an ‘inclusive’classroom

• ENGLISH TEACHING professional • 3

M A I N F E A T U R E

Jim Rose looks

positively at mixed ability

classes and suggests

some appropriate

teaching approaches.

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All classes are mixed abilityclasses. Sometimes,particularly with adults, thelevel of the students may be

more or less homogenous, but insecondary schools most classes have awide range of levels and abilities.

Developing a teaching approach todeal with such diversity in one classseems to be an almost impossibledemand. In this article I want to look

everyone has something special to offerto the class. I have to help them all toprogress together, and they have tolearn how to value each other’s skills. Itis an inclusive classroom.’

A metaphor of a mixed ability classwhich works for me is to think of theclass as a lift (elevator). Everyone needsto get into the lift to start with. Somestudents will run into the lift, some will

at mixed ability teaching from a freshangle, viewing the mixture of skills andabilities as a positive factor andsuggesting some appropriate teachingapproaches. I then want to ask ‘Whatmakes a successful mixed abilityactivity?’ and show some simple waysto modify material to make it suitablefor a range of abilities.

What is mixed ability?Here are two possible answers to thisquestion from a teacher’s point of view:

‘Students used to be split according totheir abilities into ‘streams’. Now allthe students are mixed together in oneclass. There are good students, averagestudents, and bad students. I can’tteach three different levels at the sametime so I aim the lessons at the averagestudents. I can’t really challenge thegood students and the bad studentsaren’t interested anyway, so they tendto get excluded.’

Here is a different way of viewingmixed ability:

‘The learners have different linguisticabilities but for different reasons. Theyhave a range of non-linguistic skills so

have to be dragged in. Some studentswill travel right to the top of thebuilding, some may stop at the thirdfloor and some may only reach the firstfloor, but everyone will have travelledsomewhere successfully. At the end of aclass, every student can leave the roomfeeling that they have been challengedand that they have achieved something.

Mixed Abilityan ‘inclusive’classroom

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4 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional •

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Why are some students‘worse’ than others?It is very easy to label a student as‘good’ or ‘bad’ and then expect them tomatch the label ever after, but there area number of reasons why learners maybe better or worse at English. Many ofthe reasons are temporary and can beovercome.

● They have a different starting point.Perhaps they learnt or did not learnEnglish at primary school orkindergarten.

● They have had a very poor teacher.

● They have missed out on animportant stage of learning but havegood skills in a different area.

● They have been labelled as ‘bad atEnglish’ and now they believe it, sowhy bother? They are bored anddemoralised.

● They are less mature than otherstudents or lack confidence to getinvolved.

So, in fact, there are good reasonswhy a less able student may, potentially,be a good language learner. It is thisrealisation that has undermined the oldidea of streaming where, once labelled,a student got stuck.

A mixed ability class should offerall the students in it an appropriatechallenge to help them to progress intheir own terms. Unfortunately, we allhave to work within the bureaucracy ofeducation - exams, tests and so on - inother words in someone else’s terms. Ifclasses operate a dividing line of ‘pass’and ‘fail’ in everyday activities, it can

characteristics share a common feature- they aim to make the classroominclusive for all students:

● There is a sense of discipline andshared purpose in the class. Thestudents have learned to work togetherand to be self-directed for shortperiods.

● Both linguistic and non-linguisticskills are valued and everyone cancontribute even if the contributions arenot linguistic.

● Students’ work and drawings aredisplayed on the wall or kept in a classfolder that is regularly reviewed. All thestudents in the class will be involvedand each student will have somethingappropriately challenging to work on.

● To provide a range of challenges fordifferent abilities, there will be a range

of achievable objectives for many tasks.Many of these objectives will be smalland immediate, like learning five newwords, saying one sentence correctly orrepeating an earlier exercise and gettingit right.

● There will be time and space foreveryone to think. Students learn thatthey don’t need to think when theteacher asks a question because themost able students will answer. Theycan be encouraged to note down theanswer or put up their hands brieflywhen they know, without giving theanswer. This way, all students in theclass will have the chance to thinkabout the question.

● There will be opportunities forregular assessment against a personalstandard. For example, ‘I got 3sentences right last time and 5 rightthis time!’ is a great step forward. Ifstudents are helped to measurethemselves against their own personalachievements, all students, includingthe stronger ones, can focus onimproving their own performance anda value can be placed on the effortthey have made. Students in this classwill have regular opportunities to findout how they are progressing.

● The syllabus will be planned toallow a different rate of progresswithin each lesson, so that studentscan work at the best speed for them.However, the general pace of thesyllabus will be the same for allstudents - they can all feel that theyare learning together. The more ablestudents will learn more vocabularyand engage in more challengingpractice.

