Direct Action ESOL

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Direct Action ESOL began as a project for a course during the second year of the master’s degree program in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at Upper Brittany University in Rennes, France.

The course, Elaboration de didacticiels, aims to provide current and future language teachers with the tools they need to construct an on-line module using the Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) approach. In his book on TBLT, David Nunan argues that a pedagogical task contains work involving the following in the target language:

Comprehension
Manipulation
Production
Interaction
Focus on meaning in a communicative act 1

In other words, students advance in the language learning process through meaningful activities with an emphasis on communication rather than manipulation of form through artificial grammatical drills.

The pedagogical scenario of Direct Action ESOL was constructed by:

Defining a final task (macro-task) for the learners
Determining the intermediate steps (micro-tasks) needed to fulfill the final task
Gathering authentic documents related to the theme
Identifying linguistic elements that are present in the documents
Designing activities with digital tools that help learners complete the tasks of the sequence

This scenario involves communicative tasks within the context of civil disobedience. The final task for this course unit is a teach-in that requires learners to participate in a panel discussion. The intermediate steps include conducting research on nonviolent movements and tactics of civil disobedience as well as determining the focus of the discussion in written form.

The title “Direct Action ESOL” comes from the theme of direct action (in this case nonviolent) and the context of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) using the TBLT approach, in which the learner takes an active role in the learning process.

1. David Nunan, Task-Based Language Teaching (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4.