All content by Mark is listed below:
I got my first teaching job in 1984, working at a large boy's secondary school in El Obeid, Sudan. This experience made it very clear to me that there's a lot more to teaching English than just being able to speak the language!
Sunday - October 21st, 2012
This was very much a participative workshop session, based on classroom research material being developed by Mª Jesús. We began with group discussions on the importance of vocabulary and the most effective methods of learning it. Suggestions included relevance and motivation, repeated exposure, visual support, richness of context and test washback.
We looked at 8 features of pronunciation which are of particular relevance for Spanish speaking learners of English. These included vowels, spelling of vowels, consonants, consonant clusters, word stress, phrase stress patterns, tonic syllables and connected speech. Each feature was explained, contrasted with Spanish and demonstrated with an example game.
Wednesday - October 10th, 2012
DIGESTED READ
Delightfully retro-themed conference with a cutting-edge online support programme.
LOCATION/SITE
Wednesday - October 10th, 2012
Éva Illés of ELTE in Budapest, began by explaining how English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) differs from pidgin: 1. Pidgin is limited, for example to one trade hub, while ELF is global; 2. Pidgin is limited to a trading domain, while ELF is used in all domains, and 3. Pidgin doesn’t have native speakers while ELF does.
Monday - October 8th, 2012
Mark began with a guessing game. Participants had to guess the word "attention" by seeing phrases and collocations with which it occurs. He then went on to point out the importance of attention for learning, and defined the job of a teacher as a "sculptor of learners' attention". He then compared two different was of manipulating attention - directing it and attracting it.
Sunday - October 7th, 2012
Scott began by looking at some of the reasons that teachers might get to feel jaded as their career progresses. He revealed his own pet peeve as being the rampant commoditization of ELT, with words from the world of business being drafted in, such as ‘outcomes’, ‘solutions’, ‘value-added’, ‘accountability’ and so on.
Sunday - October 7th, 2012
As well as her plenary on teacher development, Margit Szesztay presented this very practical, classroom-focussed workshop on harnessing the power of questions. First of all, she asked participants to simply formulate one question we would like to ask, and then ask it to as many other participants as possible.
Saturday - October 6th, 2012
Event date:
Saturday, October 6, 2012 - 13:15
Michael began by pointing out the now overwhelming reasons people have for learning English. Statistically, it’s proven that increased English means increased income (except perhaps for English teachers, as one member of the audience pointed out, to much laughter!). He went on to point out that more and more, academic programmes are conducted through English.
Sunday - September 30th, 2012
My impression is that coverage of pronunciation in current coursebooks is usually imbalanced in favour of individual sounds, to the detriment of syllables, connected speech and discourse.
Friday - September 28th, 2012
Mark Hancock and Victor Pavón wrote these articles under the title 'Pronzone' for the TESOL Spain newsletter.
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