Just for fun!
Teaching can be difficult, but teaching large classes can make any teaching job that much more difficult. With large classes, the key is to be organized and have a good repertoire of large-group activities. Communicative (information gap) and jigsaw activities work well with large groups, as do dictation activities. But speaking activities represent their own set of challenges. How can the teacher monitor the groups most efficiently?
One idea is to assign roles to the students whenever they have a discussion. Put the students into groups of 4 and assign each student one of the roles below:
- a group manager, who makes sure that everyone participates X number of times during the discussion
- a word giver, who has a bilingual dictionary and helps students find words as needed
- a secretary, who keeps notes on how the activity proceeded and on any problems that occurred, and then who gives a brief report to the teacher
- a language monitor, who makes sure students are using L2.
There are other roles that could be included and/or added:
- information seeker - in charge of asking questions
- opinion seeker - asks group members their opinions about the topic
- encourager - praises the ideas of the group members
- time keeper - keeps track of the time, can also keep track of the amount of time group members participate and give this information to the manager, who would in turn encourage the students with low participation.
By assigning the students roles within their groups, the teacher is free to pay attention to accuracy and fluency, while the students take care of the more mundane tasks of the activity.