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As I have not been in a classroom in a long while, I enjoyed the refresher on establishing rapport with new students. With one-on-one lessons, there is no chance for pass the ball or milling around completing questionnaires. I could see how choral tongue twisters where nobody is singled out or the memory game would be a good way to engage students and encourage them not to become passive in the class. The piece about mixed levels is still very abstract to me, as my long-ago classroom experience was with more or less accurately-leveled students, except some false starters and some people who only took my German 101 class because Spanish 101 was full. The delicate balancing act here would definitely be pairing stronger students with weaker students without making the weaker students self-conscious. Then in the large groups section, I definitely think the key would be designating group leaders or at least pairing everybody off. The last language class I took as a student made good use of these strategies, as there were about 25 students, and we had a lot of dialogues and questionnaires to do. The teacher is key here, lest the students lapse into their native language and just start talking about the weekend. Finally, the use of native language with monolingual classes. I agree that it would be ideal to keep students encouraged to use as much English as possible, only responding to English requests, etc. Coming from several years of individual lessons with absolute beginners who spoke German, I would have liked for them to have had access to peers with a bit more English so they wouldn't need quite as much intervention in their own language, but many learners I taught individually did make a concerted effort not to lapse. It takes a certain bravery to have no classmates and only one teacher and to have the choice between one who can help you in your own language and one who can't. I have no data on whether those learners did better than those who went with bilingual trainers, and I suspect at the end of the day there are numerous factors determining learner outcomes in lessons.
