Stacy Hagen
The best teaching tip I ever got came from a TESOL presentation long ago. A very perceptive teacher-trainer, whose name I no longer have, suggested that every time we ask a question — no matter the question — we silently count to 10 before moving on. Ten seconds sounded like a long time to me, but when I got back to class, I decided to give it a try. It didn’t take long to see the wisdom in his advice. Continue reading
Don’t worry, Pearson ELT has a quick recap of the show that we can share with you!
Join Pearson ELT at TESOL 2015 in Toronto to learn more about our new courses and skill titles. Work on our many interactive displays or flip through copies on our shelves! Be part of small group discussions with our bestselling authors! Join our new exhibitor presentations where leading authors will demonstrate how to use new materials effectively in your classroom. Check it out now!
Please stop by booth #1608-1609. We look forward to seeing you there!
Joan Saslow and Allen Ascher
The most important building blocks of conversational competence are carefully constructed conversation models combined with a step-by-step pedagogy for intensive practice.
The Value of Conversation Models
Although more and more English language course books today no longer even contain them, texts written in the form of “dialogues” or “conversations” have appeared in course book lessons for decades. The earliest dialogues were written to show students examples of “grammar in context,” but because such conversations simply “hammered” the grammar, they had an inauthentic feel that didn’t represent anything real people would ever say. Following is an extreme case, though not an unusual one:
Roy: What are we going to do for our class field trip?
Jim: When is it going to be?
Roy: It’s going to be on Saturday.
Jim: Where are we going to go?
Roy: The students want to go to the nature park.
Jim: OK. And we’re going to have a picnic. What are we going to need?
Roy: My students are going to bring the sandwiches and drinks. And what about your students?
Jim: They’re going to bring salads and snacks. Continue reading
When we discuss technology, we often refer to “user experience,” that is, the user’s sense of ease of navigation, ease of use, satisfaction with the technology, even the pleasure they derive, and the attraction they feel toward using it.[i]
When we talk about learning technology, part of user experience is a deeper layer that we might call the learning design. That is, the interconnectivity of the various features and elements and how they lead toward significant learning outcomes[ii].
I’d like to relate to you how I became interested in or how I developed an initial understanding of the relationship between teaching and user experience and learning design. This was during my senior year at the University of Michigan when I was doing my student teaching. I was assigned to a high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan to teach first and second year English. And my master teacher, who was going to guide me through this, was Shirley McKeon, who was a very gifted, very talented, very charismatic, and—fortunately for me—very empathic teacher. And part of my job was to come every morning before class and present Shirley my lesson plans for the day. And they looked something like this, where we would list the lesson objectives.[iii] And these were in terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and then the lesson structure, with the time, the topic, and the teaching approach that was to be used for each activity. Continue reading
