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Teaching GroupsTeaching groups of students can be very rewarding and it brings certain sets of challenges. In this article, I will talk about teaching elementary students, middle aged students, and teaching adults as a group. When teaching very young children, aged 5-9 for example, they have a very short span of attention. The teacher must always be keeping them focused and must change the activity very quickly to keep pace with the limited span of attention. A good deal of interaction is required in order to keep the students learning and working on the task at hand. Coloring and drawing seems to be a great way to motivate the young learner. That is to say that one must use these fun activities as a way to learn. Animals can be colored in and have the names of the animals under them and have the students repeat the names. One can feel with young learners that almost everything is a game! Even the youngest of learners can learn to use basic sentences properly. For example, they can learn to respond to “What is your name”? They can say “my name is Ji Yoon”. These basic sentences should always be encouraged in the classroom. One should always be thinking sentence structure with all lessons that are taught, no matter how young. In the situation with students a little older, much more emphasis is on sentence structure and understanding and the use of more vocabulary in the classroom. Older students understand more words but can struggle in just how to form sentences. As a teacher moves up the line in age he must adapt to a higher understanding or english by the students. With older elementary students, a multi tier approach can be used to great effectiveness. For example, while teaching a short lesson from the book, many new words can be introduced on the board for drills and understanding. The higher the level of english, the more the teacher must introduce more options and examples. The internet is very useful here as you can find good examples that relate to the lesson plan. It is good to point out to the students several fun websites that they can go to on their own. Homework at these sites may or may not be appropriate, depending on where you are teaching and the expectations of the course. Teaching middle age students can perhaps be the most fun of all! All teaching of english can be fun but middle school level students have a greater understanding of english than the lower levels, of course. While teaching them, one can bring in news paper articles and use short stories. Again, the more understanding by the students, the more a teacher must adapt to the new level of english. Usually less discipline is needed at this level. Anything below middle school will require some classroom management. Much more conversational teaching can be fostered at this level. In addition, homework can be a very strong consideration at this level. With this level, more attention to the multi tier approach comes in to play. More spelling, more subtle understanding of the language, more vocabulary. In short, more things can be introduced in the classroom. It can be shocking to a teacher just how well students can read and pronounce paragraphs of english! Finally, teaching adults my require more of the teachers skills than any other. I say that as now the teacher may have to teach much more grammar, again, depending on the english level of the adults. Greater cooperation may be achieved since often the adult is learning english because of work or some expanded desire to learn english. I have personally found that homework was completed at this level much more than any other level! Finally, in general, a teacher must employ certain techniques in order to keep the group setting flowing and use time in the class wisely. With groups, one must insure that all are participating, not just a few advanced students. For a group setting to work well, a teacher must use all of his personality and skills to insure that all are learning. Pair work is so important with groups.