 Our final grouping that we're going to look at is the differences between teaching monolingual and multilingual classes. Firstly, we should define what we mean by these two things. Monolingual students are a group of students that all have the same native language, and typically that's taught in the country. So an example of that could be the teaching of English to Thai students in Thailand. The chances are that the vast majority of your class will all speak Thai, so they all have the same L1. The difference with a multilingual class is that the students will have a range of first languages, so they have different L1s. An example there may be the teaching of English to a group of students in an English-speaking country, for example in England. Whether your class is monolingual or multilingual, it brings with it a range of advantages and disadvantages. So let's have a look at what some of those could be. So let's have a run through the advantages first of all for the monolingual and the multilingual classes. For a monolingual class, because they all come from the same country and speak the same language, they're going to have some common difficulties. This is an advantage as the teacher because we can work on those common difficulties with the whole class. Secondly, because they're all from the same country, they will be culturally similar. And finally, another advantage with the monolingual class is that they can actually help each other in their native language. What potential disadvantages are there with having a monolingual class? Well secondly, they can help each other in their L1 and whilst this may be okay at the lower levels, say up to pre-intermediate, and in fact it can often actually be more effective to allow them to do so, at the higher levels we should be discouraging that. So the fact that they are able to talk to each other in their L1, we should try and discourage that at the higher levels. Secondly, they will have less natural exposure to L2 as a monolingual class. If you remember we said an example of a monolingual class was teaching English to Thai students in Thailand. They're going to have less natural exposure to the English language in Thailand than they would in England. So what about the multilingual class? What are some of the advantages of teaching those? One of the advantages is that they have no common language. They come from different countries throughout the world and they all speak a different first language. So the fact that they have no common language is actually an advantage to us because their only common language in that situation is therefore going to be English. Another advantage of a multilingual class because they come from different countries throughout the world, they will have a large variety of experiences and those experiences can be used within our classroom. Another advantage that the multilingual class will have is because they're learning the language in an English-speaking country, they are going to have more exposure to that English language. Some of the disadvantages, well here we have the fact that they have common difficulties. Within the multilingual class it's a disadvantage. So some students may find some concepts very easy because it's closer to their native language than others and therefore there are no common difficulties. So we may be having to explain to a particular type of student from a particular country about certain things that the whole class is okay with. And finally, one potential disadvantage if we're not careful is that because they come from different ethnic backgrounds we need to be very, very careful to be culturally aware of what we're doing within the classroom.