Outside of an Aldous Huxley novel, you aren't going to find a class of students of exactly the same ability. It is frustrating when you set the class a task and one student has finished before some have even started. One simple technique to cope with such variation is a multiple cloze exercise. A what? A cloze test is a text that has had every nth word removed. The students then have to add the missing words. There are a number of software programmes that allow you to make a cloze test with every nth word removed automatically - and usually an answer key given. (The one that I use was written by M. Carl Grott and is available here - for free).
So how can a cloze test help a mixed ability class? If 'n' equals 15, then it is comparatively easy to work out what the missing word is. If 'n' equals 4 (i.e. every 4th word removed) then it is much harder - and therefore takes more time. It is easy to prepare the same text with n5, n7, n9, n11. Then you can challenge your better students to work on an n5, while your strugglers can do an n11. Be aware that they could cheat/help each other as the gaps will be different for each text.
