Chapter I questioning strategies

Get students to learn by heart

Another shock, especially for those who work for language schools. We hardly ever make students learn texts by heart and always try to come up with a creative way of memorising all irregular verbs without rote-learning. However, learning by heart can help students memorise lots of natural grammar chunks, collocations, idioms and other frequent phrases that occur in conversation. Penny Ur suggests using poems, songs, rhyming chants and dialogues for this purpose.

Have a good reason to use group work

Varied interaction patterns in a lesson are a sign of good classroom management. Lots of communicative activities imply working in groups. To what extent is it necessary? Let’s listen to Penny Ur: ‘In some lessons, group work involves only ‘busy work’ or ‘sharing the ignorance’, with little learning. Sometimes group activities can be difficult to control in classes where students are easily distracted and tend to go off-task. Students vary a lot in the way they like to learn. Although some enjoy working in groups, others prefer to do things on their own, or in teacher-led full-class activity.’ (from ‘100 Teaching Tips’ by Penny Ur) All in all, don’t feel guilty if you opt for individual work at times and remember about balancing interaction patterns to students’ benefit.