As teachers we want to maximize the time our students are speaking and using English in the classroom. One way to do this is by using pair and group work. But how do you decide which students to place in which groups. There are a number of grouping strategies you could try out. I’ve included some of the most popular below:
Same-ability groups: Students are grouped with other students who are at a similar level. While the theme of student work will be consistent, the task will vary for each group. For example, if you’re doing a lesson on going to a restaurant, a beginning group might work on menu vocabulary while a more advanced group could role play a conversation between a waiter and a customer. This lets the teacher focus the task of each group specifically to their needs.
Mixed-ability groups: Advanced students and lower-level students are grouped together. Rather than vary the task by group, tasks are varied within a group. Often times this is done by assigning students roles within the group (note taker, reporter, recorder, time keeper, etc.). With this type of grouping, advanced students get the chance to act as the teacher and lower-level students can ask their peers questions they might not feel comfortable asking the teacher.
Interest groups: An example of interest groups would be in a unit on hobbies where the teacher groups students who share a common interest. Often times students who don’t have a lot of English still have a good deal of background knowledge on topics that are personally meaningful. They can share their knowledge and have engaging conversations with their fellow group members on a topic that excites them.
Jigsaws: In a jigsaw, students are put in a group and work together to learn new information. This could be a reading on a topic of interest. Students then change groups and share the information they learned in their first group with classmates in their new group.
I use group and pair work all the time in my classes, but I always make sure to start and end the class as a whole group to maintain a sense of full-class community and cohesiveness. And I try to mix up the types of groupings I use so students have the chance to interact and learn from everyone else in the class.
Grouping is an especially important strategy in multi-level classes. To learn more about using groups in the multi-level classroom, check out this short digest put together by CAELA (The Center for Adult English Language Acquisition): http://www.cal.org/caela/esl_resources/digests/SHANK.html
Now that you’ve decided how to group your students, what next? Check back next week for a post on the logistics of setting up groups to maximize students engagement and participation.