Teaching in groups or teams

[Warrior4Jesus]

Hello,

I have just joined UsEnglish Forum and I am very glad to know I can share with some or many of my colleagues. And, evenif I cannot be connected every time I will remain here for a very long time for sure.

Well, I would like to know how I can teach English through grouping my pupils. I have been teaching for six years and I am still trying to my best with this strategy. I know it one of the best method to teach overpopulated classrooms. Most of time I have around fifty-sixty pupils per class and even more. And one year I had been teaching near a hundred pupils in a first form classroom.

I have been teaching as a volunteer teacher since 2011, year of my first beginning.

British English is the official or the standard one to be taught in state (public) schools but, we do not have necessary materials to faciliatate our job. Therefore I am still looking for the very good method or strategy so that I may succeed in teaching English. And even most of the pupils in class do not own any dictionary either a french or an English one.

By the way I used ePals a very good network for helping my students ahd sharing with new partenrs but almost all of my pupils cannot use internet. Internet does not exist in schools except in some private ones.

For your information, here in the republic of Congo we start learning English when we enter junior secondary school then from the first form (about grade). And we don't have full-time schools here and of course in privates schools and also pupils have four hours per week with the English class.

And as I am concerned I cannot say about myself I am a perfect teacher and chiefly when talking about pronunciation but I do my best.

Thanks a lot for your sharing.

[Tdol]

There are some offline internet resources that make it possible to get your hands on copies of sites that you can then use in class without the internet:

https://racheloffline.org/

You can even get our site on one of these as we said they were welcome to do it.

[Hunia]

Karibu (welcome)!

I can fully understand your needs for free and high quality language materials. One source to try would be here:
http://www.englishbanana.com

Classes of 100 students may be normal in areas where you live, and I have had the same when teaching in Kenya and Namibia. What you can do is dividing classes into groups, assign activities to each group where students collaborate and after a while have all the groups come together to evaluate what they have done, to correct their work, etc.

This way of working is what we in Europe would call "constructivist didactics".

[emsr2d2]

I used EnglishBanana a lot when I was teaching in Spain.

[Hunia]

Yes, emsr2d2, I have had some contacts with the owner of englishbanana.com and thus know for sure that the materials on this site are intended to be used for free worldwide with a special (positive) impact on small language teaching projects in developing nations. I have collected and compiled an entire library for distribution on CD/DVD and (alternatively) for download. For free, of course.There are some ongoing projects in Nepal that were given a DVD copy.