LANGUAGE TEACHING IN LARGE CLASSES

Abstract

This research was designed to investigate some of the problems that are associated with large class teaching including teachers’ concern with large classes, the extent of the problems ( just haw large are large classes), attitudes to large classes and the methodological problems that are pertinent to large classes.

Two types of questionnaires were distributed to two tertiary level institutions, six state owned secondary schools and ten elementary school in asmara. The research considered 14%,  70%, and 100 o/o sample size of the total population of the primary, secondary and tertiary level respondents, respectively . the research showed that all the respondents were highly concerned about large classes. They said that large class teaching is actually different from language teaching in small classes. The ‘largest’  class which the secondary and primary school teacher regularly teach is 86; whereas the ‘largest’ class which the tertiary levele teachers teach is 41 .the ‘least’ experience of the respondents is not very far from their large experience: this indicated that they were teaching ‘largy’ classes almost always. The task based group teaching was found to be a partial solution to alleviate the problems of thatching in large classes.