Teaching English to Large Classes; Large Classes and Student Learning

* Between 1986 and 1992, at annual TESOL conventions as well as at two specialists' conferences, in Karachi, Pakistan (1991), and Bangkok, Thailand (1992), a group of researchers from various parts of the world presented papers and discussed issues addressing the topic of large classes. The group, initiated by Dick Allwright of Lancaster University, was known as the Lancaster-Leeds Language Learning in Large Classes Research Project, and one of the organizers, Hywel Coleman, obtained funding from Leeds University to publish several monographs (e.g., LoCastro, 1989). In addition to reporting on country-specific concerns, the publications addressed theoretical issues, including such questions as: How large is too large? When is a group of learners considered large? By whom? For what purposes? Although these questions at first seemed to be relatively easy to answer, we soon realized that we had opened up an area that could not be explained simplistically as the result of institutional or governmental concerns about expenditures for education. The purpose of this report is to survey what I suggest is the main theoretical issue that a large class, more so than small classes, makes salient: How much learning can take place in a class of 300, for example, as opposed to a class of half a dozen learners? In order to begin to answer that question, I draw from research evidence. Any serious discussion of the effect of class size on learning in a classroom environment has to be informed by a model of the sort