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.
What aspects of listening, learning and listener character traits come into play when we take authentic listening texts into our classrooms and how might they relate to tasks and activities we devise? In this workshop we’ll look at the challenges authentic listening texts present for non-expert listeners around B2 level.
A session to present and explain a concept map of current ELT. The idea is to show how the different ideas and acronyms relate to one another, so that we can keep the big picture in mind. We need to see both the wood and the trees! See a related article here.
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.
Pronunciation is not only about the mouth, but also the ears. And, with English being a global language, the ears must learn to be flexible in order to make sense of all those varieties of spoken English out there. This session is about helping learners to deal with this variety.
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.
Are your students inspired by your lessons or has their interest expired!? What can you do to attract their attention and generate intrinsic motivation? Are there any strategies you can use or is it just a question of inspiration? These are some of the questions we will address in this session.
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.
In the first part of the talk, we will see how motivation leads to attention which in turn leads to learning. We will look at the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how the first leads to a better quality of attention. We will then look at strategies for creating intrinsic motivation in the classroom.
Pronunciation is not only about the mouth, but also the ears. And, with English being a global language, the ears must learn to be flexible in order to make sense of all those varieties of spoken English out there. This session is about helping learners to deal with this variety.
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.
