Talking to teenagers in the English language classroom

Watch a recording of Chris Roland's webinar 'Talking to teenagers in the English language classroom'.

About the webinar

Instructions, explanations, requests, corrections, anecdotes, negotiation, warnings and praise all involve us talking to our students. As teacher, what we say and the way that we say it reveals our underlying attitude to those students, our conception of the classroom in general and the language learning principles we are operating by. It is also often a deciding factor in how far we achieve our aims. If we can effectively structure our message, we can normally effectively structure the task.

In this webinar we look at how to frame whatever it is we want to do with our students - exercises, pairwork, skills work, feedback, behaviour - to maximise cooperation and make our classroom a more productive place for everyone.

About the speaker

Chris is a trainer based at ELI, a language academy, in Seville. He works with teachers across a wide variety of contexts: at in-house level, as tutor on the Trinity Certificate and Diploma courses with Oxford TEFL, and in conjunction with local education authorities. He has previously held posts with the British Council in Damascus and Barcelona. He is a regular speaker on the international conference circuit, and his first methodology book, Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom, is available from Pavilion Publishing & Media.

Watch a recording of this webinar below

Comments

Submitted by Jason Jixun M… on Wed, 01/16/2019 - 08:18

Motivation, in the daily bilingual classrooms of my piano courses, usually played the key role to 'wake up' students and interest them to learn more. Meanwhile, a large part of my family-based piano-students (in piano's traditional teaching way) have come to their secondary schooling time. Therefore, I paid more attentions to 'understand young teenagers thinking' and 'motivate their progresses' in this webinar and its training course. From daily self-reflexivity, indeed, I have researched many ways in using 'language games' to motivate my learners. Sometimes, English 'key words and their mother-tongue explanations ', some small warm-up activities & games gave me many associations. Take an example, in order to make a main theme active and impressive, piano needs people to train their single fingering lift-up ability one finger by another. Associated by a small tool - Fingers-muscle Developer, I can join students' English numbers-counting ability and their piano ability together, by giving several numbers in random (something like a piece of phone numbers - 32double45...) and checking the correction of their fingering movements one by one. I thought: though this way was like a small game, it made my learners feel happy to take their 'warm-up' section and test their fast-responding ability much more easily, which were 'written' on their smiles and also interactions with their piano tutor. Many other teachers might share their own ways in doing so and Chris' webinar would be more constructive in theoretical conclusion for guiding more daily practices, which were the main reasons I would like to take part in this world-wide webinar. Hopefully, the net-technology can associate me to take it well and hear more great methods teachers have created in their subjects. Thanks, happy 2019!

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