Looking Out for English

Brian Tomlinson

doi:10.37237/040403

Abstract

Coursebook activities tend to neglect three vital prerequisites for effective language acquisition i.e. language experience, language discovery and language use. They tend to focus on providing instruction, exemplification and practice in the classroom, and they do very little to encourage learners to achieve language experience, discovery and use outside the classroom. In this article I propose ‘new ideas’ for materials which help learners to gain language experience, language discovery and language use both inside and outside the classroom.

Highlights

E ‘Nearly 100% of innovation – from business to politics – is inspired not by "market analysis" but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.’ (Gay, 2009)
Activities in Looking Out for English I’d like to stress the point again that the activities are for use both inside and outside the classroom and the intention is that the users of the course will spend far more time acquiring English outside the classroom than learning it inside the classroom
Each learner tells the teacher about their favourite enthusiasm and the teacher helps them to work out a list of contents for a booklet on this enthusiasm

Summary

Gentlemen Drop Your Trousers Here for Overnight Service

The learners share their solutions and are given a week to collect bloopers in English from their own environment. Why?’ after discussing their answers, groups of learners use the poem to make generalisations about the form and the functions of ‘In case of’ expressions They are given a week to collect authentic examples of ‘In case of’ expressions before being asked to put together an ‘In case of’ corpus and to make final conclusions about form and functions. They write bizarre ‘In case of’ notices to put around the school For an example of a very successful experiment in encouraging unstructured interaction in a Japanese university, see Barker (2011)

Writing booklets about enthusiasms

Writing a novel

Writing a soap opera

Projects

Findings

Notes on the contributor