Kanban boards are a visual form of project management very popular among software, Engineering and product development teams, although we claim that its principles can greatly help ESL students learning to perform language tasks with proficiency, as defined by ease, speed, and accuracy of performance, acquired through practice, in order to improve both receptive skills used in understanding; reading or listening and productive skills (speaking or writing). Dividing language into skill areas for teaching and evaluation purposes does not necessarily reflect how language is really used, but it provides a basis upon which students may start building up their proficiency. ESL learning materials have a multi-layered skills approach. This is the reason why Kanban can be applied to teaching/learning of English as a second language. The methodology, originally developed by Taiichi Ohno, a Japanese engineer at Toyota in the late 1940s, is focused on continuous improvement, where tasks are "extracted" from a list of pending actions in a constant workflow. ESL students can be identified with the working teams Ohno had in mind, and the different tasks by each team member can be interpreted as the tasks related to the different language skills. ESL students using Kanban principles may enhance their results in learning English. The Toyota Production System (TPS) has inspired our proposal, which includes the concepts: Jidoka (automation), Poka Yoke (fail-safe), JIT (just-in-time), Kanban (card or token), Heijunka (production smoothing), Andon (slate), Muda (waste elimination) and Kaizen (continuous improvement), applied to learning English.

Authors:
Maria-isabel Mansilla, European University Miguel De Cervantes, Spain

About the Presenter(s)
Dr M. Isabel Mansilla is an English lecturer at UEMC, Spain (2006-). PhD in 2001. Awards: Extraordinary Doctorate 1997 and Fullbright Scholarship (2003). She has taught at the US, Germany or UK. She co-directs the Innovative Education Research Group

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/mynetwork/

Additional website of interest
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCisciKND2OnRS03SPWcjhqg

See this presentation on the full schedule – Schedule

Bookmark