Teaching Tip 10: Monitoring
- While the students are doing an activity you walk slowly
round the classroom and listen to their conversations.
- You can sit down too, if there are enough chairs, but try to
sit in the background a bit or the students will direct their conversation to
- Look at one pair whilst actually listening to a different
pair nearby. Correct the pair nearby (which will probably make them jump
because they thought you were listening to the pair you were looking at) just
to keep everyone on their toes - they never know when you're listening to them
so they can't ever switch off or revert to their mother-tongue.
- Be ready to massage any flagging conversations back into
life, to stop students monopolising conversations, to stop students falling out
with each other and to offer encouragement and praise where appropriate. Listen
- Take a piece of paper and a pen with you on your travels
round the classroom so that you can jot down any howlers (which can then be
dealt with at the end - see TT11 for further
- If you spend your life in the classroom sitting down, this
is your chance to stop numb-bum syndrome - get up and wander round. If you
spend your life in the classroom on your feet, this is your chance to put your
feet up (not literally, maybe, though I did when I was pregnant!) - sit down to
listen to the students.
- Monitoring gives you the opportunity to hear how the
students are coping with the activity and to make notes about pronunciation,
vocabulary and grammar points that are causing difficulty. I see the role as
one of listener/supervisor/facilitator/encourager - not as one of error
Although it's a good idea to indicate that you're actually
listening to the students (even to the point of feigning interest in what they
are saying) I wouldn't suggest crouching down to table height in order to
listen to the students - it looks silly.
Apparently, (according to books on body language) tipping your
head to one side gives the impression that you are listening avidly to someone
so if you were thinking of switching off and not listening to your students at
all (...me??...never!!), tip your head to one side first and they'll be none
I generally don't correct mistakes very much when I'm monitoring
- I jot them down and do a bit of error correction later because if I get
caught up correcting one student's mistakes during the activity I can't monitor
the other students properly and by the time I get back to monitoring I find
that everyone has reverted happily to their mother tongue.
© Liz Regan 2003