Foster Collaboration and Communication in the language class
As a language teacher, you know that language acquisition is more than just memorizing vocabulary and sentence structures. It's about developing the skills to communicate effectively in real-world situations.
Grouping your students for collaboration significantly impacts their language learning experience, and we see this every day in our classes. It provides opportunities for interpersonal communication and equips them with the skills required by modern educational trends, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, and social and emotional skills.
Group or team work is an excellent way to build these skills while practicing languages. However, determining how to group students can be challenging as all forms of grouping have advantages and disadvantages, so you will need to know your crowd and use your professional judgment to know when and with whom you will use each strategy.
This blog post will explore some strategies and guidelines for grouping students to develop collaboration skills in the world language class.
A few tips
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Mix it up to encourage cross-cultural communication and collaboration.
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Consider proficiency levels and use this for grouping with similar abilities and mixed abilities to provide opportunities for peer teaching and learning.
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Assign roles to ensure that all students are actively engaged in the activity.
Types of grouping
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RANDOM
This is the most common and straightforward strategy for grouping students. It is an excellent way to encourage cross-cultural exchanges between students and develop empathy and understanding for each other. Some random grouping techniques are: Lollipop Sticks, Inside-Outside Circle, Wheels of Names such as this one, or Student Randomizers such as the one in the picture, where you assign a small card per student and then you pair them up by numbers, letters, or by colors. Using this technique ensures they can be grouped with different people throughout the same lesson. It’s good for making new friends in the class and getting confident in speaking a foreign language in front of others. It also adds an extra layer of the target language as they need to look for their peers asking and answering questions in the target language.
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BASED ON THEIR INTEREST
This strategy gives your students freedom of choice and empowers them to work with others who share common interests, fostering greater collaboration and teamwork. This can get loud sometimes, which is okay in a language class. However, it can make your students too comfortable too, which, as language learners ourselves, we know there might be better positions from which language acquisition happens.
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SIMILAR ABILITY
Collaborating with students of the same ability fosters confidence as they find it easy to communicate with someone they can understand and help each other in areas of difficulty. However, if the ability is very low for both students, they might need some scaffolded support.
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MIXED ABILITY
When you mix abilities, the stronger students can mentor their peers, which will benefit both students. On one side, the more vulnerable student will strive to learn from their peers. On the other hand, the stronger student will exhibit depth in their knowledge if they can explain a concept, it means that you know it.
COMBINATION IS KEY
As teachers, we must be creative in developing different strategies for grouping students to enhance their collaboration skills. Overall, it is essential to remember that we can use various activities and techniques to make language classes more fun and interactive.
I like to implement a combination of all the above. Still, I found the student randomizer particularly useful as they need to communicate with others using target language to see their team, which is an extra opportunity for practice.
I am always looking for new ways to make language classes fun, so if you have developed any unique strategies that work well, please share them with me. Language acquisition will never be a one-size-fits-all process, so drawing on different experiences is good! What technique have you found works for you? Let me know in the comments section!