Teaching lower levels: difficulties teachers face and how to overcome them

Not once in my life have I heard a common misconception from people who aren’t too deep in the subject of teaching English. 

The idea is that you don’t need much language knowledge or teaching skills to teach lower levels, such as A1 or A2. 

It is thought that since lower-level students don’t study complicated grammar, you don’t need to know it to teach. 

And come on, how many teaching skills do you need to teach the forms of the verb ‘to be’ or some basic vocabulary? 

I would agree that you really don’t need to know C1 or C2 level grammar topics to be able to teach the verb ‘to be’. 

However, I’m convinced that a teacher who knows and understands the full organization of the English language and how it works would be much stronger and more confident in teaching than a teacher who is still on this learning path. 

What about teaching skills? I strongly believe that of all the levels, lower levels are the most challenging to teach. And here’s why:

Students’ skills are not very well developed

A1-A2 level students either don’t speak English at all or don’t speak it well. 

And as a teacher you have to find those means of communication with them that provide enough challenge for students, but at the same time don’t demotivate them. 

It means that you need to grade your language to the simplest level and you must make it as brief and clear as possible.

English only

It’s great when you teach a group where students understand everything you say and can respond. 

But this is not the case for lower levels. Getting your students to understand you could be the most challenging thing. 

Of course, they know words like ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’, they might even know the ‘London is the capital of Great Britain’ thing. 

But when it comes to instructions in  the lesson, it’s a completely different story. 

Not only do you need to give instructions correctly, but you also need to make sure your students understand them and are ready to do the task. 

Mixed-ability groups

Adult people who start studying English might have a completely different background of encountering English in their lives. 

This means that if you teach a group, there is a big chance this group is a mixed-ability one. Generally, those students can all be beginners, but in very different ways. 

For example, there are people (usually of younger age) who don’t have particular knowledge of English or don’t know how to speak English correctly, but they encounter English every day in their lives and they recognize it — playing videogames in English, watching reels in English, buying something on websites etc. 

There’s also a category of people who have no idea what English is (maybe they’ve studied another language before, or they studied English so long ago that they don’t remember a thing), and students from this category will definitely need more teacher’s attention and assistance. 

The thing is that students in mixed-ability classes can’t work at the same pace. 

You will have to mix and match your teaching procedures, because some of them will finish tasks sooner, some later, and you don’t want the first ones to get bored and the latter ones to be discouraged.

Lack of learning skills

If you teach an adult group of students from the very beginner level, they may lack  learning skills. 

They might have this memory from school/university years of how they were taught at that time, and they could try to apply it here too. 

It can lead to awkward situations at a lesson when most students seem to have understood the task, but one of the students is completely lost, doesn’t know what to do and decides to do the task their own way or not to do it at all, because it’s either too embarrassing to ask or they simply don’t know how to ask what they want. 

For example, let’s say in a reading task your student John gets stuck on an unknown word and decides that reading further is pointless. 

John remembers that his school teacher taught him to translate every single word in a text. 

And now he can’t read the text to the end because the reading method is different this time and John has no idea how it works. 

And it’s a teachers’ job to explain and demonstrate how to work with all those different tasks, keeping in mind they might be new for students. 

These are some challenges I faced while teaching lower levels. I’m sure there are more, but they can depend on a group of learners and be more specific. 

I bet you don’t think teaching lower levels is all about easy grammar anymore.

But what are the solutions? How to avoid making a ‘battlefield’ of your teaching, when you have to ‘fight’ through teaching a lesson every time?

Language grading and instructions

Prepare ‘classroom language’ for the first lesson with your students and teach them some essential instructions – read, listen, write, work in pairs, look etc. 

Refer to classroom language every time you give instructions. 

You can add miming from your side to help students understand the instructions better every time you give them. 

And don’t add any other words like ‘Could you please read…’ or ‘Would you be so kind and work in pairs…’. They might confuse your students and make your instructions unnecessarily  long. 

Use only the words your students have learnt and can comprehend. This will help you teach your students to switch to English, and you won’t have to use L1 in  your lessons.

Body language

This is your best friend throughout the whole teaching process. 

It will help you communicate your feelings and emotions to students, help you explain prepositions of place/movement, every day actions and adverbs of frequency position without translating all that to L1. 

I’ve already mentioned how useful it can be to mime instructions, however, there’s one more thing you can do. 

There’s a technique we use for error correction, especially when students make mistakes in word order, pronunciation or miss a part of a phrase or a construction. 

Here’s one of the examples of how this can be done, but there are many more cases you can apply this technique to.

Visuals

Use as many visuals as possible. 

Teaching new vocabulary? Prepare pictures. 

Teaching new grammar? Prepare examples in context with pictures. 

Teaching prepositions of time? Prepare short visual formulas for your students (e.g. in + month, on + day). 

When I teach my students everyday objects vocabulary, I make sure I have all those objects around me for this lesson, so that I can show them anytime students have trouble recalling an object. 

I also have a card with ‘-s’ on it to hint my students when they forget to use a plural form or third person singular. 

Visuals are something you can always rely on.

Demonstrating

It can be challenging to set up pair and group work for lower-level  students because they simply don’t know all those difficult words. 

And you can’t really use ICQs to check if students got your instructions. But you can always demonstrate a task open class and thus you don’t even need to give full instructions. 

Let’s say, students need to practice a dialogue in pairs. 

You can set it up like this: “Mary, you are Camilla. John, you are Jose. Read the dialogue….. Now everyone, work in pairs, read the dialogue/do the same”.

And this way you can also make sure that your false beginners and total beginners are on the same page and ready for pair work.

Drilling

This is probably the most useful thing at lower levels. 

I’m sure you all have a phrase you remember from English lessons at school even though so many years have passed. 

You probably remember it because your school teacher made you ‘drill it to death’. 

And now you can’t get rid of it, after all these years. 

It also helps students understand intonation better and be able to use it, for example, in questions and perceive it in real-life situations.

Classroom management

Last but notleast, dealing with mixed-ability groups and managing fast-finishers can play an important role in your students’ perception of learning.

This will help you manage your class better in the future. 

For example, if you want to do a pair checking on a task, it’s probably not a good idea to pair up two stronger students. 

They will most likely finish the task and get bored by the time you check this task open class, while a pair of weaker students might not even have finished the task by then.

It’s also a good idea to prepare additional tasks for fast finishers to get them busy while weaker students finish the main tasks. 

I also did a thing with peer teaching. I had 2-3 stronger students in class who always finished exercises earlier. 

I gave them the answer keys, and then I asked them to check the rest of the students in pairs/groups. 

When students came back from groups, they only asked questions to clarify difficult cases, we didn’t have to check the whole  exercise sentence by sentence. So it’s a time saver as well.

Teaching lower levels could be challenging, but if you have your students’ best interest in your heart and can organize an efficient learning process, your students will be forever grateful to you, as you showed them the world of English and taught them not to get lost there.