This document discusses different methods for grouping students in language classes, including their advantages and disadvantages. Whole-class teaching allows the teacher to gauge the mood of the class but may not encourage individual responsibility. Individualized learning addresses differences but lacks a sense of belonging. Pairwork increases speaking time but is noisy, while groupwork promotes cooperation but some students may not enjoy it. The document provides tips for organizing various grouping methods, such as considering friendship, ability levels and gender in forming pairs or groups, and monitoring students during and providing feedback after activities.

1. Grouping
Students

2. Different groups
• Crowding, fixed furniture and entrenched students
attitudes, may make grouping problematic.

3. Whole – class teaching
Advantages of whole – class grouping:
o It reinforces a sense of belonging among the group
members.
o It allows teachers to “gauge the mood” of the class in general.
o If language learning is a collective endeavour, then “learning
takes place more effectively when language classes pull
together as unified groups”.

4. Disadvantages
• It favors the group rather than the individual.
• Individual students do not have much chance to say on
their own.
• Many students are disinclined to participate in front of
the whole class.
• It may not encourage students to take responsibility for
their own learning.
• It is not the best way to organized communicate
language teaching.

5. Seating whole classes
ORDERLY ROWS
• The teacher has a clear view of all students.
• It is perfect for: explaining grammar, watching a
video or a Power Point.

6. Horseshoe:
• Small groups.
• The teacher will probably be at the open end of the
arrangement since that may well be where the
board, overhead and computer are situated.
Circle:
• It makes a quite a strong statement about what the
teacher and students believe in.

7. Separate tables:
• Group work is easy to arrange.
• Useful in mixed-ability classes.
• Difficult to teach in whole-group activities.
Other seating arrangements:
• Enemy corners: two groups get into opposite
corners of the room.
• Opposing teams, and face to face : where
students sit in rows in rows to make pairs.

8. Students on their own
• Such individualized learning is a vital step in the
development of learner autonomy.

9. Advantages of individualized learning:
• It allows teachers to respond to individual
student differences.
• It is less stressful for students to perform.
• It can develop learner autonomy.
• It can be a way of restoring peace and
tranquility to a noisy and chaotic classroom.

10. Disadvantages:
• It does help a class develop a sense of
belonging.
• It takes much more time than interacting
with the whole class.

11. Pair Work
Advantages:
• Increases the amount of speaking time any one student
gets in class.
• Allows teachers to work with 1 or 2 pairs while other
students continue working.
• “Two heads are better than one”.
• Relatively quick and easy to organize.

12. Disadvantages:
• It is very noisy.
• The chances of misbehavior are greater with pairwork
than in a whole class setting.
• It is not always popular with students.
• Choosing a partner can be problematic.

13. Groupwork:
Students can:
•Write a story.
•Create a role-play.
•Watch, write or perform a video sequence.

14. Advantages:
• Increases the number of talking
opportunities.
• Personal relationships are less problematic.
• It encourages broader skills of cooperation
and negotiation than pairwork.
• It promotes learner autonomy.
• Students can choose their level of
participation.

15. Disadvantages:
•It is noisy.
• Not all students enjoy it.
• Individuals may fall into group roles that become
fossilized.
• Groups can take longer to organize than pairs.

16. Ringing the changes:
• The task: Many tasks suggest obvious student
groupings, we can usually adapt them for use with
other groupings.
• Variety in a sequence: It helps to provide a
variety, thus sustaining motivation.
• The mood: Changing the grouping of a class can
be a good way to change its mood when required.

17. Organizing pairwork and groupwork
• Making it work:
We can come with an agreement about when and how
to use different student groupings.
When we know how our students feel about pairwork
and grouping, we can decide, as with all action
research, what changes of method, if any, we need
to make.

18. Creating pairs and groups
• Friendship: Friends should sit with friends.
• Streaming: Pairwork should have a mixture of
weaker and stronger students.
• Chance: It demands little pre-planning, and, by
its very arbitrariness, stresses the cooperative
nature of working together.

19. •The task: Tasks determine the make up of
the pairs or groups.
•Changing groups: Just because we put
students in groups at the beginning of an
activity does not mean that they have to stay
in these groups until the end.
• Gender and status: In some contexts it may
not be appropriate to have men and women
working together.

20. Procedures for pairwork and
groupwork
• Before: Giving the students a time when the activity should
finish, and then sticking to it.
• During: Monitoring going around the class.
• After: We need to organized feedback. We want them to
discuss what occurred during the groupwork session and,
where necessary, add our own assessments and make
corrections.

21. Troubleshooting
• Finishing first: We need to have a series of
challenging task-related extensions for early finishers, so
that when a group has finished early, we can give them
an activity to complete while they are waiting.
• Awkward groups: We can separate best friends
for pairwork; we can put all the high-status figures in one
group.

22. One way of finding out about groups, in
particular, is simply to observe, noting
down how often each student speaks.