Over this summer, I’ve taken quite a lot of Spanish classes. A back of the envelope calculation reckons about 70 hours over the space of 6 or so weeks. On the whole, the tuition has been excellent; my level of Spanish has improved significantly (I’ve gone from a low A2 to mid-B1), and I’ve picked up a few activities and techniques that I will certainly apply in my own English classes. In this blogpost, I’m going to think about how different interaction patterns were used in the classes, and how they could be changed to enhance the student experience.
My classes have been with a number of teachers (I reckon I’ve had lessons from at least 7 teachers over this summer) and in a number of different academies in different cities. This is definitely not a review, nor criticism of any in particular, but rather general observations I’ve made.
Attention Span
We associate low attention spans with young learners. We all know that we must have a wide variety of activities, otherwise we risk losing them. They’ll become restless, possibly misbehave and there won’t be any learning happening. Young learner courses like IH CYLT tell us to plan every minute and avoid boredom at all costs.
However, the ever-reliable Wikipedia carries an estimate of a 20-minute attention span for a typical adult. Given that almost every English class you teach will exceed this, it should be something to consider carefully. I’ve seen classes where after a particularly long period of the dreaded teacher talk time (TTT), the majority of students were looking at their phones. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss this as rude, but it’s a symptom of insufficient variety of interaction patterns and activities. How can we avoid this scenario? How can the lesson fly by for the students, instead of having them clock watching?
Pairs and Groups
As students, we’re creatures of habit. In almost every class I’ve been in, people sit in the same seat every day. In one class that was very mixed ability, one student (probably the strongest) commented at the end of the week that he had struggled to practice speaking because of who he was sitting next to (the weakest). I, on the other hand, was next to a strong student and could practice very well. But for a whole week, the pairs never changed and nobody moved!
He’d have had a much more positive learning experience if the pairs had swapped at least once in each class. How? If you know the class well, you’ll know who’ll work best together. Which student will dominate a conversation, and who can give them a run for their money? Who is quiet, and which student will help them express themselves? Who is weak, and which student is patient enough to help them? Tell the students who their partner is and let them figure out the seating!
If it’s a new group, or you want to experiment, have the students line up in an arbitrary order (height, birthday, shoe size, time they went to bed last night) and then have them sit in that same order. Alternatively, if you’re moving students frequently and want to do it quickly, just ask each student move one seat clockwise around the room (ABCDEF to FABCDE) or every other student to move two seats (ABCDEF to AFCBED).
Even if the groups or pairs do seem to be working, a bit of variety is always positive. Everybody knowing everybody will almost certainly enhance the dynamics of the whole class. Learning a language can, and should, be a sociable experience too!
Post Activity Feedback
So, you’ve just completed an activity in pairs. You’re in a reasonably small class, say 6-10 students. How do you follow it up, bringing it to a nice conclusion? One of the most common ways is to have each student tell you what they talked about. Or even better, what their partner talked about. It’s good in the sense that the students will be prepared to speak and won’t feel too much like they’re on the spot, but ask yourself what is gained through this exercise? I’d argue that in the majority of cases, it simply leads to lots of individual student teacher interactions that are effectively dead time for the rest of the class. If each student reports for a minute in a class of ten students, that’s nine minutes of dead time for everyone. Glance round the room, and I’d be willing to bet one or two of them are on Facebook by the end.
If you really want that teacher student interaction, consider only asking a handful of the students. If you’ve been closely monitoring, you’ll know which students have a particularly interesting thing to say! Since you’re going to be doing several pair activities in the class (right?), you can simply get feedback from the other students on a different activity. Of course, keep a careful mental note of who has and hasn’t spoken (or use some scrap paper if necessary!) to ensure everybody gets a turn across the lesson.
Alternatively, regrouping and having the students inform a new partner about their previous discussion is going to lead to much more interaction between students. Depending on the task, it could be an opportunity to come to some kind of conclusion too (for example, in the first pair students discuss the pros and cons of various restaurants based on some information, then in a new pair they decide on which would be the best to go to for a class meal). Tell your students in advance that they must listen carefully to their first partner (and perhaps take brief notes) so that nobody is made to feel embarrassed that they weren’t listening or can’t remember when it comes to retelling.
Sitting Comfortably
Inevitably, most of the time our students are seated. It’s comfortable in two sense - physically, of course, but also proximity to their notes and textbooks! We can’t turn our classroom into the real world, but we can get our students away from their books and out of their comfort zone. This is the stuff we all learn on CELTA, but after some experience, how often do you honestly adapt your materials to stick fragments of a text on the walls, in the corridor? Is ‘find someone who’ just an activity for the first day of class, and, if so, why? You can play lots of ‘daft’ games with kids, but is there any reason that they wouldn’t work just as well with adults?
One of the most memorable lessons I had over the summer was a missing chair game. It was one of only a handful of times that I left my seat in a class. If you’re not familiar, you have one fewer chair than students, and the person without a chair has to announce on which condition those sitting must stand and find a new seat - for example ‘Change if you have a brother’ or ‘Change if you have been to Portugal’. It was memorable because it was fun and led to lots of use of the target language (in this case, préterito perfecto for talking about life experience. More than that, it raised the energy level and everyone’s attention span was effectively reset.
Conclusion
I doubt there’s anything terribly revolutionary here. It’s nothing CELTA didn’t teach you. However, it’s the kind of thing we’re all guilty of letting fall by the wayside. Being a student has made me appreciate more than ever why we have these techniques, why your lesson plan likely has a column for interaction plan, and why it shouldn’t be an afterthought.
As ever, comments welcome below the line!
This subject was chosen since it features in the British Council Blog Topics for September 2015
