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[fieldsofbarley]

Hi all,

I�m not a newbie as such, but I hadn�t faced a situation like this until now. I�ve been assigned a group of 6 adult professional students, to work on "Business English". The thing is, one of them is at a low elementary level, two are upper intermediate, and the rest are at intermediate level.

There�s such a mismatch of abilities that I don�t even know where to start from. How can I plan the classes to cater for all of them? Or...can I??

Any advice will be much,much appreciated

[spiral78]

Very difficult at such a wide range.

This might help a little:

There is quite a lot of research that indicates it's useful for lower and uppoer level students to work together in a target language. It's helpful for the stronger students, as they need to explain, rephrase, and restate things for the weaker one. All of these are useful skills in the real business world.

It's obvious that the weaker student can learn from the stronger ones. Using question forms, for example, to ask for clarification, is very useful.

If you can get them on board with this concept, and then rotate the two stronger students to work with the weaker one, it could work to some degree.

Tasks are the best kind of thing in such a context - have them work together to produce something - a chart, a dialogue, a short or long talk, a piece of writing, whatever.

It can also be helpful to give the weaker student the materials and tasks in advance so that he/she can do extra preparation.

[artemisia]

Hopefully there's not a huge difference between the intermediate and upper intermediate students unless they're at the lower/higher end. With mixed ability classes (common with ESL at high school), I did pair weaker students with stronger ones for various activities with key questions on the board. I made sure I sometimes paired weak with weak and strong with strong so that I didn't overtax the strong students and so they had a chance to work at their natural pace with each other.

At times, I had such different levels (from high to non existent) that at one point, I remember, I had practically two classes at the same time which I had to plan for. I'd give them different materials to work on and set writing activities for one so I could work with the other and vice versa. It was hard-going but eventually the low to non-existent level ones improved enough to get them back together as a whole class. Once they came back together, I decided to focus on the four skills and give out more or less the same material which small groups, pairs or individuals worked on at their own pace. For example, if you have a listening task you could set it up so that some later get the CD player and replay recordings again and /or have the tapescripts to follow. You might find with the elementary student that you have be the other part of the pair for activities for a while. Task-based activities are a good idea, too, especially when lower levels can get to see examples of what they need to produce.

I've also had mixed adult groups but, with one exception, the differences between levels were not as extreme as high school.

[fieldsofbarley]

Thank you both, that was very useful.