Raising Students´ Employability by Targeting Transferable Skills in Task-based Teaching
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Humanising Language Teaching |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | https://www.hltmag.co.uk/feb23/raising-students-employability |
| Keywords | empolyability, transferable skills, task-based teaching |
| Attached files | |
| Description | This article presents the design of a series of task-based courses of English for special educators at the B1/B1+ level introduced at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. In response to the recently identified need to prepare students more effectively for the demands of the job market (Collins-Nelsen, 2022), the course design focuses on real-life tasks and scaffolding activities which help students bridge the gap between graduates’ competences and their future employers’ requirements, which Beneitone and Yarosh (2022) agree is a pressing issue. Rather than focusing on teaching specific content related to special education in English, the courses thus have the ambition to develop more generic transferable skills identified as crucial for successful graduation and future career by specialists in the field. First, the paper shows how the tasks were chosen and how they align with the CEFR framework. It then explains how the tasks included in the courses are related and integrated to provide the students with a meaningful structure of skills they will find useful in their future practice. Finally, the paper assesses how the participants responded to the assignments in course evaluation surveys. |