The importance of PAIRWORK in TOP NOTCH series

I really did not think of PAIRWORK as an important teaching technique. Yet, I really wanted my students to develop their speaking skills in the class. Some of them were shy to talk to me. For some, I had no time, for some I really feared talking to because of the number of mistakes they made in their speaking, and for others I didn't know how to stop them once they started on the talking thing!!!! I kept thinking about this problem for a long time. And at last I realized the solution is to pay attention to PAIRWORKS in the class. Here I list their advantages and I hope student and teachers do their best to make pairworks more effective in the class.

1. Increasing the time of speaking: The time students spend talking to their partners is much longer than the time they spend talking to their teacher.
2. No stress: Talking to a classmate is much easier than to a teacher (especially one like me!!!)
3. Limiting the mistakes: All pairworks have been modeled and their pattern is well organized by the authors. So this will give the student less risk at making mistakes.
4. FUN...FUN...FUN: I personally enjoy seeing a noisy class with everyone busy talking with their partners. This makes the class fun, less formal and more efficient.

Here are some tips to have successful pairwork practices:

1. explain to the students why you think pairwork is important
2. act wisely in choosing who gets to be paired with who
3. walk around the class, stand by partners for a couple of seconds and encourage them
4. encourage students to use the model in the book
5. choose your own partner and enjoy sharing your ideas with him/her
6. ask them questions about their partners' point of view on the subject
7. swap partners to get better results
8. pay attention to shy students

I hope next time you have a pairwork, you have fun and faith in what you are doing,,,

Unwritten Letters

You told me to write a letter to you, and I asked you why. You shrugged and looked away and the subject was dropped.

I cannot write a letter to you because there was too much to say and there were too little words. What would you have me write? That I look for excuses to talk to you longer on the phone, or if we were in the car? That I get annoyed if you ask me to rest instead of seeing you because I prefer the latter? That I replay the conversations we've had in my head and smile? That I look for your car whenever we drive past its usual parking space? (Or the fact that I feel sad and a little lonely now that it's vacant?) That I look for you at all?

In my head I did exactly that, I wrote many letters to you.

I kept them in my eyes, I locked them behind pursed lips. But if you listen; you'll find them screaming between skipped heartbeats, in every impulse, as loud as the ocean. 

source: one paragraph stories (Weblog)