Do you teach English as a foreign language?  You're competent in the classroom, your lessons are successful, and maybe you've passed the CELTA or Trinity TEFL, or the DELTA course.  You want to develop your teaching skills, try something new, or perhaps you feel the coursebook is limited and not engaging your students.  Perhaps you teach English for academic purposes, or prepare your students for international exams and you feel that the approaches in your syllabus are too narrow and your students get a little....well.....bored. 

There are two sides to our project.  Firstly, we have designed a course spanning a minimum of 8 hours teaching time, including materials and a teachers' guide.  Secondly, this course is integrated into a professional development plan.  Working together with your director of studies or academic team leader, or using our reflective teaching diary, our plan will help you develop your skills and repertoire as a teacher, independently.  To discover more about professional development, click here. 

The aim of the course itself is to teach writing skills, using music at the centre of each lesson.  Music can be used because the lyrics contain target grammar or vocabulary, the text forms the topic for a discussion or a reading comprehension.  The four lessons in this course contain these features, but seek to explore how different genres in music can be used to teach genre in writing, writing coherently and cohesively and paraphrasing.  Also, the motivational factor cannot be overlooked; people like listening to music, this is hardly news.

The varied music in our course reflects the eclectic nature of the teaching methodologies. Linguist and methodology expert Henry Widdowson discussed how some teachers considered themselves 'eclectic', as if this were an alternative to being theoretical (2003:19).  This course is based on sound teaching principles, with a suggested reading list as part of the professional development plan.

The lessons are designed for B2 level (Common European Framework) or upper-intermediate students. Each lesson is designed to last two hours, minimum; this is flexible, go at your own pace.  There are extension activities included.  The teachers' notes are designed to follow methodologies which fit into the Communicative Language Teaching (C.L.T) approach.  If a more teacher-centred approach is appropriate in your classroom, the materials can be easily adapted to your situation.        

Speak with your director of studies, or the teacher responsible for observing you in the classroom and direct them to our professional development plan.  Ask them to watch you teach all, or part of this course and offer you feedback.  Or use our reflective teaching diary.  Develop your skills by reading and using what you learn from this project. Finally, create your own material, following the framework of one of our lessons.  When you are ready, teach again using your own material, and complete the professional development cycle.

Good Luck

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