Aksyutina T. V.

Oles’ Honchar Dnepropetrovsk National University, Ukraine

MANAGING CONSTRAINTS IN TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

There are very few contexts in which students learn English only for the purposes of listening and reading, without any need to interact with others in writing and speech. When it comes to giving students opportunities to talk, constraints such as large, multilevel classes with fixed furniture, traditions of learning («Games are for children. This is an adult class»), an examination-oriented curriculum («We have to pass an exam. Exams are not about group work»), and difficulty in assessing resources all seem to stand in the way of organizing talk. Resources frequently head the list of constraints. Some teachers have no photocopiers or no funds to make copies for the whole class, no tape recorders or video recorders, and their students have no source of interesting reading material, even in a library. The teacher may have a single copy of a useful article, colored photographs relevant to the topic but too small to be seen at the back of a large class, or half a dozen copies of commercial readers at the right level for a class of forty students. Managing with scarce resources is a challenge, but rather than abandoning these great resources, teachers often find ways around this problem.

Reading many accounts of how the other teaches have overcome constraints is one way of picking up the ideas. For example, the encouraging news about group works despite large numbers and fixed furniture is that it happens in many parts of the world. In the journal Teaching English Forum there are a lot of articles where teachers describe how they organize group work in large classes with benches fixed to the floor by asking students to turn around and form groups of four with the students sitting in the row behind. Sometimes the group leader scrambles over the desks to reach the teacher to discuss progress.

If traditions of learning make students reluctant to join the group work, then the first step is to overcome their preconceptions, and «sell» the idea of groups.

1. Explain that groups are a chance to speak without the teacher noticing the mistakes.

2. When students complain about having to listen to all the other students’ bad English when they get into groups, point out that communication involves listening to everyone and making sense whether people speak slowly or fast, formally or informally.

3. Make the activities age-appropriate. Avoid the word games with adult learners.

4. Make the purpose of each activity clear beforehand.

5. Call for students’ feedback on group activities. What went well? What could be changed?

6. Start with self-selected groupings, so that students work with those who they know or like.

7. Show connections with group activities and the rest of the program to overcome the belief that group work is an extra.

In some cultures, students are very anxious about making mistakes in front of others. Oxford suggests a number of ways of reducing anxiety, including talking about the problem and minimizing conditions that might increase [1, р. 23]. In particular, she recommends laughter and music as antidotes to anxiety.

To overcome photocopying constraints, a single article can be photocopied just once and cut up so that each student may have one sentence. This becomes the basis of ‘divided information» communicative activity. Colored photographs and a limited number of readers can be supplemented by «self-access worksheets» [1, р. 57] so that students work through the tasks and materials individually or in pairs on different days. Another resource is a blackboard sketch. Quick drawing while talking enlivens a dialogue, illustrates a word meaning, or prompts student talk.

If the barrier to group work is managing large numbers, the teacher could experiment with different types of group work which call for different management skills: free discussion, projects, and the particular type of group work described as «tasks». In free-discussion groups, the teacher can use the multilevel nature of the class to advantage by appointing specific roles to avoid problems such as having one student dominating the group and others sitting passively.

Another type of group work is the project. Projects involve collating material from different sources – inanimate and human. The teacher needs to check out availability beforehand with librarians and specialist informants.

The most specific type of small-group activity in the language class is the task. Tasks require input data, procedures, goals, and specific roles for teachers and learners, all of which need to be explained to the class. If photocopying facilities are limited, an alternative is to use the board and an overhead transparency. For example, a collection of words which students have to categorise and label can be written up in just a couple of minutes. Some teachers play music as the task input. Procedures can also be listed on the board, or, if they are short enough, the teacher can dictate them.

Because some groups finish before others, teachers often organize an individual activity to follow, and return to a discussion of outcomes when everyone has finished. May in his book Exam Classes suggests:

1) different word limits for different group of students, since it takes the same amount of homework time for individual students to complete different amounts of material.

2) providing more able students with different extra tasks rather than just more of the same [2, р. 84].

As with any other form of organization, group work can be overdone. The teacher’s challenge is to decide which class activities can be done individually, which work well in pairs or groups, and which call for the whole-class work. Creative thinking will show teachers which of the following activities to choose on a particular day: marking homework, solving a word puzzle, practicing a new language, answering students’ questions, listening to tapes, or writing a letter.

List of References:

1. Oxford, R. Anxiety and Language Learner. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. – 125 p.

2. May P. Exam Classes. – Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. – 56 p.