Help, How to control the classroom's discipline

[Yang cuiju]

Hello, everyone. Now, I'm teaching English in an elementary school in Beijing, China. I teach grade 6 which the students will graduate. However, no matter what method I take, some students still can't concentrate on the class. They play or speak in the class which makes the classroom very noisy. Although I criticize or punish them, they still like this in the next class. They ignore my existence, my words and my punishments. So you can image how the class efficiency is. I don't know how to deal with this situation and this kind of students. Who can help me? Thank you very much.

[Sally Olsen]

I once went into the classroom and softly asked the students who wanted to learn English to come with me to another classroom. Since the students who really didn't want to learn were talking and fooling around they didn't hear my soft message and didn't come along.

However, they did catch on as more and more students came to the second classroom. The students who really wanted to learn kept them quiet or I sent them back to their original classroom as soon as they talked.

I did have a teacher friend nearby the original classroom but out of sight in case the students left behind started to do something I didn't want or got into trouble.

There were three or four students who didn't want to come or were sent back and so the next lesson I reversed the process and those four students met in the second room and worked on their homework under supervision.

They soon missed their friends and wanted to come back but one student called in his parents to complain and after hearing about his behaviour in class, the principal suspended him permanently from my class.

It was not perfect but calmed things down considerably.

In another class, the principal came in and gave the children a questionnaire on their behaviour and their motivation to learn English. Since it was grade 5 they just had to circle a smiley face if they agreed or a sad face if they disagreed. She read the questions in their own language. The results were of course, that the students wanted to be good and wanted to learn English and I used to refer to the results which I posted on the back wall whenever things got out of hand.

In another class, I booked the computer room and told my best behaving students to meet me there for the class instead of the original classroom. I said that they could ask anyone who they thought would behave. It was amazing that they left out the children that usually misbehaved.

Again the misbehaving students soon discovered the secret and came to the computer room but by then they had to share with others as we didn't have enough computers and again I sent out misbehaving students. One was usually enough.

Still you have to provide interesting and challenging lessons. For that grade 5 class we did Japanese cartoon characters - naming body parts, clothes, powers, families, transportation, weapons, places and so on just as we would have done in a picture dictionary. Some of the girls objected and so they did the same exercises with pictures of female cartoons or Barbie. I had the same exercises with a variety of cartoon characters so the students could choose. The students compared differences. They made up booklets that they could put in the library when they finished so many spent hours colouring in the exercise sheets and adding background. All the characters are available on the Internet. Donald Duck has a big family that is good for learning family names and he even has a family tree.

That doesn't mean I didn't let the children talk in class but it had to be directed talk and good questions or something genuinely funny.