Literature Review: Challenges Facing EFL Teachers in Mixed-Ability Classes and Strategies

 Furthermore, the lack of training in the skills and methodologies to deal with MACs (Butterworth, 2010;Kantor, 2011;Xanthou & Pavlou, 2010) and the lack of MAC teaching strategies (Morris, 2008) are some of the challenges teachers faced. Besides, the inability to adapt materials/tasks (Loiacono & Allen, 2008;Perera, 2010) to accommodate the different ability levels of students (Mathews, Aydinli & Horne, 2006;Morris, 2008) and failure to address advanced or struggling students (Al-Shammakhi & Al-Humaidi, 2015) are also worth mentioning challenging. When teachers fail to teach and address all levels of students, they teach to the average ignoring the advanced and struggling groups (Al-Shammakhi & Al-Humaidi, 2015;Reed, 2004). ...

... Besides, the inability to adapt materials/tasks (Loiacono & Allen, 2008;Perera, 2010) to accommodate the different ability levels of students (Mathews, Aydinli & Horne, 2006;Morris, 2008) and failure to address advanced or struggling students (Al-Shammakhi & Al-Humaidi, 2015) are also worth mentioning challenging. When teachers fail to teach and address all levels of students, they teach to the average ignoring the advanced and struggling groups (Al-Shammakhi & Al-Humaidi, 2015;Reed, 2004). Teaching to the middle level disappoints struggling students and influences them to fall farther behind, while the advanced students remain unchallenged, and lose motivation to learn (Reed, 2004). .