Teach English in Taohai Zhen - Bayannao'er Shi — Bayan Nur

In order to be effective, an ESL class requires active participation from students, meaning interest and space to express themselves, but also for the teacher to be aware of the needs of each student in the class. Teaching a foreign language can present certain extra challenges when it comes to large groups of learners. Some of these challenges can include a difficulty for the teacher to pay enough attention to each individual student, and getting to know every student by name. Larger groups are more likely to have more differences in initial knowledge of the language, as well as different levels of skill in learning languages. Speaking activities, which are essential to language learning can become very noisy and it can become very difficult both for the teacher and students to benefit from them. In time it can become difficult for the teacher to create lessons that are well adapted to the students’ different levels and interests, which can provoke a loss of interest for the students and in turn create discipline problems. More outgoing students might take over all of the speaking time while other quieter learners can become more detached from the course, and stronger students can participate more and improve while weaker student can fall back even further from the group thereby increasing the skills gap within the class. Due to sheer volume, it can also become very time consuming to correct written assignments. This risks degrading the quality of the corrections and delaying the feedback for the students. Such delays can make the corrections irrelevant because too far detached from the performance given by the student. These potential problems are certainly real and require a high level of awareness from the teacher in order to be prevented. It seems to me that discipline depends very largely on the satisfaction of the students, and their involvement in the learning process. Bearing this in mind, the actual problem of discipline can be solved as a consequence of solving the problems specific to learning. Working with a large group requires for the teacher to take a longer term view than just individual lessons. In the beginning of the course, it might be useful for the teacher to identify the more confident and skilful pupils within the group. Once he has identified those students, he can get them to assist him in the teaching of lessons. If the activities are well thought out, the teacher might organise group activities in which the designated “strong” students will be required to lead the activity within the smaller group, thereby helping weaker students grasp the material better. This frees the teacher to go from group to group and monitor the progress of more manageable numbers of students. Learning the names of individual students is certainly a very useful thing for the teacher, because it shows interest in the students, and if they feel respected and that they are the object of an interest from the teacher, they will be more inclined to participate actively in activities. For very large classes, this process should be accomplished over the course of several lessons. Another way of keeping the students interested is to vary the topics and types of activities that are given during the lessons. If we are talking about language production, the teacher may require weak students to produce sufficient understandable language, while he can also get stronger students to be more specific, and ask follow up questions, in order to challenge them and keep them interested. This can also serve as a good modelling example for other students. As for written exercises, there are different ways one can work around numbers that are too big. Firstly, the teacher can get students to correct each other’s work, which is an exercise in itself, and can also break down the correction work to be done. After one or two reworks, the teacher can collect the assignments and make corrections. These corrections can include the most typical mistakes. If there are recurring mistakes in a large number of assignments, these should be addressed in a later lesson for the whole class to work on. As a teacher with three years experience, I have never taught large groups. This is why I thought I would be of interest investigate this topic. I researched ideas from other teachers before writing this essay, which covers only a small part of a very broad subject. Here are some of the sources I read beforehand: http://www.nzdl.org/gsdl/collect/literatu/index/assoc/HASH0170.dir/doc.pdf https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teaching-large-classes https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/what-consider-when-teaching-english-large-classes https://blog.youragora.com/5-common-classroom-challenges-you-should-never-ignore