Effective Management of Mixed-Ability Groups of 10-16 year-old Children

Effective Management of Mixed-
Ability Groups of 10-16 year-old
Children
Olga Goncharova
CELTA, DELTA, COLT, Cambridge Examiner
CELTA Trainer, IHC YLT Trainer, TKT: Trainer (3 Modules, Practical, TKT: YL)

© BKC-IH Moscow Teacher Training Centre 2012

Reading/Listening


Reading/Listening

More challenge More support
• Ask early finishers to write new • Pre-teach difficult vocabulary and
vocab up on the board with leave it written on the board
definitions • If there are gaps, give students the
• Have students underline specific answers in a jumbled order, with a
few extras
vocabulary or grammar points
while they read/listen • Give students the tape script on
second listening
• Rewrite a part of the text in a • Play the recording again
different tense / person
• Give students an option to read
• Write their personal opinion / a some of the text
short summary of the text. • Have compulsory vs optional tasks,
Write questions about the text e.g. answer 5 questions, the rest 3
• If it’s a true/false activity, follow on are optional
by asking ‘why/why not?'

Writing
• Give creative tasks that students • Reduce the word limit
can do at their own level • Indicate mistakes but also supply
• Increase the word limit correct forms as models
• Indicate mistakes using correction • Encourage use of dictionaries
code to give students a chance to
self-correct. (Sp = spelling, Gr = • Give and example piece of writing
grammar etc.) as a model before they begin
• Indicate where they could use more writing
interesting ways of saying
something


Speaking

• Ask students to justify / defend their • Give students time to rehearse
opinions before a role play or discussion
• Encourage the use of more difficult
words to push their vocab to a higher • Give students more listening and
level thinking time before calling on them
• Consider pairing strong speakers with to answer questions
other strong speakers from time to • Let students make notes before the
time so they can really challenge
each other speaking activity begins
• Do more error-correction • Consider pairing strong speakers with
• Provide open-ended tasks as less adept speakers to provide
opposed to closed-ended support for those who need it


Language practice

• Provide less prompting • Provide more prompts
• Increase the number of sentences • Decrease the number of sentences to
to do do
• Ask to add more examples • Allow more time
• Ask to help other students • Help more while monitoring
• While monitoring look at their • Give students compulsory tasks
answers and highlight the mistakes leaving the optional ones for
to correct homework
• Give students a dictionary to look
up the words they don’t know from
the exercise
• Let students write answers on the
board

Remember
Praise students for their efforts and
achievements, which are measured
not in comparison with others, but in
comparison with where they started.

* The song used in the seminar comes from the coursebook Messages 3 (Unit 1) by Diana Goodey, Noel
Goodey &Miles Craven.


BKC-IH Teacher Training Centre

E-mail: t-training@bkc.ru
Tel: (495) 2340314
www.bkc.ru


Effective Management of Mixed-Ability Groups of 10-16 year-old Children

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to Effective Management of Mixed-Ability Groups of 10-16 year-old Children

Similar to Effective Management of Mixed-Ability Groups of 10-16 year-old Children (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Effective Management of Mixed-Ability Groups of 10-16 year-old Children