Week 5: Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT)

Discussion 1: From Worms to Wall Street Video

My Response:

From watching the video, Project Based Learning is a pedagogical approach in which, rather than having students learn through structured, teacher-led units, students are instead led to learn for themselves over an extended timeframe (such as a quarter or semester) based on a topic that they are interested in. While these sorts of approaches seem easier to implement in fields like science, for a subject like English Language Arts, I might be reticent to have students spend an extended time on a topic of their own choosing - especially given the breadth of topics an English Language Arts teacher needs to cover in a given year. However, there is two project-based approaches I have considered implementing in the past, which I am seriously considering implementing for the upcoming school year are a mock job fair and NaNoWriMo.

For the first, I have a quarter-long technical writing course for my 8th grade students dedicated solely for preparing for employment. In the unit, students create resumes and cover letters, learn job interviewing skills, and then conclude with a mock interview for themselves. The problem I have this year is that it was fairly teacher-led. While some of this is understandable, as I needed to acquaint students to these documents, some aspects of this unit - like giving them a pre-assigned position to apply for, seem to take away from the authenticity of the unit. Perhaps if students were applying for actual job positions in the community, giving students the choice as to where to apply for and inviting community employers to act as interviewers for this activity, students might have a better indication of how the job application process actually works. Moreover, as demonstrated through approaches to this like this example from EducationWorld (https://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr196.shtml), we can dive into some of the expenses that students would need to prepare for as adults to make the need for a job more readily apparent. 

As for the second example, in my general English classes, I have greatly considered having my 8th grade students next year participate in National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. While the initial prospect of insisting that students spend all of November writing a novel of their own choosing seems daunting, there are resources provided by the non-profit that help teachers scaffold what things students will need to know about novel writing - such as story elements - to ensure students can spend the entire month of November writing their novels for themselves. It is a daunting opportunity for standard ELA students, let alone ELLs, but perhaps the flexibility of the prompt will be more accommodable to help students write the language in a way that expresses who they are. Here is a link to these resources: https://ywp.nanowrimo.org/pages/educator-resources. 

Obviously PBL takes a lot of work to push forward, but I am eager to see how this approach might work for my students.

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Response to Melinda Oakes:

I find it interesting what types of topics might be covered in an adult-based PBL approach over a one catered for adolescents. I can totally see the practicality for both of these, as the former helps acclimate recent immigrants to some of the things we take most for granted about living in the United States while the latter helps in navigating them around the idiosyncrasies of our medical system. These definitely look like interesting projects!

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Response to Michelle Johansen:

You know what, I might adopt your cookbook idea for my class. I don't like this only for the fact that it seems like a great English-based activity that students would be independently motivated to work on, but also because it might lead to an opportunity for all of my students to learn about each other's cultures by cooking something of importance to them. Plus, any unit that ends with a class party is a win in my book!