Pair work /Group work

Pairwork/Groupwork

How:
1. Make a list of pairs of names before the lesson starts or while the students are coming in or just
tell them when the time comes ‘Amal, you work with Mona; Hind, you’re with Samar this time.
2. If there is an odd number of students make a group of three but break them up later in the lesson
and put them into pairs with someone else so they get more chance to speak.
3. You could put them in small groups to start with if the activity allows. You could even make the
activity a competition in small teams if the activity allows, seeing which team gets the most
answers right. Use the board or a piece of paper for keeping score.
4. Change the partners quite often so that the students don’t get bored with their partner. This is
especially important if there is a student who isn’t very popular with the others.
Why:
1. It’s good for the students to speak to each other in English .
2. It’s good for the students to work with another student sometimes rather than alone .
Extra Info:
I don’t put my students into groups bigger than 3 because I don’t think they get enough chance to
speak in such a large group so they switch off, start fidgeting, get frustrated, let the hard-working
students do all the work, fall asleep etc. In a pair, one student is speaking and one is listening and
formulating a response, in a group of three, one is speaking, and usually the other two are
listening and formulating responses, in a group of four (or more), one is speaking, one or two are
listening and formulating responses and the other one is asleep, aware that s/he hasn’t got much
chance of getting a word in edge-ways. Or of course, in a group of four, two speak to each other
while the other two often either fall asleep or end up speaking to each other too, in which case
you might as well have put them in pairs in the first place.
If you have an odd number of students don’t pair the extra student up with yourself – make a
group of three somewhere. I used to take on the ‘odd’ student myself but
I found that it didn’t work. The other students weren’t daft – they realised they were missing out
on the teacher’s attention and I realised they were right – I was short-changing them by not
monitoring them as I should.
If you’ve got some talkative and somehttp://img117.imageshack.us/img117/2307/cuteic0.gif quiet students, pair the quiet ones together for the fluency
activities (as opposed to the vocabulary/grammar activities) to encourage them to talk more. I
used to put one talkative student in a pair with a quiet one, thinking that the quiet one would speak
more if his/her partner was the chatty type. I was wrong – the talkative one monopolises the
conversation and the quiet one is happy to let this happen