Creative and innovative ways to teach English: You make the difference

• Main Author: Koh, Soo Ling
• Format: Book Section
• Language: English
• Published: Faculty of Communication and Modern Languages, Universiti Utara Malaysia 2007
• Subjects: LB2300 Higher Education; PE English
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/3201/1/K1.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/3201/; http://staf.uum.edu.my/tleia2/
• Institution: Universiti Utara Malaysia

The Malaysian education scene is under going seismic change as we move from years of tried and tested rote learning strategies and venture towards advocating creative thinking skills. In keeping with the demands of globalization, there is deliberate effort to depart from an examination oriented system, often deemed the malaise of the Asian society, to one of creative learning. In order to encourage students to concentrate and participate in the class, teachers need to be creative and innovative. A wide variety of materials and methods of teaching should be explored as students come in different packages with different learning styles and capabilities. But perennial problems plague both the novice and the experienced teacher. The innovative teacher can extract information from texts, audio and visual sources of information for teaching purposes. This paper seeks to inform, to motivate and to explore the many possibilities of making out-of-the-box teaching a reality. Based on classroom and journalistic research across Malaysian schools and universities, this paper deals with the challenges that teachers face and provides practical classroom ideas on how to wear Edward De Bono’s thinking hats in the very mundane classroom. This paper will focus on the following issues: 1.How to generate interest among students, 2.How to make use of everyday objects to bring fun into the classroom, 3. Task-based teaching/ Activity centred teaching, 4. Problems that teachers and students face (ESL context), 5. Thematic teaching methods - across the 4 skills