I teach ninth graders in Thailand.

Thai students love to have fun and so do I (my little bundles of joy refer to me as Mr Bean - altogether now, awww!) and I can see great potential in using WBT however, my classes have close to forty students or more with wildly varying levels of English language competency.

Does anyone have any experience of using WBT when teaching English as a foreign language to very large class sizes and proficiency mixes?

BTW, hat tip to www.ajarn.com for bringing WBT to my attention. www.ajarn.com/ajarn-guests/articles/whol...eaching-techniques/]

ไม่มีใครรู้ภาษาไทยด้วยหรือไม่? ฉันมีคนไทยหลายคนร่วมงานสนใจมากใน WBT แต่พวกเขามีทักษะด้านภาษาอังกฤษดีมาก

ขอบคุณสำหรับการเข้าใช้ใดไทย

atm,

I wish I could help with advise on the same set up you have, but our situation is different. We use WBT at our international school in Vietnam and our class sizes are pretty small, typically 20 or fewer. Also, they are set up on English proficiency. So a teacher might have 6th, 7th and 8th graders all with a beginner proficiency or the same ages with intermediate proficiency. WBT works very well with our set up.

I would be very interested in learning how WBT is working for you in your situation. What are the challenges you have. Also, what are the solutions you are trying.

Looking through the forum I have noticed that when a teacher posts a specific problem there is a lot of support for dealing with it. So if you can give specifics on a situation you face I think the other teachers here will be glad to help with their experience and ideas.

I teach 2nd grade ESL students. An idea that I picked up on here is giving sentence frames. When you do the teach-ok the students have the sentence frame to help them construct the sentences. I also realizd that it is important to have informaton up on the screen or on posters for the students to reference. It helps them to remember the words to use.

Since you have a wide range of students, pair up the more advanced students with lower ones. The students who are more fluent can be partner #1, and the sutdent who is less fluent can be partner #2. That way when you use the teach-ok the more fluent student goes first and the other can listen. You can also do mirror words where the partner repeats all the words that the first parther says. The teach-ok is awesome because it gives the students practice speaking in a "safe" environment and you can monitor understanding and make corrections as you walk around without having to put a student on the spot in front of the whole class.


There are so many great things about WBT for ESL students. Even just the basic procedures are excellent practice. For example when we need to get something out of the desk, I will say something like "Please get out your blue reading book." And the class will respond, "Blue reading book, blue reading book, blue reading book!" Or I'll tell the class to sit on the floor and they will say "floor, floor, floor" as they move into place.

I also LOVE WBT for vocabulary. We make gestures for new words. Then to really reinforce the concepts, I will use the vocabulary to get the students' attention throughout the day. In said of saying class-yes, I will say "ancient" and they will say "ancient, VERY old" as they act it out. Instead of answering with the definition, you can also have them practice the words in context by having them repeat a sentence using the word.

I also love the new brain toys that I heard about on the livestream broadcast: www.livestream.com/wholebrainteaching1 One idea is to teach the students to create complete sentences orally before they ever begin the writing.

One more idea- you might also use some of your more advanced students as student leaders who can help you monitor for correct speech during teach-ok.

Good luck!
Allison awholebrainteacher.blogspot.com/

Dear atm,
I teach 7th, 8th and 9th grade EFL (English as a Foreign Language) in a remote corner of Brazil. This year I don't have any classes over 30 students, but last year when I started using WBT I had 4 classes with over 40 students. WBT works well with large classes, it just takes a little more time to get things going smoothly. My students are quite lively and given some downtime they can be quite a handful, but once I got them started with teach-O.K. they put all that energy into teaching there partner and things went things got better.
Once, towards the end of last year I was talking to my coordenator and lamenting the fact that I hadn't been able to complete all of the Nation Standards, and she said to me: that may be true, but what you taught your students they LEARNED!
As for the wide proficiency levels, as allisong said: My students were very shy in the beginning, nobody wanted to try to say the words or phrases in English, but after I started using mirroring and teach-O.K. That changed.
Hope this helps.