One of the things I love about my new teacher trainer position at SMU-TESOL is that there is a system in place. Every teacher uses it and the idea (like it always is with content based instruction) is to help students improve English proficiency as they study course content.
I've had lots of expereince with CBI, but never in a program that puts as much emphasis on getting individual students to take turns and error correction as SMU-TESOL.
I'll try to go into more detail later, but here's a quick example. I introduce the outline for todays's lesson. I ask a student to be the teacher and intorduce today's lesson (I probbaly write an outline on the board with a few key words to help). If the student makes a mistake I correct it (since I've already modeled the language).
It certainly puts more emphasis on accuracy than classes I'm used to teaching which focus largely on fuency. I'm sure people have had different experiences, but when I did task-based CBI classes in the past, I didn't do a lot of specific error correction when students spoke (I did on written work and I tried to prepare worksheets based on errors I overheard in class) because correcting one student in front of the class seemed too harsh (it might raise the affective filter).
Posted by James Trotta at February 8, 2006 3:21 PMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.