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.
2.

Your students have complained about too much use of pairwork

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 doesnt 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
teachers 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 teachers 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 couldnt 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 teachers 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 arent using pairwork enough

1.
2.
3.

You often go through a whole lesson without using any pairwork

Students speak for fewer than 10 minutes per class
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 dont 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 teachers 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/ dont know how to use textbook pairwork tasks like
jigsaw readings
14. You have never used/ dont know how to use photocopiable pairwork tasks
like pairwork picture differences
15. You dont 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 dont respond well to pairwork when you first try it, you give up
18. If pairwork doesnt 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 dont use pairwork is because you dont 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 schools 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