Sunday, January 10, 2021

English as a Medium of Instruction

臺中市教育電子報

How to design an EMI cross-curricular course and engage the students through Backward Design and Task-based Learning lesson planning 

With this government-funded cross-curricular collaboration project, both the visual art teacher and I worked together to develop a content-based English class. The goal is to get students using simple English to describe how to make a Taiwanese lantern. Without a doubt, it was such a successful class that students reacted very well to both the lectures and activities. 

1. English as a Medium of Instruction

The 8-week online teacher training course by OPEN paid off. I acquired lots of practical skills and put them into practice with this project. I did not use any L1 to do a direct translation of the technical terms. Instead, I used visual aids, real-life examples, and activities to help them pick up some useful English expressions.   

I made sure all the language I used for instruction and the worksheet was authentic and easy to understand by consulting with a native speaker. Also, I can't help taking pride in my English fluency because most students could understand what I said. I'd especially savor the moment when they were surprised to find that I could speak Mandarin. 

2. Backward Design

As I was preparing for the lesson, questions I'd ask myself were:

• What is the end product going to be? If I want the students to give a simple English presentation about their lanterns, what must they include? 

• What activities can help connect the dots that they pick up the target English expressions and move on to the next?

• What is the assessment for each activity? Can they all be observed and measured? What rubrics are suitable?

3. Task-based Learning

I'd usually turn to TBL for task ideas to decide on what activities to engage students and achieve the desired objectives:

• listing/brainstorming

• ordering/sorting

• matching

• comparing

• problem-solving

• sharing personal experience

For example, I selected matching and ordering tasks for this course because I knew they'd work well for equipping the students with the necessary vocabulary and sentence patterns. They are easy to prepare without any high-tech involved. 

4. Mini Lecture and Interactive Activity

From the OPEN EMI training course again, I learned the combination of the two would be the key to ensure students' attention throughout the whole class. Lectures have to be short and may have any or all of the following:

• show PPT slides, videos on YouTube, or worksheets

• tell them about the target concepts in an organized way 

• practice with drills like filling in the blanks or giving the Chinese equivalents 

Why do we get students to work in groups? There is no need to do so if there are only individual tasks and no interaction among them. 

5. Extension of the Course

The worksheet serves as a script for making English-speaking videos with OBS or presenting in international video conferencing. The project only allowed for one English class, so I didn't get to give the course to its full potential, making a presentation about how to make a Taiwanese lantern in English. However, I managed to invite a gorgeous native speaker and have the students briefly interact with her. 

I learned a lot about designing and teaching an EMI course, with a total of 10 ninth-grade classes experiencing this cross-curricular art class:

• Do have a meaningful context. 

• Do engage students with interactive activities. 

• Do give simple and clear instructions in English. 

• Do use visual aids and gestures to help students pick up new words.  

• Don't just do a direct translation of the Chinese equivalents. 

• Don't use too many technical terms. 

• Don't lecture throughout the class. 

The president of Taiwan announced the 2030 Bilingual Nation Project this June. Many government-funded programs were already on the way, including teacher training, curriculum development, the establishment of bilingual schools, and so on. Unlike the naysayers, I fully support it because I hope people would begin to focus more on the real-life application, instead of rote memorization, of English teaching and learning. Whether it's EMI, CBI, or CLIL, HERE WE GO!