Creating a Learner-centered Teacher Education Program

Step 1 is to write the goals and objectives of the lesson on the board and then explain them clearly at the beginning of each lesson. Communicative tasks and activities are a novelty to our students, and they want to know the reasoning behind them. Also, these new communicative activities with negotiating, role-playing, and transferring information can be confusing. Therefore, it is necessary to clue the students into this teaching approach by explicitly stating the purposes underlying the new tasks and activities in the daily lesson plan.

Second, we rotate from controlled to guided to free, and thereby achieve balanced activities (Crookes and Chaudron 1991). Communicative tasks and activities take a variety of forms, and this variety helps students with mixed speaking and listening abilities to get involved.

Controlled activities are highly structured and get nonparticipatory, low-level students involved in speaking and listening. For example:

Students volunteer answers to display questions from the teacher.

Students fill out a chart from the book on a topic being presented by the teacher.

Students look at an illustration from the book and discuss what they see.

Guided activities, on the other hand, appeal to students at an intermediate level of speaking proficiency. For example:

Students ask one another questions and answer them in turn (an information exchange).

Students write an original dialogue or narrative and then role-play it for the class.

Pairs present their dialogue or narrative to another pair to summarize (an information transfer).

Free activities appeal to students who are highly communicative. For example:

Students freely discuss a topic provided by the teacher.

Students report individually to the class on a subject they know a lot about.

Students work together to come up with a solution to a problem posed by the teacher.

Later in the academic term, a third step is to evaluate the usefulness of pedagogical tasks by eliciting student feedback on these activities with a questionnaire. Nunan (1995) emphasizes that teachers should discover their students? feelings about the learning process. The list of balanced classroom activities, from controlled to guided to free, was rated according to the following scale:

Directions: For your speaking and listening class, rate the following activities according to the scale given below.

5. I always like this activity

4. I usually like this activity

3. I sometimes like this activity

2. I seldom like this activity

1. I never like this activity

We discovered with the questionnaire how useful communicative activities were for learning. Different students liked different activities more than others; but none of the activities were unanimously disliked. The questionnaire results were shared with the students in order to limit negative reactions to activities that didn抰 appeal to individual student抯 learning styles. The questionnaire results revealed that other students found the activities appealing. Moreover, from the results of the questionnaire, students became aware that all activity types are effective and by engaging in all of them, their language learning opportunities will improve.

Finally, we got students involved in lesson content. Studies show that student-initiated interaction results in more comprehensible input than teacher initiated-interaction. Entire lesson plans can be built on student-initiated topics in which most students take an interest. Student-initiated topics can be encouraged by the teacher by asking referential questions instead of display questions, that is, questions to which the speaker does not already know the answer and which have a variety of possible answers (Crookes and Chaudron 1991). An open-ended referential question could invite students?viewpoints on any topic. For example, our students enjoyed discussing journalism in Turkey, gun control, and the environmental impact of tourism.

Grammar course

While speaking and listening courses focused on communicative competence for fluency of expression, the grammar course focused on explicit presentation of grammar rules for accuracy of expression. The grammar course is a popular course with our students because it conforms to their previous experiences with learning the language code through a teacher-fronted method. However, in addition to explicit rule presentation, we helped students understand implicit rules, using communicative activities again. We incorporated interactive and meaningful tasks and activities to highlight relevant grammatical explanations.

Communicative language teaching relates forms to meaning (Littlewood 1981). In order for students to grasp grammatical features of the target language, we teach the language forms first by rules, then in structured activities. Structured activities begin with a teacher prompt, and students?replies are limited and inauthentic. However, from the structured activity, we move on to communicative functions which are naturally more authentic. Communicative functions teach students how to use the target language to perform specific tasks such as to give advice, make suggestions, describe, request, compare, and so on. While we are aware that real communication is still limited in this procedure, students are made aware to associate these practices and put their explicit knowledge to use in other course work.

《Creating a Learner-centered Teacher Education Program》