Students' learning strategies in a large speaking class.

Teaching a large class is really difficult. When we have too many students, there may be problems with classroom management, correcting oral or written work, maintaining rapport with students etc. Therefore, many teachers believe that in large classes, students can’t do well, especially in a speaking class.

However, from my observation of some large classes in Dong Nai, an underprivileged province of Vietnam, this is not really true. Students find their own ways in such classes to make learning fruitful and enjoyable.

These classes are the joint-project between the English Department of HCMC University of Education with the Center of Computer Science and Foreign Languages of Dong Nai province. The former sends teachers to Dong Nai to teach and administers academic issues. The latter is in charge of teaching facilities and administration.

Since Dong Nai is a poor province, in order to cover the training costs, class size must be big. All the three English classes there have from 80 to 100 students. It is interesting to see the strategies these students develop to cope with their class size.

The first thing I notice in these students is the way they make use of the rich pool of human resources available. They tend to bring their varied life experience, opinions, interests and ideas classroom interaction (Ur 1996:305). I realize that they learn quite a lot by finding out about each other. Indeed, the wealth of dissimilarity can be utilized in creating interesting, varied, meaningful and student-centered lessons (Hess 2001). Having large number of peers to interact with turns out to be a social advantage that these students make use of. They understand that learning to work and cooperate with others is a very important part of students’ lives. If a learner does not have enough experience working with students from various backgrounds, he may have difficulty working with people in a world becoming more and more culturally diversified. Therefore, they change their partners all the time. I was quite amazed at the energy and interest they put in their discussions.

Another factor I notice in these classes is that the students are highly motivated. o­nce they are in group work, it takes quite an amount of time to stop what they are doing. This high motivation can be explained by the fact that they have a lot of peers to interact with. In a research o­n advantages and disadvantages of small class size, Yi (2004) finds out that the students will not have a sufficient amount of peers to interact with if the class is small. According to her, interaction with peers is a very important part of students’ lives. If a child does not have enough experience with students of all backgrounds, he may have trouble in the future interacting with students of different backgrounds. Additionally, in a small class, it is quite difficult to keep students interested as they have to interact with people they have known very well. However, in large classes like these there are always enough students for interaction. Even some students or some groups are quite, there are always good noises everywhere. When a group of students see how noisy the other groups are, they try to make their group speak up.

Most interestingly, in those large classes, the teacher is not the o­nly pedagogue. Indeed, with so many levels of language ability, it is natural that the more able students will become teacher-assistants. They can help weaker students to learn and by doing so improve themselves: “Cross-ability grouping allows the more able learners to improve their language skills by honing their ability to explain, to state clearly, and to give effective examples, while it provides the less able with considerable support” (Hess 2001:3). This kind of peer-teaching and collaboration fosters a cooperative atmosphere, which has great educational values. Therefore, teaching and learning in these classes turn out to be very enjoyable for both the teacher and the learners.

From the observation of these classes, I even love to teach large classes. I think, o­nce a teacher knows how to maximize the advantages from the learning strategies of students in large classes, teaching them will be very rewarding.

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