5 Ways to Handle a Heterogeneous Language Class
by Tarun Patel, Founder of ELTWeekly.com
In my ELT and Communication skills classrooms, I have to face the students with varied linguistic backgrounds. They belong to different part of the country and have been using their mother tongue during their elementary education.
This brings a big challenge for me – as a language teacher. In the same class I have students who could be put under the label of ‘advanced’ and also I have students who could be called at ‘elementary level’.
Based on my 5 year experience of handling such learners, here are five tips to deal with them:
1. Teach 5 words a day: Make it a routine for them to learn at least 5 new words everyday. Ask the students to find out at least 5 new words from the dictionary or some other resources. Learning new words will help them advance quickly and get into the stream of learning smoothly.
2. Keep them involved: Keep the classroom alive with constant interaction with the learners. You – as a teacher, speak less and make your learners speak more. Ask a lot of questions. Confuse them – as much as you could – and make them speak and interact with you and the other students in the class.
3. Make them read: Give them plenty of reading materials in the forms of short stories, news articles related to the field of their interest, quotations etc. Reading will empower them thoughts and ideas which will urge them to come out and use the language. Also reading helps them learn correct and appropriate forms of language and enables them to become flawless users of language.
4. Connect them – make pairs: Depending upon their level divide students and then make pairs wherein one student is good at language and the other needs support to be good. Allow them to interact during the classroom session. This will help the second category student improve upon his linguistic skills with the help of his peer.
5. Make them speak – short presentations: Motivate your students to deliver short presentations. This will remove the stage fright from their mindset and make them comfortable at using the language. Allowing the use of visual aids will help them speak confidently as they have something at their help. They can be involved in poster presentations, picture presentations or some such similar theme.
These techniques have worked for me in my language classrooms, please do let me know what results you get when you apply them with your students 🙂
About Tarun Patel
Tarun Patel (http://tarunpatel.net/blog/) is an ELT and Communication skills teacher, working with Charotar University of Science & Technology (CHARUSAT – http://charusat.ac.in/). He has been dealing with the Language learning processes for last seven years. ‘Technology in Teaching English’ is his favorite game and has presented several papers in national and international conferences on the same theme. He is the founder editor ofELTWeekly(http://eltweekly.com/), India’s first weekly ELT eNewsletter which reaches in more than forty countries and benefits more than one thousand teachers of English and Communication Skills. Have a look at his personal blog http://tarunpatel.net/blog/.