Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

As promised in the previous post, I am going to share an idea, although it has not been tried or tested by me.  Perhaps some other English language teacher has done something similar to this: developing English language learners' information and communication technology (ICT) skills while developing their English language skills.  This is kind of like a hybrid of content-based instruction and task-based instruction.  The content includes academic and workplace language regarding ICT, whereas the tasks can vary. For the sake of continuity from the previous post, the example task for this blog is more linguistic:  teach another group of English language learners (in their own classroom, in another classroom, or to future students in their current class) a grammar rule and demonstrate its usage as authentic to your life as possible.  Although some novice level students may be able to do this, I would aim this task at intermediate speakers.  For advanced spea...

For a class, I wrote a 7-page annotated bibliography and presented a 7-minute presentation on role-plays in task-based instruction, which is one of my areas of interest for research. The most useful bit of information I got from this research was that the preferred term in this area is "information gap task" as opposed to "role-play" or "simulation." The term "role-play" reminds most educators about the suggestopedia method or drama (which many instructors rule out as time-consuming and chaotic), so it often does not get much respect in second language education research. Information gap tasks can be tied easily to task-based instruction , which is a more recent and widely used approach to language teaching than suggestopedia. Another great find was Dr. Teresa Pica from the University of Pennsylvania. She appears to be the leading expert in information gap tasks and would be a very valuable resource if I decide to do my dissertation on this t...