The 4 Types of Multilevel Class Activities

Heather McKay & Abigail Tom (1999, CUP, Teaching Adult Second Language Learners, pp. 21-22) suggest teachers differentiate among four types of mixed-ability activity.  Unless the text is in quotation marks, it is my own interpretation. same input, same task What is different in this situation is the level of your students’ language proficiency. What makes […]

Large Class Sizes & Low-Tech Classrooms

What’s the magic formula I wonder? You are given  a mixed-ability class of ca 20 students, whose average level is pre-intermediate, and an upper-intermediate level multi-page coursebook to cover in ca. 50 90-minute lectures. How on earth is it possible to cover everything and to ensure that all the students have achieved the desired level […]

Posted on October 29, 2007 at 9:06 pm by Stacey · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: ESL Facts & Figures, Teacher Skills · Tagged with: , , ,

What a mix!

I am teaching elementaries this year – this is very unlike me for I find this level somewhat tedious to teach.  To make matters worse, instead of two nationalities, I’ve got four – it is a real challenge, for I do understand what sort of problems Russians and Estonians might encounter in terms vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation, […]