David Lees

Philosophy

My EFL/ESL teaching experience, although spanning a relatively short 8 years, of which only 4 years have been spent teaching in universities, nevertheless covers a broad range of schools, class-types and teaching situations. This range of different teaching experiences, coupled with my own language learning experience, serves to grant me a set of skills which upon which to draw, employ and adapt to the teaching environments and learners’ needs as required. As such, my first major contribution to English Education in the Japanese universities in which I have worked would be my activities and designed in accordance with Constructive Alignment (CA), which has several important implications for learning. The primary feature of CA is the careful alignment between the core constituents of a course of study – chiefly, i) intended learning outcomes (ILOs), ii) teaching-learning activities (TLAs), and iii) assessment tasks (ATs) – as well as objectives in the wider curriculum, while intentionally accounting for both the learning process and the contemporary HEI environment (Biggs & Tang, 2011).

CA is described by Biggs & Tang (2011) as having arisen through the need to bridge the gap “between a static body of declarative knowledge and personal action” (p. 97). CA therefore strives to have course and curriculum learning objectives represented as accurately as possible by what the learners do (in TLAs) and what they work towards (ATs) through close consideration of the desired outcomes. Additionally, as the theoretical roots of CA hold learning to be “the construction of meaning from experience” (Merriam & Bierema, 2013, p. 36), such an active, explicit, task-focused teaching system is noted to help less academically-inclined learners to learn (Biggs & Tang, 2011; Ellis, 2018). Indeed, the alignment of these ILO, AT and TLA elements of a course and curriculum must, structurally, be accounted for before issues of rapport, mode and manner, for even as Kelly (2012) – one of CA’s main critics – importantly admits, what learner would be motivated to learn – not just pass – in a curriculum where the courses of study are not mutually interlinked, nor in a singular course with unaligned learning.