Designing an EFL Oral Communication Course for ELT Students

TANER G., Balikci G.

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING, vol.12, no.2, pp.55-77, 2022 (ESCI) identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 12 Issue: 2
  • Publication Date: 2022
  • Journal Name: JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING
  • Journal Indexes: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Communication & Mass Media Index, MLA - Modern Language Association Database
  • Page Numbers: pp.55-77
  • Keywords: Pre-service Teachers of English, EFL Oral Communication, EAP Course, Curriculum Design
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

This paper reports on the process of designing an Oral Communication Skills course offered in the first year of an undergraduate English Language Teaching program at an English-medium university in Turkey. This course was designed for pre-service teachers of English as a foreign language, considering the environmental factors and needs, by employing Nation and Macalister's (2010) model of curriculum design. Course instructors, pre-service teachers and recent graduates participated in the study. The course design was guided by the results of environment and needs analyses and related literature. Taking students' interests into consideration in topic selection, researchers adopted the theme-based approach with an aim to address communicative, interactional, and intercultural competence by engaging all students in meaningful interaction across various speech events. This study stands as an example of how diverging constraints can be accommodated in a theme-based approach to course design, responding to the needs of the learners. (c) Association of Applied Linguistics. All rights reserved