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What are the differences between teaching one to one and groups? This seems a simple question but in reality both can be sometimes a complicate situation and sometime they can have positive things to deal with. To talk about the differences is good to have a look to the advantages and disanvantages of teaching them. Both have advantages and disadvantages to deal with. In this section I am going to touch both disiplines. As teacher I have experience in teaching both. And in general I like teaching both the one to one and the groups. It is about keep changing your attitude to what the students desire because actually their needs are more important the the mine,as teacher. First let’s have a look to the advantages of a one on one situation. This is the one that the student feel more relaxed to use the language. The student doesn’t worry about making mistake and that is an advantage when you are learning a language. You have to speak as much as possible to get comfortable with the language. Also you as teacher can easily change and adapt yourself to the needs of the student, because he is only one. And another positive aspect of the one on one is that you can dedicate more time on the skills that he shows weaknesses, bacause there no other student that is pending for you. Now I want to talk about the disadvantages of the one on one. With this one on one it is not possible to do some activities especially in the study and the activate phase. You can not do any debate or discussion activity duo to the facts that you have only one student. My experience with them is also that due to the fact that they are sometime free to organise their time to attend the lessons, they cancelled the lessons a lot. And you as teacher get no payment because they don’t sign the attendance sheet, so you will not get paid. Next we will touch the aspects of the advantages teaching groups. During groups teaching you can practice a lot of excercises where student can interact more between each others. You will experience more team work. And you as teacher can easily recognise which students are strong and which are weak using the language. You need to use that when you are making the the groups to mix them as much as possible so that a stronger student can help a weaker student. Also in group you can organise more debate and discussion between the students. This will help them a lot using the language and feel comfortable with it. The followings are the disadvantages of working with a group of students. Here I have experience that the students don’t want to use the language for being afraid to make mistakes for taking in consideration what the others student will think or say about them making mistakes. In this situation they don’t use the language to get more comfortable with the language. Also due to the amount of students it is more difficult for the teacher to attend all the weaknesses, of different skills, of all student in one lessons. It will take more time to attend individual student, because most of the time they have not the same problems. And the others students feel bored due to situation. It can be a frustrated situation for all. Consequently most of the time students that don’t understand something, won’t say it to the teacher, because they are afraid that the other students will react unhappy to the situation. So you as teacher has to try to avoid this as much as possible. So to conclude I have to say that there are both positive and negative aspects of teaching groups and one on one. It is about try to manage it as well as you can to avoid problems and frustration in your classroom. Thank you.
