The importance of teacher training has earned significant attention during the past decade, which is evidenced by the fact that many language-teacher training workshops are being held islandwide. Teacher training has surfaced as an issue because (1) the ability to teach is no longer inherent in scholarship (Strasheim, 1991); (2) learning a subject is not equivalent to learning how to teach (Kelley, 1969); and (3) no amount of expertise in methodology alone is sufficient enough in helping language teachers deal with a variety of learners and problem situations (Geddes et al., 1990). Preservice teacher training is especially indispensable at the Language Center because teaching can be extremely anxiety-provoking, for it involves speaking the target language in the presence of others. This year (1995-6), thirty-two new teachers have been hired at the center, and half of these teachers either have no TEFL background or have had little previous experience teaching English Conversation Lab to college non-English-major students. Due to the scanty amount of funds and limited administrative resources, the center held an orientation instead of a training workshop for these novice teachers. This paper proposes a teacher-training workshop for these novice teachers by using a classroom activity-simulation-from which these novice teachers can acquire information about both language learning and teaching of this particular course.
