A1 students, an A2 term test, and five voices doing all the talking
You teach English in Grade 7 at a lyceum in Astana: 26 students, three 45-minute lessons a week. The September diagnostic, aligned to CEFR, placed 19 students at A1 and 7 at A1+, with nobody at A2. In six weeks all Grade 7 classes sit a centrally built term test based on the A2 curriculum, and your deputy has said the test will not be changed. A recorded 10-minute pair-work sample shows that 71% of student turns are in Kazakh or Russian; most English turns are one or two words; five students produce 60% of all English turns. Reading aloud is accurate, but when you asked two students what a paragraph was about, both answered with single words. The textbook unit 'Travel' is built around the present perfect and a 300-word reading about airport security, followed by a grammar drill section and a postcard writing task. You have 18 lessons before the test.
1. With 18 lessons left, what do you change first and what do you deliberately leave alone? Justify the priorities methodologically.
Read the worked answer
Read the evidence before choosing. Reading aloud is accurate while comprehension is one-word: decoding is not the bottleneck, meaning-making and production are. 71% first-language turns plus five students taking 60% of English turns means the problem is the quantity and distribution of output, not the syllabus coverage.
Change first.
- Speaking routines with fixed chunks, 8-10 minutes every lesson: information-gap pairs with A/B cards, sentence frames on the desk ('I'd rather go by ___ because ___'), and a rule that first-language use is allowed for 30 seconds of planning only. Chunks are chosen to be recyclable across topics, because A1 learners need many retrievals of few items.
- Turn-taking structures to break the 60/40 split: random selection by name cards, timed turns of 30 seconds each, assigned roles of interviewer and interviewee that swap.
- Grammar inside use, not before it. The present perfect is on the A2 test, so it cannot be dropped, but it should be met in the travel contexts and practised in short focused slots after students have tried to say something, not through the drill page first.
Leave alone. The unit topics and the writing task: the postcard is a legitimate A2 genre and gives you written evidence.
Reasoning. With 30 hours of contact time, the achievable change is the amount and spread of meaningful English use. Chasing coverage of a textbook designed for A2 learners would raise the input but not the intake.
2. Plan one 45-minute lesson from the unit that raises English talk time and gives you evidence you can actually use.
Read the worked answer
Objective. Students can ask and answer four questions about a past trip using given chunks, with at least three English turns each.
Plan.
- 0-5: retrieval warm-up, six chunks on the board, choral then paired repetition.
- 5-12: listening to a 90-second model dialogue; students tick the questions they hear. Comprehension before production.
- 12-20: guided practice with A/B cards. A asks, B answers from a picture prompt, then swap. Teacher circulates and notes two errors, not ten.
- 20-32: information gap - each student has three facts the partner does not, and must ask to complete a table. This is where English is genuinely necessary.
- 32-40: each pair records a 60-second dialogue on one phone (voice memo), then listens once and ticks a three-point self-assessment card: Did we use four chunks? Did we speak for the whole minute? Did we avoid translating?
- 40-45: two pairs play their recording; class names one thing that worked.
Why the recording matters. It is ICT that serves pedagogy rather than decorating it: it creates a reason to speak accurately, gives you five recordings to listen to after class instead of trying to hear 13 pairs at once, and gives students evidence of their own fluency over time. Keep the files, compare week 1 with week 6.
Evidence. Count English turns for three focal pairs against the 71% baseline, and collect the self-assessment cards. Both are quick and comparable.
3. How do you handle the A2 test with an A1 class, and how do you stop five students from owning the lesson?
Read the worked answer
On the test: do not lower the standard, do not pretend the gap away.
- Check the test specification against what has been taught. If items test vocabulary or structures never covered, that is a validity problem to raise in writing with the deputy, not a reason to coach answers.
- Teach the format, not the content: familiarise students with item types and timing using parallel material, which is legitimate test preparation.
- Use formative data to predict which sections will cost most marks and spend proportionally more time there.
- Differentiate upwards: the 7 at A1+ need extension tasks, or they will be the ones dominating. Their progress is also your evidence that the class is not simply being held back.
On the five dominant students: change the structure, not the students.
- Random selection by name cards removes the volunteer economy.
- Timed 30-second turns mean a dominant student physically cannot take the pair's whole slot.
- Assigned roles that rotate (interviewer, note-taker, reporter) give the quiet students a mandated turn.
- Monitor with a tally of who speaks across three lessons. If distribution does not shift, change pairings.
What to say to the deputy. Report the diagnosis, the intervention, and the trend in turn-taking and comprehension data. Honest data plus a documented plan is stronger in an inspection than a predicted pass rate.