e-journal 5

Uhh! The last three weeks and the last e-journal! Well on the first week Kosar and Kimia taught the rest of their chapter, Content-Based Instruction. Then the next chapter was taught by Mohadese and Sepideh, Task-Based Language teaching. The second week's presentation was about the political dimension of language teaching and the Participatory Approach which was presented perfectly by Masoomeh and Hero. Regarding the third week, Unfortunately, I couldn’t be present for the last presentation because I had a ticket and wanted to come back home. As far as I know, the last chapter was taught by Fahimeh and Kimia and it was about three different methods; learning Strategy Training, Cooperative Learning and Multiple Intelligences. Here, I'm going to explain briefly what I've learnt on these sessions.

Content-Based Instruction is a method in which a subject-mattered content and language are taught simultaneously. There could be one instructor for both content and language or two instructors in order to teach them separately. The next method, Task-Based language teaching, is a way of teaching language through tasks. It's like the students learn the language by completing different kinds of tasks given by the teacher. Now, let's move on to the next presentation. The political dimension of language teaching is mainly talking about the policies behind the process of teaching and learning. Since language isn't neutral, a teacher must be aware of the policies and don't just think about improving her knowledge of linguistics. In fact, policy plays a big role in making and changing students' minds. Then there was this method, Participatory approach, which is one response to policies of language teaching. The teacher in this method pays a lot of attention to students' interests in choosing the content and also tries to provide the learners with real-life situations. To sum it up, the three methods mentioned above, CBI, TBLT and Participatory Approach are all the strong versions of the Communicative Approach. It means that they focus on using the language in order to learn it.

These three methods seemed all useful to me as there were a lot of interactions between the teacher and students and students with each other. The presenters did a great job and taught them comprehensively. At the end, I want to say that this course was one of the most useful courses I've ever had in this university. I learnt many things about teaching methods and techniques which I'm going to apply in my own classes in the future. Hope to have more of such courses!