Grouping students for different communicative

GROUPING STUDENTS FOR DIFFERENT COMMUNICATIVE
ACTIVITIES - ADI ISMA – [e-mail]
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c. Teacher Choice
• It allows putting all the high ability students or low ability students together
for a specific task.
• It allows the high ability students to share with the low ability one, if they are
in group.
• It helps the teacher to create effective teaching-learning process.
d. Student Choice
• It allows students to choose their group partners that may work well for some
projects.
• It allows students to group themselves according to a shared preference, for an
author or genre in reading, for example, or historical period or country in
social studies. This grouping system is good to use when student success is
not dependent on choice, when you want students to take the lead.
2. The disadvantages of grouping students
According to Slavin and Braddock (1993:120) grouping by ability is
ineffective. It is harmful to many students and inhibits the development of
interracial respect, understanding, and friendship. It undermines democratic values
and contributes to a stratified society.
Here, there are some disadvantages of selecting the students based on;
ability grouping, random choice, teacher choice, and student choice.
a. Ability grouping
The criticisms to ability grouping can be summarized as follows:
• Opportunities to learn one of the clearest outcomes of ability grouping at all
instructional levels is that students in low-ability groups are exposed to
substantially less material and to lower quality instruction than are students in
middle-or high ability groups.
• Achievement: He argues that the pro-grouping argument is primarily concerned
with effectiveness, and the anti-grouping argument is primarily concerned with
equity, and democratic values. He states further that the proponents of ability
grouping fail to meet this burden of proof clearly showing the effectiveness of

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