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ELT Upgrade Special: An Integrated Skills Approach to Teaching

05/19/2017 00:00:00

 

Throughout the years, many teachers have been trying and even experiencing on new classroom activities that might be the best activities to promote the 4 basic skills of English language: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Teachers also have been dealing with how to integrate those skills to practice the 4 skills and then later introducing them into the classroom activities. On 19 May 2017, English Department of Education in Atma Jaya University held a seminar titled “ELT Upgrade Special: An Integrated Skills Approach to Teaching” with the speaker Mr. Derek Spafford from Macmillan Publishers. The seminar was held to be introduced to classroom activities that integrated and practice the 4 skills. The seminar started from 10 AM to 12 PM, including the talk show session and the Q&A session.

 

 

Throughout the seminar, Mr. Derek demonstrated the classroom activities that he prepared beforehand, and he involved the audiences to join the activities. The activities are all integrated skills, and he integrated all the 4 skills into each activity respectively. For example, The first activity is about stimulating interest in a topic, in which the students have to move to the designated places that has Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree attached on the walls according to the topics given. Then later they have to give their opinion. 

 

Mr. Derek also demonstrated an activity that integrated all the 4 skills, he named it Picture Dictation. First, the audiences have to close their eyes and listen to the story from the speaker. Then, they have to retell the story to their friends. From the story that they have heard, they have to make it into a drawing. Lastly, audiences have to create a story from their drawing. Throughout the seminar, he demonstrated many new activities that we did not know before and he explained the reasoning and how it might improve the classroom activities in term of variety, fun, freshness, and also the students’ knowledge development. We hope through this seminar, students are able to foster their interest in education development, especially about classroom activities and its material development.