It's only Tuesday but this week has already been a very busy one - with the start of both EFL and EAP courses.
While it is true that students in every class have varying abilities, differentiated teaching has taken on a new meaning for me since I began to teach a multilingual EAP class with students from various learning backgrounds. Some followed traditional schooling in their home countries, whereas others went to international or English-medium schools at home and abroad.
How do you give more or less balanced attention to both the stronger and the weaker students? How do I give all students appropriate challenge by stretching a task in both directions, i.e. grading it up and down at the same time?
I suspect that I'll be able to find the answers to the above questions in a few months' time. For now, here are some ideas for differentiated teaching that I've tried out:
- speaking activities - giving the weaker students sentence frames orally or in written form
- online self-study resource as extra homework for the weaker students
- enlisting the help of the stronger students when something needs explaining again for the weaker students
- grammar review (matching sentences to their meaning/use) - giving the weaker students the answer key for backward engineering while requiring them to write new sentences
- hybrid approach - strong-end Task-Based Learning with the stronger students and weak-end Task-Based Learning with language input with the weaker students