Dr Rose Senior: Communicative language teaching takes the world by storm
Tuesday 12 August 2008 at 7:30pm for 8pm
Library Meeting Room
Ground Floor
Reid Library Building
The University of Western Australia
Dr Rose Senior: Communicative language teaching takes the world by storm
We are all aware of the meteoric rise of English as the language of global communication. This has led to the burgeoning of institutions in Australia offering intensive English language courses for overseas students – and to a growing number of teaching positions available to graduates who have completed short courses in the practice of English language teaching.
In this talk Rose will describe what communicative language teaching is by contrasting it to the ways in which most of us were taught foreign languages at school. After describing the experience of learning to teach English from a trainee perspective, Rose will identify some of the benefits and pitfalls of communicative language teaching. She will focus in particular on the shock sometimes experienced by adult language learners from traditional educational backgrounds who find themselves expected to behave spontaneous ways in lively, noisy, laughter-filled communicative classrooms.
About the Speaker
Rose is a senior honorary research fellow in the Graduate School of Education at UWA. She has been a language teacher all of her working life, spending the last 15 years researching what goes on inside language classrooms where adult students from a range of ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds find themselves studying together in the same class. Rose holds an award-winning PhD from Edith Cowan University and is the author of ‘The Experience of Language Teaching’ (Cambridge University Press), winner of the 2006 Ben Warren International House Prize.
Members: Free
Non-members: $5.00 donation
