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The importance of pair work and a few tips on how to do it effectively
Submitted by Amin-Hadjaran on 31 October, 2010 - 07:24
I really did not think of PAIRWORK as an important teaching technique. Yet, I really wanted my students to develop their speaking skills in the class. Some of them were shy to talk to me. For some, I had no time, for some I really feared talking to because of the number of mistakes they made in their speaking, and for others I didn't know how to stop them once they started on the talking thing!!!! I kept thinking about this problem for a long time. And at last I realized the solution is to pay attention to PAIRWORKS in the class. Here I list their advantages and I hope student and teachers do their best to make pairworks more effective in the class.
- Increasing the time of speaking: The time students spend talking to their partners is much longer than the time they spend talking to their teacher.
- No stress: Talking to a classmate is much easier than to a teacher (especially one like me!!!)
- Limiting the mistakes: All pairworks have been modeled and their pattern is well organized by the authors. So this will give the student less risk at making mistakes.
- FUN...FUN...FUN: I personally enjoy seeing a noisy class with everyone busy talking with their partners. This makes the class fun, less formal and more efficient.
Here are some tips to have successful pairwork practices:
- explain to the students why you think pairwork is important
- act wisely in choosing who gets to be paired with who
- walk around the class, stand by partners for a couple of seconds and encourage them
- encourage students to use the model in the book
- choose your own partner and enjoy sharing your ideas with him/her
- ask them questions about their partners' point of view on the subject
- swap partners to get better results
- pay attention to shy students
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Comments
Students can really practice their fluency during pair work activities.