Luento
Lauantaina 21.11.2009 klo 14.30-15.15
Dave Willis - Biodata
Dave Willis has worked as a teacher and teacher trainer in Ghana, Cyprus, Iran and Singapore, as well as the UK. He was a British Council Officer for almost twenty years, before moving to the Centre for English Language Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1990 where he worked mainly on MA TEFL/TESOL programmes.
He has published widely on discourse analysis, task-based methodology and pedagogic language description, and is twice winner of the Duke of Edinburgh Prize.
He wrote The Collins Cobuild English Course with Jane Willis, and co-edited with her Challenge and Change in Language Teaching . (Heinemann 1996). He is author of The Lexical Syllabus (Collins Cobuild 1990) and co-author (with Ramesh Krishnamurthy) of The Cobuild Students' Grammar and with John Wright of The Cobuild Basic Grammar.
His latest books are Rules, Patterns and Words: Grammar and Lexis in English Language Teaching (CUP 2003), and Doing Task-based Teaching (OUP 2006), co-authored with Jane Willis.
He is now happily retired in the English Lake District, but maintains his interest in ELT through writing, conference attendance, and occasional consultancies.
Keynote abstract:
Task-based Learning and the Language Classroom
Many aspects of language are too complex to teach. Some grammatical systems defy explanation. How, for example, do we choose between the past simple and the past perfect tense? How do we differentiate between countable and non-countable nouns? As teachers we are aware of this complexity, but we are also aware that, given the right kind of input and encouragement our learners do succeed in mastering even these highly complex systems.
This raises the question 'How can learners acquire a grammar which is too complex to explain?' Second language acquisition does not provide an answer to this question, but it does tell us a lot about how we do not learn the grammar. We do not learn it systematically, mastering items step by step until we have a workable command of the language.
Learning a language must be a highly creative process in which learners constantly review and revise their language system, prompted by exposure to language and their own attempts to produce language. The question we need to ask as teachers is 'How can we best prompt and assist this process?'
I would suggest the following:
- as much exposure as possible to language in use
- as many opportunities as possible for learners to use language
- incentives for learners to think critically about the language they are exposed to and the language they use
- guidelines to encourage learners to discover language for themselves
I will show how these principles are applied in a task-based approach to teaching.
