DESINGNING A COURSE AROUND BIOGRAPHY-BASED UNITS

Аннотация

Entire courses have been successfully designed around biographies. In 1999, our university began offering intensive, one-month, noncredit courses for English language study. After initial experimentation with various themes, we decided to develop each course around a series of four week-long biography-based-units. Biographies gave students rich language to talk or write about life, specific vocabulary related to certain professions, and themes and topics related to their experiences and cultures. They also provided authentic contexts for review and recycling of important vocabulary in each successive week. We chose biography subjects who were famous in their field-so that it was easy to find information-but whose life stories were not very familiar to our students-so the students were learning new information no matter what their background, level, or prior education had been. Some of the most successful units were created around the lives of Frank Lloyd Wright (architect), Wilma Rudolph (athlete), Estee Lauder (businessperson), and Milton Hershey (confectioner and philanthropist) [1,2,3].