My Classroom Activity - 3

Proficiency in English: Towards Small Group Activities 

vishal bhadani

Teaching Proficiency in English (PE) is one of the great learning experiences for a number of reasons; (a) it is not lecturing, (b) it allows a lot of innovative activities, (c) it is activity based, (d) for each class one needs to develop a fresh methodology etc.

I would like to share one of my experiences of teaching PE with the help of small group activities.

Generally, we have observed that some students feel hesitant to come to the podium to perform individual speaking tasks. But the same students are comfortable in speaking in smaller groups, like their real life scenarios.

So I started giving them speaking tasks in the smaller groups along with individual tasks based on their willingness to come to the podium.

There are two findings: 1) this activity provided correct simulation to students' life i.e. engineers are not likely to become public speaker, rather they will need English to communicate in smaller groups and 2) it increased confidence of those students who were on the border lines to such an extent that now they are willing to come to front of the class to speak.

My own learning: learning a language is actually a social process. Smaller group tasks provide a small social situation.  

Try it out, it may work more beautifully in your sessions!