EAPEducation

    We all know how fantastic MOOCs are and how they are almost as addictive as Kopparberg pear cider. Take a course in Animal Psychology or some outlandish course you wouldn't have touched with a barge pole when you were at uni and try and tell me that MOOCs aren't the greatest thing to hit the internet since that jumping dinosaur game on the google page.      But why am I talking about MOOCs now? Well, the last class I did was about lifelong learning. I created a lesson based on that topic because I was getting a bit frustrated with my students moaning (is moaning the right word? ehm yeah, I think so) about how they are not getting what they expected from their university experience. Some of the complaints were: The low English level of the Korean professors*. Korean professors not being interested in the class, lack of passion.  Classes are a waste of time as students can't understand the professor. Korean professors speaking in Korean for Korean cl...

     Our last lesson was the  cheating  lesson then we had a break for a couple of weeks due to the midterm exams. During the  transport  lesson one of the students mentioned how he 'needed' a car, in fact, he 'needed' two cars, maybe even three. This information surprised another student from a different country. The exchange between the two students got me thinking about necessities and what our students value, and do different cultures value the same things?  The class was for two hours with international students studying a variety of different majors at a Korean university. All the students have an IELTS score of 5.5 or above. I will continue to use Bloom's   as a guide for my activities. I have 50 students spread over three classes. For this lesson on necessities, I modified, or some would more accurately say, stole ideas from a  National Geographic textbook . The class started with some warm-up questions.  Class 101. The ques...

     I produced these after doing a cracking Coursera  course from the  Relay Graduate School of Education. Everything is lifted from their  website , and I love the idea of teaching character strengths alongside traditional subjects. I highly recommend the MOOC.

     The  transport   lesson worked well. One of the biggest concerns I sensed with the class was that the topic was irrelevant to some students. This is always a problem; how do we know which topics will benefit the students? Of course, we can't. The best we can do is to continue to ask students for advice and feedback about the class. Often we gain much-needed insight into what our students are interested in by reading their comments and listening to them during regular meetings (see my 7 education principles post ).      In the next class, we focused on cheating. I feel this is a very interesting topic for our students, they will have all experienced cheating at some point in their lives, but it seems to be a topic that isn't covered in the textbooks I have used. I also hoped it might allow the students to confront their inner cheats and reflect on their behaviour in education, and of course, that is what they did! I heard some interesting stor...

My experience teaching 21st-century skills to a group of international students at a university in South Korea continues. The  spaghetti and marshmallow lesson  was a success. Feedback from students was very encouraging (you can see some of the comments in the pictures below) .  Having focused on collaboration and cooperation in the previous class, we moved on to critical thinking. The focus of many of our classes will be on critical thinking skills, and I will use Blooms' Taxonomy   to guide me in the activities I create and the projects I will ask the students to complete. I have attached the worksheet I used for this class (entitled transport, the cheating section will be next week's class), and it might be helpful to have it available whilst I go through the activities and the students' responses. Week One As a warm-up activity, I showed the students this  picture  by  Karl Jilg  and asked the students to work in pairs and think about the pict...

    All students at my university must take four semesters of English classes. For the native Korean students, this consists typically of conversation classes. The textbooks used are full of the standard fare of topics (greetings, family, daily routines, etc.), which have been taught to Korean students since the 3rd grade of elementary school. In the last couple of years, we have seen an influx of international students at the university, and just like the Korean students, they have to take four semesters of English classes. These international students have a minimum CEFR level of B2, their subject classes are delivered in English, and many come from English-speaking countries. It was decided that a new English course was needed for these international students and that it was my job to design the course, happy days.      From consultations with students and other professors, we decided to embark on a more general education course that would involve task-b...

     This is a short review of the Teaching English for Academic Purposes course at the   University of Leicester . The course is a PGcert and takes nine months to complete. As somebody who is always interested in professional development and really just like to learn (I’m a bit of a geek, addicted to MOOCs and Khan Academy), I thought it would be a perfect way to develop new skills and explore an area of English language teaching I am not familiar with. I would like to give you a brief rundown of the modules and what to expect in regards of activities. The course is a one year, part-time course aimed at existing or potential teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). I found the course very difficult but extremely useful. The EAP classroom is very different from the conversation English classroom I am used to, if you don’t have any experience of EAP and you want to take this course you might want to familiarise yourself with the  BALEAP framework . T...