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How to Make Upper-Level University English Classes More Interactive

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Md. Mostafa Rashel:
How to Make Upper-Level University English Classes More Interactive


Upper-level English classes often pose special problems for teachers. At some universities,
upper-level students learn English by using the technical language of their degree program, such as medicine, business, information technology, or some other field. Known as English for Specific Purposes (ESP), this type of English instruction integrates the specialized subject matter of the field into the classroom. ESP requires the acquisition of highly specialized terminology and the ability to explain formal processes as students prepare for the high-level competence they will have to demonstrate in their chosen careers. Because this advanced material is often difficult and challenging, students can easily fall behind or become nonresponsive. It is therefore imperative for teachers to use methods that make upper-level classes effective and communicative. One good solution is task-based teaching, which links pair and group work with relevant activities to make language lessons more interactive, thus increasing student engagement and comprehension. This article describes how I implemented task-based teaching to improve language learning in an upper-level ESP class for engineering students.

Task-based teaching and oral communication practice

Before I learned about task-based teaching, two main problems in class were to find more time for students to communicate and to motivate them to talk. If activities are primarily focused on drilling and studying grammatical forms, it is difficult for students to communicate since the language situation
they are put in is rather unnatural, and their roles do not demand the use of authentic language. They therefore treat language learning as routine and simply go through the motions. Task-based learning produces the opposite effect, as is evident by the definition of task given by Willis (1996, 36): “a goal-oriented communicative activity with a specific outcome, where the emphasis is on exchanging meanings, not producing specific language forms.” Tasks based on relevant student interests and aspirations increase the meaningful use of language, and when tasks are focused on meaning, learners have better “opportunities in the classroom to use the language for genuine communication” (Willis and Willis 2007, 4).

Task-based activities set up social situations so that students can have meaningful discussions with one another. When students use English to cooperate and interact with each other, classes are more effective. According to Brown (1994), interactive classes have the following beneficial features:

• There is a large amount of pair and group work.
• Students engage in spontaneous and authentic conversations.
• Students write for actual audiences and purposes, not artificial ones.
• Tasks prepare students for the real world outside of the classroom.


Irina LytovchenkoUkraine

Enduring ............

Md. Mostafa Rashel:
Group and pair work

Group and pair work are indispensible to task-based teaching. This type of classroom arrangement creates a completely different atmosphere from that of a traditional teacher-centered class; instead of strictly controlling the students, the teacher coordinates their work. According to Brown (1994), group work creates a favorable climate for communication by relieving students of the anxiety of having to talk in front of the whole class. Brown reports miraculous changes in students who had been too shy to talk until they worked in groups. In addition, group work makes students more responsible and autonomous—they have equal responsibility for performing a task and find it “difficult to ‘hide’ in a small group” (Brown 1994, 174). Group and pair work also increase the speaking time for each student in a class. According to Byrne (1988, 31), “unless you have a very small class, you will never be able to give your students enough oral practice through whole class work.” For example, if you have 30 students and 30 minutes of oral work, each student will at most have only one minute to talk; “on the other hand, if you divide your students into pairs for just five minutes, each student will get more talking time during those five minutes than during the rest of the lesson” (Byrne 1988, 31).

Irina LytovchenkoUkraine

Enduring ............

Md. Mostafa Rashel:
Organizing group work

A fundamental consideration is how to arrange the students to perform a task in pairs and groups, and teachers must find solutions to problems such as cramped classrooms and having to pair up students of different language levels. Although a classroom with moveable tables and chairs is ideal, many classrooms have rows of desks that are permanently attached to the floor. In this case, one solution is to ask the students in one row to turn around and talk to the students sitting in the row behind them. In this way, they can face each other during their conversation, which I believe is better than talking to the student sitting next to them. This method also works when dividing students up into groups of four: two students who sit next to each other can turn around and work with the two students sitting behind them. Sometimes I ask my students to leave their desks and find partners
themselves. However, if it takes them too much time to decide, I pair them up myself or number off the students and assign each pair a place in the classroom.

