The Effect of Large Classes on English Teaching

There are considerable studies concerning the influence of class size on students' improvement but a shortage of consensus on the definition of large and small classes. Thus, this section and the one that follows intend to probe into the causes to plateau of English learning and teaching in large classes. It is the language teachers who hold a negative view against large classes as they believe having many students in one class can cause some problems that affect them and their students. Some commonly comments heard by teachers are: there is no communication, the class is out of control, lack of individual attention and difficult to set effective group activities. Other teachers always emphasize that it is impossible to concentrate on all students and therefore not enough reinforcement will be made to encourage all to participate in different activities.

On the contrary, teachers in small classes are able to pay great attention to their students and the benefit from the presented activities is considered to be high. From that we can say that it is abundantly evident that English teachers encounter great challenges when teaching large classes as they encounter difficulties in knowing all students in the class, having time for all individuals or presenting effective activities and therefore many students, especially the weak ones, tend to lose concentration. Another problem which is borne out in the words of the teachers and hinders the learning process in large classes is identifying and controlling students who tend to distract their classmates from concentrating on the lesson. Lazear (2003) assumed that if a student misbehaves and begins disturbing the class, the teacher has to attend the disturbance and control the noise. Such action from one student or more in a large class will block the learning of that moment and demolish the capability of others to learn. 

Activities for working with large classes

According to Harmer (2007), despite the problems of big classes, there are things that teachers can do such as using worksheets to hand out worksheets for many of the tasks which they would normally do with the whole class. Pair work and group work play an important part since they maximize students´ participation. There are ways of doing this: first rows turn to face second rows, third rows to face fourth rows, etc. It is important to make instructions especially clear, and agree on how to stop the activity.

An additional activity is chorus reaction where the class can be divided into two groups, the front five rows and the back five rows. Then, each row/half can speak a part in a dialogue, ask or answer a question, and repeat sentences or words.

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