In order to be an English-speaking tour guide for these foreign friends to know more about Taiwan. We design a set of English learning tasks to help Taiwanese become an English-speaking tour guide.
First of all, the target learners of the learning are the college students who are not in any language departments and whose English skill is under the level of High-Intermediate of GEPT.The reason why we focus on the college students is that we find that in most colleges, there are many foreign students. For students, except studying, the only thing they can do is play around. And who accopanies with these foreign students? Of course the Taiwanese students.
And the objective is make the learners be able to be a guide about Taiwan for their foreign friends by speaking and writing. Just as what I've mentioned in the first paragraph, there are more and more foreigners coming to Taiwan. If they just come here to learn language, it would be very boring for them. As a native of Taiwan, we must do something to welcome these visitors. To a person who never been in Taiwan or who knows few about Taiwan, it will be very interesting for them to know Formosa much more. And how to speak with them? Of course, in English. Even though they come to learn Chinese, when they just come to Taiwan, English must be the main communicative language.
CMC is famous now. And because computer is a common tool everywhere, we use the Internet as our tool and build up a website. This website is basically used by teachers in oral and writing class. Students, however, can get the website to learn themsleves. The link is below:
http://play.ncu.edu.tw/team1/
In the website, called TravelEng, there is a short movie we filmed ourselves. There are many traveling films in the Internet. Why don't we pick up anyone of them to be our teaching material? It's because that we want to make the learners feel comfortable. Some leaners think it's not familiar and a little bit "culture shock" to watch a foreigner-host teaching film with the language in the film is foreign. And most importantly, our object is encourage Taiwanese students to sharing our country with those foreigners. It is better for us to be the host the film.
In TravelEng, we design a set of activities, including watching the film, learning vocabulary, play words-filling game, reading comprehention of the film, oral task, and writing task. There are different training in each part of activities. But the main purpose is all make the learners be able to introduce Taiwan to foreigners through talking and writing by themselves.
The first level is watching the film. We make an example about how to introduce a place in English. And then the second level is learning the words we've mentioned in the film. Therefore, they won't feel difficult to understand the film. And moreover, there are some useful words they can use as they guide the foreigners in other places. With the words learning, there is a game for the learners. It can strengthen the learners' knowing to these words. And it also help them learn how to explain some words in English. In the third level, it's a reading comprehention task. According to the subtitle in the film, learners can try to answer the questions. The forth level is oral. Learning up the some basic words and the example we show in the film, it's time for learners try to talk! And the last part is writing. Some learners think English writing is torture. But it's necessary to learn writing because that there are more and more opportunities for language users to express on the Internet by writing. So, we hope that the learners can try to write an English article to introduce places.
We invite some students to play TravelEng. And the finding is below:
- Pronunciation is quiet important for the learners whose listening skill is not good. We have to speak clearly, slowly and moreover, the funner, the better.
- To the learners whose English is not quiet well, it's good for them to learn in a familiar context.
- Simple guide is good to inspire learners' potential creation.
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