A Fluency First Approach through Extensive Writing in the EFL Context
Steven Herder
Steven Herder describes his epiphany after many years of classroom EFL teaching when he took an MA course in the subject as, having dutifully followed the Presentation, Practice, Production (PPP) module for all those years, realizing that his students were simply "doing anything to get out of the classroom" and he needed to change that. Herder points out that "input can be controlled but output cannot be put in a can"—and that successful language learning first focuses on fluency, then accuracy and complexity (like kids do). Writing has an advantage over speaking in the luxury of time to work out how best to express what you want to say.
To this end, the first activity in his classes (duplicated in this presentation) is ten minutes of free writing—No dictionary, eraser, stopping or talking, with follow-up activities such as counting adjectives, words in the past tense or words using time-- and then putting them together in a scale. (Some classes double their average total word count over one year in this not particularly academically outstanding high school.) Herder then went on to describe a variety of innovative exercises which made a good personal introduction to his inspiring website: http://stevenherder.org
Link to meeting listing

Next Item Previous Item