Teaching Problems in Large Heterogeneous Classes ( Learner differences )

The idea of this post is to look for possible solutions for certain barries to take classes....

1. Discipline, it's difficult to control the class...

• My personal opinion is to focus in the students who are not interested in the class, giving them extra tasks with the idea to keep in contact during it.  For example if I need to show some pictures, they could be part of this task, they could show the pictures or in other case to ask them for distributing some papers. 
• Another idea could be to organize a competition, to modify their attention to the class, we can divide the class in two or three groups and giving some extra points to the winner group.  Different activities could help them to be motivated with the class and not to get bored.

2. Correcting written assignments, I can't keep up with the marking load.

• It could be a good deal to keep busy to the persons who have just finished  their work, giving them the responsability to help their classmates who are doing their work. 
• Other idea is to give the person who has just finished his / her work, the responsability to be godfather to the one of the students in the class, the person who has no finished his / her work.  It helps him / her to be proud of his godson or goddaughter.

3. Interest, They get bored. 

• I think in this occassion we can apply different types of activities to introduce them the goal of the class, thinking about some interesting play like bingo, some guessing riddles, puzzles, brain storm, etc... the basic idea is to attempt to get them motivated, waking up their emotions.
• Another different thing is to watch some film which could be part of our content in the class.  It could be a good idea to invite them to prepare some interesting room seems like a cinema, and maybe a better idea could be they take part of this film  in the next days, trying to perform it.  So they can act like the different actors in the film.

4. Effective learning for all.

• The idea is to introduce the class the aim of it, and then we would attempt to focus in different activities with them, knowing their personal interest.  For example,  in the case of learnign present tenses, if Juanito likes singing, it could be a good idea to recognize different structures in a song about present tenses.  Also he could analize the structures in the song, and additional idea could be to add some paragraphs to the song, his personal ideas, trying to monitoring his learning.
• Another good point could be to work in pairs, trying to create a project.  In this case we have many activities to focus in.  It's the case of creating a story, drawing conceptual maps, an album, a note, a play, an advertisement, a magazine, some newspaper, etc...

5.  Materials.

• Well, Internet have a lot of different types of materials to apply students in order to motivate them.  It's the case of newspaper, magazines, worksheets, reading papers, books, some interested chat that we can use to talk with foreign students.  So the idea is to test many things to apply the best one.  Also It's important to connect them with our reality and of course with real english.
• An other interesting idea is they can create their personal materials to work, for example if you need to teach the verb be, they can build their own album with different types of photographies or pictures about their own families.  They can introduce themselves their family in front to the class. 

6. Individual Awareness. 

• The idea is working in groups, we have to divide the students in differents groups and each group could have a leader or two leaders, the idea is they can  reinforce our teaching.  They could have the responsability to give direction to the students in order to finish their work in a good way.
• Another good idea could be to organize a play where they can participate in groups too, each group could have a leader again and the idea is to try to do the best work in group.  The worst group could to do penance in front of the class, like singing alone, telling a poetry, etc.

7. Participation.

• In this case the idea is to create our class together, if I need to focus my class in the past perfect for example, I can invite them to create some tale about it. Every pupil can add information to my tale linking one phrase or sentence to another.  After that every student can draw some pictures about our tale or fixing some pictures about it.  and for the next class they can finish the end of the story, using the structure that we used in the previous class.  The idea is to monitor their learning.
• To work in groups giving them a different role in the group, every pupil can be responsible for different kind of work.