TESOL REFLECTIONS

  This is my response to a task to create an academic skills lesson. Topic:  How to incorporate information from sources  Broad discipline area:  Social sciences Target audience: 1st Year Undergraduate students Lesson aims To introduce and practise: reading with a purpose. summarising, paraphrasing and synthesising. collaborative learning. critical thinking.   1.  Read the text about race assigned to your group and, as a group , write a short definition in the Table 1 : 2. Read the other two texts and check if you agree with the other groups' definitions. 3. With your original group, compare the definitions from the three texts as outlined in Table 2 : 4. Using the three definitions, write a cohesive response to the question: What is race? Do this individually. Remember to cite each author and year of publication. 5. Compare in your group. 6. Then compare your output with this model: Small (2006) writes that race as a concept or theory originated in the 18 th and 19 th

General English language teaching (GELT) is the context in which I have honed, and to a large extent am still honing, my teaching skills. Like English for Academic Purposes (EAP) contexts, GELT comes with its own unique set of challenges and rewards. In this post, I look at some of the differences between these two contexts through the prism of my experience. Therefore, the reader should be aware of the anecdotal nature of my commentary. Alexander, Argent, and Spencer (2018, pp. 11-13) outline differences along three categories, namely context, people, and teaching and learning content. I will now briefly explore each of these and their sub-categories. Context What drives the syllabus? In GELT contexts, the syllabus is level driven. These are typically labelled Beginner, Elementary, Pre-intermediate, etc. Some schools and institutions might also refer to these levels as A1, A2, B1, etc [based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)]. New students ar