishers" are left with nothing to do at the end of the activity, side conversations may break out in the L1, or they may start messing around with their mobile phones or getting involved in other off-task activities.
• one solution to this problem is to pair the learners weak/strong. However, this strategy may creates problem of its own : the stronger learners may simply dominate, doing all the work while the weaker learners remain passive. Or they may resent being put in the role of "teacher".

A different solution is to abandon lockstep teaching (1) for at least parts of the lesson, so that the teacher can work intensively with a sub-group of the class while the others work autonomously. This, of course means that suitable materials for autonomous study need to be available. These can be in any format, but if computers are available in the classroom, the easiest solution is undoubtedly the use of on-line materials.

The most radical way of using the materials would be to make them the sole basis of the lessons. Each student would spend the lesson working through a course at his/her own level while the teacher circulated – monitoring and giving individual help , explanation and practice as necessary. With some groups, containing students of widely differing levels, this may well be the best solution. But with others, where the difference is not too extreme, it’s also possible to incorporate the autonomous work into the regular class lessons.

Let’s take the example of a mixed level group containing students from upper-elementary to mid-intermediate levels. The next area to be covered in the syllabus is the present perfect for past to present events – for example, I’ve lived here for ten years. For the upper-elementary students this is completely new. They’re going to need not only a full presentation but also a lot of controlled practice before they can go on to using the structure. For the mid-intermediate students however, the lesson is only revision and consolidation.

Here is a possible outline for the lesson :

• Stage One
  
  The lesson starts with a warm-up activity consolidating the simple past, which all students have met previously.
  
  
• Stage Two
  
  The class then divides. The elementary and weaker intermediate students, who the teacher thinks need a full structured presentation of the present perfect, remain with the teacher while the stronger intermediate students work autonomously on a second simple past consolidation activity – maybe a short listening or reading activity with answers that they can check for themselves.
  
  
• Stage Three
  After the teacher has completed the presentation, the class comes back together and completes a receptive practice activity which asks them to distinguish between the two verb forms – for instance the first activity mentioned in the article Receptive Practice Activities. This has the aim of checking whether all the students understand the use of the form. If the teacher finds that any of the higher level students in fact don’t, s/he can ask the lower level students to explain. This a) checks that the students who heard the presentation really understand, and b) aids motivation : one of the problems of a mixed ability group is that it is always the same, weaker or lower level students who “don’t know/can’t do”. This activity gives them the chance to be the ones who do know.


• Stage Four
  
  The class then splits again. This stronger students go back to the computer (or other materials) and work on consolidation activities for the present perfect at their own level. These may be grammar practice activities, a listening consolidation, or whatever the teacher thinks the students need. Meanwhile the lower level students remain with the teacher for some controlled practice work.
  
  
• Stage Five
  
  The groups then swap. The stronger students meet the teacher for some semi-controlled or freer practice, while the weaker ones work autonomously at their own level – which may or may not mean working on the same activities that the stronger students did in stage four.
  
  
• Stage Six
  The group comes back into lockstep and works on a final activity in which either a) students are paired high/low level with the stronger student having a more demanding role, b) students are again paired high/low and work on an activity in which the strong students help the weaker students or c) students are paired high/high, low/low and work on an activity at their own level.

This constant switching between lockstep and ability group work has various advantages :

a) Most importantly, the lockstep allows the students to develop a single group identity and collaborative working dynamic. However, this will only happen if the lockstep stages are productive and non-threatening for everyone. The split group stages ensure that when the students do come together they are all able to work on an activity which is the correct level of challenge for all members of the group. No-one needs to feel they’re wasting time waiting for the others or that they are “out of their depth” in comparison to other members of the group.
b) The lesson format also has the practical advantage, if you are using on-line courses, that you don’t need an enormous number of computers. Only half the group will be at the computers at any one time. If they work in pairs that means that three computers would be sufficient for a group of twelve.

