(160) 'TO PUT IT SIMPLY' - TEACHING THROUGH AND ABOUT SIMPLICITY

摘要

In my talk, I will present the outline of an ESP (English for Specific Purposes) course for students ofInformation Design drawing upon John Maeda's book The Laws of Simplicity, illustrating how a textcan be used in a threefold manner, as a source for information and ideas, as an example of languageusage, and as the basis for developing and/or selecting teaching materials. The combination seemsparticularly attractive to future information designers, judging from the anonymous evaluations bystudents, who described the course as the best and most practically applicable English course theyhad taken so far.John Maeda's book The Laws of Simplicity suggests itself for an English course in Information Designas its author, a graphic designer and computer scientist, proposes ten laws for simplifying complexsystems in business, life and product design. Not only is the subject matter of interest to students, it isalso the unique correspondence of content and style of presentation that is appealing and also invitesfurther investigation.My students were required to read the book and during lessons we discussed the content and thelanguage used. Concerning the tasks I concentrated on oral work, vocabulary and grammar as well asautonomous learning by having students do research on certain questions. The exercisesmethodologically also vary between different teaching and learning styles. The variability in theapproach is supposed to contrast with the topic of the course.I want to focus on the benefits the methodology I used offers for EFL (English as a Foreign Language)learning and teaching since the use of varying tuition methods fosters learner autonomy andmotivation through interactivity and multimedia. Using subject-specific authentic texts clearly raisedthe learners' motivation which was further increased through fun in the activities, curiosity as thesubject matter was of interest to students, multimedial learning material and social interaction. Thelearners were automatically involved in making choices and in modifying and adapting their goalswhich is typical of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) classrooms. This constructivistapproach to learning where the learners are offered content dependent possibilities promote learnerautonomy and therefore guarantee a better outcome.