An activity in a mixed-ability group_Veselovska Iryna PHEb-3-18

Teachers of mixed-ability classes have a lot on their plate. Weaker students may give up on
work assigned to them and stronger students often finish very quickly. Both groups can switch off
and start messing about. Nobody would disagree that ‘Every child matters’, but for a teacher with
eight classes of thirty children, responding to each child’s needs can sometimes seem a challenge to
put it mildly.
So even in such conditions teacher should find a benefit and create interesting tasks that will
be appropriate both for students with lower level and for students with higher level of knowledge.
Most teachers have probably done a gap fill with songs at some point. Let’s look at how we
can add different levels of challenge. The song in question is ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking
for’ by U2, and it’s a classic for contextualizing the present perfect.
Look at the following four boxes: can you work out what you need to do? Which is the
the hardest?

A) You need to fill in the past participle

B) You need to fill in the auxiliary, past participle, put the lines in order and eliminate the lines
you don’t hear
C) You need to put the lines in order
D) You need to put the lines in order and fill in the auxiliary and past participle.
B is the hardest obviously. C or A is the easiest. But the point here is that the outcome is the same
whichever task you do (getting the song lyrics, in the right order).

Post task
Let’s get students to continue the song, including other difficult things they have done in the present
perfect tense. This creative task works well because it is open: all students can answer at their own
level.