ELT Workshops: Teaching English to Adults

2011-2012 series

A series of 8 two-hour workshops form this year's IH YL Teacher Development Course.

Participants may enrol for all eight sessions, or for individual sessions. However, it should be noted that the sessions are designed as a cohesive series forming a course in Teacher Development for teachers of Young Learners.

Teachers attending the whole course of eight sessions will receive a certificate at the end of the course. Certificates will not be issued for single sessions.

Teaching with the lights off – Dogme: where is it, where's it going?

TD 1 — Friday, November 4, 2011 10.00-12.00

Dogme has been with us for 10 years now, but is still perhaps not all that well known. In this session we be looking at what it is and isn't, where it all came from and its practical application in the classroom.

Reformulation: upgrading student output

TD 2 — Friday November 18, 2011 10.00-12.00

The classroom technique known as 'reformulation' (or 'shaping') involves helping the student with the sophistication of the expression of an utterance. For example, in response to the question 'Did you do anything this weekend?' a response such as: 'No, not really' might be reformulated to: 'No, nothing out of the ordinary'. In essence, the new phrase conveys the same message as the original, but uses more sophisticated language to do so.

This approach is of particular relevance at higher levels where the students frequently feel they have stopped making any real progress.

Five generic ways to teach grammar

TD 3 — Friday December 16, 2011 10.00-12.00

In this session we will be looking at ways of teaching grammar that can be applied to any grammar point (hence 'generic').

Five generic ways to teach vocabulary

TD 4 — Friday January 20, 2012 10.00-12.00

As with our previous 'Five generic ways to teach grammar' workshop, in this second session we will be looking at ways of teaching vocabulary that can be applied to any area of vocabulary.

Teaching with Cuisenaire rods

TD 5 — Friday February 17, 2012 10.00-12.00

One hundred and one ways to teach grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation using Cuisenaire rods.

Teaching pronunciation

TD 6 — Friday March 2, 2012 10.00-12.00

Have you noticed how when someone from a country outside Spain chats in English to your students s/he can't understand a thing they say? It's not the words or grammar they use, it's the way they use them: their pronunciation. It's very easy to become accustomed to our students' pronunciation of English and, consequently to neglect helping them with it.

In this session we will define a threshold level for pronunciation for both productive and receptive purposes. We will then explore classroom approaches and activities to help our students' intelligibility with sounds, stress, intonation and features of connected speech.

10 years on: CEF and where are we now?

TD 7 — Friday March 16, 2012 10.00-12.00

In what ways has ten years of evaluating communicative competence and self evaluation by students themselves impacted on school tests and classroom practice?

In this session we will be looking at the growth of the CEF as an international assessment means and its likely influence over the next few years. We will also be looking at those old school tests and how we might use the CEF in the classroom.

Using students as a resource

TD 8 — Friday April 13, 2012 10.00-12.00

You start them off, they do it, you react with language focus work, they carry on doing it but better. In this session we'll be looking at a number of other very simple student-centred classroom approaches which involve helping students with the sophistication of the language they use in a task. One task can be used at many different levels, the difference being the language items we might expect the students to use to complete the task. This includes predicting language content; shaping; noticing and factors in task design.

See also

Previous years