What and Why?
In many of the activities in CES, students will be working in small groups or pairs. This way of working has many advantages, in that it gives students a chance to work at their own pace, to ask each other for help, to share ideas and to get more language practice. Small group and pair work, however, can run the danger of students wasting their time together as they become distracted, talk about or do things other than requested, or produce work which is full of errors. For this reason, monitoring and guiding by the teacher is very important.
Practical ideas
- Before setting students to work in pairs/groups, check that they understand fully what they are going to do. You can go through one or two examples with whole class first.
- While they are working, go round the class. You can check whether they are having any problems, check the work they have done, give extra ideas where necessary, and generally keep them on the task.
- While going round the class, you can also note down common errors that you notice. You can then spend a short time at the end of the lesson, going through a few of these.
- You also make a note of which students seem to be working well together and which seem to be having problems. Next time, you can vary the way you set up groupwork accordingly.
- Before students start working, you can put some tasks in blocks. Where students have finished the work, they can move on to something from the exercise box, look back at previous units, or choose to do it yourself.
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