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...

I have been teaching English as a second or foreign language now for ten years. Five of those ten years were spent training teachers of ESL or EFL. At this point in my profession, I've demonstrated to myself that my guiding principles are authenticity and student autonomy. (On a personal note, I find it oddly coincidental that my newborn daughter's name share's the first vowel sound as my guiding principles.) Authenticity When I was a teacher trainer in Seoul, Korea, students in many of my methodology courses informed me that the word I most often used was "authentic." Looking at the base content, the word didn't come up as frequently as I mentioned it. I confess this was my spin on delivering the TESOL methodology content designed in a collaborative effort between professors at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and at Sookmyung Women's University-TESOL. But it wasn't really spin more than exaggerating what I believe to a fundamental pr...