What and Why?
All classes are 'mixed ability' classes. All classes consist of individual students with different personalities and interests. All students also, themselves, have 'mixed abilities'. For example, some students may find writing easier than speaking or vice versa. Some students find one particular task or approach more appealing than other tasks or approaches. It is also important to distinguish two aspects of 'ability': language ability and language learning ability. The first aspect refers to how much language the students actually know/understand at a particular point in time. The second aspect refers to their ability to learn. A student may be weak in English, for example, but given appropriate support may be able to learn quickly. This suggests that some 'mixed ability' classes may be the result of particular approaches to teaching (the ability to learn or the ability to be taught?). For this reason, teachers need to adopt a flexible methodology that allows for a variety of learning styles and abilities (see Learning Strategies).
Practical ideas
- One key principle in teaching mixed ability groups is transparency. Try to make sure that all students understand what is happening in the lesson, for example by overviewing before beginning the lesson or a new task.
- There are a number of ways in which you can approach teaching groups of mixed language and learning ability: i) stronger/average/weaker students can be given completely different tasks at different levels of difficulty; ii) students can given tasks on the same topic at varying levels of difficulty (see below); iii) Students can be involved in open-ended tasks which allow them to respond at their own level of ability. In principle, approaches ii) and iii) are better, since they avoid students feeling left out. Approach iii), additionally, allows a student to develop more freely without being restricted by the tasks themselves.
- To provide tasks at varying levels of difficulty on the same topic, text etc. think about how a task can be made more challenging or how more support can be given. In the Teaching Notes for all the Topic and Language Focus units there are ideas for making these kinds of adjustments to the key exercises in the units.
- At the back of this teacher's book, there are additional, photocopiable language worksheets for each grammar point in the Language Units.
- The Time to Spare exercises at the end of each Topic and Language Focus unit provide further tasks for varying levels of ability.
- The exercises in the 'Decide' boxes encourage students to make choices about what they need to do and to work at their own pace.
- In groupwork, try to mix students so that students of all abilities can work together.
- See further ideas under listening, speaking, reading and writing.
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