What makes a successfulmixed ability activity?Activities need to be quick and easy toprepare and they need to take accountof the practicalities of teaching.

In the following activity, there islittle extra preparation because it usesone piece of material - a standardcoursebook dialogue. Memorisation isthe common starting point (to get allthe students into the lift) while thedialogue is a springboard for morechallenging work (which will takethem to different storeys of thebuilding).

create a sense of failure and a feelingthat the task of learning is too hard. Asteachers, we can be much more thaneducational bureaucrats - we can offerthe chance of real educational andlinguistic progress together, and we canmake it fun too.

What are the characteristics ofgood mixed ability classes?The thought of having to develop acompletely new approach in order todeal with mixed ability teaching isunderstandably frightening. In practice,what is needed most is a change ofemphasis in the classroom to create thecontext where all the learners feelvaluable and have the space andconfidence to try. All these

What is needed most is a change of emphasis

an ‘inclusive’classroom

Mixed Abilityan ‘inclusive’classroom

ETp Issue 3 pp1-7 26/4/01 9:49 am Page 4

• ENGLISH TEACHING professional • 5

Jim Rose lived and taughtin Nigeria and Brazil,before becoming Directorof Studies for TeacherTraining at InternationalHouse London. He haslectured at LancasterUniversity and he nowwrites for Longman. Hehas just co-authored alower secondary coursebook with Steve Elsworthcalled Go!

The teacher writes the dialogue onthe board and establishes the contextfrom the picture. If this part of thelesson is conducted in the students’ ownlanguage then all students canparticipate.

The students take the parts of Helenand Karini and say the dialogue in pairs.

They do it again, and again. Eachtime, the teacher erases a few morewords until the students can repeat thedialogue from memory.

Now the students draw a picture ofthree or four people in their realfamilies.

The students then talk about theirpictures using the questions and answersthey have memorised as a basis. Every

student will have something to say andwill be able to participate in the activity.The better students will be able tocommunicate more.

This activity has several features thatmake it suitable for mixed abilityteaching:

● The starting points are the same for allthe students - predicting the context intheir own language, then memorising.

● The starting points don’t depend uponprevious linguistic knowledge. Othernon-linguistic starting points mightbe: using music, drawing or painting,miming, generating ideas or sharingworld knowledge in their ownlanguage.

● Both linguistic and non-linguisticskills are integral to the success of theactivity.

● There is more than one objective -memorisation, drawing, a simplecontrolled dialogue, a dialoguedeparting further from the memorisedmodel.

Every conversation in this activity,however fluent or halting it may be, is asuccess because students are asking andanswering something real about theirfamilies.

How to modify tasksMost tasks can be modified simply toprovide a non-linguistic objective byadding an element of discussion in theirown language or incorporating maths,drawing a diagram, or a performancetask and so on. Two or three levels oflinguistic difficulty can also be added byproviding steps or stages to make themeasier.

For example, in the followinglistening task, the students have to writethe names of the rooms correspondingto the letters on the plan of the ship. Inthe box below, however, the task is madeeasier for weaker students by giving

them options to choose from. Thisreduces the amount of information theyhave to listen for.

Similarly, questions for a readingtext can offer options:

Karini: Who’s that?Helen: My mum. She’s a teacher.Karini: Is that your father?Helen: Yes. He’s an architect.

And that’s my sister.She’s called Theresa.

Karini: How old is she?Helen: She’s twenty-two.

She’s a student.

Listen and circle the names of the rooms

Why doesn’t Vinnie like Malek?

Malek’s new at theschool. He can’t playfootball. He’s got longhair.Who wins the race? Is it Pat, Vinnie or Malek?

Malek.

Safestart Dialogue

Students can learn to decide forthemselves which level of task theywant to do. At first they may chooseinappropriately (but remember that asingle objective activity is alreadyinappropriate for many students).

After a while they will start tochoose the level which challenges thembest because it is boring doing tasksthat are too easy or too challenging allthe time.

Each student has a differentlearning profile too, so a student may,for example, choose an easier task for agrammar exercise because s/herecognises where her/his strengths andweaknesses lie.

Small successesThere is a simple idea behind all this:just as learners need achievableobjectives and plenty of small successesto stay motivated, so do teachers. If wethink that we have to retraincompletely or spend every eveningpreparing new materials to cope withmixed ability classes, then onlyseriously dedicated teachers will do so,and then not always. In fact, we canstart taking the small but significantsteps towards an inclusive classroomnow.

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