Evaluation and Critical Reflection on The Listening and Speaking Activities Taught in an English for Specific Purpose Course (Published)
The following paper is a combination of two assignments for the Master’s program “The Teaching of English as a Foreign/ International Language”. It concerns the evaluation and critical reflection on the listening and speaking activities offered to an adult learners’ course during their “English Terminology for Paramedics” class, along with a redesigned lesson plan. The paper analyses the students’ profiles, describes the listening activities used in a particular unit, evaluates them, and suggests improvements to their teaching. An evaluation of the speaking activities based on Johnson’s principles and Nation’s features, a redesigned lesson plan based on the Communicative Language Approach, and a critical evaluation on it follow.
Keywords: Adult Learning, Communicative Competence, ESL, ESP
COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES: ISSUES ON PRE, DURING, AND POST CHALLENGES IN SOUTH KOREA’S ENGLISH EDUCATION (Published)
This paper determined 128 Korean university students’ language potentials on “pre,” “during,” and “post” communicative activities. Their strengths and weaknesses in the communicative challenges were investigated; particularly, their weaknesses in the three stages were determined in terms of rank of difficulty and frequency of attitude toward the activities. In the exploratory-quantitative-exploratory research method with qualitative perspectives, the findings were concluded: Not all were challenged in pre, during, and post communicative activities. Parents, English language environment, teaching approaches, and bad timing may be the culprit why students’ motivation, interest, and proficiencies were in bad shape. Students’ learning styles, strategies, and attitudes were also affected due to the difficulties of communicative challenges and lack of support system. Lack of support system can be characterized with lack of the proper language proficiency assessment on where to place the students in class and how much time to be allotted for each class. The students from the 22 departments attended an English class for only an hour and fifty minutes per week. With the conditions mentioned above, the students could hardly develop communicative skills because they were not able to manage learning meaningfully. Deeper insights on these three stages (such as pre, during, and post) would add literature to address students’ real needs and teacher’s issues on sense of commitment in the English language education. The rank of difficulty on communicative activities in each stage would provide the support system (which involves TESOL practitioners, teachers, curriculum developers, researchers, and even students) priorities on what, how, and when to implement communicative challenges. By evaluating every angle of these current data would help the support system design or develop teaching techniques, result-oriented materials, and interactive activities to accommodate the priorities. Thus, the ranks of difficulty in communicative activities as well as the rank and frequency of attitude towards these activities will serve as a basis for conducting further investigation or similar studies to fulfill the support system’s objectives.
Keywords: Communicative Activities, Communicative Competence, Conversation, Conversation Theory, Teachers' and Learners' roles in the classroom, Willingness to Communicate (WTC)