Communication SkillsⅠ/Ⅱ
国際キャリア学科の英語科目は定期的に実施するテストに基づき、レベルごとにクラスを編成しています。カリキュラムは英語力をスキル別に高め、総合的に伸ばすことを目的に編成されており、授業の多くは英語圏のネイティブの教員が担当しています。以下は英語で効果的なコミュニケーションをとれるように訓練することを目的とする「Communication SkillsⅠ/Ⅱ」を担当しているグレゴリー・オキーフ先生(Mr.Gregory J. O’Keefe、米国出身)による授業紹介です。
Communication skills I & II are designed to help give students a chance to use English that they in many ways have already learned, but aren’t proficient in. While many students have the ability to recognize and translate many English words into Japanese, they still have difficulty using many simple phrases in real situations.
One of the first things taught in this course is study methods and techniques. I often teach students to recognize ineffective study habits and abandon them for ones geared towards speaking rather than test taking. While tests are an important part of student life, it isn’t always the fastest and most effective way to become fluent in the language.
This course teaches them results come from true input and output learning and applying that to practical and useful English-only situations. The importance of understanding the balance of listening, speaking, reading and writing as a symbiotic system rather than in separate parts of a lesson is crucial to this method. Teaching this method in the early weeks of the course helps students understand why they are doing what they are doing in class every week.
オキーフ先生の授業で
左はN.Iさん(2年、福岡県立春日高等学校出身)、中はA.Kさん(福岡県立筑紫高等学校出身)
One of the final steps of this class is to have the students team up and create their own conversation using a mixture of their imagination and phrases they have learned from the text. Their ability to understand the usage of the target language is shown in the ways they implement it into their writing.
One example would be how far they venture away from the situations in the book, while still using the phrases correctly. They work in pairs which also allows me to help teach students on an individual basis targeting individual needs. This process is repeated several times in the semester. Students conversations get progressively better and display a better understanding of how to construct everyday English phrarses by the end of the course.