I've had a few successes and a few failures recently. Successes include setting students tasks to read a paragraph in their textbook, then use the information to explain how to answer a problem to the rest of the class. This task was given to a new class of September starters. Some of the student presentations were better than others, but they all participated and seemed to gain confidence from the task. A few were surprisingly good and the task helped me to evaluate the level of English of each student.
The revision class, who take their exams in the next few weeks have not been so successful. I don't seem to have been able to motivate that class to revise thoroughly. Despite repeated nagging from me, they have either ignored all revision tasks or have just resorted to reading the textbook. Students do not know how to revise. I've given advice over and over, set tasks using past exam papers, but unless we go through these in class, they are just not using past papers at all. Then they complain about not being able to understand the questions in the papers!
Today, I gave them a task to precis some already short revision notes I made a few years ago. 14 sides of A4 were to be reduced to just 1 or 2 sides of A4 notes on the "waves" topic. After much agonising, they all started the task and seemed to cope quite well. I think it was easier for them to precis an already shorter version of the topic than to start from scratch using the textbook. I went through the original notes before they began the precis to make sure they understood the content. At the end, I reminded them of the difference between "active" and "passive" revision. I hope I have time before their exams to review whether they found it useful or not.
