Course Contents

Course Content Unit One: Introduction to Second Language Acquisition • Introduction to the Course Teaching English • Introduction to Unit One and Initial Activity: Exploring course participants’ views of how languages are learned. • What do people need to know to speak a foreign language well? • Four influential ESL approaches • The Grammar-Translation method and its limitations • Behaviourism and the Audio-Lingual Method • The Natural Approach The Interactionist Approach • Practical teaching activities using the Interactionist Approach • Criticism of the Interactionist Approach • A quiz to review the four approaches to SLA • Implications of the Post-Methods Era • Factors Affecting Second Language Learning: Investigating learner differences and learning styles What is Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)? Unit Two: Receptive Skills (Listening & Reading) What are listening skills? Listening as a skill: some listening theories How do children learn to listen? • Some suggestions for classroom listening What does real-life listening involve? • Extensive and Intensive Listening • Techniques and Activities for Teaching Listening Skills communicatively in the classroom • Pre-Listening, While-Listening, and Post-Listening activities • Designing effective listening materials and activities for the language classroom • Practical microteaching of listening skills in the classroom • What is reading? • What is the purpose of reading inside and outside the classroom? • The power of reading • Reading comprehension skills o Some suggestions for reading activities Factors affecting learning to read in a second language o The role of the teacher in extensive and intensive reading • Techniques and activities for teaching reading communicatively • Pre-Reading, While-Reading, and Post-Reading activities • Designing and developing effective reading activities for the language classroom • Practical microteaching of reading skills in the classroom Unit Three: Productive Skills - Speaking and Writing o What are Speaking Skills? o Helping learners to improve their pronunciation through the use of simple exercises and tasks o How to introduce learners to the sound system of English – Use of varied drills Ways of helping learners to improve their pronunciation through practical classroom exercises (jazz chants, songs, rhymes, etc.) o Teaching Basic Communication Strategies – relating functions to appropriate language forms o Experiencing, Designing and Evaluating Speaking Activities for the o Communicative Language Classroom I o Using songs to encourage speaking o Asking and Answering simple questions o A discussion game ‘Shipwrecked’ Experiencing, Designing and Evaluating Speaking Activities for the o Communicative Language Classroom II o Using pictures in a speaking exercise o Using a story for acting and developing speaking Assessing CLT activities – a questionnaire Practical microteaching of speaking skills in the classroom and evaluation Key concepts in teaching second language writing : controlled writing, guided writing, genre-based writing, the product approach, the process approach Types of writing tasks that have been used effectively in Communicative Language Teaching Practical CLT Writing activities such as describing a view, writing about a personal experience, writing a dialogue between two friends, etc. How to help students by giving them language scaffolding Giving useful feedback to learners on their writing. Designing writing materials and activities for the language classroom Practical microteaching of writing skills by groups in the classroom and evaluation of the presentations Unit Four: Teaching Grammar Communicatively - A review of basic concepts in grammar: tense, subject-verb agreement, formation of interrogative and negative verb forms, SVO word order, simple/compound/complex sentences. - Student teachers work through practical exercises and activities in the above areas to ensure that they have a clear understanding of the appropriate grammatical forms required for the structures outlined above. The course facilitator gives student teachers some tips on how to edit their work for errors. - The place of grammar teaching in the second language acquisition process; evaluating different approaches to grammar teaching taken by course book writers - Micro-teaching by student teachers in groups of the activities they have prepared and evaluation of these activities by the class. Unit Five: Teaching Vocabulary Effectively - Function words vs. lexical words - High frequency vs. low frequency words - Discussion of which English words young learners will need to know to be able to speak and write at a basic level. How should these items be presented to the learners? - Student teachers do web searches to choose 50 words they would like to teach to their students. Discussion in class on how and why the 50 words were selected. - Making vocabulary a useful part of a language course – when and how should vocabulary be taught to English learners? Unit Six: Assessing Language Performance - Designing Language Tests for Young Learners - Some basic principles and key concepts in assessment Basic principles for assessing children’s language learning Why do we test students? - Tips and special considerations for Testing Young Learners - Conflicts between classroom learning and classroom testing and ways of reducing these conflicts - Ways of Marking Language Tests and Giving Feedback - Samples of test types that can be used to test young learners - In groups, student teachers prepare their own materials for testing one of the four skills for a 15-minute presentation - Micro-teaching in groups and evaluation of the testing materials by the class

Course Synopsis

This three-credit course has been designed to enable prospective teachers to teach English using an interactive communicative approach to students aged 6 to 13. It will be taught over 16 weeks with three face-to-face sessions per week, making a total of 48 sessions. The course aims to be comprehensive in its coverage and depth so that, on its completion, participants will have gained both a theoretical understanding of the basic principles of Second Language Acquisition and the practical knowledge of how to apply these principles effectively in the language classroom. The course focuses on ways of teaching young learners the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing to enable them to reach a basic level of communicative competence in both spoken and written English. In addition to learning how to teach and integrate the four skills in an interactive, learner-centered manner, participants will gain an understanding of how grammar awareness raising and vocabulary acquisition can be incorporated into a communicative teaching approach. Finally, student teachers will learn how to design and develop their own teaching materials and activities, and how to assess and test their students’ language proficiency and progress.

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon completing the course, Student Teachers will be able to: • explain in basic terms how second languages are acquired and demonstrate a working knowledge of the grammar-translation method, the audio-lingualism method, the natural approach, and communicative language teaching1 • teach listening, reading, speaking, and writing skills to young learners using an interactive, communicative approach • design suitable teaching materials which focus on helping learners acquire a basic level of communicative competence • assess their students’ language performance and progress using their own self-designed assessment procedures • help learners develop basic grammatical competence and vocabulary in English using a learner-centred, communicative teaching approach • explain differences between teaching and testing when they are designing their own classroom materials and activities.