Sometimes we have to teach large classes. Teaching large classes, however, in some countries are not uncommon. Teaching such a large group of students can be a challenge. Here are some strategies you can use in different stages of the lesson to encourage everyone to participate and make the most out of your time with students.

How to Teach Large Groups

The Perfect Balance Between Pair Work And Group Work

1. Appropriate Activities & Benefits
   Pair work is great for practicing model dialogues, playing games such as battleship, conducting vocabulary checks, and completing worksheets. Working in pairs gives individual students a lot of speaking time. If working together, students will often have more confidence than when completing exercises individually. If students are competing with their partners, they will be more motivated. Students can work in groups or form teams for role plays, races, games such as board games or card games, and discussions. Groups give students the opportunity to create more complex dialogues, explore relationships between characters, pool knowledge together, and have a more social learning environment. Additionally there is a better chance for self correction or peer correction and for a discussion on a wider range of thoughts and opinions with larger group sizes. On the other hand, individual speaking time is limited when working in groups. You can increase the amount of speaking time students have by decreasing the size of groups to three or four people. If you are in a large class and want all the groups to present material at the end of the lesson, larger groups may be necessary but limit group size to about six.

Role-plays give students the opportunity to demonstrate how to use English in real life situations and make them focus more on communication than on grammar. Role-play activities can be a lot of fun however a class full of shy students may be reluctant to participate so it is important to know your students.

How To Proceed

Developing a research question is probably the most difficult thing to do by a teacher, yet it is actually easy. This statement seems to be a paradox. Some teachers find doing it a difficult task to do since they do not know what seems to be the problem in their class or what can be improved. It can also happen when the teachers already feel comfortable with the way they teach or are too familiar with the system of teaching in their institution, or because the teachers are so ignorant about what is happening, especially what is happening wrong, in their class.
A research question can simply originate from the teacher’s reflection. Every time you teach, there must be things that cause you to reflect. When doing so, you might ask yourself:

Action Research is a process of systematic inquiry into a self-identified teaching or learning problem to better understand its complex dynamics and to develop strategies geared towards the problem’s improvement. (Hamilton 1997, 3)

Marion MacLean and Marian Mohr (1999) wrote in their book, “Teacher Researchers at Work” that to begin the process of teacher research one needs “a question, a place to record your thoughts, and some colleagues to work with you.” The following outline describes the process of conducting a teacher research project:

Summarizing or making a summary can be a tiresome activity for either students or avid readers. However, the ability to do so reflects how well the readers understand a writing piece. In fact, summarizing helps a reader retain the knowledge or message being conveyed by the writer after he or she reads the material. In addition, summaries made will help readers locate ideas about the text without having to re-read the whole material. 

In this post, there are several strategies of how to summarize, they are as follows: