Understand your learners needs and levels

Understand your learners needs and levels

As your learners return to school, you may find that some students are at different levels or abilities. Learn how to best support your students.

Understand your learners needs and levels

After the long school breaks the level and abilities in English are different for each student. Some of them had been learning at home or abroad and improved their English. Others have engaged less and lost some of their knowledge of English over the summer break. There are also different types of learning. Some may have chosen to avoid things they enjoy less or feel they aren’t good at.

Level of your learners

So how can your students be supported? One possibility to find out how much they know and where some gaps are, is to let them take a Placement test or Linguaskill evaluation test. The Cambridge English Placement Test is an adaptive test and identifies the Level of English from the candidate for non-productive skills like Reading and Listening. The Linguaskill Test by Cambridge works similar but includes two more skills: Writing and Speaking what makes the test more accurate.

Supporting your students

With those tests it is easier to identify the levels and you can see the learning gaps of your students. To support your learners needs, you could do a one-to-one learning session, to individually help them, or ask the learners before each Unit/new Subject how comfortable they feel in these tasks. At the end of the unit/Subject, the questions could be asked again. Are they now more confident? Do they need some more help?

Top tips

Here are some ideas, resources, guides, practice tests and sample papers to help you understand what the gaps are and how to address them.

Here are 14 fast-finisher ideas that you can use in your primary classroom, while you support the students that need more time.

Download 14 fast finisher ideas here

Download self-study material for B2 First for Schools fast-finishers

Download self-study material for C1 Advanced fast-finishers

Don't miss our upcoming webinar series: «Are your students getting it? How to find out!»

In this series of two webinars, one with hands-on activities, we will be looking at how to test the progress of your students preparing for a Cambridge English Qualification. What goes into a good test that will show you if your students are getting what you are teaching them…. are they on the right track making progress or where is more support needed, etc. At state secondary schools in Switzerland, teachers can be expected to write an average of 50 tests per schoolyear yet get little support on how to write a good test.  The aim of these two webinars is to show you what a good test should contain in order to be reliable and effective. Our presenter, Tim Black, is a Cambridge Assessment presenter with many years of experience teaching and testing at the state secondary school level (Berufsschule).

Webinar dates:

  • 1 September 2021           17:00 to 18:00 pm
  • 15 September 2021    17:00 to 18:30 pm

Registrations for this event are closed

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