Class Organization

6. Group work Students work in small groups on tasks that entail interaction: conveying information, for example, or group decision-making. The teacher walks around listening, intervenes little if at all. 7. Individual work The teacher gives a task or set of tasks, and students work on them independently; the teacher walks around monitoring and assisting where necessary. 8. Collaboration Students do the same sort of tasks as in 'Individual work', but work together, usually in pairs, to try to achieve the best results they can The teacher may or may not intervene (Note that this is different from 'Group work', where the task itself necessitates interaction) 9. Teacher talk This may involve some kind of silent student response, such as writing from dictation, but there is no initiative on the part of the student.

Questioning Questioning is a universally used activation technique in teaching, mainly within the Initiation-Response-Feedback pattern described at the beginning of Unit One. Note that teacher questions are not always realized by interrogatives. However, in the present context, I propose concentrating on a few basic principles that would seem to characterize effective questions within the conventional IRF structure, defining 'effective questions' in terms of the desired response. As language teachers, our motive in questioning is usually to get our students to engage with the language material actively through speech; so an effective questioning technique is one that elicits fairly prompt, motivated, relevant and full responses.

Criteria for effective questioning 1. Clarity: do the learners immediately grasp not only what the question means, but also what kind of an answer is required? 2. Learning value: does the question stimulate thinking and responses that will contribute to further learning of the target material? Or is it irrelevant, unhelpful or merely time-filling? 3. Interest: do learners find the question interesting, challenging, stimulating? 4. Availability: can most of the members of the class try to answer it? Or only the more advanced, confident, knowledgeable? (Note that the mere addition of a few seconds' wait-time before accepting a response can make the question available to a significantly larger number of learners.) 5. Extension: does the question invite and encourage extended and/or varied answers? 6. Teacher reaction: are the learners sure that their responses will be related to with respect, that they will not be put down or ridiculed if they say something inappropriate?