Week 5 - Blog 2: Differentiation (Ch. 10)

The authors mention that one of the popular business strategies is differentiation, which is "highlighting the unique or special qualities of a company's product or service" (p. 312). We can apply this concept for not only business but also teaching. At a college, I lead some workshops for ESL students, and one of these workshops is in the form of Karaoke singing to help students gain native-like English pronunciation. Many educators have used songs to teach English skills, such as grammar, vocabulary, culture, and pronunciation is also one of them. However, my teaching is unique and different from methods of other teachers, as far as I know. When I have learned jazz singing, I could figure out how to improve English pronunciation, especially how to speak English fluently, observing the singing of native English-speaking co-singers, so I utilize those techniques in my workshop. Although singing is not exactly same as speaking, the method works very well, and the students who took the workshop improved their pronunciation and had fun at the same time. I have been teaching this for about seven years, and the grand total of participants is now over 1200! :-) (Table 10.2, p. 330).