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...

     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...

     A  language classroom can be an incredibly boring place to spend a vacation. Throughout the semester students have dutifully attended a plethora of English lessons only to be faced with extra “fun, exciting and interesting” English classes during the vacation months. The stresses and strains our students face on a day-to-day basis are immense, as educators, it is not only our job to instil language into our students, but also to encourage, engage, and empathise with our students. We need to take into account the feelings of our students. What can we do to relieve the pressures our students face? How can we engage our students? How can we make our classes more enjoyable without sacrificing our goals? Most importantly, how can we get students to take control of their own learning? With these questions moving around in my mind I set out to create a vacation programme that would ignite the passions of our students.      My first decision was to move a...