Some teachers avoid doing group and pair work in class because it is noisy. But how is it possible to learn a language silently? If my students are noisy but they are speaking English, I feel satisfied. In some cases, when there is too much noise in the classroom, I use a simple but efficient technique with stoplight cards described by Jacobs and Hall (2002, 55): “A green card goes on the desk of groups if they are working together quietly. A yellow card indicates they need to quiet down a bit. When a red card is put on their desk, the group should become completely silent, and all should silently count to ten before starting work again.” With time, as students regularly practice group and pair work, they learn to work more quietly

Irina LytovchenkoUkraine

Enduring ............

Md. Mostafa Rashel:
A series of language learning tasks

I first encountered the amazing possibilities of interactive techniques for preparing students for real-world language use when I discovered the following six tasks categorized by Willis (1996) that form a chain in advanced order of complexity:

1. Listing. Students work individually or in groups to gather facts about a topic by brainstorming, researching, and interviewing. This provides plentiful data and activates their background knowledge and experience of the topic.

2. Ordering and sorting. Students sequence or rank the facts, vocabulary, or ideas about a topic in a meaningful order.

3. Comparing and contrasting. Students point out the similarities and differences
in the information they have gathered.

4. Problem-solving. Students create and evaluate a hypothesis related to a problem
and analyze possible solutions.

5. Sharing personal experiences. Students engage in conversations and discussions
about topics that have personal relevance.

6. Creative tasks and projects. Students collaborate to produce a written, oral, or multimedia project that summarizes the important things they have learned from task-based work.

These techniques are especially valuable for organizing group or pair work, and they can be based on almost any text, adapted to almost any topic, and used in any class. While performing these tasks, students engage in spontaneous discussions, solve problems, and prepare presentations. These activities help students communicate freely and overcome the psychological barrier to communication that so often occurs in a classroom setting. While it is difficult for teachers to reproduce in a classroom all the situations in which students may need to use English in real life, these kinds of tasks will help students be better prepared to undertake real-life challenges. They will train learners to use language spontaneously outside the classroom, and allow them to use important language functions correctly, including “agreeing and disagreeing, interrupting, asking for repetition and clarification, changing the subject or the emphasis, highlighting the important part of the message, guessing at meanings and making inferences and so on” (Willis and Willis 2007, 136). One of my students once told me that he had been able to give directions to a foreign visitor in English. The visitor was very grateful because until he met my student, he had not been able to find anyone in the street who could speak English. My student said that the communication in groups and pairs in class helped him in that situation, even though we had never practiced giving directions
in our lessons.

Irina LytovchenkoUkraine

Enduring ............

Md. Mostafa Rashel:
Task-based teaching in action

Using Willis’s (1996) series of tasks is convenient and practical because implementing them does not take much time or require many resources. When implemented together they form a task chain of increasing complexity that is an excellent method for creating communicative activities for any topic. However, this does not mean that teachers have to use them all for every topic, or even use them in the given order. It is possible to use only one or two if a teacher is short on time or has difficulties developing six tasks for the same project. In addition, as was my case, the type of project may require switching the order of the six tasks.

I adapted the tasks for a project based on a reading passage from an ESP textbook titled The Language of Mechanical Engineering in English (Hall 1977). The project was made relevant and interesting by focusing on the environmental problems caused by engineered devices used in our everyday lives and the students’ reasons for choosing engineering as a career. Combining these relevant topics with task-based teaching is a way to “involve learners in different types of extended discourse. It provides an arena for informal spontaneous interaction” (Willis and Willis 2007, 136).
Although task-based teaching exposes students to all four skills, I made sure to supplement
all the tasks with meaningful writing that was used to inform the class. According to Willis and Willis (2007), writing complements oral activities and provides opportunities for language focus because “speaking is a real-time activity, in which there is normally no time for careful consideration of language. Writing, on the other hand, allows time to think about language” (117).

The following tasks were performed as post-reading activities to elicit further discussion
of the text’s main aspects, although the same tasks could easily be adapted for pre-reading activities. The students did the following activities in two subsequent 90-minute lessons. However, other teachers can adapt the tasks to their own class schedules.


Irina LytovchenkoUkraine

Enduring ............

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