How to organize groups effectively based on language competency

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Armenuhi Seghbosyan

ESL senior trainer with 8+ years of teaching experience, specializing in ESP (Medical, IT, Financial, Business English), course content creator, CELTA certified trainer, PTE examiner

As you know, all of us — teachers, have come across the situation where we have to work with learners whose levels are not that homogeneous to put it lightly. It is the teacher’s job to make sure that everyone in the classroom gets an equal amount of challenge and develops the skills in the target language according to their capabilities. This gets more difficult when in modern teaching methodology 70% of classroom work is done through pair and group works.

So, what to do to guarantee that everyone feels comfortable with the group they work in?

1. Groups based on skill levels

When grouping the learners consider their capacity in practising this or that skill. Let’s say some students are better at listening than the others. One of the ways is to group weak students together and strong ones together. This will give them a chance to work in a group of students with similar abilities and feel more comfortable. You can provide more support to weak students. However, this cannot always be the case as it can result in very slow progress. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to shuffle the groups so that weak learners are faced with a bit of more challenge and strive for more. When doing this, the individual differences of the learners should surely be taken into consideration.

2. Groups based on interest

This may sound strange when talking about grouping based on language competency, but if you want your learners to stay in their comfort zones and hone language skills at the same time, then this way of grouping the learners is a good choice. Setting up groups based on learner interest will prioritize the task and put language competency in the background. It will help the learners to feel more relaxed and in the sphere of their interest. They gradually will forget the fear of making a mistake and start producing more language, practising. As we all know, the more you practice, the better it gets.

3. Groups based on learning styles

It is not a secret that there are different types of learners. Some of them prefer learning through visual aids, some of them like books, the others prefer technology, etc. When, however, they are placed outside of their comfort zones, the learning and the assimilation stage slow down. To avoid this, it’s a nice idea to group the learners based on the way they like learning and adapt the lesson materials accordingly. This, surely, will be more time-consuming on the part of the teacher as they will need to adjust the learning materials for each group.

4. Groups based on specific tasks

To make sure all of your learners work with each other every now and then, in other words, to provide them with the chance to work within stronger and weaker groups, it is a common practice to distribute the learners some roles and rules they need to follow. For instance, if you have a strong student in a group who you know will steal all the spotlight and not give the others a chance to speak up, assign the role of a ‘teacher’ to them. Their task will be to observe the other members’ speech and correct the language mistakes if any. Similarly, if you have a very quiet student in a group, assign them the role of a presenter. Their job will be to summarize what the task is and present it to the rest of the class. By doing so, you’ll create diversity and manage the classroom much better. It will also help the learners to go out of their comfort zones and face more challenges with the target language.

To sum up, taking language competency of the learners is a must when grouping them to do a task. However, we should make sure that our grouping methods don’t always depend on that, but also are more future-oriented in helping the learners to face their fears.