Dealing with large classes : Part 1

I confess that when I came to Baiyin I was shocked by the class sizes. Of course I knew, in a theoretical way, how big they were going to be but knowing it and seeing it are two very different things. In that first year I taught all my lessons at Baiyin Middle School Number Ten and my smallest class had 62 students. My largest had 84.

Walking into a room and finding that the whole room is filled with desks placed in the old-fashioned rows layout with just about room to walk down between them (and not always even that) is quite daunting.

Many of the standard EFL activities that we all do all the time simply can't be done with groups this size in classrooms this crowded. How, for example, can you organise a "find someone who" activity when there is no room to stand up and walk about?

Even very sedentary activities become impossible if any kind of handout is needed. At the moment I teach, every week, just over 1200 students. Any copying I need to have done I have to pay for. That means that at one handout per student and about one penny per copy I'd need to spend twelve pounds and carry a stack of paper about four inches thick around.

With lessons forty minutes long the logistics of actually handing things out and collecting things in would use a significant percentage of  the time and checking them would be flat out impossible.

So, what's to be done about it?

The first and most obvious thing is to make the class size seem smaller and there is a way to manage that. Divide it into groups. I find that, depending on the actual class size and the type of activity I'm using, groups of four to eight work well. If you choose the groups based on where people are sitting you can do most activities without anyone needing to stand up at all.

The groups can be used in two ways. You can treat each group as if it were an individual student. When  you ask questions ask a group. You are more likely to get an answer. If groups are still reluctant to answer you can get them to choose a leader or you can nominate leaders yourself.

The leaders can then act os a spokesperson for the group.

The second thing that groups allow you to do is a variation on the kind of mingling activity that you might do in a small class. Instead of "find someone who", for example, you can ask "find someone in your group who".

The difficulty with this is that if you give each student a hand out they will just show each other and work on them as a writing task rather than a speaking task. It needs close monitoring and you have to beconstantly walking around the class checking that the groups are doing the activity as you intended.

Another difficulty in large classes, especially when you have a lot of them, is names. Some of the kids have taken English names, most have only Chinese names and I find it impossible to even contemplate learning 1200 Chinese names. More on how I deal with this later.