EUROCALL 2018

This workshop aimed at giving the participants a taste of using authentic activities in foreign or second language learning environments from both the teacher and a language learner perspectives. From a learner perspective, participants were given a holiday task to complete. Therefore, in order to complete the task, participants had to organise a cost effective holiday using a variety of mobile apps (see Appendix 6) and present it. (Please note that only three hours were allocated for this workshop and thus it was not possible to complete it as it would be done in real educational settings. Therefore, in class students can be guided to focus on local food -and their ingredients, museums, tourist attractions, events and other important things that can be done or visited and produce flyers, leaflets, posters, webpages, blogs or alike. All these will provide opportunities for learners to use the target language in context for a purpose). From the teacher’s perspective, participants focused on how each of the characteristics of authentic learning activities in EFL is used while designing the task and how each characteristic contributed to making the task authentic and communicative, and facilitated learning.

Handouts used at this workshop:

• Appendix 1: 3 tasks to compare

• Appendix 2: Characteristics of authentic activities

• Appendix 3: An example authentic activity

• Appendix 4: The major task (organising a holiday)

• Appendix 5: Grid

• Appendix 6: Some apps to complete the activity

• Appendix 7: Feedback form

Feedback taken from participants:

Some of the key take aways from this workshop was pointed out as:

• Guiding concepts surrounding the creation of T.B. activities

• The principles --> very useful to take into consideration

• Get me to start thinking about designing authentic activities for my class

• Being aware of pros and cons of auth. activities, how you can adopt them for different groups and situations + assessment tips

• Helpful reflection + take aways also for work life

• Tools to assess activities both from participants’ & teachers’ perspectives

• Apply authentic activities to my courses / Encourage communication – tasks (work in pairs)

• The theoretical background of designing tasks

Some suggestions given for further development:

• Maybe a short review of lit. on authenticity or clarifying authenticity vs. authentic learning at the beginning

• Present the principles after the Appendix 1 activity

• The link to digital language learning

• Had to adopt to digital, self-directed, asynchronous teaching

• Maybe share more real-live challenges students/teachers face with the example lessons/activities

Some moments to remember: