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The largest class I have ever taught was about 15 years ago. It was an Oral Communication high school class of 52 students held in the Language Lab (LL), which incidentally only had 48 desks with headsets. Now that was an interesting challenge. I usually had 4 students sitting near the front of the room huddled around a cassette tape player while others listened through the sound system on their headsets. I had to substitute students into the main area like players in a football match. The biggest problem in super-size classes is that I couldn’t connect with all of the students, and I began to lose the students who needed personal attention but didn’t get any or didn’t get nearly enough.
My other “large” Oral Communication classes were university classes of 35 students. In these classes, I tried many strategies from the standard to the sometimes silly in order to connect with more students:
In a nutshell, with bigger classes, I try to make everything bigger, while at the same time trying to connect with as many individuals as possible. What strategies work for you?
Click on any of the author thumbnails to go see their answer to this difficult question:
Tamas Lorincz |
Chiew Pang |
Nour Alkhalidy |
Steven Herder |
Chuck Sandy |
Barbara Sakamoto |
How can we encourage students to use English outside of class?
There are three different ways to interpret this question:
I will address the question from a little bit of all three perspectives.
I think that anyone can force students to use English outside the classroom by assigning homework activities, but I question how much learning actually takes place. In fact, I hear students complaining all the time about having to do something in English outside of class that doesn’t make sense to them (nor to me quite often).
As for techniques that work on me, the most effective way to get me to check something out online, on TV or in a book is to be passionate or enthusiastic about it. I’m totally susceptible to clicking on things that buzz; like on Facebook – if something has many likes, you’ll go check it out as well. Humans are just programmed like that and we, as teachers, have an opportunity to promote ideas to a captive audience every single class.
So… I know the power of enthusiasm about subject matter, and I know that forcing students to do things isn’t very effective, and I don’t particularly want to pile on more homework. OK, this naturally leads me to share the things that interest me, and that I know will both touch my students and be within their reach linguistically.
Another wickedly powerful tool in being able to encourage students successfully is to become a meaningful person in their lives. One of my heroes, Curtis Kelly, first introduced me to this powerful message through the bonobo apes (watch specifically from 13:00) and the secret to their language acquisition skills, which I believe makes perfect sense for my students and me as well. I have seen that students sometimes try something just to please me but often end up pleasing themselves as well. That’s a win-win situation.
I want students to use English outside of class to reach their own goals. I try to show students that English can connect them to a great big world beyond the classroom. And so, I share music, videos, websites and ideas that teach us something about the human condition (making sure students can “get it” with a bit of effort).
Here are just a few videos I’ve shared recently with students:
Videos:
Signs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy0HNWto0UY
Validation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao
Children full of life http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=armP8TfS9Is
Christian the lion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btuxO-C2IzE&context=C46f5e3aADvjVQa1PpcFNnvdsKajQDXzniu5SddmxG2-P0B1AVAbs
Lost Generation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA
Click on any of the author thumbnails to go see their answer to this difficult question:
Steven Herder | Scott Thornbury | Vladimira Michalkova |
Tamas Lorincz | Vicky Loras |
Anna Loseva |