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Have you ever caught yourself diving into the famous Teacher Talking Time (TTT) deep well, while your whole class is staring at you like zombies? Well, I’ve caught myself in this situation, and every single time I’ve felt AWFUL! I’ll be honest, although I do my best and try to create interesting ESL and EFL lessons for my children, I also make many mistakes, and this has undoubtedly happened. But for the times it has happened, I’ve always upgraded my lessons by looking at our English teacher toolkit. I usually grab either a traditional or a customizedgrouping technique that wakes my students up.
But Adriana, not everybody knows what a grouping technique is.
What’s a Grouping Technique?
A grouping technique is a strategy ESL and EFL teachers use to organize their students into smaller groups and create a much more dynamic environment. They are used by almost every language teacher around the world and may vary from teacher to teacher and from context to context.
Examples Of Grouping Techniques
A basic grouping technique that I bet you use almost every day is to ask students to work with the people they are seated next to; another one I’m pretty sure you probably use is to ask your students to act like an animal and make a group with the students who are acting like the same animal. There are as many grouping techniques as there are creative teachers.
As you can see, grouping techniques are wonderful and we, as ESL and EFL teachers, might use them for a variety of purposes. A technique I commonly use is called “inside and outside circles”. The students must create two circles with the same number of students in each. One of the circles will surround the second, so that one circle is inside the other. The idea is to play some music and allow the two circles to rotate while the music is being played. You can do this as many times as you want, this will make the activity even more fun!
When the music stops, both circles must stop too, at which point each one of the students is facing a student from the other group. Done! You have made pairs to work on the next learning task!
Adriana, I do these types of activities all the time, I don’t get the point of this blog…some of you might be thinking now.
Don’t worry I’m going to explain!
Creating a Dynamic ESL and EFL Classroom with Grouping Techniques
Although grouping techniques are used on a daily basis by many ESL and EFL teachers, it is important to understand the ways in which they can be customized and used in a more efficient way!
Grouping techniques increase students’ motivation, support us when designing differentiated instruction lessons, and promote interaction among learners. Bearing these characteristics in mind, it seems that they might be considered as the perfect tool to review content in a dynamic and fun way. In other words, we can use them to let our students play, while strengthening their skills.
The act of standing up, interacting with their classmates, and coming back to work with a more relaxed mind makes this the perfect moment to put into practice the idea of “learning with emotion”.
A well-designed grouping technique with a pertinent learning objective can help us not only to promote oral abilities, but also to review vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and even reading comprehension, all in just a few minutes.
Now you must be saying: How do you do that? Explain more!
Create Your Customized Grouping Techniques
You can create a set of matching cards with questions and answers that might include a grammar structure (question-answer), a list of vocabulary (images–word), English pronunciation sounds (word and symbol), or even general comprehension (questions-answers) taken from a text you have recently worked on in class. After having done this, follow the steps below:
Cut out the cards and place them in a container or a plastic bag.
Ask each child to draw a card from the container and hide it.
Ask your learners to read their cards and find the card or cards that match theirs.
Make sure everybody has found their match or matches and create their working groups. After this, your children will be ready to develop the group activity you have in mind. Is important to remind you that this is just a grouping technique, and it must be created based on a previously studied topic. My other suggestions are to keep it short, simple, and above all, keep it FUN!
Well… you might be thinking … Adriana, I don’t have time to do all that, you know how teachers’ lives are. I can barely plan my lessons!
If that’s the problem, DON’T WORRY! Because I have a solution!
The following Instagram Post has four fun grouping techniques you can use and adapt to any ESL and EFL content. Click on the image below and download it NOW!
If you’d like to download my ‘Present Simple – Classroom Supplies Grouping Technique’ or any other “protected resource”, first you’ll need to download a resource from my ‘Free Resources Library’ to receive the password via email in our NEXT Newsletter.
Join us in my selective group and get access to all the private resources. See you there!
In conclusion, customized grouping techniques are an excellent choice to recycle and review previous topics. They can be adapted to almost any topic and can help you keep your class motivated, communicative, and efficient.
If you’d like to download my ‘Present Simple – Classroom Supplies Grouping Technique’ or any other “protected resource”, first you’ll need to download a resource from my ‘Free Resources Library’ to receive the password via email in our NEXT Newsletter.
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