A well-balanced use of pairwork

Although students and teachers can need some selling on the benefits of students working together in pairs, once they are convinced by the argument of the positive effects of students speaking more (lots of STT) and better classroom dynamics everyone can quickly get into the habit of working in pairs through most of the class. This, however, is a sure sign that things have gone too far the other way and that pairwork is being used as a reflex reaction or comfortable habit without thinking about the reasons why is was originally adopted. Below are some ways of spotting if you have been able to draw the fine line between too much pairwork and not enough, and ways of planning lessons that include whatever you decide is the perfect amount. 

Possible signs that you are using pairwork too much

1. Your students have complained about too much use of pairwork
2. Students have complained about working with people with much lower language levels
3. You use lots of pairwork games and students have complained about too many games
4. Student complaints (including ones that are not obviously tied to pairwork) have not changed your use of pairwork
5. Working with students who are not used to pairwork does not change how much you use it or how slowly you introduce it
6. Having a mixed level class does not change your use of pairwork
7. You use pairwork in small classes as often as you use it in larger classes
8. There is sometimes nothing for you to do when the students are doing pairwork
9. Your lesson plan doesn’t even say “pairwork” because you know that it will be used at every stage
10. You spend a lot of classroom time organising people into pairs
11. You spend a lot of classroom time explaining the rules of pairwork games
12. Students usually do most things twice – once as a pairwork stage and once as a whole class stage
13. You add lots of pairwork stages such as checking answers in pairs to the teacher’s book lesson plan without thinking too carefully about why you are doing so
14. Your use of pairwork means it takes you a lot longer to get through the textbook than the teacher’s book suggests or other teachers take
15. You have done the pairwork variations of most TEFL activities (dictation, error correction etc) but never the teacher-led version
16. You use pairwork at every stage you possibly can
17. You use pairwork when it would be quicker to do it as a whole class
18. You use pairwork when it extends an activity that would actually be better finished off quickly so you can move onto something else
19. Your students start doing everything in pairs without being asked because they know that is what you always ask them to do
20. You ask students to check their answers in pairs even when you know they all have the right answers
21. You ask students to check their answers in pairs even when you know that they have all made the same mistakes
22. When you count up the number of stages using pairwork, groupwork, team games, students working alone and whole class activities the number of pairwork stages is much bigger than that of any of the others, or even much bigger than all the others combined
23. You couldn’t answer if someone asked you why you made students work in pairs at each stage in your lesson
24. You get students working in pairs every time the textbook or teacher’s book suggests it, without thinking about alternatives
25. They always write in pairs (a somewhat unnatural activity!)
26. Students never have a minute or two just to try and get their head around the language

Possible signs that you aren’t using pairwork enough

1. You often go through a whole lesson without using any pairwork
2. Students speak for fewer than 10 minutes per class
3. There are many more stages where students work alone or as a whole class than there are pairwork stages
4. The amount of (useful) student talking time could be easily raised by adding pairwork
5. You don’t have an opportunity to stand back and monitor student errors
6. You are losing your voice by the end of the class or the end of the day
7. The students could have used another chance to look at their answers with the help of someone else before they got help from the teacher or checked their answers as a class
8. The students know everything about the teacher’s life but very little about each other
9. Most students in the class have never worked with each other
10. One student always shouts out the answers in whole class activities before other students have had a chance to think about it
11. Some students are too shy to speak out in front of the whole class
12. You have never asked students to check their answers in pairs
13. You have never used/ don’t know how to use textbook pairwork tasks like jigsaw readings
14. You have never used/ don’t know how to use photocopiable pairwork tasks like pairwork picture differences
15. You don’t know any pairwork variations on dictation, using videos etc.
16. You usually skip the parts of the textbook or the lesson plan in the teachers’ book that suggests students working in pairs
17. If students don’t respond well to pairwork when you first try it, you give up
18. If pairwork doesn’t work well with a class or students complain about it, you always stop using it rather than using it in different ways or explaining its uses to your students
19. The only reason you don’t use pairwork is because you don’t feel confident that you know how to

Ways of making sure you use the right amount of pairwork

1. Check your lesson plan for a good mix of pairwork, group work, students working on their own, team games, whole class student-led activities and whole class teacher-led activities. You can do this by number of activities or by percentage of class time.
2. Calculate an estimated average student talking time (STT) for your lesson plan, and see if you can raise the figure by using more or less pairwork, making sure you include realistic estimates for how long it will take to explain activities and rearrange the class
3. Have a space at the top of your lesson plan to list the pairwork stages, groupwork stages etc so that how many there are of each one becomes obvious
4. Find out about how much pairwork has been used in classes your students have been in before (e.g. classes with a different teacher in your school) and what kind of things they are used to doing in pairs, so that you know whether you should introduce it to them slowly or not
5. Find out how much pairwork is used in the school system your students went through
6. Find out if there are any cultural factors that could make pairwork popular or unpopular
7. Ask the school manager what the student reaction to pairwork has been in end of course feedback questionnaires
8. Ask for your school’s student feedback questionnaires to be changed to get more information on what they think about how pairwork is being used
9. At each pairwork stage, tell your students “Now I want you to work in pairs so that…”, so also making the reasons clear to yourself
10. Write the reasons for each stage on your lesson plan
11. Go through your lesson plan one more time to see if you could usefully add pairwork
12. Go through your lesson plan one more time to see if you could miss out any of the pairwork stages or usefully change them to groupwork, individual work or whole class activities