These days, the use of languages and their status has grown dramatically, creating a need to learn them worldwide. This brings every potential learner to the choice of having language lessons in small or larger groups. While some think that classes with few students can be more effective, others, and I personally, consider that the size of the group has no reasonable influence. Instead, attending lessons with many people can offer even more opportunities to learn a particular language.
When having a lesson with many students, teachers are able to provide a wide variety of activities to teach any language, which makes the learning process even more interesting and creates an entertaining atmosphere of learning. Primary and secondary school English teachers always have large groups comprised of a minimum of 30 students. Thus, to manage all of them, they opt for competitive activities in their lessons, which increase motivation and desire in students to learn the language. For example, learners are divided into three or four groups and are given a small project to do altogether by meeting in libraries for extra sources to find out data or directly to research on the lessons. By discussion and doing some written work, they not only learn the language but also build up strong bonds with each other.
However, the mentioned way of learning a certain language in one group can be useful only for intermediate and advanced learners, while beginners need more attention and immediate feedback, which they are unlikely to get in groups with lots of students. Therefore, students who are at the beginning of their learning journey towards any language are advised to sign up for small groups where they can improve at a rapid pace under the teacher’s direct supervision. Hence, when surfing the internet, everyone can come up with a language course for different ages that offers studying in classes both online and offline with a maximum of 5 students, which is quite reasonable but can be pretty expensive.
Nevertheless, having many students in the lesson can provide a chance to experience more accents and backgrounds, which adds to the knowledge of students. Moreover, signing up for larger groups can be cost-effective, which can be most appropriate, especially for students of the middle class.
To sum up, it is more rational to attend classes with many students if a person has achieved an intermediate level or higher, while beginners are better educated in smaller groups due to the ability to have instant feedback and help from teachers.