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.
There is a video of this lecture recorded at TESOL Spain, Bilbao below. Pronunciation is just as important for listening as for speaking. In this workshop, we will see how to help learners to understand authentic English by focusing on pronunciation. Specifically, we will look at features of connected speech, intonation, and accent.
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.
We will look at 8 features of pronunciation which are of particular relevance for Spanish speaking learners of English. These will include vowels, spelling of vowels, consonants, clusters, word stress, stress patterns, tonic syllables and joined up speech. Each feature will be explained, contrasted with Spanish and demonstrated with an example game.
In this workshop, we will look at how politeness works in English. We will see that there is more than one kind of politeness, and it varies according to the relationship of speaker to listener. We will consider the problems this may present for learners and try out some classroom activities for raising awareness of this aspect of language.
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.
In this presentation, we will look at intrinsic motivation in the ELT classroom. I will suggest that for a lesson to generate intrinsic motivation, it should appeal not also to the student-as-learner but also the student-as-person.
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.
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?
"I've studied English for X years but I still can't use it". Sound familiar? It's what you get when you present language as a ladder of grammar rules rather than as communicative potential. If learners want to be able to use English, they need an action-oriented approach to language: developing communicative competences rather than just knowledge of form.
In this workshop, we will look at the pronunciation of grammar features including verb inflections, contractions, auxiliaries, part of speech and clause structure. We will see how the pronunciation of these features is particularly important for meaning, and can be easily integrated into course materials. We will look at ways of working on these areas of pronunciation.
