Friday evening for me started off with Carole Ann Robinson’s workshop, “Awareness raising activities for high level learners”. In fact it raised my own awareness on how far we can interpret certain expressions without a given context. Try asking students to imagine as many ways to use “Put it on” as possible. Maybe several have already popped up in your mind just now. How would you interpret the following sentences? “The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.” Again, without context, “it” could refer to a number of things.
With Saturday supplying a full day of 34 different workshops for attendees, it was sometimes almost too difficult to choose which one to go to. For the 11:00 AM session I hesitated between “Online Teaching”, “From Whiteboards to Web 2.0”, and “Developing 21st Century Teaching Skills to cope with Millennials”. In the end, I chose “Online Teaching”, because this is an area where I have no experience even though the thought has certainly crossed my mind. Joanna Malefaki gave this workshop. She’s from Greece and teaches French and German students online. Her presentation was not only informative, but also provided practical online tools and resources. I came out of her session reassured with the feeling that teaching online could actually be a realistic option for me, especially during the down times a lot of us have when school is out of session.
Joanna Malefaki's blog: http://myeltrambles.blogspot.gr
Christina Rebuffet-Broadus's sketchnotes of the Online Teaching session:
For lunch, I ate with some new friends from different areas of France that I had just met at the last workshop. We exchanged our stories on how we got into teaching and how we ended up in France. We talked about all the funny quirks of teaching English to the French as we all so love to do. We exchanged contacts, and now I have new teacher friends in Bordeaux and Paris.
When it came time to start the afternoon sessions, I was a little saddened when I found out that “Using Photography in the Learner Centered Classroom” was cancelled, but not let down at all with Annie McDonald’s workshop “Priming for Listening”. She showed fun and new ways to prepare students for listening to short real world clips. Fun visual ways to depict intonation and syllable stress, which we all know how hard it can be for our students to understand.
After that, the General Assembly for TESOL France members took place. Before the meeting started, I was delighted to find a table with several stacks of all sorts of English teaching textbooks being given away for free! I quickly picked up a Cambridge book on English for the Financial Sector, a book on Idioms in pictures and the equivalent French translation, and another one called Visual Aids for Classroom Interaction. It was hard to pull myself away from such a cornucopia of teaching resources, but the assembly was starting and I took a seat. We received updates from each TESOL branch in France. What workshops and events they had last year and are planning for the forthcoming year. Gillian Evans proudly announced the launch of the Lille branch and our inaugural event. After that last year’s budget was projected and showed a surplus. This year’s forecasted budget was displayed and voted on. And then, for their commendable work and efforts, the Executive Committee was unanimously voted to be kept the same.
Free books!
Next up, was Graciela Alchini from Mexico, and presentation “Enhancing Both Language and Personal Skills through Collaborative Learning”. Combining group projects, language, and teaching students how to deal with different personalities in realistic situations. This certainly interested me, because where I work, at EDHEC, we assign lots of group projects and I had always felt that it was sometimes hard to make the students take them seriously as if it were a real world situation. Peer evaluation, not only on presentations, but also on how others contributed and worked along a project seemed to be a good strategy as well as recording and/or videotaping them. I may consider dabbling with the latter.
Finally, the big stage was given up to the legendary Stephen Krashen. Once he picked up the microphone, the filled auditorium was swept away in amazement of his vast knowledge which, in my opinion could rival Noam Chomsky’s. I can’t begin to fully explain in detail his theories on second language acquisition nor on his anecdotes about Washoe, the first chimpanzee that could use sign language, as well as on bird calls, Cosmos the parrot, and surprisingly on alien language communication theories. But one thing is for sure, I walked out of there, not only feeling lucky to have been in the presence such a great mind, but also having the strange desire to get my own talking pet parrot.
An hour later, about 70 of the attendees all met up for the specially planned dinner in a French Basque-style restaurant. I was at a table with English teachers from all over; Spain, Lebanon, Hungary, Greece, and Holland. We shared our thoughts on teaching and compared what it’s like to teach in different cultures. We exchanged contacts, and now I have a place to stay if I ever visited their countries.
Going to more pedagogical workshops isn’t exactly how I imagine an ideal Sunday morning. But if you truly enjoy teaching and have, yourself, an appetite for learning, then last Sunday’s workshop lineup would have been a hard one to resist. Once again hesitating between several tempting options, I chose to go to Anita Kwiatkowska’s (from Poland) session “Fun and Games 2”. Anita had done “Fun and Games 1” last year and since I heard so many people praising her last year, I made sure not to miss her this time. Anita showed us many easy-to-prepare and materials light games to use in the classroom. From Spelling races, to “Who Am I?” with sticky-tabs on your back, to drawing “pies” and “grids” to make your own board/quiz game. Personally, I like using games, and it was albeit refreshing to see that some of the ideas I already use with the help of technology could actually be done in a “low-tech” way.
Anita's blog: http://anita-kwiatkowska.blogspot.fr/
Now for the next workshop, I decided to see Christina Rebuffet-Broadus. Who is not only the editor of TESOL France’s quarterly magazine The Teaching Times, but truly impressed me when I saw her visual mind mapping/ sketchnote taking skills in the “Online Teaching” session (posted above). Christina’s talk was “Top tools for truly effective training courses.” She showed us a variety of documents and time-saving resources she has used over the years when training business professionals all while keeping with a humorous train theme (for training). Her methods proved to be a good way to reduce planning stress and I plan to grab a few pdfs that are available on her blog.
Christina's highly recommended blog: http://ilovetefl.wordpress.com/
The last workshop I attended, and honestly one of my favorites of the weekend, was from Colin McKenzie on building and maintaining classroom rapport. He demonstrated fun and interactive ways to build trust, credibility, and mutual understanding with students. For example, by simply asking others about the origins and meanings of their names, or by guessing whether certain statements about him were true or false, or by even getting people to breathe together. These activities and more reminded me just how important it is for students to feel connected to the teacher as well as the other classmates.
From "My Not So Secret Life". Which one do you think is true about Colin McKenzie?
To wrap up this colossal colloquium, the closing plenary was once again given by none other than this year’s guest of honor, Stephen Krashen. He started off by sharing his secrets on the writing and composing process. Simply put: 1. Revision, 2. Panning, 3. Re-read, 4. Delay Editing, 5. Incubation, and 6. Daily Regular Writing. I’m not going to reiterate what he said about each, but what I can say is that his outline and advice may have actually inspired me to write this weekend synopsis. After writing, he told us that grammar only matters to a very small percentage of people in the world. Besides, linguists and grammar teachers, most people don’t even think about grammar. Thus, we must be very careful with how we present grammar to students. First of all, by making sure the rules are clear, then by focusing on form, then by being careful with time restraints, and on top of that making sure the input is interesting and comprehensible. Consequently, even if you have followed all those steps, the success rate for learning grammar is still slim. He then went on to conclude by saying that despite all of those things, that grammar isn’t so bad.
