Identifying and catering for students’ needs

Identifying students’ needs

Teachers have ample opportunities to learn about their students’ needs. Simply paying attention to what your students say will enable you to learn a great deal about them. Consider taking notes to help you remember more about each member of the class. This information is invaluable. It is important to observe the way that students participate in different classroom activities and noticing which types of tasks seem to motivate them more.  Noticing what they find easy or difficult can also help teachers make informed choices when planning their lessons.

Many ESL schools ask students to complete questionnaires to find out whether they were satisfied with their experience. Unfortunately, in many cases these are ‘end of course questionnaires,’ so if the students were dissatisfied in some way, it is too late to make any changes. For this reason, teachers should consider giving their students a questionnaire a few weeks into the course and use this feedback. These questionnaires can focus on personal details, students’ strengths and weaknesses or on learning styles.

When asking students for feedback on your lessons, try using a question like, ‘Which activity was the most useful for you today?’  If your students are really young, they could choose which ‘face’ best describes their feelings about an activity.

Catering for students’ needs

Once you have identified your students’ needs, the next step is to take them into account when preparing your lessons. Let’s say that you have noticed that there is a wide variation in your students’ listening skills. When you do a listening skills lesson, some students have all the correct answers after listening just once, whereas others are struggling to complete any of the questions after hearing the audio three times.

One possible solution to this problem is to use differentiated tasks. Rather than giving all the children the same task, create a number of tasks with different levels of difficulty. Give the more challenging task to the students with stronger listening skills. Perhaps also have a second task ready for these students so that you can replay the audio for weaker students without wasting anyone’s time.

In this way, you are providing an opportunity for all your students to develop their listening skills.

Some teachers are concerned that students will be embarrassed if they are given an easier task, but in fact most students are usually very grateful to be given something more manageable that is at their level. This is far less embarrassing than listening to an audio multiple times without being able to understand it.