Buckland Weekly #34 - Class Sizes

When you come to China - even if you are an experienced teacher at home - there is one key difference that you can’t fail to be shocked by - class sizes. I taught at a college in England for over ten years and my largest class was about twenty students. In my six years in China my smallest class has been double that and my largest regular class was eighty four students. I’ve averaged about sixty.

It can be quite a daunting prospect. When you first walk into a small classroom packed to overflowing with eager Chinese teachers your first instinct might well be to turn around and go home to a country where classes have a sensible number of students.

Don’t panic. There are ways to manage large classes and once you get the hang of it, it isn’t really any more difficult than smaller groups.

The first thing to realise is that many of the typical EFL activities you may have learned if you have done a CELTA or a TESOL course simply can’t be done as they are usually done and if you attempt them they will be a disaster. The kind of thing I am talking about is any activity that involves the students getting up and moving about or involves you, the teacher, rearranging the classroom layout. Try it if you like but I’m confident that chaos will ensue.

For example, one typical activity in an EFL classroom is “Find someone who…” where each student has a list of activities and must find students who can do each one by walking around and talking to classmates. With so many students and so little space there is no way at all that this could work. In a way, being an experienced teacher with a wide repertoire of activities will work against you as you need to drastically rethink what is possible and how to organise things.

So what can you do?

The main thing is to work in groups. Groups of four or six are best because fewer restricts the scope of activities available to you and more makes it impractical for all the students to talk to each other.

When you try to set up your groups you hit another snag. Conventional wisdom says one of two things. Either you group students of a similar level together to promote maximum interaction or you mix the levels so that the stronger students can have a chance to help the weaker ones. Either way you are supposed to vary the groups frequently so that they aren’t always working with the same people.

That just isn’t possible when you can’t move students around. You can only group students with the others sitting near to them but the good news is that it takes seconds to walk around the class indicating who you want to to work together with a group number and a wave of the arms.

Let’s take a look at why this is such a good idea.

Now that the students are in groups you can teach the class as if each group is a student. What was an unmanageable eighty students has been reduced to a far easier twenty groups. How does this help?

Let’s think of some advantages.

1. Where a single student might be reluctant to answer a question because he doesn’t want to be wrong and lose face, a group is more likely to answer because its a consensus process where no one loses face.

2. Activities such as “find someone who…” can be reduced to “find someone in your group who…”.

3. Discussion activities are easy to organise because discussion can now take place in a group.

4. When walking around monitoring you can talk to a whole group at once instead of trying to talk to every individual.

5. You can choose a leader in each group and have them ensure that everyone is participating.

6. Students who haven’t understood the task can ask the others in their group for help in what they must do. (I allow them to help each other to understand the tasks in Chinese though the tasks themselves must be done in English.)

7. Feedback at the end of the tasks is far quicker and classroom management in general is easier.

8. If you need handouts you can make one copy per group for your largest class and then collect them and reuse them every time. Making one copy per student would mean carrying a pile of papers six inches thick and, as you might have to spend your own money on producing them, cost a small fortune.

Will this solve all the problems of a large class? No. Of course not. There will always be students in a class who won’t participate whatever you do. (I have a student in one class who has literally (and I mean that literally) slept through every minute of every lesson. As he wears a hoodie pulled over his head I have never actually seen his face. I have been told by the other teachers to just let him as he sleeps through every minute of every class.)

What it will do though is encourage the students to interact with each other in English and greatly simplify your job in the classroom.