This course is meant to be a forum for discussion of issues in Communicative Language Teaching, as well as a workshop where students will be able to evaluate and develop materials and activities for the first semester of language instruction.
Open to all languages, 1 credit. Instruction and working hours are 15 in total (50 minutes each session). Students meet once a week for 14 weeks. Each TA will observe one other TA for 40 minutes and then discuss for 10 minutes aspects of his/her teaching with the TA they have observed. This observation and critique will count toward the 15th hour of work and instruction.
This course is required of all new Teaching Associates in Italian and open to experienced Teaching Associates from any language. Please note that the course will be taught in Italian. Experienced TAs will have the opportunity to develop their professional skills by applying to teach one class as invited speakers (max. 2 guest speakers for the whole course).
Readings:
• Brandl, Klaus. Communicative Language Teaching in Action. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008.
• Articles from selected books and other material available through Learn@UW and/or distributed in class.
During our course, we will examine and/or develop the following language course materials:
• Lesson planning
• Introducing grammar
• Introducing vocabulary
• Developing listening, reading, writing and oral communication skills
• Instructional sequencing, task design and time management in the classroom
At the end of this course the TAs will:
• be familiar with teaching approaches and methods from a historical perspective
• learn about and design communicative activities
• reflect on sequencing of class activities
• be able to organize and design lesson plans
Requirements: Students will be responsible for readings, discussion, development of some lesson plans and assessments. They will explain the rationale underlying their lesson plans and assessments during brief comment sessions during class. They will visit one class taught be one of their peers and give feedback to their colleague.