BREAK YOUR CHAINS (PAIR WORK)

AFTER SOME TIME, PAIR WORK CAN ACTUALLY BE VERY VERY   BORING FOR YOUR STUDENTS IF YOU ARE DOING A LOT OF PAIR WORK ACTIVITIES IN YOUR LESSONS

AND AGAIN

PAIR WORK CAN ACTUALLY BE VERY VERY   BORING FOR YOUR STUDENTS IF THEY ARE LEARNING ENGLISH FROM 9.30 AM TO 3.30 PM EVERY DAY (OMG!)

                               

I believe there could be several reasons for that:

• Doing pair-work may not be real life like anymore because students are tired of working with the more or less same people.You can obviously pair a student with a different student but well.....after some time -based on my observations- students  might get bored anyway.
• They may simply  not feel 'that excited' anymore about doing pair works.
• No matter what you do they may still end up speaking in their native tongue during the activities esp when you are working with monolingual students.
• It could be boring if you have a small class (4-5 students)
• Students who know each other well might start chatting instead of doing the activity.

So what I have been doing recently to overcome this challenge:

1. I and my students visit other classrooms and say 'Hello neighbour, we are here to ask you a couple of questions:)'

 

                          

How do I do it?

To illustrate the point, two examples are given below but you might as well come up with your own ideas and leave me a comment on how you did it and how it went. Here is how:

• I informed a colleague earlier. We arranged a proper day and time together.
• During the lesson my students wrote down some interview questions (by themselves)
• We all went to the other classroom together.
• When we entered, I greeted the teacher and the students and asked the teacher if my students could ask a few questions to her students.
• Then my students started interviewing the other students.
• I asked my students beforehand to interview with at least three people.
• When they finished the activity, we thanked the class and went back to our classroom.
• Each student reported back to the class.
• After they reported back, each students talked about his/her experience: what he/she learned from the students he/she had interviewed and also what he/she taught the students he/she had interviewed.

2. My students wrote and sent note cards to two other classes. Here is how I did it:

A task from English Unlimited Elementary Coursebook pg:24/ 5

'You decide to use Sofasurfing.com to find a place to stay in another country. Write an e-mail to your host.

• Give information about yourself
• Ask two or three questions
• Check your e-mail. Are the capital letters correct?'

1.  My students  did the task(they wrote two copies) but instead of reading his/her pair's email and writing a reply, a student collected all the students note cards and went to other classrooms (Let's say classroom B and C).
2.  Class B and C read my students note cards and wrote replies.Then a student from classroom B collected the replies and got them back to my classroom and gave it to me. And a student from classroom C did the same thing.
3. I distributed the replies to my students and they  chose the one they would like to stay at. 
4. After the activity finished, each student worked with a partner and corrected grammar mistakes in the e-mails (replies as well).
5. A classroom discussion about the corrections of grammar mistakes and also things we learned from this experience.