Small Group...What?
by Rocky Peltzman

When teaching conversational English, the most prevalent method used around the world is the Small Group Communicative Method. That may be hard to picture in the mind’s eye. You may ask yourself, “Doesn’t every language teacher communicate with his/her students?”
Recently, while visiting a university in the Visayas, the head English teacher proudly declared that they use small group discussion in their classroom. He sketched the classroom as so:
X = Teacher
O = Students (15)

I posed the following question to the head teacher: If the teacher gives each student equal opportunity to speak during a 60-minute class, how many minutes will each student actually speak English? His answer, of course, was “four minutes” (60 minutes divided by 15 students).

I sketched an alternative way to set up the classroom:

I posed my question again, and the teacher answered, “Twenty minutes of English speaking per student” (60 minutes divided by 3 students). It was if a light bulb went off in his head. By dividing up the class into small groups, the language instructor can greatly maximize Student Talking Time (STT) in the classroom (thereby minimizing Teacher Talking Time—TTT).

The role of the language teacher here changes dramatically. His/her foremost responsibility is to structure the oral activity so that all students are talking. This means activities using information gap exercises (where questions must be asked to extract information that a partner/partners have), guided discussion questions (to have been written up by the students as homework), etc. Oral exercises designed for pairs, or groups of 3 to 4 are ideal for maximizing STT.

The function of the instructor is then to move between the groups, monitoring that students have more or less equal opportunity to practice, practice, practice, are correcting each other, or pointing out that an error has been made and allowing the student to self-correct.

The teacher will quickly learn to visually scan the groups and listen out of both ears to ensure that they are practicing the targeted language, no matter how far they are positioned from the instructor’s location.

As mentioned, this is sometimes difficult to envision—it’s best encountered in the flesh. At John Clements we offer a free 3-hour demonstration of these techniques every Friday morning at LKG Tower (6801 Ayala Avenue, Makati, Room B1) at 8:30 a.m. so that teachers and trainers can experience and appreciate the critical difference between small-group communicative work and the traditional (stationary teacher stands at the front of the classroom and interacts with each student one-on-one while the others sit passively), frontal classroom.

Call the HRD Division at 02-845-2093, 845-2117, or 845-2002 to 4 to confirm attendance, and learn more about this dynamic way of teaching conversational English.