Why though should you choose on-line materials over any other type of materials? They have two practical advantages:

a) firstly, they are specifically designed for autonomous study and staged accordingly, whilst “ordinary” materials tend to be designed for teacher-led classes and may not be suitable for students working alone.
b) putting together a sequence of activities taken from various sources, plus supplementing them with answers, explanations etc to make them suitable for autonomous study means a considerable amount of preparation for the teacher and can be very time consuming. A coherent on-line course will already have done most of the work for you – preparation is confined to familiarising yourself with the materials and choosing which activities you want each group to do at which point of the lesson.

Notes

1. If a class is working “in lockstep”, all the students are doing the same thing at the same time.

Further Reading ...

Roberts, R.  Simple ways to differentiate materials for mixed level classes

Teaching Individual Sounds : Part One

Why do language learners have difficulty pronouncing specific sounds in the language they are learning? The answer lies, not surprisingly, in the contrast between their own language and the new language. We are born with the ability to recognise and to learn to pronounce every sound, but as we come to realise that some are meaningful and others aren’t, we filter out the non-meaningful sounds to the point where we may not even be able to “hear” them any more, let alone know how to form them.

• The sound may not exist in the L1

  
  

  No language uses every single sound that the human voice can make in order to express meaning. You can probably think of sounds which occur in other languages which don’t occur in English – like the double-l sound found in many Welsh words such as Llan (church).

  
  A sound is meaningful for a language if substituting it for another sound causes a change in meaning. In English /p/ is a meaningful sound – if I say peat you understand something very different from if I say beat or meat or heat. In Arabic however, the sound has no meaning – in terms of Arabic, it doesn’t exist. A sound like this which creates a meaning distinction is known as a phoneme (1) of the language. /p/ is a phoneme of English but not of Arabic. (2)
  
  English uses a relatively high number of phonemes in comparison with many other languages, so there’s a good chance that our learners will come across sounds they’ve never used before.


• The sound may exist in the L1, but be used differently. Alternatively the difficulty may lie in the position of the sound. Sounds may not occur in every position in a syllable in a specific language, or may never be combined with other sounds. For example, in English the “dark” /l/ found in words like bottle never occurs at the beginning of a syllable whereas in Turkish it may. English allows certain combinations of up to three consonants at the beginnings of words /spr / /str/ /spl/ but not others /sdn/ or /ksb/. Other languages will differ. They may allow fewer consonants to cluster together like this, or more. And they may be quite different consonants. Japanese allows only the possibility of consonant + /j/ as in Tokyo, (compare the Japanese /təʊkjəʊ/ with the English/təʊkiːjaʊ/) whereas Croatian allows many more – try opskrbljivanje (supplying) for instance. 

• Learners may use a similar, but not identical sound from the L1. For example,  Mandarin Chinese uses a retroflex version of the approximant /r/ - [ɻ].  Try curling the tip of your tongue back to the hard palate and then say /r/ as you bring it forward. What you'll here sounds almost, but not quite, like the English /r/.

• The sound may exist in the L1, but not be perceived. And finally, two sounds which native speakers consider to be “the same” sound, may actually be phonetically quite different. Take the words cat and cool. If you wrote them phonologically, the symbol used for the first consonant in both would be the same - /k/. But now try saying them. Put your tongue in the /k/ position as if you wanted to say cat, and leave it there a moment. Now put it in the position to say cool. You should feel that it moves back significantly. That means that the two /k/ sounds (I’ll call them /k1/ and /k2/) are phonetically quite different.

So why don’t we think of them as different? In English the difference never signals a change in meaning. If I say /k1u:l/ instead of /k2u:l/, it may sound a bit odd, but it doesn’t mean something different – as it does if I say /bi:t/ instead of /pi:t/. /k1/ and /k2/ are phonetically different, but in English are allophones (2) (or variants) of the same phoneme, whereas, in English /p/ and /b/ are two different phonemes. Another example is /p/ itself. /p/ may be aspirated, as in pill, or not – as in spill. But the difference between the two allophones never creates a meaning difference and, as such is not consciously recognised by native speakers. In Cantonese, on the other hand, the difference does cause a change of meaning. In Cantonese aspirated and non-aspirated /p/ are two different phonemes.

This is what lies behind the problem which Korean learners have, for example, with the /r/, /l/ distinction. Korean does have a version of the /r/ consonant (though not identical to the English /r/), but it only occurs between vowels. It also has an /l/ sound which occurs in other phonetic contexts. The two Korean sounds /l/ /r/ are therefore allophones of the same phoneme – they never occur in the same phonetic context and therefore never distinguish meaning. And therefore they are perceived by Korean speakers as the “same” sound, in the same way that for English speakers /k1/ and /k2/ or aspirated and non-aspirated /p/ are.

All of this means that in teaching the pronunciation of individual sounds we have to deal first not with production but perception. Learners have to learn to recognise the new sounds – and, even more difficult, to notice the difference between sounds that they previously considered “the same” –and then learn how to pronounce them. In the second part of this article we’ll look at strategies to achieve both these aims.

Notes

1. For a good explanation of phonemes and allophones, see Wikipedia

2. The best source on the web for finding out which English sounds are liable to cause problems for learners from specific language groups is probably Ted Power's site English Language Learning and Teaching

Idiomatic English : Geographical Features

Here’s another activity in our series on Teaching Idioms. This time it focuses on idioms referring to geographical features.

Quite often, idioms are fairly transparent in meaning. They involve a metaphorical use of language which it’s not difficult to understand in context as long as you know the literal meaning of the words. And this is often the main problem for learners – they have to cope at one and the same time with learning both the words contained in the idioms, and their idiomatic meaning.

When teaching idioms then, you often need to divide the activity into two stages and look at lexical meaning before presenting the idioms themselves. This activity, which looks at idioms referring to geographical features, does just that. The students have a handout similar to the one in the photo and are asked to match the objects in the pictures with the words in the centre.

Of course, given that you would probably be using this activity at an upper intermediate level or higher, some of the words in the idiom would already be known – they shouldn’t have much difficulty with mountains, ocean or wood for example. These are included in the preparatory exercises mainly to ensure that they will get at least fifty per cent of the answers right, and secondly to help them work out logically the meaning of some of the others : if they know hills they are halfway to recognising molehill.

Once the words have been checked, they can then be asked to infer the meaning of the idioms from contextualised sentences. This is made easier if they are given a set of synonymous expressions to match to the idioms, as below, or they can simply be asked to try and guess what the idioms mean.



Look at the nine underlined idioms in sentences 1-8 and match them with the correct meaning a-i.

1. I don’t know why you let David be so rude to you. If I were you, I’d tell him to go jump in the lake.
2. The company is on the rocks and will probably go bankrupt.
3. I’ve been offered two jobs and I don’t know which to take. One’s for a multinational – I’d only be an assistant manager, but the money is good and so are the career prospects. In the other one I’d be the boss! But there are only six employees - I’d be a big fish in a small pond. I’m not sure if it would lead anywhere.
4. I get really annoyed when I see my staff sending E-mails with spelling mistakes. They think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but I’m convinced it’s bad for our company’s image.
5. Although the country receives a certain amount of foreign aid, it’s only a drop in the ocean.
6. Trying to convince Geena that the proposal was a good idea was an uphill job! She was so focused on the cost that she couldn’t see the wood for the trees.
7. He invested all his money in one company and then of course, when its shares crashed, he found himself up the creek without a paddle.
8. Linda thinks she’s indispensable and that we couldn’t cope without her. But she’s wrong. If she goes on like this I shall fire her and get someone else. She’s not the only pebble on the beach.


a. the only person available
b. a small amount in comparison to what’s necessary
c. to go away and stop being unpleasant
d. in trouble
e. in trouble and liable to end soon.
f. an apparently important person in an unimportant situation
g. really difficult
h. to exaggerate the importance of something
i. to lose sight of the overall situation because you are concentrating on the details


Further Reading

Schmitt, N. Vocabulary in Language Teaching, CUP




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