A Sporting Chance is a workshop I’m presenting on Sunday 25th March 2012 at the ABS conference ‘Challenge Your English’ – a conference for non-native teachers of English to boost the level of their own English.
The workshop focuses on English idioms from the world of sports, starting with sailing, then baseball, cricket, cards and finally a free-for-all called guess the sport.
As they are introduced to the idioms, the teachers play sports themselves which can be used in the classroom.
Abstract:
Do you find yourself behind the eight ball when idioms come out of left field? Are you out of your depth when idiom-loving friends call the shots? Give yourself a sporting chance to cover all the bases as we dive headfirst into the world of sport-inspired idioms, exploring their meaning and background to give ourselves the inside track in the idiom race, allowing us to paddle our own idiom canoes and put a new vocabulary arrow in our language quivers.
Here are the slides from my talk ‘Realising Reading’ which I gave for the first time at the Macmillan Conference in Montevideo on February 29th 2012. The talk is about how we can keep reading real for our students at the same time as getting them to realise what they’re reading, thinking about it critically and noticing the language in the texts.
Look forward to hearing what you think about it. Enjoy!
On Wednesday 29/2/12 I had another go at No Man’s Land at the Macmillan Montevideo Conference 2011 held at the Anglo. It was interesting to see how the talk changed as a result of having a different dialogue with a different audience – Montevideo was much less impressed with Dogme than Buenos Aires was and quite a few members of the audience were brave enough to call themselves Textbook Traditionalists at the beginning of the talk, although we all ended up as Dog-maurauders at the end. The talk was also shorter, so I focused more on the ten key principles and had also summarised 10 key Dogme-rauder principles which the audience were happy to accept and take away to consider. Let us know how you get on!
Many thanks to Nicolas from Macmillan for organising the day, my impressive fellow speakers Aldo Rodriguez, Phil Hanham and Gustavo Gonzalez and, of course, the anglo for hosting the event – although it was the great audience that made the day such a success.
Pro-T Buenos Aires
Here are the slides from the talk at Pro-T 2012 on Thursday 16th February 2012.
Many thanks to everyone who came to the talk on Thursday and to @lcamio and the Pro-T team for inviting me and organising everything so smoothly. I really enjoyed the talk and discovering much more about the principles of Dogme ELT through the process of researching, planning and writing the talk and sharing it with you on Thursday. It was exciting (and empowering) to put the decision about whether or not to ‘convert’ myself into a Dogme-gician in your hands, and participating in that Dialogic Co-constructionof knowledge to see what emerged was an enlightening process. I hope the talk has helped some of you to look at your classrooms from a slightly different angle and gives you some ideas about how to ensure our students are at the centre of everything we do.
If you feel you are a Dogme-gician, it would be great to hear how you have managed to incorporate your Dogme teaching style into the confines of the educational context where you work.
Dogme-gician's believe in all the magic of Dogme.
If you’re a Dogme-rauder, it would be great to hear which principles of Dogme you have particularly pillaged and which ‘emergent’ tasks and activities you have used successfully or are going to try out.
Dogme-rauders have a soft spot for the 10 key Dogme principles, but prefer to loot and pillage the best of all methods
And if you’re a Textbook Traditionalist, then it would be great to hear the reasons why.
Textbook traditionalists start their planning from the next page of the course book and feed their students grammar mcnuggets
The ones that came up during the talk were pressure from above (Principals getting in the way of principles?) and the necessity to prepare students for exams.
The first problem is going to take time and persistence in order to convince principals, parents and even ministries of education, that the syllabus can be covered and students can learn English and prepare themselves for exams without having to faithfully follow a course book step by step.
And exam classes can easily prepare through a less materials dominated approach. Students choose the texts they want to work with (be they authentic, course book, test book or whatever). Students can construct test activities for each other from these texts, empowering them to discover much more about the tests and the strategies needed to complete them successfully. Students can decide which tasks to work on when, depending on mood, trending current affairs topics, previous classes, perceived weaknesses. Students can design the course syllabus, selecting the test materials to use, the balance of test types to focus on, writing proposals at the beginning of the course, progress summaries during the course, reviews of the course as it progresses and reports on their progress towards the end of the course. Obviously, the students will choose to use Practice Test materials during the course (I imagine), but this is all part of being a good Dogme-rauder – letting students choose, allowing the syllabus (as well as the langauge) emerge through a dialogue involving the whole class.
Al, Vicky and Susan enjoying the talk – laughing in the face of Dogme?
I seem to have burst into song – lyrics a-merging!
Looking forward to hearing where you stand and I was relieved to find out I can continue to be a Dogme-rauder at the end of the talk!
I was asked to give a workshop today for the teachers at International House Recoleta and Belgrano based on the talk I did at the ABS Conference for Coordinators back in August. Since I was confident they are already doing lots of the development ideas I addressed in the original talk, I wanted to attempt to make it a more personal and specific experience by adding in more interactive tasks and giving them summaries of the different tools on a plate, so to speak.
I enjoyed the journey they took me on and a lot of interesting ideas came out of it. Hopefully some of them will go on to discover Suggestopedia in an experimental practice lesson or do some Action Research to improve their FCE learners listening skills. Or at the very least they’ll come and comment on my blog.
Enjoy the slides and the handouts and I hope they help you to decide where to take your own Continuous Professional Develoment next.
One of my favourite subjects and favourite workshops, I have recently revamped and improved this session for talks I have recently done for Macmillan Argentina, at the APIZALS conference in Bariloche, Rio Negro on Friday 30/9/11 and at KEL in Martinez, Buenos Aires on Saturday 15/10/11.
I intend to explore different aspects of this talk in more detail when time permits, adding posts on why feedback is so important and others giving more details and activities for personalising, etxending, revising and motivating – stay tuned!
Reworking
I presented the latest version of this workshop at the inaugural IHWO Teachers Online Conference (IH TOC) on November 15th 2011. And will be repeating it on February 10th and 13th as a Live Online Workshop (IH LOW) for International House teachers around the world. After these workshops I will add the latest edition of the slides and hopefully a video of the session.
Coordinating against the clock was a workshop on time management that I gave at the ABS Intermational Conference for Coordinators and Directors of Studies in Buenos Aires in 2008. The workshop looks at planning your to do lists, how to stop procrastinating, how to deal with your inbox efficiently and how to avoid needless interruptions.
As always, I post it here as it was originally presented and I hope to update it with new ideas when I get the chance. Please help with the reworking by adding your comments and questions about the slides and handout. I hope you find the materials helpful.
This was a workshop I did at the ABS International Challenge Your English Conference in 2006. The theme of the conference is to help Englaish Language teachers in South America improve their own English in order to help their students improve theirs.
In this workshop we focused on the power of metaphor and through a variety of activties the participants improved their colloquial and idomatic use of English and also their ability to use and create their own metaphoric language.
Enjoy the slides and handout available above and I’ll be back soon with some reworkings of this workshop in the form of new ideas and teaching suggestions about metaphor. And of course if you have any ideas, questions and suggestions to share, please just leave a comment.
It's finnished! 17hours of non-stop top-quality CPD from #IHTOC50. We'll be back in November, 50 glorious years of IH online traiing await.. 3 days ago
We're into the last half hour of #IHTOC50 - what a great day it's been! 3 days ago
