How to teach English ---September 27, 2009

I have attended a 2-day seminar on how to teach English to Japanese children in Japan.  The seminar was given by a prestigious Japanese woman in English and all students discussed in English, too.  It was a lot of fun and challenging. 
First of all the seminar fee was a little expensive for me.  Secondly the text book we used was also written in English, academic English.  That is normal since the book is written mainly for TESOL students.  Many graduate schools use this book as their text book.  It covers up-to-date methods or theory.  Current trend is “Task Based Teaching”.  Teachers have to plan a good task for learners to work on so that their English are used to complete the task and eventually they learn the language.  Easy to say and hard to do.  We experienced some of those in the seminar.  Learners are not just listening but also working to fulfill the task that the teacher assigned.  Some tasks are done as pair work and some are done as group. 
I found some difficulties because all group members were not at the same understanding.  Some has studied the materials before a lot but some hasn’t.  Some has good speaking English but some doesn’t.  Some has a long teaching experiences and others none.  Some teaches in a big class and some teaches to only a few at the same time.  Even though, we shared our opinions and came up with some ideas.  For most of us, this Task-Based-Teaching is a new concept to work on.  It was not easy to get our mind away from what we used to know.  What I learned is that at first, we have to come up with an idea of a task that students have to complete.  And then think of the language they need to reinforce or learn. 
For me this Task Based Teaching theory is something new and I would like to use it in my daily teaching.  Students get excited about completing the task using the language they know.  And hopefully they should pick up other useful expressions as they try to complete the task.
Academic atmosphere was great.  Warm fun atmosphere was great.  Working of the task was exciting and challenging.  I got some confidence and some failure feelings at the same time.  I would like to read the text book again and again so that I can fully understand what it said.  And eventually I would like to implement the method in my teaching.