ELT Methods and Practices

Aims

The overall aim of this course is to provide students with a critical awareness of ELT practices and to develop their theoretical and practical knowledge related to the teaching and learning of languages and particularly English as a foreign language. An equally important general aim of the course, which is offered within the framework of the pre-service EFL Teacher Training Programme that our Faculty offers to undergraduate students, is to prepare students as future teachers of English. To this end, the course has the following goals:

• To provide a basic understanding of recent developments in ELT approaches, methods and techniques and their underlying principles, particularly in view of the position of English today as an international language.
• To raise awareness of how developments and research in theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, educational linguistics and discourse analysis have informed language teaching/learning approaches, classroom practices, assessment and materials design.
• To become familiar with critical trends in the mainstream ELT field and begin thinking of alternative ways of teaching languages in a European setting which aspires to promote plurilingual citizenry.
• To introduce students to ways in which language teaching/learning/assessment approaches and methods can be employed in ELT programmes (i.e., in the classroom, in self-directed learning, in EFL teaching materials).
• To build an understanding of the perception and production skills that are involved when dealing with oral and written texts so as to realize the implications for the development of these skills in an ELT programme.
• To become familiar with the underlying principles of techniques for the teaching/testing of the lexicogrammatical elements of language.
• To show students how to apply these techniques in various teaching/learning situations.
• To provide opportunities to students for controlled practice teaching.
• To promote positive and open attitudes to teaching and assessment and to sensitise students to factors affecting the teaching and learning environment.

Objectives

By the end of the course the students are expected to demonstrate:

• An understanding of the principles of lesson planning and an ability to design lesson plans.
• An understanding of classroom management skills such as giving instructions, grouping students purposefully, monitoring on-going classwork etc.
• An awareness of the use and purpose of simple resources in teaching (pictures, use of board, OHP, flash cards etc.).
• An awareness of the nature of perception and production skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing, their similarities/differences and main characteristics) and the basic principles underlying the development of these skills.
• An understanding of different ways of dealing with elements of language (at the level of lexis, sentence and text) in different teaching situations.
• An understanding of how to use the mother-tongue effectively in teaching and learning situations and how to develop mediation skills.
• An awareness of the types and functions of assessment and ability to design language tests appropriate to a particular group of students.

Bessie Dendrinos

Bessie Dendrinos completed her undergraduate studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece, her postgraduate studies in the USA, at Claremont Graduate School and University Centre and at UCLA, and her postdoctoral studies in the U.K. (at the University of Cambridge). Mainly concerned with the discursive practices of TEFL and European educational language planning, she has carried out research in Greece and other European member states, particularly in England, Portugal and Spain. Her areas of expertise are language politics in the European Union and foreign language pedagogy, curriculum and materials development, as well as language testing and assessment. She has worked in the field of applied linguistics for language teaching and learning and, since the early 90s, she has been working in educational linguistics, but also in critical discourse analysis of language policy documents and foreign language teaching materials. Her keen interest in socially accountable applied linguistics has also led her to investigate linguistically construed gender ideology, the linguistic representation of poverty and the bureaucratic discourse in Greek public documents. Since 2002, she has devoted much of her time to developing a foreign language examination suite for six languages on the 6-level scale of the Council of Europe. The exams prepared by expert teams from the University of Athens and the University of Thessaloniki are conducted by the Ministry of Education, which issues the certificates of language proficiency. In 2004 she founded the Research Centre for Language Teaching, Testing and Assessment, which she has been directing ever since, and which is presently fully equipped and staffed. Since 2010, she has been very involved with two multidimensional projects, funded by the European Union and the Greek state, which are concerned with language teaching and assessment. She is also involved with the work of the DG EAC of the European Commission to promote multilingualism in Europe. 

This a degree requirement course and therefore compulsory for all students, like the course of Applied Linguistics to Foreign Language Teaching and Learning, which is its prerequisite.

Hedge, T. (2000). Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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