FLEPS Workshop Fest

This workshop took place in June 2018 at English Preparatory School, Eastern Mediterranean University. It 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:

• Features of authentic tasks

• How I can be sure that an activity is purely authentic

• Authentic materials’ use in our context

• How to do an authentic task using technology from the learners’ perspective

• Designing authentic tasks which are really “authentic”

Some suggestions for further development:

• To design more authentic tasks and more reflections from the colleagues experiences. Need more time on this workshop was too fast

• I need more time to complete the given tasks

• It would have been less-loaded due to time constraints

• If it was a little longer, it would have been more beneficial

Some moments to remember: