Teaching English as a Foreign Language

(Chris Devlin) #1

120 Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together


For both weak and strong students, include more competitions and games
with the same language aims as the syllabus in the book. When the students
work together in mixed ability groups they support each other and the group
can establish its own pace, whereas exercises in a course book are less fluid.

Dealing with mixed age groups

In a class with different age groups, think about what the task or exercise in
the book is aiming to achieve and keep this focus while changing the setting.

In a personal example, in a lesson about expressing figures, the course book
presented a graph about profit and loss in a construction company. The teen-
age students were ready to switch off before they even read the instructions.
So, I encouraged them to change the setting to one based on music. Instead
of a construction company, their graph was now about a rock star’s record
sales. The students could come up with reasons for the sales performance,
whether based on the serious economic factors or on music trends and con-
cert performances. Once they’d analysed the graph in their own way, I mixed
the students up again to summarise their findings because the basic language
remained the same – increase, decrease, peak, slump and so on.

There isn’t that much difference in the language you teach students of differ-
ent ages, especially at lower levels. It’s the setting in which you put the lan-
guage that really makes the difference.

Setting tasks........................................................................................

Sometimes students don’t engage with the material or feel that it’s not rele-
vant to them. In this case, set students tasks based on the book. Get students
role-playing characters in the book, and having debates about points made
in the text. They can also read a passage aloud in the manner of a particular
adverb (quickly, snobbishly and so on) or dictate short sections to each
other to practise pronunciation.

When you plan your lesson, include a warm-up activity and maybe a cool-
down one too, which have nothing to do with the book. And don’t open
the book until it’s absolutely necessary. Insist that students close the book
during the stages of the lesson when it’s not needed so that they focus on
what you’re saying, or so that they try hard to use their own words instead of
reading.
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