Image courtesy of Chiew Pang aka @aClilToClimb at #eltpics
Just as a brief hiatus in the midst of this Confidence flow, I’d like to post a couple of links to ‘stuff’ I’ve done recently – hope you don’t mind. Hopefully, you’ll find the things interesting.
In November 2012 (or maybe it was October?), I gave a webinar for the British Council, having been invited by Paul Braddock. The topic – or rather title was Teenage kicks (for grown-ups) and it was a kind of on-line workshop on how to make your coursebook more learner-centred ( or at least how to TRY to…). If you’re at all interested, the webinar is to be found here.
There were some interesting questions in the chatbox, but, if you’ve ever done a webinar, you’ll know that, at least at novice stage as I was, it’s quite hard to keep an eye on your slides, a smile on your face, address your invisible audience somehow directly and watch out for questions all at the same time. SO Paul and I decided that we’d pull the questions out of the box, after finishing the webinar, and I’d answer them as a blog post for the British Council’s TeachingEnglish web. And then the holidays got in the way.
So finally, we uploaded the answers to the ‘questions from the floor’ today. If you’d like to have a look, they’re here and comments would be more than welcome, as I’ve decided to start blogging on the topic as soon as I’ve finished the ‘Confidence Suite’, the next post of which is due tomorrow some time. The questions I answered (my opinions, obviously, not oracle-like empirical answers) were as follows, if you fancy having a ponder yourself:
1. Do you encourage the use of colloquialism and idioms etc. with teens?
2. Any tips for teaching online?
3. Do you take the coursebook as the basis for your lesson or do you use other materials?
4. How do you feel about using online corpora to help sts with language?
Back very soon with the remaining Confidence posts, and on to pastures new…. Oh, and a Happy New Year to you!
