ELT in Brazil

Today’s lesson is a variant of the lesson from Listing and ranking departments in the company – TBL Lesson #4. If you haven’t seen this post I recommend you do so you know what I’m talking about!

This is another TBL lesson for my cohort of Business English students. Today I used a variant of the activity where students have to name the departments in their company and rank them in terms of perceived importance. Mind you, I haven’t taught this lesson yet, but the plan is to have it next week.

Today I decided to scaffold a little by changing the context from their company to our country. I elicited from students ten ministries and wrote them on the board. You can see their contributions below.

These students work in lobbying so getting in touch with the ministries is their bread and butter. With the ministries on the board, we clarified what they were responsible for. I googled the ones I was not familiar with but students had a thorough understanding of the ministries, all I did was help with the language. In my experience, this is often the case. The students are experts in their fields, they know stuff. They have the content. We, teachers, have language knowledge and know how to facilitate their learning of it.

After that, I asked students to rank the ministries in terms of importance and when they were done they discussed to reach a consensus on their order.

I gave students feedback based on the notes below, we worked on some emergent language and that was the end of the lesson.

In the next class, students will do the same activity, not according to their opinions, but from their company’s perspective. This task is a little more challenging because they have to ‘think’ like their company instead of themselves and justify their choices. The logical sequence to this is to do the task as described in the last post where students name and rank the importance of the departments in their company.

I think a key takeaway from this lesson is the fact that I did not have to teach students the content of the lesson. I did not have to be an expert in Brazilian ministries or lobbying to teach this lesson.

Were I to teach this class from a more teacher-centered, PPP perspective, I would have to learn all the vocabulary beforehand to present it to students. Notice how wasteful of everybody’s time that would be. My students already know what the ministries are responsible for and what they do, I don’t have to know that – they will teach me.

Conversely, because I brought to class a student-centered, meaning-focused, relevant task my students could teach me about the ministries while I helped them talk about these ministries better. Everybody wins.