Leveling The Playing Field: 7 Question Strategies for Mixed-ability Classes

Someone who spoke up very rarely, whose eyes tended to be downcast, and who was sent into a panic by the notion of being asked to speak in front of the class. As someone who has worked extensively with students from Asia, I’m very used to this phenomenon; many of my students were reluctant to answer for fear of making mistakes. But this is just one cause of shyness, and I’d like to suggest some other sources, as well as some techniques for helping these students to gain confidence.
Shyness presents teaching professionals with a real challenge, because we can’t know – at least, at first – the cause of the students’ reluctance to answer and/or participate. Possible origins include:
The problem is that every one of these possible origins for shyness results in exactly the same sound: silence. How can we possibly know which is responsible?
I hope you don’t mind if I tell you a true story.
I was teaching an intermediate class at a language school in Boston, and we were in our fourth day together. By this point, I’d carried out my usual ‘needs analysis’, and had some thoughts on how I might tailor the course to suit the students’ levels and aptitudes. But there was one young lady from Chengdu (a huge city in western China) who had barely spoken a word. Her written answers were fine, but she was painfully shy when speaking. I gave her one more chance, calling on her to answer a pretty straightforward comprehension question, but all I heard was some indistinct muttering, followed by a shake of the head.
Break time came, and I chose to act. My classes are highly inclusive, engaging environments where everyone takes part, so silence and shyness are real problems for me. I was fortunate to have a shortcut to better understanding this issue – I speak conversational Mandarin, though it’s not something I advertise, lest students try to take advantage. So, I approached the shy student during the break and, to her amazement, chatted with her in Chinese.
What I found was absolutely typical. She was, at root, a fairly confident person who had achieved a lot academically, but her English classes back home had been stressful and poorly run, so she’d never really spoken much English before. Her comprehension wasn’t bad at all, as I found when I switched to English mid-conversation, but her fluency needed a big boost.
Right there and then, we agreed a strategy. When out in Boston or on the bus by herself, she would think and whisper to herself only in English. After a week of this, I involved her roommates, who agreed that they would have an English-only time from 7-8pm every night, and for two hours on weekends. This incremental approach, involving only herself and her closest friends, began to pay immediate dividends. I made sure that I questioned her increasingly often in class, helping each time with the beginning of the answer, or gesturing to useful vocab and structures on the board. Classmates helped and were warm and generous toward her as her shyness began to lift. Little by little, the words started to come.
Engage with your students. Get some help to bridge the language barrier, if needed, so that you can truly understand what’s going on, because there’s always more than we expect. In my student’s case, she’d been let down by poor teaching – her aptitude and willingness were never in doubt – but I couldn’t have learned that without making the first move.
Beyond addressing individual cases and discovering the roots of shyness, a good policy is always to run your classroom in a way likely to get good results from everyone, including the shy students. Most of this is common sense, but putting it all into practice can take years of thought, experiment and research. I’m sure you’re doing some of these things already. If so, well done.
It is something to be treated carefully, and with a constant sense that this is a human individual, with a perhaps complex back-story. Take it slow, do your homework and discover where the problem might originate from, and then develop a strategy in collaboration with the student and their friends. Oftentimes, you’ll find that beneath the shyness is a complex and able student, just waiting to make themselves heard.