It’s an unfair situation and one in which the effectiveness (and enjoyment) of the learning situation is in the hands of school administrators and not students and teachers – ridiculous. But that’s the way it is in the real world and there’s nothing that can be done about it!
Like you I feel most sorry for the students in this situation who are wasting their time, money and learning opportunity. It is this sense of fairness and a commitment to professionalism that forces me to try and make the best of a difficult situation - from the comments given here by others I’m not alone in this.
- As Stanley says, the best method is to group the students within the class according to level; physically sit them together, get them to work together in pair and group activities.
- Also ways aim presentations at your lowest level students. Concept check grammar and vocabulary meaning to the lowest ability students to ensure they follow the lesson and don’t get bored and lose motivation.
- Give the language challenge to the higher level students, e.g. formulate complex sentence structures in drill activities, provide feedback to speaking activities.
- Teacher – divide classroom time equally between the different level groups of students, e.g. work closely with the lower level group of students and give them intensive tuition while the rest of the class do something else, e.g. drills on basic structure. Or – work closely with the higher level students while the lower level students complete a different task, e.g. communicative discussion work.
- Provide extra homework to the lower level students, e.g. multiple written sentence drills. Provide more challenging homework to the higher level students, e.g. longer written discourse pieces such as a letter.
All these techniques are fine and sound great on paper (or screen) but in practice teaching a class, particularly a large number of students, is a difficult juggling act.