Why are very large EFL classes problematic for both learners and teachers? How can we teach with very limited or no resources?

Most teachers would prefer to work in an dynamic, well equipped classroom, limited to a maximum of 25 students who have books and materials to support their learning. This is not the situation in many classrooms in developing countries and in Cameroon, in particular, where the classes are full of noisy teenagers who often are not interested in learning English and most of whom have few resources: sometimes just sheets of paper and a pen or pencil, and the teacher only the blackboard and a piece of chalk, with little or no access to the Internet, electricity, books, English dictionaries, or even grammar books and photocopies.

Most classes in sub-Saharan Africa have more than 150 students, crammed into classrooms meant for no more than 60. How can teachers find and create resources to meet the challenges of teaching in resource deficient classes attain their objectives and have a majority of learners active? Most of the teachers earn below US$500 a month, which negates the possibility of using personal funds for classroom resources.

Picture a bitingly hot afternoon in an overcrowded classroom with no electricity where 160 multilevel students, the majority without textbooks, are squeezed onto wooden benches, maybe squatting on the floor because the benches are insufficient. The teacher has only a piece of chalk and her resourcefulness to help her teach English to French-speaking students who have little or no interest in the English language.

This has been my plight more than 20 years, and that of many teachers in Cameroon and sub-Saharan Africa, which has developed my desire to find ways to cope with large, resource-challenged EFL classes. The purpose of this article is to share some tried and tested activities to help surmount a lack of resources and increase student motivation and participation through the use of local available resources—in the hope that teachers in similar situations can adapt and share.

Surmounting Overcrowded Classes

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs states that we must satisfy each need in turn, starting with the first, which deals with the most obvious needs for survival itself. Only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional well-being are satisfied are we concerned with the higher order needs of influence and personal development.

A classroom meant for 40 students is obviously inconvenient for 150+ students. They don’t feel safe or comfortable and, as a result, they won’t concentrate or be motivated in class. Many large class experts (Feichtner, S.B. , among others)  advocate pair/group work to get maximum class participation. If we adopt the task-based approach to teaching, each group will be assigned a different task on the same topic. While some groups will be working in class, others will be doing a different activity outside. Let us take this example:
You have to do reading comprehension and only 10 students out of 150 have textbooks. You are unable to photocopy. What will you do?

• Break the students into 10 groups, based on their language level and perceived intelligence or interest, each with one textbook.
• Create 3–4 activities for the topic.
• Share the textbooks within the different groups and assign each group with an activity. For example, for a reading comprehension topic of “jungle justice”:
• Groups 1 & 6: Draw picture of a thief molested by the population
• Groups 2 & 7: Read the passage and summarize
• Groups 3 & 8: Create and conduct an interview or debate bringing out arguments on the ills of jungle justice
• Groups 4 & 9: Create a word puzzle using words pertaining to jungle justice
• Groups 5 & 10: Role play a jungle justice scene

Have 3–4 groups work in the classroom and the remaining 6 groups work outside.

The groups doing a summary and puzzle may remain in class because they need writing surfaces, while the others prepare their activities outside. Students come together at the end for a whole class session.

Advantages

1. This will ease classroom management
2. The noise level will be minimized
3. Learners don’t get bored
4. Good use is made of a limited-space environment
5. This provides many opportunities for students to work together, compare thoughts, discuss topics, and benefit from the variety of voices
6. Teacher talking time is reduced and student engagement time increased

Disadvantages

1. If the teacher is not strict in monitoring, students may not use the target language in preparing their activities.
2. There is the risk of having higher-level students completing the work for others if the appropriate strategy, like attributing different roles to each group member to ensure active participation, is not devised to ensure that every learner is involved.

