Putting students into groups

1. Gestures
For example: point to pairs of people who should work together while saying “Student A, student B- work together”; use your forearms and open palms to “cut” between people to divide the class up; show the spot on the floor someone should move their seat to; make a sweeping circle motion with both arms to show the that chairs should be brought round to face each other more; spin your index finger round to indicate a chair turning round 180 degrees; cross arms over to show people swapping seats; or count people who should be in the same team or group off as you point at them. Please note that in many counties there are taboos about particular ways of pointing at people or gesturing for them to come, e.g. “come here” with the index finger is rude is most places.

2. Move seats
Another simple physical way of showing who should work with who is to take chairs and move them around. The simplest way is to pick up a chair yourself and put it in front of a student, ask their partner to move there to face them (or face the opposite direction if you are doing phone calls or making sure they can’t see each others’ worksheets in an information gap exercise), then ask all the other students to do the same with their chairs. You can do something similar to change into new groupings by taking a chair and putting it at the end of the row of students. The student from the other end of the row then moves to that chair, and all the other students turn to their other side to work with someone new (without the majority of students having to change chairs themselves).

3. Language
Useful phases for putting students into groups include “Work in pairs/ groups of three”, “Who is student B? Raise your hands. Okay, all the student Bs turn your chairs around/ move to the right side of the room/ stand up and go to the (running dictation) text on the board”, “Change partners”, “Work with someone you haven’t worked with today yet”, “You two, switch chairs. And you two do the same”, “Stand up and move over here”, and “A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D. All the As work together”. See my articles on classroom language here on TEFL.net for ideas on how to make sure they understand such language.