Today I’m going to tell you about my school and program of study. My school is the School of Education and the program is MA TESOL & ICT.
There are about 100 PG students in the School of Education, with some of the programs of study being MA in TESOL, TESOL & ICT, ICT & Education, TESOL for Young Learner, TESOL Teacher Education (if interested, you can have a look at these and other programs offered by the School of Education by following the link provided below):
http://www.education.leeds.ac.uk/prospective/postgraduate/programme.php
There are 3 compulsory modules in the program:
a) Critical Study
b) Learning and Teaching in TESOL
c) Investigating language for TESOL
and a choice of optional ones (all offered in the 2nd semester):
-Design and Evaluation of Web-based Learning Environments
-e-Learning: Principles and Practices
-Investigating Practice in the English Language Classroom
-Issues in English for Academic Purposes
-Corpora in TESP
-Language Learning and Teaching with ICT - Online
You can study any of these closer by accessing the program catalogue; what I’d like to do today is to share with you some of my impressions about what these courses are like and what is expected from the students.
Both Learning and Teaching in TESOL and Investigating language for TESOL are lecture courses taught by a number of different professors. The first one gives an overview of different methods that have been practised in ELT over the last century (e.g., Natural Approach, Audio-lingualism, CLT, TBL etc). Parts of this course are quite familiar to you from your programs of study at Russian universities and colleges. However, all of them are discussed in the context of current research in the corresponding fields. The second one discusses different aspects of the language, such as pragmatics, discourse, grammar, lexis, register and genre etc. What makes this course interesting for me is that again it is grounded in their discussion in research journals, giving you a sense of currency.
In addition, the university offers Academic Skills classes which focus on different aspects of writing in the academic environment. So far, we have covered such topics as product and process approaches to writing, how to interpret the title of your assignment, how to structure it, what criteria are used to assess it, how to deal with references and examples and how to find your own voice in your work. These might seem simple, but I believe that these are essential for successful study.
Have you thought about that back home we often ask students to do things without giving them enough support for it? Make a presentation, write a report or prepare a book review are good examples. Some people say that university education presupposes you becoming more independent and doing things on your own. Yes, I fully agree but first students need to receive some help to acquire the necessary level of autonomy. I’d very much welcome your opinions and comments about this. Really, how should we approach these issues to make the process of study more beneficial for our learners?
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Дорогая Наталья!
Большое спасибо за подробное описание программы. Я сама верю в автономное, самостоятельное обучение. Я учусь лучше, когда передо мной стоит сложная задача и когда преподаватель заставляет меня саму найти решение проблемы. Однако, на мой взгляд, это как стили обучени. Кто-то не сможет так учиться, некоторым учащимся нужно больше поддержки. Просто потому, что они по другому учатся. Еще это зависит от степени ознакомленности с предметом. Если мне предмет не знаком, мне будет слишком трудно разобраться самостоятельно, и просто станет неинтересно. Вообще, хороший преподаватель варьирует стили, но это, конечно, очень общее утверждение.
Надеюсь, другие коллеги тоже подключатся и выскажет свое мнение.
У меня есть встречный вопрос - Узнали ли вы что-то практическое на занятиях, что можно было бы порекомендовать для использования в классе?
Заранее большое спасибо!
Ольга
It's nice to meet you again, it's really very interesting to read about the course you are taking at the university.
I kmow you are interested in writing, are there any activities you would like to apply in your teaching?
Thank you
Tatyana
Dear Olga--
Thanks for your comments and a question. I'm going to respond in English so that if some of my program fellows could follow the discussion if the decide to participate in it (I invited them to do so).
I agree that different learners need different levels of support from teachers and that their learning styles can affect the quality of knowledge they receive. At the same time, I believe that one of the things we should aim to do as teachers is develop our students' autonomy. We are not going to be around with them all the time, aren't we? More than that, I think we should be there all the time. Personally, I feel satisfied when I see that my students start using something they have learned in class on their own. I feel even more satisfied when they start learning something in addition to that themselves and sharing it with each other. And yes, more challenging and demanding tasks can motivate students more but what about those of them who are not motivated and who do not care?
As for learning something that can be used in our classes back home, I'm actually going to devote a special entry to answering this question a bit later when there are more things to share. :)
Natalya
Dear Tatyana--
It's great to hear from you. I was almost sure you will be one of the first people to get in touch and respond! I keep thinking about discussing with you doing some project together.
