A brief post to share some slides from the talk I gave today at the ELT Ireland conference. I spoke about my experience trying to work with various ESP / business English groups to negotiate their syllabus and go coursebook free.

The conference itself has been fantastic so far, well-organised with a great atmosphere and a real mix of topics being talked about.

After talking about my context, teaching business in Germany, and my goals as a teacher, I once again declared my love for the CEFR and spoke about my attempts at using the descriptors as guidelines to help me ditch the coursebook, and create a course with my students that was relevant, authentic, learner centred, task-based and communicative.

The following slides show the different steps I took the first few times I tried this process.

Then I tried to simplify it and instead of using the full Eaquals list of descriptors for the appropriate level, I chose 8 and cut up a few sets and asked the students in pairs to rank them in order of relevance.

All in all, the project is definitely paying off. My students have fully taken to the idea and are providing me with fantastic ideas and more material than we could ever use. So I will keep working on it, perfecting my system and then I’ll post another update.

Link to my talk

Negotiating a task-based syllabus – my experiment with adult learners

Thanks to everyone who came and all those who messaged me. As nerve-wracking as it can be, the feedback and support from peers makes presenting at these events such a wonderful experience.

Websites with  CEFR resources: http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/cadre1_en.asp

https://www.eaquals.org/our-expertise/cefr/our-work-practical-resources-for-language-teaching/