Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English

How to Make Upper-Level University English Classes More Interactive

<< < (3/5) > >>

Md. Mostafa Rashel:
A natural focus on form

For teachers who might be afraid that the focus on grammar is lost in this sequence of task-based activities, it is important to note that the opposite is true. In fact, during the whole task sequence, as they are absorbed in the meaningful content, students naturally take the time to decide what types of vocabulary and sentence structure they will use to best express their messages. “They may stop to search for the right word to express the meaning they want, or to look up in the dictionary a word they are not sure of. Or they may stop to wonder if a sentence they are planning to produce is grammatical, or if it can be improved in some way” (Willis and Willis 2007, 113).

Conclusion
Using these task-based activities in my upper-level ESP classes has really helped encourage my students to communicate in English and made my lessons livelier. At first I was afraid that my students would be too shy and reluctant to participate in the activities. I was especially concerned because my groups of engineering students consist mainly of young men, and I tend to find that male students are, on the whole, less talkative and more reserved than female students. But I was both surprised and inspired by the fact that they did not object at all to performing the tasks, and I could even see that they enjoyed doing them. I also observed that even the quietest students spoke more freely in groups and pairs than in front of the whole class. My fear that students would speak their native language instead of English was also unfounded. There were several such incidents, but on the whole it was not a problem because the students had more time to speak English and they gradually got used to it.

In closing, I would also like to mention that because the students’ communication in groups and pairs is much like real communication between people outside of class, they now feel more confident as English speakers. And I feel more confident as a language teacher!

References

Brown, H. D. 1994. Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.

Byrne, D. 1988. Techniques for classroom interaction. London: Longman.

Hall, E. J. 1977. The language of mechanical engineering in English. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall Regents.

Jacobs, G. M., and S. Hall. 2002. Implementing cooperative learning. In Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice, ed. J. C. Richards and W. A. Renandya, 52–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Willis, D., and J. Willis. 2007. Doing task-based teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Willis, J. 1996. A framework for task-based learning. Harlow, UK: Addison Wesley.

Irina LytovchenkoUkraine

Antara11:
Dear Sir,

You posts are much effective. We all should bring these practices in use. Nevertheless, sometimes it's really difficult to get all the students involved.

shamsi:
Dear Sir:

Thanks for your helpful posts.In fact all of us want to make our classes more interactive.What I have observed in my classes is that  students like to share their personal experience if the teacher is supportive,ie.if they can have a sense of security of not being insulted or laughed at by the teacher or their fellow class mates.I have also found them liking topics of their own interest such as-technology,internet, smart phone,face-book,concert,event management,cricket,football,lifestyle,theme parks,photography and many more...

Regards

Shamsi

jas_fluidm:
thanks for great thinking.

Md. Mostafa Rashel:
Thanks for reply and comments. I know, this is difficult to maintain in the class room but not impossible. So, we have to find out or create the scope so that we can able to use it every time.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page