As for the writing activities, this is how the story goes. The university offers a whole range of what is called Academic Skills courses devoted to different aspects of academic writing. They are not obligatory and offered for free to anybody interested. I've attended all Academic Writing tutorials offered so far and found them quite useful. Think we need to introduce something similar back home. These are the topics we've covered:
a) Process vs Product approach to writing in the context of Ss writing their papers.
b) Interpreting the title: this is about what the title of you papers should be and how to make the most out of them. Seems to be trivial but actually requires a lot of thought and skill because it should match the expectations of your reader.
c) Structructuring your assignment: this is about the major pieces of writing we have to submit. Having submitted one assignment already, I can't but stress the importance of it in the academic context.
d) Assessment criteria: this is a question we often prefer to stay vague or not too specific about. However, knowing them from the start is what is expected here, i.e., you are informed what grade you can receive for what, which makes your work more difficult but easier at the same time. Informed is what?... forewarned.:)
e) Using reference and examples: this is all about not plagiarising. I don't have to mention plagiarism is not tolerated. But you are offered a lot of help for you to understand what plagiarism is and practise skills necessary not to plagiarize.
f) Finding your voice: nothing to add because the heading says it all. Practice is the key.
g) How to approach writing your critical study (this is what a dissertation is called here).
h) Using the library: no small matter because there are many small tricks to know to use it effectively.
All that I have mentioned is offered to post-graduate students, but, of course, they teach similar things on a less advanced level to Undergrads too.
I found these workshops rather useful even though many of the topics are part of my course back home but here the academic focus of them is stronger.
Dear Natasha,
Thank you for very clear explanation and practically all the points may be also applied to secondary school students.
For example, the school teachers do not think much about interpreting the title as it teachers the necessary strategy for Russian State exam preparation.
Another key point is structuring, this is also important to develop skills to be logical and what I'll definetelly apply is assessment as I think the students should know what will they get for this or that piece of writing.
I fully agree with the statement: practice is the key.
I know that you once recommended the web-links for developing writing skills, could you mention some good resource?
Thank you for Wordle, I also started using it.
Tatyana
Dear Tatyana--
Thanks for your questions. I'll be glad to share the resources I've been using in my writing class. All my bookmarks are on http://delicious.com, but there there many on all sorts of things I'm interested in. To give you a better answer I need some more specific information about the kinds of writing you teach your students for what purposes. You probably use the product approach to teaching writing, don't you? Do you see some room for the discussion of the writing process and peer-review? Do you discuss plagiarism?
Yes, your school context is slightly different from mine at the university, and I'm not saying one approach is bettar than the other one. In the end, I use both product and process approaches with some elements of genre. But knowing the details will allow me to suggest you the resources that can fit into your context.
So, what I'm saying in the end is that, please, give me more details about your context and then I'll be able to advise you on appropriate resources.
When you have used Wordle for some time, let me know how you have been using it. We can exchange ideas then, right?
Looking forward to continuing this discussion.
Natalya
Sorry, forgot to provide a link for my delicious collection http://delicious.com/nataneva
Hi again,
You are right our school context is a bit different from university level, now I am actually thinking about preparation students for RNE (Russian national exam), the students have to write a personal letter 100-140 words) and composition for and against or opinion. There could be some changers for the year 2010. I am teaching my students to start with brainstorming then a paragraph writing then developing the idea according to the task.The only problem is time, it's rather difficult to "squeeze" all the techniques into the frame of a lesson. Thank you for delicious, I am on Twitter, my user name tanyakuz.
Looking forward to hear from you soon.
Tatyana
Dear Tatyana--
Just a quick question before a longer answer l8er:) What's your nick on delicious.com? I can add you to my network and send you the links for writing resources I think might be good in your context to you directly. I don't mind doing it here as well but just thought that doing it directly on delicious.com will save the stage of copying, linking and pasting here.
However, just to start, I think you might like to try the Letter Generator software (http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/letter_generator/), which does what it says, generates letters from the information you submit. Let me know what you think about it and give me some feedback if you use it with your students. I just had a look at it and thought I might use it with my secondary school students but did not have a chance yet to do so.
Natalya
Tatyana--
It's me again with an exercise that seems worth trying out if you haven't done so already. One of the skills students need to master on their way to writing good essays is summarizing. One of the activities I've been using in my classes is asking students to create their bookmarks on delicious.com for a given topic and add its description in the Note field. Even though it seems quite a simple thing to do but actually it is not. First, the students might need to find appropriate resources, then study them in more detail and write about them in the note. Of course, this all only works if you do not allow them to cut and paste bits and pieces from the pages they will have found (plagiarism(:! ) A more structured version of the same activity is you providing them with the resources first and letting them summarise their content for the Note next.
Let me know if you have used delicious.com this way and what you think about it.
Natalya