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Teaching Conversational English to 60 Students


Eteachernumber1

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Question, how do you teach conversational English to a class of 60 students?

 

I usually only teach around 25, but for the last 2 weeks I have had to take on much larger classes. There is barely room to sit in my classroom, so forget standing up to perform role plays. Also, I work in a public school, so just getting students to respond with a one word answer can be a challenge sometimes. Last week and this week I have taught Christmas vocabulary, played a game and issued a couple of worksheets such as match the pictures to the words. I am beating myself up a bit, feeling as if I'm not achieving very much with my students, and feeling as though I'm not really teaching 'conversation.' Any tips or advice from experienced professionals? I've only been in the game for 5 weeks.

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There is a fair amount of stuff online for teaching large classes. Including stuff directed at Chinese schools. 

 

Essentially, in a class of 30-60 you’re going to need to try and use mixed teams and pair work. For the mixed teams, make someone the team leader and give them some kind of responsibility. For example, giving out worksheets, organising the team, making sure everyone is working etc. You can rotate team leaders. 

 

There is 100% opportunity for role play in large classes. If you’ve got mixed teams, they don’t need to stand up to do it. Just do it sat down. 

 

I’m not sure of the level but try put everything in a question and answer or at least a sentence. If you’re teaching one word vocabulary then they’ll likely say one word.

 

Once you’ve got a nice Q/A for them to practice just think / find team or pair games that involves using that. A no-prep example would be “rock paper scissors”. Introduce the question so students understand (e.g. a video, a demo, role play, modelling) then do some drilling. For a big class you can drill as a class, by team, by row, by boy/girl etc. Mix it up.

 

You then demo how to “play”. For this you’d ideally use a teaching assistant. If not, a student. Show them how to play RPS and that the “winner” gets to ask the question. Repeat a few times. Play again and ask “who asks?” To check understanding. 

 

Once that’s done break off into pairs and groups. Walk round and listen. If your class students aren’t confident, you can avoid individual correction at first during this phase. Just walk round and make notes. Stop the class and review together the different issues you spotted. You can do this written or verbal depending on the level. For older students, write them up and get them to come to the front to write the correction. 

 

If you have some time, see if any pairs want to stand up and demonstrate for the class. You can also pick a few that have tried hard during pairwork. 

 

Replace RPS with another pair or group activity and repeat the process.

 

You can buy small dice very cheaply and they can be useful for a lot of activities. I used to like having a question up like:

 

What do you like to do?

I like to _____

1) play ball 2) dance 3) fly a kite etc

 

I then gave each pair a dice and a cup. The dice MUST remain in the cup. The student without the cup asks the question. The student with the cup shakes it (with hand over the cup) and looks at the dice. If the dice is (1) then they use answer 1 from the board. 

 

Hope it helps!

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''If your students are capable of it, I'd also implement a strict 'no speaking in chinese' rule.  The way I used to do this, was to teach the class the words and actions to 'I'm a little teapot' in the very first lesson of the semester, getting them all to sing along and do the actions.  They'll think it's great fun.  Then when they know it well, tell them that from now on, there's to be no Chinese spoken in class, and anyone caught speaking Chinese has to come up the front and perform "I'm a little teapot".   Once a couple of people have had to go up and sing, you'll get very little Chinese spoken in class for the rest of the semester - you'll even get people dobbing in their friends who are whispering in Chinese because they'll think it's funny if they have to go up and sing and dance.''

 

That is golden. Thank you. Definitely implementing next term.

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44 minutes ago, Eteachernumber1 said:

That is golden. Thank you. Definitely implementing next term.

It made classes so much easier to manage!  Normally there would always be a few students in each class with poor English and they'd start talking in Chinese and drag the rest of the class down with them.  Once you implement this rule those students will either make more effort to participate or they'll stay silent - either way they won't be disrupting the rest of the class.

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2 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Come back and tell us how it worked it. 

 

I couldn’t resist using it straight away so yesterday in the last 2 lessons I told students that if they were caught talking when they shouldn’t be, they would have to stand up by themselves and sing “I wish you a merry Christmas.” It 100% helped. The couple of times I did ask a student to stand they became extremely embarrassed and very thankful that I allowed that to be their final warning.

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