Dealing with gifted students in EFL: a practical approach through differentiation

Abstract

[eng] High-ability students represent one of the major educational challenges of our time. The Spanish current educational legislation promotes diversity to be properly addressed in heterogeneous environments as moving towards an inclusive educational model. However, dealing with diversity in regular classroom often results in ineffective teaching strategies, especially when it comes to highability learners. Consequently, gifted students are quite often deprived of equitable educational approaches which allow them to develop both their personal and academic abilities at schools. The myths around giftedness, the lack of teachers’ training in gifted education and the scarce support from both the legislation and the educational administration prevent an improvement in the short term. Confronted this situation, whereas no other strategies are sufficiently consolidated to deal with high-ability learners, it is of capital importance to find out proper alternatives such as differentiation to mitigate deficiencies. Therefore, as it will be shown throughout the didactic proposal of this dissertation, differentiation can be regarded as a feasible and a realistic strategy to approach giftedness in heterogeneous environments.