Plenary Talk (5:00 – 5:50 pm Sa-Hap Room 108)
Becoming a Global Teacher: 10 Steps to an International Classroom
What does it mean to be a global teacher? How can we teach English in a way that promotes global awareness, international understanding and social responsibility?
Teaching about global issues, world cultures and international themes is part of “global education” – an exciting new field which brings an international perspective to the classroom and to the school curriculum. In contrast to much traditional language teaching, which focuses narrowly on grammar, translation or "conversation" and avoids real-world issues as "too controversial", global education aims at enabling students to effectively acquire and use a foreign language while empowering them with the knowledge, skills and commitment required for the solution of global problems.
What are the benefits of teaching EFL from a global education perspective? These include relevance, excitement and student motivation. The countries, themes and issues taught each morning in an ‘English for world citizenship’ class appear each night on the TV news - a daily lesson in educational relevance. The knowledge that students gain about world countries, topics and issues, and the ability to discuss these in English, translates into a special feeling of international cosmopolitanism. All this leads to a degree of self-confidence, excitement and interest that is hard to compare to more traditional classes.
This talk will outline 10 key steps that language instructors can take to add an international dimension to their classrooms. These steps range from re-defining our field, re-thinking our aims and re-designing our classroom atmosphere to experimenting with global content, organizing extra-curricular activities and investing in professional development. The talk mention initiatives taken by English teachers worldwide to promote the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for living responsibly in our multicultural, interdependent world. The presenter will conclude by arguing that the EFL profession needs internationally-minded language teachers who care about their students, who care about our world and who care about teaching for a better future.
Workshop (11:45 – 12:25 Woodang Room 101)
Teaching Global Issues in the Language Classroom
Pick up a newspaper, turn on the TV and you are immediately confronted with “global issues” - world problems such as global warming, ethnic conflict, street children and AIDS.
For some people, these are hard-to-understand issues in far-away places that have nothing to do with our daily lives. For others, these are depressing topics best avoided which, if addressed, lead only to apathy or despair. For internationally-minded language teachers, however, global issues provide an exciting opportunity to help students practice foreign language skills as they develop international awareness, critical thinking, an understanding of world affairs and a sense of responsible world citizenship.
This session will discuss pedagogical approaches to the teaching of world problems in the language classroom and will introduce a variety of EFL activities designed around the topic of global issues. The activities to be demonstrated have been designed and tested in Japan with college EFL students, and are based on teaching approaches from such fields as global education, peace education, human rights education and environmental education.
In the session, participants will experience the activities, analyze their pedagogical aims and design, then discuss how these could be adapted to their own teaching. The session will finish with a question and answer session where participants can share their own concerns and experiences of teaching about world problems and global issues. Participants will receive handouts, a bibliography and a list of resources.