DIVERSITY, I go on with my obsession with words. This one seems great to me, evocations of individualism are so strange these days. It focuses on the standing alone of each unit or member within the uniformity, everything is different, every human being is, above all, unique. Obvious. But it is quite difficult to keep this in mind when, day after day, hour after hour, you come into rooms filled with people dressed with the most fashionable sports trademarks on the market, with similar black or dark blue rucksacks, with the same books, rulers, rubbers, pencils, notebooks, all of them looking in the same direction. Students. Pupils. You, opposite them, with a task to do, an aim: make them learn English. Now ‘diversity’ comes into other meanings, attitude, ability, skills, competence,…..

     We start the course with a diagnostic test in order to find out the students’ level or levels; how diverse is our class? Soon, as classes go by, we detect fast finishers, who is having private classes, hard workers, who is interested or motivated, slow learners, pupils with serious learning difficulties or with nearly no knowledge of English, …, the usual E.S.O. class. Fast finishers and advanced students, those who want a curricular enlargement, offer no problem, readings, vocabulary and grammar activities, sets of questions and listenings can be easily prepared or, if you don’t have much time, culled from  the additional material given by any publisher.

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                       DIVERSITY. How different this word becomes when we read it in the context of the L.O.G.S.E. Here we are talked to about the integration of students, students with special educational needs, A.C.I.s (individual curriculum adaptations). Diversity reaches a much wider reality when you have in your class students that come with a modified curriculum, modified contents and objectives.

     When students come to our class officially recognised as ‘integration students’, that is,  they come with a diagnosed handicap or serious learning difficulty, usually a mental deficiency, we must, in co-ordination with  the psychologist and a specialist teacher (el profesor de apoyo), draw up an adapted curriculum according to the necessities of the student, this is what is called a significant individual curriculum adaptation (A.C.I. significativa).  But it is quite frequent to find among our students some with a minor or slight mental deficiency or affective problems that impede their reaching the minimum objectives of the subject, or following the usual tasks in class. We must bear in mind that we must involve them in the normal development of the class whenever possible. Now, we don’t have to draw up a different curriculum, we only need to fit techniques and activities, and maybe some objective, to the student’s needs.  So attention to diversity in the E.S.O. class must be understood as a teacher’s ordinary task, which aims to allow all the students to reach the capacities and abilities pointed out in the objectives of each area or period. It is not a question of lowering levels or prescribing different and specific activities for each pupil according to her/his capacities, interests or motivation, but a job that must take into account the school (where it is, what means we have at our disposal,..), the period (age, course, moment in which the student requires special attention, if it is just a temporary or specific problem, or implies the whole learning process,) and the area (just a linguistic problem, or involving the rest of the subjects on the curriculum). 

     When we refer to slight deficiencies or learning problems, pair work activities are very useful. Writing, reading or role-playing dialogues can be very helpful for these students, not only academically but also affectively. In many cases this technique can be extended to other tasks or types of work so that the other student becomes more than a simple partner:  he or she becomes a tutor , that is, to help them, show them how to work on an activity or the trick to doing an exercise, and over all, to make him feeling integrated in the class. But most of the time these students must work on their own, so we will need other resources apart from the level, the grammar point or the vocabulary we are dealing with. All the activities we give them must be simple, easy to understand and do, and avoid complex or long processes to solve them.

·         Substitution drills

·         Multiple choice questions

·         Coloured things beginning with the letter…..

·         Matching exercises: a mouse in a red box------------à (picture)

                                            a man under a yellow car-----à (picture)

·         Write (nº) of crosses/dots in the boy/car/house/…

·         Draw a big/little/green/… ball/dog/book/…

·         Draw a cat under the bed

·         Draw a girl on the bicycle

·         (Picture of a boy running)  This boy is running

(Picture of a fish) Can this fish run?                    YES                  NO