"I want to know how I can work in a group with children from diferent levels. Which activities can work with all the students and which not. Thank you."
This question is from Carmen Berrutti, Argentina
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Comments
rebecca2
My advice: Individualize the lesson as much as possible, and use the different levels to your advantage. Pair/group them and have the stronger students work with the weaker students.
Patrick J.G.Shaw/Japan
If I were you, I think the following might work with multi-level young English learners
1. Get them making their own local board games (e.g. Monopoly for Brazilia),giving the instructions on the size of everything to each other - in English
2. show short clips from popular cartoons,children's dramas in English and then get them acting out various scenes.
Fatima, New Jersey USA
I would try to use differentiated instruction. Since all kids learn differently, this approach will help you see that some of your students are visual learners whereas others are more hands on. There are many books that you can buy on differentiated instruction. I have been using it in my classroom and it has helped both me and my students. Good luck!
Kamala, India
Yes, you need to group them and give them activities like visuals, music, rhyming words, which they could present later.
Manuel Ramia, Spain
It is difficult to teach children with different levels, especially when you are in a seconday school and you get a lot of mixed ability groups. My experience in secondary school and teaching English as a foreigh language is that you must teach the basic points to the whole class and then, after a short time start preparing different exercises for the different "levels" in the class. This is not easy because we have groups of 25/30 students. If you are a few teachers of English teaching the same level or form you should try and regroup students of different abilities at the same time making more homogenous groups. We do it in 9th grade and it works pretty well.
Sara, Korea
Choose activities/tasks that allow learners to draw on their own experience (e.g. life stories or a funny experience) this way everyone has something to say and the focus is not on whose better/not so good, but on sharing experiences and ideas through English.
Annamaria D. Kalmar, Hungary
I'm an ELT of a vocational secondary school in Budapest, Hungary. We are working on a very u-to-date project on the doorstep of our joining the EU: completing a computer aided presentation of a selected EU-country. Students of the same course, but on a different level of language proficiency get 'tailored' tasks. For those who are on a good level of reading comprehension and are good at writing composition at all, history, economy, polictical system in brief are to be presented. Others translate stories downloaded from the webside of the selected country. Students of a lower level of proficiency collect pictures and complete them with short explanations, descriptions. Those who are good at arts, make drawings and combine them with specific sayings or jokes, etc. Finally, students who are 'skilled' in completing, systematizing and organising things and are talented designers, make the aesthetic outlook of the project. Doung this collective work, I think everybody could find sense and satisfaction by doing something useful and lasting for a longer time.
Richard Spurgeon, USA
Whether you are working with a whole class or a small group, it is important to begin with a good assessment so that you can set expectations and plan curriculum. For example, I have three groups: a challenge group, an English learner group, and a group that needs extra support. These are heterogeneous groups. Everyone in the class may read the same story or write the same story, but what I expect from them is based on the assessment of their needs. When I work with the whole class, I will expect to scaffold the vocabulary and concepts that we will deal with. However, the way that I scaffold and coach each group is different, but overlapping. For the English learners, I expect to scaffold and coach their pronunciation and comprehension of vocabulary items. For the challenge group, I have to have extensive readings and extra writing assignments. The pencil and paper work is very different from group to group and within groups. It's not so much work if you do the necessary and periodic assessments and adjust your instruction.