When the Room Is Full and the Exam Is Real

The principles are universal; your classroom is particular. In Lagos, in a Saturday diaspora school, in a village of forty children — you may face large classes, exam pressure, few resources, and a room that shares one mother tongue. None of that breaks the method. It shapes how you apply it.

• Big classes → small groups. Turn forty children into eight teams and let peers teach peers. Games and information gaps scale where lectures never can.
• Exam pressure → both, not either. You can build a warm, speaking, communicative classroom and prepare for the test. Fluency and accuracy are not enemies — sequence them.
• Shared mother tongue → use it wisely. A word of the home language at the right moment lowers the filter; a class lived mostly in English raises the input. Find the balance; don’t police it.
• Few resources → realia is free. The door, the window, a child’s shoe, a chalk map. The best material costs nothing.
• Align to your curriculum. Map these topics onto your national syllabus — in Nigeria, the NERDC primary English themes — so that play and policy pull in the same direction.

The method survives contact with the real classroom. It just learns to travel light.