國中英語課程轉化研習

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How to fulfill the Curricular Guidelines and its Indicators of Stage Competence has been highly emphasized by the MOE for a few years. To make sure quality of our English education, the idea is to help teachers to give more consideration and try to get students achieve the given indicators. Thus, a total of eighty teachers signed up for the workshop held by Guangde Junior High school (光德國中) this afternoon, and Ming-Der Girls’ Senior High School (明德女中) is just an ideal venue for conferences like this.

According to the basic assumptions and goals of the CG, we can summarize the whole CG with only one word, “communication”. From the compilation of textbooks to suggested teaching methods, we English teachers’ most important job is to cultivate students’ awareness of application of the language and equip them with basic communicative skills. In other words, after three years of learning, our students are supposed to learn not only about the knowledge of the language, like vocabulary and grammar rules, but also about how to DO with what they have learned in school, like communicating with others in English or introducing the beauty of Taiwan in simple English.

Computer-Assisted Language Learning, or CALL, is also one of the hottest topics for workshops for many years, so the teachers were provided many useful links this afternoon to help them match the indicators with their teaching. For example, the MOE has cooperated with the British Council and developed a very useful list that directly links each indicator to an online resource, including lesson plans, worksheets, games and so on. What’s more, a couple of search engines were also recommended because they can help teachers locate what they really want more easily, such as Turdy, iSEEK, SweetSearch and Delicious.com. Other than those useful online resources, some innovative teaching strategies were also shared and demonstrated.

The Basic Competence Test is going to be abolished in no time, so teachers are now facing even more difficult challenges because keeping students’ grades up is not the one and only concern in our teaching anymore. Each one of us is going to be forced to make a change in our teaching to motivate our students when they don’t have to spend most of their time on the memorization of vocabulary and grammar rules. We don’t want to just teach for one year and repeat that for the rest of our career span. In contrast, we should keep on learning and studying to prepare ourselves for the upcoming education overhaul, which seems quite uncertain and obscure, for instance, by attending well-prepared workshops.