Let’s Have a Tea Talk!

Abstract

English education in Korea is definitely focused on receptive skills which are reading and listening, so it is considered that it is awfully difficult to improve speaking and writing. These days, plenty of Korean parents have their children to enroll English kindergarten so that they can acquire English in natural way. However, most of the learners are not able to develop productive skills after graduate from elementary school. English is thoroughly considered as a foreign language in Korea and one of the subjects that students have to get high score on exams . Therefore, it is focused to learn only one side of language which are reading, listening, memorizing vocabulary, and grammar. This factor causes imbalance of four language functions and make English learners look at the target language from a biased point of view. In order to balance four language skills, this textbook mainly focuses on developing speaking and writing by adopts Theme Based Instruction (TBI) in combination of Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) as the main methods. Students learn not only receptive ski lls but also productive skills with this textbook. Learners are required to listen and read texts related to each topic first, then, they are required to complete tasks to improve productive skills . Since most of Korean students have higher listening and reading competence than speaking and writing, this book offers learners to experience real word s and use large amount of authentic languages. Each unit includes productive activity that focuses on improving speaking and writing strategies. This book is designed to be used for 80 hours. The textbook recommends that 12 learners take the class twice a week, and each class should be about 60 minutes. Accordingly, each unit is finished by four weeks. The target students are adults over 25 year old who have studied English for exams since this textbook attracts them to motivate by presenting interesting topics for them. In addition, t hey would absolutely have imbalance of four language skills and this book will be incredibly helpful to improve their weaker language competence. The level of learners is considered at intermediate low or intermediate high by ACTFL standards because some of vocabulary and activities in this book might be difficult to understand for lower level students.