Creating Resources

There are many places from which to draw resources that we might not usually consider. Some places to start:

• The teacher’s imagination: Ask students to use something in the class (pens, pencils, desks, rulers) in a nontraditional sense or unusual and inventive ways; to teach the comparative form, for example, use pencils of different measurements; to teach adjectives of color, match pens, pencils, and rulers of the same color.
• Teachers can also come with relia: actual objects that children can see, touch, and hear in the classroom. For a market scene, students can come to class with items sold in the market: fruit, tins of milk, handbags, and other items to sell. Students can role play, with one acting as a patron and one as a trader.
• Student-generated resources:
• Use local materials like leaves, mud, bamboo, or coal from burnt firewood for coloring. Students can also bring in recyclables, such as empty soda bottles or milk cartons for class projects.
• Have students bring articles from the home related to a particular topic to use as a talking or writing point for the class. This will encourage responsibility and participation in the activity, and it will help build community in the classroom.
• Use the talents of your learners to create teaching aids. Have them draw charts, pictures for picture talk, and molding for vocabulary.
• Newspapers: Students can recycle newspapers and magazines, cutting out letters of the alphabet or words to make their own sentences. They can create a story by gluing these sentences, with cut-out pictures from the publications, onto a flannel-graph, which is fabricated from an old blanket, sand, and glue.
• Flash cards/charts from used cartons, used cement paper, or sheets of regular paper. They can use these cards to:
• create jumbled sentences
• join the two halves of sentences (noun phrase plus verb phrase)
• create chain words (single words cut out and jumbled on pieces of paper; students order them into meaningful sentences)
• group words that go together (synonyms, parts of speech, types of actions, etc.)
• play Pictionary (students draw pictures of vocabulary words and their groups must guess what they are drawing)

With students creating their own resources, it is impossible to create enough for everyone, so we always have to redistribute the available resources to groups.

There are many ways to approach reading comprehension without a textbook. Here are a few activities that I have found successful:
 
Jigsaw texts

• Get  10 students to copy the texts on paper as extra work
• Distribute the written texts to each group
• Have the group leader cut and shuffle the text into sections and give one section to each member within the group
• Each student reads their section aloud and, together, the group reorders the text and summarizes it
• They answer comprehension questions. Students reflect on the answer first, then tell their partners and share with the whole class

Dicta-run

• The text may be written on large used cement paper by several students (or, in advance, by the teacher) and pasted on or attached to the wall
• Break the students into groups. Each group appoints a messenger, who runs to the wall, reads the text, runs back, and dictates the text to the others who listen and copy his dictation in their exercise books or on sheets of paper
• When they are finished, they compare and correct their notes and follow up with a comprehension activity

Dictogloss

• Have the students pair up
• Read text aloud while students listen
• Read text aloud again while students copy
• Students crosscheck notes with their partners, then as a group with those sitting behind them, and finally as a whole class
• You may want to write out the text on the blackboard for students to correct their texts before continuing on to a comprehension activity
• The advantage of using student/teacher generated resources is that you are able to conveniently carry out reading comprehension with every student as an active participant. The primary disadvantage is that these tasks may be time consuming

In conclusion

Using these activities, students get involved in creating resources for their own learning, making them active participants and building their self-esteem. There is a great deal of collaboration and teamwork among learners, and the classroom becomes a vibrant community. The ultimate goal is achieved: Teachers successfully carry out their lessons with few or no resources.

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Martina Mbayu Nana is Regional Pedagogic Inspector in charge of the Promotion of English to Francophone, and holds a postgraduate teacher diploma in EFL/ESL.  Her more than 25 years’ experience with overcrowded EFL classes is her inspiration for research and presentations in national and international conferences. She has co-authored EFL and ESL course books used in primary schools in Cameroon.

RESOURCES

Brenner, J. (Spring 2000). Making Large Classes More Interactive. Inquiry, 5(1).

Effective Group Management
http://www.tltgroup.org/gilbert/millis.htm

Frederick, P. J. (1987). Student involvement: Active learning in large classes. In Weimer, M.G. (Ed.), Teaching Large Classes Well. New Directions for Teaching and Learning No. 32. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Teaching Large Classes. Teachers in Action, BBC World Service/OLSET. http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/teaching-large-classes

REFERENCES

Feichtner, S. B., & Davis, E. A. (1985). Why some groups fail: A survey of students’ experiences with learning groups. Organizational Behavioral Teaching Review, 9(4), 58–73.