Skip to main content

ALL London branch webinars

http://www.all-london.org.uk/webinars.htm#ForthcomingWebinars

If you are outside the UK, the ALL is the Association for Language Learning, an English modern language teaching association.

Helen Myers, from the London branch, has very generously organised and hosted a number of webinars presented by teachers around England. I did my first webinar recently on teaching texts and found it an enjoyable experience. I hope other people did.

This morning I watched John Connor's webinar entitled "It's a guy thing" in which he attempts to look in some detail at what motivates boys in the languages classroom. He begins with some general points about the psychology of boys and girls, before going into detail about why language lessons are a particular challenge to many boys and how we might help make language learning more palatable for them. It's an excellent presentation, full of relevant points based on long experience, a small dose of theory, along with some amusing anecdote. Younger teachers would do well to spend an hour or so watching it.

As I write, Suzi Bewell from York University is doing her webinar entitled "Literature for languages". Other recorded webinars which you can view at your leisure are by Dominic McGladdery ("Talking Tools"), Joe Dale ("Using Ipads to promote speaking and listening skills") and another presentation by John Connor entitled "Using song". All the links to webinars are here.

If any teachers are interested in doing a presentation I am sure Helen Myers would be interested to hear from you. You can contact her via Twitter @HelenMyers.

I would personally be interested to learn more about TPRS and AIMLANG, both approaches having many followers in North America and elsewhere.

The webinar is a super way for teachers to connect with each other and learn. There is considerable interactivity as attendees can leave comments and ask questions which the presenter can pick up along the way. Presenters can also show powerpoints as they speak or provide visible web links.

Comments

  1. Helen Myers19 October 2014 at 19:39

    Thanks very much for this post and especially for your own webinar, Steve! I really look forward to hosting you again, and yes, please do encourage others to offer to do them! I'd love to hear from them!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).
Post a Comment
Read more

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,
4 comments
Read more

The 2026 GCSE subject content is published!

Two DfE documents were published today. The first was the response to the consultation about the proposed new GCSE (originally due in October 2021) and the second is the subject content document which, ultimately, is of most interest to MFL teachers in England. Here is the link  to the document.  We are talking about an exam to be done from 2026 (current Y7s). There is always a tendency for sceptical teachers to think that consultations are a bit of a sham and that the DfE will just go ahead and do what they want when it comes to exam reform. In this case, the responses to the original proposals were mixed, and most certainly hostile as far as exam boards and professional associations representing the MFL community, universities, head teachers and awarding bodies are concerned. What has emerged does reveal some significant changes which take account of a number of criticisms levelled at the proposals. As I read it, the most important changes relate to vocabulary and the issue of topics
5 comments
Read more