Description
There’s a great, commonly felt need, especially among experienced language teachers, to reach their learners in more effective ways, and to renovate their professional toolbox.
Sooner or later in their careers, teachers start to feel that their activities are becoming quite repetitive, and that students should be more motivated to learn contents and competencies.
If you have similar feelings in your job, here’s some good news: a variety of easy-to-implement methods, strategies and tools is available for you! This English Language Teaching (ELT) course has been created for experienced English language teachers who want to update their language teaching skills.
Course participants will engage in inspiring student-centered teaching methods through meaningful and interactive tasks with the intention of developing their language teaching practices.
Emphasis will be placed on Communicative Language Teaching, Task-Based Learning, Content and Language Integrated Learning, and Content-Based Instruction.
ELT course participants will also get new brilliant ideas to use authentic materials, as well as to teach contextualized grammar and pronunciation.
Finally, they will become more effective in dealing with classroom management issues such as error correction and the providing of useful feedback.
By the end of the course, participants will have learned how to maintain student motivation and how to promote an effective and stimulating learning environment.
They will have met other language teaching professionals from around Europe, with whom they will have fruitfully shared different teaching experiences and created a variety of activities to bring home and use with their own learners.
Participants will also be given ideas for continuing their professional development after the course.
Learning outcomes
This course will help the participants to:
- Involve their learners through a variety of tasks that encourage active participation and engagement from everyone in class;
- Design engaging activities following approaches and methods such as Communicative Language Teaching, Task-Based Learning, Content and Language Integrated Learning.
- Incorporate games and the use of authentic materials into their lessons;
- Gain useful skills for creating an effective (and fun) learning environment when teaching both content and language;
- Feel more confident, creative, and inspired in their classroom;
- Discover new formulas and tips for maintaining student motivation in language learning.
Tentative schedule
Day 1 – Course introduction & welcome
- Course Introduction;
- Presentations;
- Warm-up Activities;
- Teacher (and Student) Responsibilities;
- Learner Preferences, Pair and Group Work;
- Student versus Teacher centered classrooms.
Day 2 – Classroom communication
- Communicative Language Teaching (CLT);
- Motivating and Communicative activities – let’s practice some;
- Communicative Competence – what’s more important fluency or accuracy?
- Teaching through contexts (situations, scenarios, and events).
Day 3 – Incorporating materials
- Authentic Materials: How to incorporate listening and reading texts from the real world of native speakers;
- Task Based Learning – what can your learners design, create and produce?
- Games and Teaching Pronunciation through innovative language rhythms.
Day 4 – CBI and CLIL in your classroom
- Content Based Instruction (CBI) versus Content Integrated Learning (CLIL);
- How to create a CBI or CLIL lesson or unit integrating all four skills;
- How to deal with various classroom scenarios?
- Instructions, Monitoring, Developing Rapport;
- How should we really correct our students errors in output (writing and speaking)?
Day 5 – Presentations, peer feedback
- Final Presentations – Providing learners with feedback;
- Pursuing Professional Development;
- Peer Observation.
Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities
- Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion;
- Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance;
- Excursion and other external cultural activities.