We often present at ELT conferences and events. Just select the title below if you're looking for the handout or download from a talk or workshop you have attended.
Perhaps the most important part of effective teaching is the ability to motivate our learners. Part of this ability lies in the personal style of the teacher. But motivation can also be boosted by well-selected and well-prepared methods and means.
None of us throw our class into a listening unprepared, do we? It would be unfair - after all, in real life, we're normally listening with certain expectations. But often in ELT, our pre-listening activities are limited to a bit of discussion of the topic and maybe some pre-teaching of new vocabulary.
In one-to-one pronunciation teaching, we must assess what the individual student needs and find the best way of providing it. We can’t use a pre-determined syllabus or ‘set-piece’ pronunciation materials. Instead, we need to be flexible enough to negotiate and adapt both syllabus and methods. For this, we need to keep three questions in mind:
In this talk we'll take a look at a variety of activities which could be used with a 51 second text to help learners become better listeners. See powerpoint slides below.
Pronunciation is just as important for listening as for speaking. In this workshop, we will look at what features make connected speech difficult to follow. We will try out a series of tasks and games for raising awareness of these features. Finally, I will suggest how teachers can prepare their own micro-listening activities.
What’s your ELT footprint? This is one of the questions we will look into in “A Map of ELT” at the English UK North academic conference in Leeds on Saturday Oct 8th. After looking at the map and how it is organized, we’ll consider how it may be used for teacher reflection, critical awareness and for a ‘bigger picture’ perspective on topical issues in ELT.
It’s notoriously difficult to give meaningful feedback to learners after they have ‘done’ a speaking activity – but is this the end of the story? In this session, we’ll consider an approach which will help us generate appropriate feedback for a variety of classroom speaking tasks and for learners at different levels.
This talk was part of a day of pronunciation talks organized by the IATEFL PronSig in collaboration with the ELT website Teachitworld. In my talk, we took a playful approach to the teaching of pronunciation.
There's more than one way to motivate. In this talk, we take a tour of the Map of Motivation, from aspirations through subject matter, classroom conditions and effective learning. The main slides from the talk and the handout can be found below. There's also a ten minute video tour of the map.
