TEACHING IN LARGE HETEROGENEOUS GROUPS: AN OBSTACLE OR AN

EVERYDAY REALITY FOR THE ENGLISH TEACHER?

Teachers are always on the stage, they direct conversation and set the pace
and tone, they plant the seeds and then watch them grow, they are the best actors,
orchestral conductors and gardeners; there are many metaphors to describe what
a teacher is and everyone knows that is not an easy job. A teacher must have
certain qualities, be on training all the time, deal with different kinds of
personalities at the same time, face a lot of obstacles, etc. As well, the teacher has
many challenges that he must pass through, one of the most important challenges
is teaching in large heterogeneous groups.
As teachers were always under the glass, because our work is supervised
and reviewed for many characters: the corresponded authorities, the parents, the
society as such and the students themselves. Without going too far we will start
talking about the education and teachers here in Mexico, which are criticize most of
the time and were always being compared with other countries. What no one takes
in count is the fact that we dont have the proper conditions to be compared as we
currently are. Nowadays a teacher must prepare his class knowing that he will be
teacher from 36 to 45 students, proximately, which makes our work harder.
If we want to be more specific, an English teacher faces another challenge
besides the number of students, but the level of knowledge that every student
have. As we know, not all our students have the same level and yet, we have to
make our classes appropriate according to the syllabus and according to the
differences in every kind of students. To aboard with this marvelous topic, we will
start by explaining from the very beginning, talking about what is teacher, what is
the teacher itself and the obstacles he must face.
The process of education occurs in thousands of classrooms in most
countries and as we know teaching is many different things, it can mean
instructing, explaining, telling, however, very little can be taught in this way.
Teaching is waiting, yet there is also a time fraction, thats what Earl V. Pullias and
James D. explain to us in their work what is teaching, while Jeremy Harmer does
mention to the official definition, which is according to the Cambridge International
Dictionary of English, teaching means to give (someone) knowledge of to instruct
or train (someone), whereas the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
suggests that it means to show somebody how to do something or to change
somebodys ideas.
The fact is that we will find many different opinions about what teaching is,
there will always be definitions where we can agree and other where we may not.
But I think teaching is not exactly something that we must describe, because
everyone has different perspectives about what it is, and that doesnt mean that
someone is wrong, is just that everyone can look at it in a different way. What it is
for sure is that teaching is a science and an art and everyone who has experience
being the one who teach will know for sure that whatever it is, who has vocation to
do it, will find it very exciting and quite amusing.
And thats how we can begin describing our main character in this piece of
work: The English Teacher. An English teacher is someone who must possessed
many qualities, not everything is about the knowledge that they have, although it is
also important, an English teacher must have a dynamic personality and open
mind, they must encourage the interaction with other subjects and cultural activities
related with the English class, he must have an artistic, cultural, literary knowledge
about the different countries that speak English with special attention to the art, the
geography, the institutions and general history, so students can have a wide
cultural vision.
The English teacher must be willing to keep learning about didactics,
different approaches, bibliography, courses about perfectionism, etc. The teacher
is capable of understand and express orally and writing any text or linguistic
content that refers to everyday life and has a wide knowledge about grammar,
vocabulary and pronunciation, have a good psycho-pedagogic formation. Another
thing that he must know is about the evaluation techniques, the use of audiovisual
media and knows the environment in which he is developing his function and many
other things that are important as well.
As we have mentioned, the teacher must have a lot of qualities and
knowledge about many things, but his work doesnt end here, in fact it just begins,
because now he must apply everything he knows inside of the classroom, thats
where the real challenge begins. In the classroom, the teacher has different roles
depending on the different situations that may happen.
Within the classroom the role of the teacher can change from one activity to
another or from one stage of an activity to another. The English teacher must be a
facilitator, controller, organizer, prompter, participant, assessor, resource, tutor and
observer. But we can focus specially in the teacher as performer, when we know
that different teachers act differently and that individual teachers vary their
behavior, depending upon what they are doing; this gives us insights into
classroom behavior. Every teacher is different, but they have the same principles
and they always act according to the learners.
We know that the teacher have many obstacles such as cynicism,
narrowness, confusion, false ideas about people, disorder, dead knowledge, poor
imagination, routine, way of working, tiredness and illness. Many people see large
heterogeneous classes as a big obstacle to teaching, even though it is not
mentioned in our list, we must say that it is one of the difficulties that every teacher
has to deal with. Specially, because we are well aware that learners are always
different.
If we could only begin to describe learners, we could start by the fact that
every one of them is different. Starting by the fact that age is one of the most
important factors to take in count; they have different necessities and respond in a
different way according to the environment where they are learning. A good
teacher always takes this in consideration, knowing that they have different learner
styles. We have students that are convergers, conformists, concrete learners or
communicative learners and the teacher must be prepared to teach each one of
them.
Another thing that is important to point at is the fact that whenever we are in
a classroom we find that all our students have different language levels, we may
have advanced students, upper intermediate, mid-intermediate, lower intermediate
or some of them that will only have an elementary level or and absolutely beginner.
And one of the biggest problems is that they mean different things to different
people. What one school or education system calls advanced may be more like
intermediate to some other teachers. We must face the fact that we have different
types of students, that they all likes to do different activities, they are good at
different things and the most important; they learn best by different methods or
strategies.
Finally, we must face the fact that this is not an easy thing to deal with, it is
quite different to keep everyone satisfied and although is not an impossible task, it
is one of the things that will keep our time busy, cause the successful of our
classes, must be related to our time dedicated to create appropriate lesson plans
according to our very special and different students.



















CONCLUSION

Even though this is one of the things that the teacher must deal with in the
classroom, we can realize that this is not an obstacle to teaching, this is mainly a
challenge, and it is nothing that a real teacher cannot do. The only thing that he
must do is be aware of those differences.
Faced with the different descriptions of learner types and styles for every
student, it may seem that the teachers task is extremely complex. To start with this
challenge, we must recognize our students as individuals as well as being
members of a group, we need to establish who the different students in our classes
are and we can do this through observation or through more formal devices. We
can ask students what their learning preferences are in questionnaires. Or we can
also try to find out which preferred sensory system our students respond to.
When we finally have this information and we know how our students are,
we may create activities that can involve each one of their preferences, we know
that not everyone will be happy all of the time, on the contrary, sometimes; some
lessons will be more useful for some students than for others. But if we are aware
of this and act accordingly, then there is a good chance that most of the class will
be engaged with the learning process most of the time.