Braz-tesol

BRAZ-TESOL holds a national conference every two years, and in July 2012, the event was held in Rio de Janeiro. It was truly a national event, with delegates coming from all over the country - and it's a big country, with some internal flights being several hours long.
LOCATION

“English for Beach Entrepreneurs: Reflecting upon an ESP course” (Patricia Elizabeth Perez Martins, Claudia Rebello dos Santos Santos)

Patricia began by taking us through the standard stages of ESP course design for this 25 hour course, and then Claudia described course implementation, adaptation and learning results.

We're busy adding material following the BRAZ-TESOL conference.The talks "Pronunciation games for Brazil" and "Silent Stories: using pictures in ELT" now include videos from audio files recorded at the event, and we are busily writing up summaries of various wor

This plenary linked the conference theme Proud to be to the ultimate goals of language learning today. With images of well known bridges around the world, and drawing on expressions related to water (for example, don’t rock the boat and take the plunge), Kathy explained a comprehensive set of communication strategies.

“Enhancing students’ listening skills with authentic materials: going beyond gap-filling” (Bruna Caltabiano)Bruna began this workshop with a brainstorm session of why humans (and other animals!) listen. She led the discussion to this very human motivation, as expressed by Wilson: “We learn to listen and we listen to learn”.  

“English is a rhythmical language” (Susan Harris de Melo) The main thrust of Susan’s talk was that there is a great insight that teachers in Brazil are tending to overlook: that English is stress-timed and Brazilian Portuguese is syllable-timed. A consequence of this difference is that for a Brazilian, listening to English is very difficult because the grammar words tend to be swallowed.