Publication details
ESP, CLIL or soft-skill based syllabus?
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The paper focusses on reasons why a team of teachers at MU LC decided to abandon the traditional topic based syllabus in order to focus on soft skills and life skills. Course design at universities language centres requires crossing the border between pedagogy and andragogy. We connect LSP education with real life professional needs in order to give students reasons they should learn what the course and the teachers offer. Needs analyses carried out among faculty graduates provided us with a list of soft skills real life practitioners need to master in order to function in the target foreign language successfully. The signal that, besides discussing specialized topics and specific or technical vocabulary, our graduates value especially their soft skills and life skills was so strong and explicit that we decided to change our approach and start creating syllabi from a different perspective. We decided to move from topics as our starting point to life skills and from atomized language skills practice to task chaining. This practice leads to useful soft skills development where topics serve the purpose of soft-skill practice fillers and vocabulary building is a natural by-product of the activities. The paper offers examples of chained lesson plans based on experiential learning. Student feedback illustrates how the variety of skills, teaching methods, types of learning and interaction is perceived and appreciated by students. It also argues that project based experiential courses provide space for students with a variety of language skills and that mixed ability classes cease to be a problematic issue. |