Monitoring
and guiding
What
and why?
In
many of the activities in CEWw, students will be working
in small groups or pairs. This way of working has many advantages,
in that it gives students a chance to work at their own pace, to
ask each other for help, to share ideas and to get more language
practice. GROUPWORK
and PAIRWORK, however,
can run the danger of students wasting their time together as they
become distracted, talk about or do things other than requested,
or produce work which is full of errors. For this reason, monitoring
and guiding by the teacher are very important.
Practical
ideas
-
Before setting students to work in pairs/groups, check that they
understand fully what they are going to do. You can go through
one or two examples with the whole class first.
- While
they are working, go round the class. You can check whether they
are having any problems, check the work they have done, give extra
ideas where necessary, and generally keep them on the task.
- While
going round the class, you can also note down common errors that
you notice. You can then spend a short time at the end of the
lesson, going through a few of these.
- You
can also make a note of which students seem to be working well
together and which seem to be having problems. Next time, you
can vary the way you set up GROUPWORK
accordingly.
- Before
students start working, you can put some TASKS
IN BLOCKS. When students have finished the work, they can
move on to something from the EXERCISE
BOX, look back at previous Units, or choose a DO
IT YOURSELF task.
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