Teaching Demonstrations for Pre-service Teachers: Task-based Learning

南一書局 英語文領域新綱特刊 Vol. 2

Today's teaching demonstration served a dual purpose. One was to help promote Task-based Learning with not only the lesson plan but actual execution in a class. The other was to discuss how to deliver a good 15-minute teaching demonstration to stand out in that extremely fierce competition.

I've been using TBL for teaching textbook English, English camps, and international education ever since I attended the workshop provided by British Council Taiwan back in 2015. Last summer, the third one got me digging deeper into this approach and clarifying some doubts, too. Now, I'm so glad to get invited by one of the major textbook publishers to share my TBL lesson planning with their brand new materials for the upcoming national curriculum guidelines.

Also, by request of Pro. Chao, I promised four of my English classes for the teachers-to-be from National Changhua University of Education to observe and discuss. I believe I'm qualified for the job because I've been doing teaching demos for so many times. On top of that, for 5 years in a row, I've been invited to be part of the panel of judges to decide on the contestants who are qualified to be English teachers in public junior high schools in Taichung.

The students and I met for the very first time today. I had to request a 7th-grade class from my very close colleague for the demo because of the newly developed unit. The True or False activity worked well to set the tone for a relaxing and enjoyable class. The main purpose of the class was to demonstrate how to teach reading comprehension with engaging tasks, including ordering, matching, comparing, and so on. Throughout the whole class, students repeatedly read the text by themselves and then worked collaboratively to finish all the tasks. They also practiced sharing their finished worksheet in English.

During the class discussion, I answered questions regarding some specific details and then proceeded to share more teaching practice in terms of this English teaching approach with my blog posts. Furthermore, I offered them some principles of teaching demonstrations that they're all gonna face in the near future. I did hope that they all had some takeaway today.