The topic of mixed ability seems to be surrounding me at the moment. On a recent set of school inspections it came up at each school I visited, it is the topic of tonight’s #eltchat and then during some training I ran in Brussels today, the question ‘Oh yes but how do you do that with mixed abilities’ came up more than once.
Early in my career I came across this quote (in a sadly now out of print book):
“We do not teach a group but (up to) thirty separate people. Because of this the problem of mixed abilities in the same room seems absolutely natural, and the idea of teaching a unitary lesson that seems odd.”
Rinvolucri 1986, quoted in Podromou: Mixed Ability Classes
As a result I have always been under the impression that every class is one of mixed ability, be it mono or multi lingual. Rinvolurci has a point - all our students are individuals and individuality brings with it different learning styles and different strengths and weaknesses. They will respond to topics and activities in different ways. Engage a banker on the topic of money and their eyes light up but the eyes of the rest of the students switch off.
Students bring lots of ‘baggage’ to the classroom and often we teachers forget the effect that has. A student subjected to a ‘traditional’ classroom may be great at doing grammar gap-fills but not so willing to speak. A young student may be exposed to English from many sources and happy to communicate in English, taking risks, being fluent but maybe not accurate. But give them a ‘traditional’ controlled practice and they go from the ‘strongest’ to ‘weakest’ student in the blink of a teacher’s instruction.
In addition we have to consider the students’ literacy levels, every nation educates their citizens to a different level with race and gender all playing a part. So if a student in your class is not overly literate in their L1 how can we expect them to be so in L2?
Coming from the private language school background, one additional factor to consider is ‘how many times has the student done the material?’. We used to get students starting each academic year attending for a few weeks and then drifting off to ‘better’ pastimes such as skiing. The following September they’d return, their new teacher thinks the students is a genius but in actuality they have all the answers in their book and have done the topic before.
So when we say mixed ability what do we mean? * When we label a student as ‘weak’ or ‘strong’, are we sure? And are they really weak or strong across the board or in just certain areas – there after all four skills to master in learning a language.
I am not denying there is an issue, just urging caution with labelling, and advising that we need to know a lot about our students before we can judge. Nor am I saying we should ignore the concept of mixed ability; I just think it is the norm. There are clearly things that we can do in the class to create a level playing field, some of which I’ll address in the next posting.
* I do think mixed LEVEL classes are a different matter – though clearly a class of different levels is going to have different abilities
