Use worksheets in large classes

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mellow-yellow

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Jul 23, 2012
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English Teacher
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Does anyone understand the meaning of the bolded paragraph below? It comes from Jeremy Harmer's How To Teach English book:

What if the class is very big?
In big classes, it is difficult for the teacher to make contact with the students at the back
and it is difficult for the students to ask for and receive individual attention. It may seem
impossible to organise dynamic and creative teaching and learning sessions. Frequendy, big
classes mean that it is not easy to have students walking around or changing pairs, etc. Most
importantly, big classes can be quite intimidating for inexperienced teachers.
Despite the problems of big classes, there are things which teachers can do.

Use worksheets
One solution is for teachers to hand out worksheets for many of the tasks which they
would normally do with the whole class, if the class was smaller. When the feedback stage
is reached, teachers can go through the worksheets with the whole group - and all the
students will get the benefit.
 

TomUK

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German
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Germany
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I am not a teacher, but if I may be so bold, that's how I understand the paragraph in bold print: In a large class the teacher hands out worksheets with exercises which the students have to work through on their own (or maybe together with the student sitting next to them). For this task they will be given a certain time, maybe 5 or 10 minutes. When the time is up the teacher will then discuss the solutions with the whole class. I could imagine that the teacher asks students in turn to give an answer to one of the exercises. These answers could then be discussed with the whole group before the teacher gives the correct solution.

TomUK
 
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