All content by Annie is listed below:
My teaching career began in Liverpool, way back in 1979, where I worked as a secondary school teacher of History. I taught all ages and levels, but found myself particularly intrigued by the challenges of pupils who seemed to lack motivation.
Tuesday - November 20th, 2012
Christina’s presentation incorporated feedback from 25 students who had followed a one-semester course of dogme classes as part of classroom-based research. Students were surveyed about their willingness to take part in their teachers’ professional development, and after a first day’s dogme class, were asked to give their initial impressions of the approach.
Tuesday - November 20th, 2012
Jemma began her presentation by explaining that she would be dealing with the ‘hows’ rather than ‘whys’ in her ‘teaching unplugged’ or dogme-based presentation. She started by explaining the three main pillars of the approach: it is context-driven, materials-light and it focusses on emergent classroom language (spoken or written and can involve any language at any time).
Event date:
Saturday, November 17, 2012 - 16:45
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.
- Materials design
- Listening
Sunday - October 21st, 2012
Simon posited that, by comparing traditional and ‘newer’ course book series, we can identify a tangible shift from what he termed ‘classical communicative language teaching’ to ‘post-communicative language teaching’.
Sunday - October 21st, 2012
Christopher opened the session by imploring management to make sure that the spirit of an institution is behind its teachers so they know they have supported when it comes to issues of discipline. He then gave an entertaining and thought-provoking plenary on how to deal with challenging teaching situations and defuse tension in classrooms with primary, teenager or adult students.
Event date:
Thursday, October 18, 2012 - 17:30
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
- Listening
Tuesday - October 9th, 2012
Event date:
Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - 20:00
Annie began the workshop with a snippet taken from a BBC studio interview and participants listened and brainstormed the problems the text would present for a student approaching a B2 level in English.
Monday - October 8th, 2012
Bonnie began her presentation by comparing teaching to following a path in a forest – the path isn’t straight, there lots of dead ends and decisions to be made about which way to go.
Monday - October 8th, 2012
Event date:
Saturday, October 6, 2012 - 11:15
One huge problem faced by Professor Reima Al-Jarf and her colleagues at the King Saudi University is that freshman students on translations course have very limited access to English outside the classroom.
Saturday - October 6th, 2012
In the second plenary of the day, Steve Oakes invited us to consider whether or not teachers and learners had ‘boxed themselves in’ when it came to attitudes towards the use of authentic materials in the classroom. It was apparent that this session would get us thinking out of the box in terms of difficulty levels and what it means to understand an authentic text.
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