Some half baked ideas and others, carbonized...
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Sometimes the presentation phase of a lesson can take up most of a lesson. What percentage of an overall lesson do you spend in presenting particular language point and what percentage do the learners get to actually use the language? Half of the lesson, or just five percent of the lesson time?
Do the learners really need all of this input to get the language point?
Communicative language teaching (CLT) is a label that is often used to describe courses and it seems to be a label that has become so over-used and easily used that it has perhaps begun to lose its meaning. When asked in a recent seminar what the characteristics of community language were, there did seem to be a definite reticence to offer answers. I found this somewhat surprising given the widespread use of the term.
What would happen to your school if it did not describe the courses given there are communicative language courses? Would you lose business? Would people automatically think that your courses were of a lower quality? What would happen to me as a teacher if I told people that I did not believe in the principles of CLL? Would I be cast out of the people friendly language teaching community? A outcast, a pariah?
But, if I am not confidently sure of what the principles or characteristics of CLL are, how can I claim to believe in them? I would be doing nothing better than paying lip service. Here then, is an attemopt at a taxonomy of the characteristics of CLL to guide my own assessment of my courses and teaching.
These notes are based on a presentation given by Theresa Doğuelli University. The presentation was after sales service from Oxford University Press on the Lecture Ready series of academic English text books.
The aim of the book is strategy training and this was where Teresa began her presentation. The differences between a strategy, skill, plan and tactic were explored. One of the ideas that came out of the discussion was that a strategy is more flexible than a plan - leaving the learner the chioce of how to tackle the task rather than a less flexible and less adaptable plan. Read the rest of this entry »
This post is intended to give the most cursory idea about what exactly task based learning is. Read the rest of this entry »
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