Teach English in HAlAdaokou Zhen - Chifeng Shi

There are many difficulties language teachers are facing nowadays, among which the teaching of mixed-ability classes is a big challenge. These classes may comprise of students at pure beginning level and upper-intermediate level of English. Besides, students in these classes may have different learning background, which brings a great difference to their study habits as well as learning rhythms. Thus how can teachers deliver classes with mixed-ability students? In a mixed-ability class, students tend to respond differently to the teaching materials and questions. There are situations when the stronger students have finished an exercise when the weaker ones have just begun. The former may feel that they are not being challenged enough and are not learning as much as they can, while the latter find the tasks and learning materials are out of their ability. And the high-level students are usually more proactive in activities while the lower-level ones don’t dare to show themselves at all because they are pressured to express in front of their better classmates. An easy teaching strategy is to adopt graded activities in class. For example, teachers can choose to use worksheets with a list of questions, among which some are easy and others are relatively difficult. And teachers divide groups according to levels so that students in the same group are at similar levels. Then the difficult questions are assigned to the stronger students and the easy questions to the weaker students. In this way, the stronger students won’t get bored and the weaker students won’t become frustrated in the process. It’s worth noting that teachers should be careful with the grouping and task assigning to avoid possible errors. Another useful strategy is to differentiate the instructions and structures to the different levels of students during activities. The lower levels would get all the information needed to complete the activity while the higher levels are provided with limited prompts so they have to brainstorm and have creative thinking. Or the higher levels are requested to finish the task in a more complicated way. For example, in a class when the teacher teach some travel-related items. A matching activity is carried out to help students study the new words. Some students may find it hard since most words are new to them, while others have already learned most of them before. In this situation, the teacher can ask the students who have finished to think further: What items would you bring with you if you go traveling? In this way, all students can gain something from the course. Besides, when lower-level students are grouped with higher-level ones, both of them can benefit. Since the weaker students get a chance to learn from their stronger peers while the stronger students can also consolidate their knowledge by teaching and helping their classmates. It’s a good idea that teachers conduct a survey among all students with questions like: Do you like to work with in groups？ If so, what kind of partners would you like to have? If not, what are the reasons? How can we benefit from working with different classmates? Would you like to help others with their study? After collecting answers from the students, teachers can get a better idea of how to deliver mixed-ability classes and how to group them during activities. In conclusion, teaching mixed-ability classes can be challenging to both teachers and students. However, in spite of the challenges and problems associated with mixed-ability classes, there are still advantages to teaching and learning to manage these classes. In a mixed-ability class, the teacher can tap into different student experiences, knowledge, and ideas to give interesting student-centered lessons. Students can also learn from working with classmates with different levels of English.