|
|
The American Language Teachers’ Training Workshop
Report
March 18 – 19, 2005
The Howard Plaza Hotel
Taipei, Taiwan
2005 Taiwan Post-Workshop Report
A select group of English language teachers from Taiwan’s public and private schools attended the American International Education Foundation’s (AIEF) second annual American Language Teachers’ Training Workshop on March 18th and 19th, 2005. Held at the Howard Plaza Hotel in Taipei, the workshop provided professional development opportunities for the teachers, while introducing the latest trends in teaching English to speakers of other languages from the perspectives of U.S. specialists in the field. Sponsors of the workshop included UCIEP, an independent consortium of university and college-based intensive English programs in the United States; Bank Sinopac; Pearson Education Taiwan Ltd.; Kang Hsuan Educational Publishing; and ETTV Group.
Focusing on English as it is used in American educational and social environments, this year’s workshop followed upon the great success of the workshop that AIEF organized in Taipei in the spring of 2004. Two hundred teachers attended that event, and the feedback received from the participants was overwhelmingly favorable. For this year’s workshop, the scale of the event was intentionally limited to allow for more direct interaction between the presenters from the USA and the local English teachers in Taiwan.
 
Based upon much valuable input from last year’s presenters and participants who responded to AIEF’s post-workshop survey, the need became evident for in-depth workshop sessions that address the particular challenges faced by Taiwan’s English language teachers who instruct students at either the early stages, or more advanced stages, of English language acquisition. Thus, the approach the workshop committee took this year was two-fold: one set of sessions was designed for elementary school English teachers, while a concurrent set of sessions was tailored for English teachers at the middle school and above levels.
For the spring 2005 workshop, AIEF brought together a highly qualified and experienced team of presenters from several prestigious American universities. Presenters for the elementary school teachers’ sessions were Dr. Barbara Hawkins of Teachers College Columbia University and Prof. Kathy Trump of George Mason University. Dr. Alexandra Rowe of the University of South Carolina and Prof. Deanna Wormuth of Georgetown University conducted the sessions for teachers who instruct at the middle school and above levels.
In her workshop sessions for teachers of young learners, Dr. Barbara Hawkins, with support from Prof. Kathy Trump, addressed topics including Best Practices in EFL/ESL Instruction, Total Physical Response (TPR), an introduction to the Language Experience Approach (LEA), Reading and Writing with Elementary School Children, and Grammar Investigations for children and class routines.
Besides offering an overview of American Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in their workshop sessions, Dr. Rowe and Prof. Wormuth led brainstorming exercises on identifying barriers to CLT in Taiwan. As a resource for CLT activity designing, they examined textbooks currently used in English language courses in Taiwan’s secondary schools; a special aspect of their workshop sessions was to explore how such materials can be used in novel ways to stimulate language learning.
Through the collaborative nature of the workshop, the presenters and the participants were able to share personal teaching experiences in order to come to a better understanding of diverse pedagogical approaches within the different cultural contexts of the United States and Taiwan. An important goal of the workshop was to foster ongoing educational
exchanges between American ESL/EFL experts and Taiwan's English language educators.
Previous Page Next
|
