Module One Group Project One
A reverse web quest on alternative approaches and methods
(reverse in that you find the links, we don’t provide them)
WHAT YOU DO
Each group will find out about one method or approach.
You will be allocated to a group and an approach. Some groups (group 7A and 7B and 8A and 8B)
work fully on line and don’t design a demonstration version.
Groups 1 – 6 (As and Bs) you gather the information to put here in the Moodle in the wiki, but you
are also working as back up to the person in Istanbul who will do the demo. There will be an A and
a B version each time, so the person delivering the demo can choose to use (or even combine)
what is best from the two groups.
The different areas are …
1. TPR - Total physical response
2. The silent way
3. Suggestopedia
4. CLL – Community language learning
5. Audiolingual method
6. Direct method
7. Dogme
8. CLIL – Content and language integrated learning
You should find out about
• who is / was behind it
• what the theory of learning is / the theory of language (or why they think it will be effective)
• the roles of the teacher, the learner and L1
• characteristic materials, classroom techniques and procedures
If there is a person live in Istanbul to do it and you are in groups 1-6, you should come up with
a very short demo sequence of about 5 minutes. NOT talking about it, but doing the method or
some bit of it. You will use the other people in the room as students and teach them some
language in your method. This works best if you teach them some language they don’t know –
French ? Greek ? but if you can’t find an alternate language then English or Turkish will do (it is
only 5 minutes – it can be just a couple of words and phrases). The idea is that they should get a
feel of what it is like to be in that style of class. Afterwards they will have a couple of minutes to ask
questions about why things are done in that way (or you could elicit this information). Each group
will only have 15 minutes for setting up the space physically, doing the demo and running the post
demo feedback / exploration of the method. You will be held ruthlessly to this timing.
All groups (1-8 As and Bs) should make an information page (500 – 1000 words) to put in the
alternative approaches wiki (links on the projects page or on topic one if you scroll down).
This is a summary of your approach for other CPs to use in their studies / revision. You should use
the four headings from the previous section, keep it short, cite your sources (which books and
articles did you use) and put in links you found to be particularly useful.
HOW YOU DO IT - communications
Look on the project page (or scroll down to topic one) for the project groups link.
Find your name and note the names of the others in your group.
You can find the mail addresses of anyone else on the course by going to the Moodle, course
page, top right corner (unless you have docked it) and clicking on people - PARTICIPANTS – scroll
down the list and notice that there are page numbers at the bottom to see more people.
Collect mails of the other people in your group and copy them into your usual mail (Moodle has
internal mail, but I don’t recommend it as it gets blocked by spam filters more often and you can’t
reply to it directly).
Remember that some people may be teaching a heavy load in any given week and may not be
able to deal with this till the weekend.
Send a mail saying what you think you will do and suggesting what you think other people could
do.
You could cut the work up into bits (you do X and I’ll do Y and Z) or you could all try and do all of it
then agree to look at it together say Sunday evening.
Be flexible. Be polite. If you don’t have time till the weekend, just tell your group that so they know
you got the mail.
If you know you can’t do projects ever as you just don’t have the time, tell your group that nicely
and then write to me to tell me not to put your name in groups again.
If you don’t get answers from group mates, just start doing some work – you will learn something
and when they get in touch you will have more idea about the project and can help them organise
better.
If you do a project on your own because nobody answers, think how well you will be able to do a
task that comes up about this subject in the exam and just feel pleased that you did it.
Once you are talking as a group in mail (don’t forget to use reply all for this) you can organise
yourselves that way or you can try and set up a skype or Zoom meeting to talk things through. You
only have a week though, so finding times that work for everyone can be difficult for this. Mail is
easier. You can create group documents in Google Docs or something similar while you are
working on things. You should make some quick decisions about who is best at technology and
can set contacts up for others, who likes to organize and will chase the rest of you up or allocate
work ?
HOW YOU DO IT – resources
You will need to use the web to search for information, you can also use books
• Larsen-Freeman, D. 1986 Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching OUP
• Richards, J. & Rogers, T. 2001 (2 nd ed) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching
CUP
are particularly useful for this.
The methodology reading page in the Moodle has some starter links.
YouTube often helps with this project.
WHY YOU ARE DOING IT
Exam paper two task two requires you to identify, describe and evaluate the approaches,
methodologies and techniques underlying materials and relate this to theories of second language
acquisition and to different learners and contexts. This will also be dealt with in sessions about
lesson shape, the lexical approach, and SLA. We can’t fit it all into input sessions, you need to do
some of it yourselves.
It would be a good idea to sort out what you understand by APPROACH, METHOD, TECHNIQUE
and PROCEDURE while you are doing it.
HOW YOU GET FEEDBACK ON IT
This work is not marked by tutors (though we do read what you have done sometimes).
But .. for most projects and most groups there will be an A group and a B group (so this week there
will be an A group and a B group for Dogme for example).
When you have published your project, go and look at the other group that were doing the same
focus – find one thing you like about their project and one thing you think they could have done to
make it better. Tell them (in a mail or in the forums). Later when you are revising and you use other
people’s projects to do so, tell them what you found useful and what you would have liked to know
that isn’t there. These are wikis, so if you find out something you think is important you can even
add it to their project later (and put in a note saying you added it and why).