Hey everyone!

Hey everyone! I hope you are all having fun experimenting with new ideas today. I was wondering if I could ask your opinion on something I have just on one of my classes. I have a private student who was struggling with narrative past tenses. She was still confused and not feeling like she had mastered the use of the structures. As we are using an upper intermediate book, today I've adapted the "listening -1" to "grammar -1" tip and presented the same topic on a simplified past perfect x past simple continuous grammar lesson from an intermediate book. The lesson worked well and my student did not feel it was too easy. I must say I had never tried mixing levels before. What about you?

Comments

  1. Francesca Di MambroNovember 6, 2017 at 10:37 AM

    Sounds like it was really successful! I think it's very true that each of our students has differing levels of skills in all the different areas. As a Spanish learner, I'm technically supposed to be C1 level but I've got lots of gaps in my knowledge (due to my own laziness!) which could definitely be plugged with intermediate or even elementary materials. I used a photocopy last week from an elementary book with my intermediate group as they were really rusty on their past tenses. I explicitly told them where I got it from but reassured them it was for revision/consolidation. Level testing is a difficult art and the more aware we can be of our students' whole profiles (much easier said than done especially in larger groups), the better.
    That's my tuppence worth anyway!

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  2. Penny UrNovember 6, 2017 at 10:57 AM

    Absolutely agree. Another of my principles is what I call 'Success-orientation' - designing tasks so that they are likely to be done successfully. Failure not only frequently involves not-learning (so a waste of learning time, again) , it's also demoralizing, and demotivating. So certainly that means sometimes using stuff that's slightly easier than the 'i+1' level the textbook is providing; or giving hints and support to help them get it right.

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  3. Julia BlinovaNovember 9, 2017 at 12:34 AM

    Teaching one-to-one I do a lot of 'hole-plugging' as I call it, using materials from lower-level textbooks.
    Another thing I do with my Business English students is switch to general English, if the grammar proves to be too complicated. So first, we look at a point in general context and then go back to how this grammar can be used in work situations.

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