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.
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.
Pronunciation is just as important for listening as for speaking. In this workshop, we looked at how to help learners to understand authentic English by focusing on pronunciation. Specifically, we looked at features of connected speech and accent. You can download the slides and handout for the talk below.
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.
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.
In this workshop, we present a syllabus of 8 features of English pronunciation of relevance for Brazlian learners. Each of the 8 points are explained and illustrated with a pronunciation game. You can download the handout and the slide show for the talk below. The full instructions for most of the games can be found in the materials section of this site.
