Teach English in Heilongguan Zhen - Linfen Shi

The first English class I ever taught had a student who could have a full English conversation seated next to a student who had not mastered the numbers from one to twenty. The students were grouped together in an intensive pre-intermediate course, but their actual levels ranged from beginner to upper-intermediate. In a perfect world, such a group would be split into three small, distinct classes, but budget restrictions made such a decision impossible. Instead, I was left on my own to combat the issue as best I could. I tried adapting a single exercise to multiple levels, giving advanced students more complicated assignments, and encouraging stronger students to help their struggling classmates. Each approach has its own advantages and pitfalls, and their effectiveness depends massively on the abilities of the individual teacher. However, what they all have in common is the importance of scaffolding, or lesson planning that is suitable for multiple experience levels. By keeping scaffolding in mind, I found success in the most difficult class I ever taught. After our first class, I did my best to design lessons that would benefit all students regardless of ability. Some of my best work was with the classic waiter/customer roleplay activity. I split the class into two groups, each seated at their own table. I then assigned the two strongest students the role of waiter and the rest of the class the role of customers. This was effective for the stronger students, as it gave them a great deal of speaking time and forced them to ask a variety of follow-up questions. However, this level of scaffolding proved to be inadequate; while it certainly helped the waiters, the same could not be said of all the customers. They were all completing the same task, and ordering a basic menu item was simply too easy for many of them. When we later revisited the exercise, I had some of the “customers” pretend to be on various diets, thus forcing them to ask questions about the food and use the language in a natural context that they may not be used to. The takeaway here is that scaffolding, even for straightforward activities, requires extensive trial and error. This is because mixed language levels are a nuanced challenge, and speaking activities are just one piece of the puzzle. An especially difficult task in a mixed-level class is choosing homework assignments. When I realized that my advanced students were not learning from the worksheets I gave them, I tried assigning them harder work than that of their peers. While this decision certainly challenged the students, they found it unfair that they had to complete harder tasks on a graded activity. To them, it felt like I was punishing their success. A more reasonable and positive way to scaffold homework is through the use of bonus points and optional activities. For instance, one might include an optional essay at the end of an assignment. This helps thriving and struggling learners alike. Advanced students are encouraged to challenge themselves and rewarded for doing so. Weaker students, on the other hand, can use bonus assignments in a more remedial sense. If they are struggling with the material, an extra, guided assignment is a perfect way to boost their grades and catch them up. However, bonus points are most effective with a highly motivated class. If weaker students feel discouraged or stronger students bored, they are unlikely to willingly do extra work. A final means of scaffolding a class presents itself when the teacher is deciding how to pair students for group work. The conventional wisdom is that stronger students should be paired with weaker ones so that they can help them catch up. I incorporated this concept and found that, while it can be effective, it has a number of disadvantages. My experienced students had a frustrating habit of explaining the work to their partners in their native languages, thus preventing them from learning the concepts in English like they should. When I cracked down on this behavior, the stronger students started to simply do all the work themselves. Faced with this dynamic, I decided to try something else: pairing students with partners who were close to their own abilities. In this course, my new approach proved highly effective, but it required a great deal of participation on my part. I would circle the room and act as a tutor, helping beginner groups to understand the activity (in English, of course) and encouraging intermediate groups to go above and beyond. While this methodology proved ideal for this specific class, I had several others where the conventional approach worked better Each of these examples speaks to the overwhelming importance of adaptability. Formulaic, textbook-centered approaches are simply not suitable for a mixed-level course, for such strategies will bore the top of the class and leave the bottom of the class floundering. Mixed levels demand experimentation, care, and patience in every aspect of a course. It is unsurprising that many teachers choose to ignore such a complex problem, but grappling with and overcoming it is one of the most enjoyable experiences a TEFL instructor can have.