What strategies do you use to differentiate instruction for different levels of proficiency?
Providing multiple levels of assignments or activities; using a variety of teaching methods such as individualized instruction, small group work, and whole class instruction; and enabling students to choose topics for projects or research papers serve as some examples. Feel free to discuss how you help struggling students and push more advanced ones. Kindly also mention any tools or technologies you've utilized to support differentiated instruction.
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As I have had experience teaching pre-school kids and later elementary level children, I will follow the age level syllabus. Example for beginners, it will be phonics, action songs, flash cards and numbers. They can start writing by tracing the alphabets and three-letter words before they move on to writing. Short stories such as 'the fox and the hound'. 'three little pigs' will teach them words and how to pronounce them. For the older children, they can have grammar lessons, stories, quizzes, riddles, comprehension passages and videos like "Tom Sawyer' or Oliver Twist will give them some interest to learn language as well. For adults, I will give short passages such as from British Council on conversation practice. I will ask them questions such as names, places and any questions based on the story. In this way, I can also listen to how they use the tenses and their pronunciation.
Grouping, level appropriate tasks, Role play.
Designing lessons based on student's learning styles ,and grouping students with shared interests , and abilities,and language proficiencies.
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I think Teacher Marko's answer below is very helpful.
But bear in mind there are test that you can take to check your level.
In trail lesson i listen to sentence structure, the use of tense and then i would test your vocabulary by asking you do you know what this picture. For example if you know what a ferris wheel is chances are you C1 or C2 level.
Well first it really depends what the students need. Let's say this is a child with beginner level proficiency, you would focus on play learning ,with a lot of puppets. Cause children understand better through play. If you had an intermediate level teenager you would need to focus on associations. Take for example a video game they play, or a movie that they really like, like Harry Potter, and focus on teaching them through that. Now let's say you had an adult with a more advanced level of English, most cases all they really require is someone to conversate with or correct the way they accent certain words. Of course this isn't written in stone, you always adapt based on student's needs. Although I hope this gives a clearer picture into some of the tactics used for English developement by teachers.
when you interact with students during trial lesson. you get to learn about their level of proficiency and work on that. so you create materials based on their needs
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For those learning English Language, what do you find most difficult in grammar? Also what words do you find difficult to pronounce?
