Journal of English Language Teaching

Student-led Seminars in an ESL Classroom: An Experiment

Kshema Jose

Asst. Professor, Dept. of Training and Development, EFL University, Hyderabad.

Keywords: Student-led seminars, pedagogic competence, collaborative learning, peer- teaching, critical thinking

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Abstract

A large majority of students who complete postgraduate programs in English, ELT, or English literature, go on to become teachers/ trainers. Yet very few courses taught on these programs help students gather the pedagogic experience required to make a successful transition from ‘student’ to ‘teacher’ so that they become comfortable in the classroom (Atkinson, 2001) and deliver effective classes (Young and Bippus, 2008). This paper evaluates the efficacy of student-led seminars as an instructional method to help student-teachers acquire content knowledge and gain pedagogic competence. The paper reports how the ‘Training-to-train’ course delivered to semester III students on the MA program at EFLU, Hyderabad, was redesigned to introduce student-led seminars to encourage students who lacked teaching experience engage better with course contents. This paper discusses in detail the different parts of a modified version of student-led seminars that can be implemented by ESL teachers to facilitate students’ acquisition of complex concepts through experience and reflection.

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