“They don’t have no satisfaction”

Jola Kaźmierczak and Grażyna Turlej (teachers at a lower secondary school in Katowice)

 

That slightly perverse title expresses our uneasy feeling of the rare moments of satisfaction we get from the hard work to keep our pupils in mixed-ability classes satisfied and motivated towards learning English.

 For Grażyna and Jola it was the first ever time of sharing their experience in lecturing to a group of fellow teachers. We were both rather nervous but pleased to have the audience participating in the discussion at the end.

 Problems in mixed ability classes are difficult, time-consuming and nerve wracking at times. One gets all sorts of pupils in one class. The class, which is meant for elementary level, gathers anybody from absolute beginner to intermediate level. Some pupils would co-operate, others would only dream of sitting the lesson out safely.

 Motivating weak pupils is a hard task as they often consider themselves inferior in any other field of learning. It requires co-operation with parents who are sure to have stupid silly kids! It also means patient explanations and attempts to try many ways of teaching and learning English – to make it creative if not amusing – role plays, word games and quizzes. They often don’t believe they could write test questions for fellow pupils!

 Another extreme are talented pupils or those who have been trained on private English courses. They would either co-operate or behave badly or even aggressively. Another problem, which is not directly aimed at the teacher but ruins the work in class, is vulgarity in class.

 Mixed ability classes certainly remain a great challenge for the teacher. It’s never boring and needs more work than the teacher ever imagined. If the difference between the levels of the pupils’ command of English is too great the very weak pupils easily get discouraged.

 Grażyna and Jola presented some ideas and techniques to show how they try to solve the problems in their work with teenagers in a state school.