Starting in April, I’ll be team-teaching a couple of classes at a local women’s college, and my colleagues and I have decided to go with a new textbook for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) that was co-authored by a friend of mine, Marcos Benevides. I was fortunate enough to have been a sounding board and confidant through the many stages along the way to production, and I am truly proud of what they have accomplished with the materials.
The book’s title is Widgets, and it is a first-of-its-kind approach to task-basked foreign language learning. Students are thrust immediately into roles as new-hires in a large corporation and are given specific tasks during their training and tenure. They are expected to complete focused research and projects, and to create new products, getting a chance to participate in every stage of development, which culminates at the end of the course in infomercials written, directed, and performed by the students themselves.
One of the best points about the curriculum’s design is that the students pass their inventions on to other groups at the end of each business task (or unit). Effectively, this means that–at any given time– all of the students have a vested interest in the products being developed by other groups. Just an ingenious twist. Another excellent point is that attendance and discipline issues become the work of project leaders, leaving the teacher to focus on keeping students on task. I’m really proud of Marcos and his co-author Chris for the fine job they’ve done with this, their debut textbook.
Have a look:
Really looking forward to engaging the students with this text!
Technorati Tags: efl, learning, community, japan, autonomous_learning, education, life-coach, language, teaching
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