ELT Workshops: Teaching English to Adults
2012-2013 series
A series of 8 two-hour workshops form this year's IH YL Teacher Development Course.
Participants may enrol for all eight sessions, or for individual sessions. However, it should be noted that the sessions are designed as a cohesive series forming a course in Teacher Development for teachers of Young Learners.
Teachers attending the whole course of eight sessions will receive a certificate at the end of the course. Certificates will not be issued for single sessions.
Next session
Technology: an Edmodo group and what you could do with it
TD 8 — Friday April 26 10.00-12.00
"Everyone" is on Facebook these days, aren't they? And there are undoubtedly lots of language learning activities that could be done in a Facebook group. However, in any given group of adults, there still tends to be at least one person who would rather not be on Facebook.
Because it is much more private, Edmodo is a fabulous alternative and in this hands-on session we'll be looking at some of the things that we (or rather our learners) could use it for.
Translation: The elephant in the room. Contrastive analysis and L1 as a learning aid
TD 1 — Friday, November 9, 2012 10.00-12.00
Use of L1 has been seen negatively for many years in many schools possibly because of its association with old-fashioned Grammar Translation approaches. However, translating from one language to another is practised by a vast number of language students who know what they want to say and are looking for the foreign language way of saying it. A particular advantage of using the student's L1 is how it can enable the student to see differences between L1 and L2 and so construct L2 utterances more accurately by NOT translating literally.
In this session we will be exploring a number of classroom-based activities in which L1 and L2 are analysed contrastively. We will be working from what the students know: their own language, to what they are trying to learn: the new language.
Teaching speaking
TD 2 — Friday November 23 10.00-12.00
Countless students say they come to class because they want to speak English and countless teachers engage their students in speaking activities but where is the speaking syllabus? It's easy to make a list of grammar points and lexical areas to cover, but where is the list of what's involved in speaking? It will be presented in this workshop along with a number of activities that practise its contents.
Teaching pronunciation
TD 3 — Friday December 14 10.00-12.00
A Spanish friend with an advanced level of English was dismayed when she went to England and the people in the family she stayed with couldn't understand her. Her pronunciation of English was below the level of comfortable intelligibility; in this workshop we'll be looking at ways and means of putting it well above this level.
Teaching beyond the sentence
TD 4 — Friday January 18, 2013 10.00-12.00
'A shirt was bought by me yesterday' and 'Across the road was where he walked and Deidre was the person who met him' are not incorrect grammatically, but they are incorrect: they break rules of English usage beyond simple sentence-level grammar.
In this workshop we will be looking at ways of teaching using real language and real rules of language use.
Comprehension questions should be banned
TD 5 — Friday February 22 10.00-12.00
Comprehension questions are a useful means of testing a student's reading and listening skills, but there is no real reason to test these skills in the classroom (other than for examination practice).
In this workshop we will look at ways of teaching these skills and say goodbye to all those multiple-choice and true/false questions, and all other forms of comprehension testing.
Teacher talk
TD 6 — Friday March 8 10.00-12.00
We all learned our first language by listening to lots and lots of Parent-Talking-Time so what's wrong with Teacher-Talking-Time, after all a teacher's voice is probably his/her most powerful teaching tool.
In this workshop we will look at quality ways for the teacher to use his/her voice to ensure it is used as a powerful teaching tool.
Language out of nowhere
TD 7 — Friday April 12 10.00-12.00
Typically teachers select language points to teach, these are often chosen simply by doing whatever is next in the book. In this workshop we will be looking at reactive teaching in which what we teach is based on what the students are trying to do with the language.
Technology: an Edmodo group and what you could do with it
TD 8 — Friday April 26 10.00-12.00
See also
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Teaching young learners workshops
