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Speaking matters: Pairwork
Elena Geiko: Speaking matters: Pairwork (by Adrian Tennant) extracts
Îòâåòîâ - 2
Elena Geiko: Why should I use pairwork? There are some clear advantages to using pairwork. First, in large classes it gives more students the opportunity to speak. Imagine you have 30 students and your class is an hour long. If your students took equal turns speaking and you did no speaking at all, and assuming there was no reading or listening either, your students would still only get two minutes each! So, if they have two lessons a week for thirty weeks they’d each get two hours in total, and that’s only if you don’t speak. Quite clearly, this is absurd. So, by using pairwork you can maximise the opportunities for your students in terms of time spent speaking. Another reason is that students will learn from each other. Learning is not just a top-down activity where the teacher opens up the top of the student’s heads and pours in the information. By using pairwork you give students the opportunity to learn from each other and learn from doing. Finally, pairwork gives students a degree of privacy and allows them to try things out that they might not attempt in the more public forum of a class discussion or a teacher-fronted activity. When students speak with a partner only one other person can hear their mistakes (and, of course, the teacher can her them if he or she is monitoring). This helps give shy and reserved students more confidence in their ability to use the language.
Elena Geiko: Are there any disadvantages to pairwork? Yes. There is, of course, a loss of control in terms of how much the teacher can check and hear. This does mean that some students may continue to make mistakes simply because the teacher does not hear them. There are also issues to do with how you pair the students up. Some students may tend to dominate the speaking exchange: shy students may say little or nothing. A weak student may benefit from being paired with a strong student, but will the strong student also benefit? It is no good simply putting students into pairs without also taking into consideration who they should work with. A key point is that variety is good. If students always work with the same partner, then any problems will continue (and often get worse).
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