Syllabus
Week 1 – The EFL teacher and his rolesWeek 2 – The EFL student – roles, variablesWeek 3 – The content of ELT and curricular documents Week 4 – Lesson planning and working with coursebooks Week 5 – Technology in ELTWeek 6 – Teaching pronunciation 1Week 7 – Teaching pronunciation 2Week 8 – Teaching listening 1Week 9 – Teaching listening 2Week 10 – Teaching vocabulary 1Week 11 – Teaching vocabulary 2Week 12 – Meeting a real EFL teacherWeek 13 – ELT coursebooks 2
Annotation
The English language is ever evolving and in the current world it plays a large number of roles. The English language teaching profession has constantly to look for ways to address all of these and to respond to the changing contexts in which English is being used and how it is being perceived by its users. Whether they are learning English for the purposes of global communication, whether they want to learn the language of cultures they find attractive or need English as a tool for carrying out their professional aims, the ELT profession needs to keep finding ways of adapting its procedures and objectives in order to meet the needs of all learners and as such is continually evolving as well.
The present course Teaching English as a Foreign Language 1 is designed to address these issues and aims to prepare modern English language teachers who are both technically equipped to teach English and aware of the changing contexts in which English is used in the current world. Its curricular basis is a combination of the communicative wave and the third wave of language teaching curricula (Graves 2016), i. e. the combination of the communicative approach to language teaching with contextually based approaches which foreground the use of language as meaning-based social practice. It's second language acquisition basis is strongly grounded in usage-based theories.
The course presents a core course in the teacher-training programme at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. It is intended for MA students of the teacher-training programmes. These students developed their understanding of many of the associated concepts during the BA part of their training, including introductory topics to ELT and second language acquisition and also the historical development of the field and several of the key developmental phases. Students who join the course ought to be familiar with the ELT and SLA topics introduced in the courses English Language Seminar for Teachers 1, English Language Seminar for Teachers 2 and Language-learning theory and practice for ELT.
The main topics for this term of the course include the participants in the ELT process, i. e. teachers and learners, the content and context of ELT in the Czech Republic (essential curricular documents, design of curricular and the structure of ELT content), and the introduction to the teaching of selected language forms (namely pronunciation and vocabulary), and language skills (namely listening). It also includes a seminar on teaching materials and the use of ICT.
This is a highly practical course in which the students are constantly involved in discussions, group activities and project work. They also regularly participate in short teaching episodes (microteachings) which may last from a few seconds to 20 minutes.
The last mentioned microteachings are videoed and the videos are made available to the trainees for their private analysis. The inclusion of the longer micro-teaching slot is the reason why the course has been designed for three 45-minute blocks. It is during the last one that the microteaching and its analysis (i .e. feedback session) happen.
The course is multidisciplinary drawing on research findings in the field of language teaching methodology, applied linguistics, linguistics, learner corpus research, psycholinguistics, pedagogy, psychology and second language acquisition.