Talks by Annie McDonald

Photo of Annie talking at a conference

Hints and tips on developing listening skills using authentic materials (TESOL France)

Speaker: 
Event date: 
Saturday, November 17, 2012 - 16:45
Venue: 
TESOL France
Location: 
Paris
Extra info: 
Handouts and downloads
Annie McDonald at TESOL France

Do you want to use more authentic listening materials with your learners? Are you looking for ideas on the kind of tasks you could design that will make the listening experience doable, develop your learners’ skills and inculcate confidence - all at the same time? And what's ambiguity and risk got to do with it all? Just some of the questions to be mulled over in this session.
 

Workshop: Designing Listening Activities

Speaker: 
Event date: 
Thursday, October 18, 2012 - 17:30
Venue: 
GRETA
Location: 
Granada
Extra info: 
Handouts and downloads
Effective Listening

In this workshop, we’ll be talking about and trying out various activities to use with authentic listening texts.
We’ll look at ways of activating different types of background knowledge, before moving on to consider the purpose and practicalities of materials design for activities which help students develop their decoding and meaning-building skills.

Materials Design: Helping Learners Become More Effective Listeners

Speaker: 
Event date: 
Saturday, October 6, 2012 - 10:15
Venue: 
IATEFL Hungary
Location: 
Eger
Extra info: 
Plus downloads
Talks - hancockmcdonald.com/talks

Designing a listening lesson based on authentic texts poses several challenges, not least because of the qualities of the texts themselves. However, with careful task design, we can mediate the difficulty level and ‘teach’ rather than 'test' listening.

Helping Students Become More Effective Listeners

Speaker: 
Event date: 
Saturday, September 8, 2012 - 10:15
Venue: 
IATEFL Poland
Location: 
Wroclaw
Extra info: 
Includes handouts
Talks - hancockmcdonald.com/talks

Nowadays, the internet gives us easy access to audio (and audio-visual) recordings, and, naturally, many learners of English will want / need / try to listen to some of what’s available. However, and despite the amount of time spent ‘doing’ listening in the language classroom, they will often feel frustrated when they try to follow such recordings.

Helping Students Become More Effective Listeners

Speaker: 
Event date: 
Wednesday, July 18, 2012 - 15:30
Venue: 
BRAZ-TESOL 2012
Location: 
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Extra info: 
Handouts and downloads
Talks - hancockmcdonald.com/talks

In this workshop, we’ll analyse some of the challenges language learners face when listening to authentic texts. Then we’ll take a walk through a listening lesson, trying out and discussing the different types of tasks which ‘teach’ listening, and help learners aspiring to B2 level become more effective, confident and autonomous listeners.

Silent Stories: using pictures in ELT

Event date: 
Tuesday, July 17, 2012 - 13:30
Venue: 
Braz-TESOL, room 803
Location: 
Rio de Janeiro
Extra info: 
Plus downloads
Silent Stories: using pictures in ELT - hancockmcdonald.com/talks/silent-stories-using-pictures-elt

Pictures are like silent stories. Silent because they are non-verbal. Stories, because they are pregnant with content to talk about. For these two reasons alone, they are extremely useful in English language teaching. In this talk, we explain these and more advantages of pictures, as well as demonstrating different activity types for use in the classroom.

'Marking' Speaking

Speaker: 
Event date: 
Saturday, March 10, 2012 - 15:30
Venue: 
TESOL Spain Annual National Convention
Location: 
Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao
Extra info: 
Includes handouts
'Marking' Speaking

How can we 'mark' students’ oral production? In this session, we will look at suitable tasks for classroom assessment. We will then look at criteria with which both teacher and students can evaluate speaking. You will leave the session with strategies for creating ‘marking menus’ which are balanced and appropriate for different tasks and levels.

Increasing Motivation and Inspiring Effective Learning: Two birds, one stone

Speaker: 
Event date: 
Friday, March 11, 2011 - 14:15
Venue: 
34th TESOL-Spain National Convention
Location: 
Madrid
Extra info: 
Handouts and downloads
Motivated students?

If you’re motivated to do something you value what you’re doing, and if you value what you’re doing you’re motivated – you’ll attend to the task at hand and be more likely to achieve success. In this presentation, we’ll briefly examine the nature of motivation alongside different aspects of courses we teach.

Testing Oral Skills

Speaker: 
Event date: 
Thursday, September 23, 2010 - 16:00
Venue: 
XXX Encuentro de profesores de inglés Universidad de Otoño
Location: 
Universidad Complutense Madrid
Extra info: 
Plus downloads
Testing Oral Skills

Many learners of English are now required to take an end-of-course speaking test, which teachers have to design, administer and assess. In this presentation, we’ll examine characteristics of practice tests which provide useful pointers for in-house test design.

Responding to Students' Written Work: What are the options?

Speaker: 
Event date: 
Sunday, September 5, 2010 - 11:30
Extra info: 
Includes handouts
Talks - hancockmcdonald.com/talks

Providing feedback is one of the most commonly conceived functions of a teacher, yet, according to Nunan (1991), the ultimate effect of feedback is often doubtful. How do we tend to respond to students' written work? What messages are we sending to our students as a result? Is the ultimate effect really, as Nunan suggests, doubtful? What are the implications for our teaching?

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