Keeping forty students engaged in an English class

Advice about motivation usually assumes a class of twelve. A great deal of English teaching in Colombia happens with thirty-five to forty-five students in a room built for thirty, with a range of levels inside it that spans four years of proficiency.

The strategies that work there are different, and mostly structural rather than inspirational.

The real problem is not motivation

In a class of forty, the number of students speaking English in a fifty-minute lesson is often three. Not because thirty-seven are unmotivated, but because there is no mechanism that requires the other thirty-seven to say anything.

Reframed that way, the problem becomes solvable. You are not trying to make forty teenagers want to learn English. You are trying to design a lesson where not participating is harder than participating.

Increase the amount of talking, structurally

Pair work is the whole game. In whole-class question and answer, one student speaks at a time: total student talking time across fifty minutes might be four minutes. In pair work, twenty pairs speak simultaneously: the same four minutes of clock time gives every student four minutes of talking. There is no other change with this effect size.

The objection is noise and control. Both are managed with structure, not volume:

• Time it visibly. "Ninety seconds. Go." A countdown on the board changes the behaviour of the room.
• Give a product. Each pair must produce something — three sentences, one question, a decision. Talk with no output drifts.
• Rotate partners on a system, not by choice. Rows shift one seat; the front row moves to the back. It takes fifteen seconds and it breaks the same-friend pattern.
• Sample publicly afterwards. Ask three pairs to report. Since nobody knows which three, everyone prepares.

Choral and simultaneous responses. Everyone answers at once — repeating, holding up a card, writing on a mini-whiteboard or a page. It is low-risk for weak students and gives you an instant read of the whole room.

Write before you speak. Thirty seconds of writing before a discussion massively raises the quality and the willingness to talk, especially for students who need processing time in a foreign language.

The students you are not reaching

In every large class there is a group — usually the same eight or ten — who never speak, never volunteer, and pass or fail silently. They are not disengaged. They have learned that they can be invisible, and in a class of forty, invisibility is cheap.

Three things break it:

Non-volunteer nomination, done kindly. Not to catch anyone out. Give the question, give thirty seconds of thinking time, then nominate. Thinking time is the difference between an inclusive practice and a humiliating one.

A weekly two-minute conversation. Three students per class, thirty seconds each, while the rest work. Over two weeks you have spoken individually to everyone. For a quiet student, being addressed by name about their own work changes their relationship to the subject more than any activity.

Roles in group work. In an unstructured group of four, one person does the work. Assign roles — recorder, timekeeper, reporter, checker — and rotate them. The quiet student who is reporter this week has to speak, and knows it in advance.

Managing the level spread

In one room you may have students who can hold a conversation and students who cannot read the instructions. Two approaches that do not require making four versions of everything:

Same task, different output. One prompt, and the expectation scales. "Describe this photo" produces three words from one student and a paragraph from another, and neither is publicly labelled.

Deliberate mixed pairing, sometimes. Not always — the stronger student needs their own challenge too. But a rotation where mixed pairs happen once a week gives weaker students a model and stronger students the well-documented benefit of explaining.

Extension that is not more of the same. Fast finishers should get a harder version, not extra items. Extra items are a punishment for working quickly, and students learn that quickly.

Routines beat novelty

The instinct with a difficult large group is to make lessons more entertaining. It works briefly and it is exhausting to sustain.

Predictable routines work better: the same opening every day, the same signal for silence, the same structure for pair work, the same closing. Routines cut the transaction cost of every activity. When students know exactly what happens, the transitions stop consuming ten minutes of a fifty-minute class.

Novelty then goes where it counts: in the content, not the procedure.

What to try first

If you take one thing from this: add one structured ninety-second pair task to every lesson this week. Time it, require a product, sample three pairs.

Then count how many students spoke English in the lesson. It is the number that matters, and it is the one almost nobody measures.

Keep going

• The webinar library includes sessions on engagement, gamification and socio-emotional learning in EFL.
• Bring your own strategy to the 61st Annual Conference as a pedagogical experience session.
• Join a Special Interest Group to keep working on this with colleagues.