“You are listening to KSUB, the student radio station of Seattle University. My name is Heidi Beck, and this morning, students from the Culture and Language Bridge Program will be teaching conversational first language lessons. First up: Bahasa Indonesia.”

When my students struggle with second language concepts that I also have found challenging, I try to design lesson plans that meet course goals using methods that have been effective for me. Many of my students dread giving presentations, so I wondered how I could create communicative oral tasks that, while improving oral delivery, could lower affective filter. Interestingly, student broadcasts were not initially what I had in mind. Although not the reason I first contacted the campus station, these broadcasts have since become an integral part of the course.

The goal of the broadcast lesson plan, reached through a series of scaffolded assignments, is teaching a first language lesson on the air. Although students are employing oral delivery techniques practiced earlier in the classroom, their focus remains on content: vocabulary, comparative grammar, and a dialogue that incorporates the two. This linking of classroom language learning with language activation out of the classroom is a major feature of task-based language teaching (Nunan, 1991).

After the broadcasts, students reported feeling more confident. In other words, while improving comprehensibility, these broadcasts also raised self-esteem, which can lower affective filter (Krashen, 1982). Over the past 10 years, I have also observed (and student reflections confirm) that it accomplishes a third objective: Sharing culture and language helps international students feel more integrated into and better understood by the campus community.

How did the convention session convey the broadcast lesson process? After listening to a promotional announcement advertising “the CLB show,” participants learned the background information that shaped the lesson design. Next, the class, course content, and textbook exercises were briefly described, as was the series of assignments that culminate in the first language lesson broadcast. Then, participants heard portions of the broadcasts and witnessed how students benefitted by evaluating their podcasts. The presentation concluded with a brief discussion on how this same assignment could be modified for other venues.

References

Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.

Nunan, D. (1991). Communicative tasks and the language curriculum. TESOL Quarterly, 25(2), 279–295.

Heidi Beck has been teaching at Seattle University since 2001. A Seattle area native who has also lived on the East Coast, she became interested in the field of second language acquisition as a career after joining the Peace Corps, where she taught English to high school students in Poland. Heidi was thrilled to have her radio broadcast project accepted as her first TESOL presentation.