Be a Flamingo in a Flock of Pigeons: Teaching the Syllabus in Creative Ways

Our desire as teachers to be creative and to encourage our learners’ creativity are prime motivating factors in our own professional self-development and self-renewal. Yet there is often a tension perceived between ‘being creative’ in our lessons and the demands of standardised curricula and testing.  In this interactive talk, Antonia will explore reasons why it is so important to resolve that tension – to teach the syllabus in creative ways.  The workshop will also offer practical ideas to help you become that flamingo in your teaching.

Antonia Clare is a teacher, trainer, international conference speaker and author.  Her special interests include the use of video and new technologies in ELT, creativity and the psychology of language learning. She has taught and trained around the world, and co-authored bestselling coursebook titles including Total English and Speakout (Pearson).  She is currently a freelance writer and consultant trainer with NILE. Her latest publication is The Creative Teacher’s Compendium – An A-Z guide of creative activities for the language classroom, published by Pavilion ELT.

How to Integrate Life Skills into your English Language Teaching

Teachers understand the importance of helping their students develop life skills, as well as school subjects.  But how can they do this when there is no extra time for it? This talk shows how life skills or competencies can be integrated into English language learning activities without taking up additional classroom time and resource. It also shows how the Cambridge Life Competencies Framework helps teachers understand better which skills they are developing and how they can build those up gradually over time.

Niall Curry is a Lecturer in Academic Writing at the Centre for Academic Writing at Coventry University. He has been actively engaged in both teaching and research for many years and his teaching covers a range of topics in applied linguistics and language pedagogy. His research crosses many fields, including language teaching and learning, digital pedagogy, English medium instruction, corpus linguistics, and academic discourse. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Academic Writing and he holds a PhD in corpus and contrastive linguistics from the University of Limerick.

Write up there! From B2 First to C1 Advanced

This session will look at how students can develop their writing skills and the more important areas to consider and focus on when taking the step up to C1 Advanced from B2 First. We will consider the different stages of the writing process and explore the use of authentic material and skills integration in face-to-face and online contexts. We will then move on to focus on two assessment criteria in particular – organisation and communicative achievement – and explore how to support students in understanding and developing these aspects of their writing. We will end with some ideas on how best to take advantage of digital platforms and thus foster learner autonomy and responsibility, hopefully shifting some of the critical burden from teachers to their students.

George started working at Cambridge Assessment English in 2013 after over 10 years’ experience teaching in Latin America, Iberia and the UK to students of all ages and levels. He worked in the Assessment department in Cambridge for 3 years on a variety of exams and the Young Learners revision project. He moved to the Madrid office in 2016, where he has worked on various assessment projects with regional bilingual programmes, and has designed and delivered training programmes for teachers across the world. He has a particular interest in the blended classroom and evolving approaches to formative assessment.

Victoria Peña has worked for Cambridge Assessment English since September 2018. Prior to that, she taught English topreschool, primary and secondary school students for ten years, as well as preparing adults for Cambridge examinations. Since joining Cambridge Assessment English, she has been involved in creating content for teachers and collaborating in different government bilingual projects. She holds a degree in Translation and Interpreting and an MA in Applied Linguistics and a PhD focusing on the washback of proficiency exams.

English as a Lingua Franca and the Myth of the Native Speaker

There is a persistent belief in ELT, an ideology if you will – often referred to as native speakerism, that ‘native speakers’ are better teachers. They are better because they have superior knowledge of the language. A wider vocabulary. Better pronunciation. They are more fluent. They are unique sources of cultural knowledge. Their teaching methodology is better.

However, do these arguments about the superiority of ‘native speaker’ teachers hold any water in a world where English has become a global lingua franca? In this talk I will debunk some of these myths about ‘native speakers’, and argue that all teachers, whether ‘native’ or ‘non-native’, should be evaluated for their pedagogical skills and professionalism, rather than for a language their unwittingly picked up as children. To do so, I will refer to appropriate research and literature, as well as my own experience as an English teacher, teacher trainer and language learner.

Marek Kiczkowiak is the founder of TEFL Equity Advocates & Academy, where he helps English teachers tackle native speakerism, promote equality and teach English for global communication. He’s written numerous peer-reviewed research papers, co-written a teaching methodology book Teaching English as a Lingua Franca: The Journey from EFL to ELF and a 7-level course book Voices for National Geographic Learning. He runs his own company, Academic English Now, where he helps PhD students write excellent theses and research papers for high-impact journals.

Teaching the Whole Student: Cultivating a Positive Mindset in Hard Times

Cultivating a positive mindset, learning to grow from failure and developing a sense of self are just some of the crucial skills our students need, particularly in these challenging times. In this talk, I will be looking at how we can use our unique position as language teachers to encourage our students both to study well and to live well.

Katherine Stannett is an author with over twenty years of experience. She spent two years in Japan in the 1990s, teaching English to a wide variety of students in many different settings. She is the co-author of the several successful secondary series and has also written articles, songs and raps for many popular EFL magazines. Most recently, she has written two levels of the new National Geographic Middle School series, ‘Impact’ and one level of the new National Geographic Primary series, ‘Look’. She has given presentations and run workshops in many countries around the world, including Poland, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Honduras, Brazil, Spain and Slovenia and also conducts webinars from her home office in the UK.

Spark Teenagers’ interest by using Song Apps and Lyrics in the Classroom

Do you remember the day when apps invaded our lives? Exactly, neither do I, because it’s not a matter of just one day. Whether we like it or not, we need to embrace the fact that YouTube and TikTok have become our reality and that’s what the near future holds for us. In this session we will see how to implement some of those ‘procrastination’ and ‘distraction’ apps in the classroom with teens. We will look at some engaging listening tasks, as well as some fun pre-and-post listening activities. If you are into teaching English to music, too, then I hope you will take a chance to try out some of today’s activities in your Monday class.

Veronika has been in TEFL since 2014. She has worked in Manchester, Moscow, Genoa, and she’s been living in Milan for 5 years. She has got experience teaching all age groups, CLIL, Cambridge and IELTS classes. She enjoys having fun with VYL and teaching high school students. Veronika is also passionate about rock music and occasionally she organises her English-speaking rock events on a voluntary basis, both face-to-face and online.

Nasrudin and the tiger – 5 activities to teach English through storytelling

Using the traditional Turkish folk tale of Nasrudin and the tiger as an example, in this workshop we will learn some hands-on activities to include storytelling in our everyday lessons. Learn how to make your lessons more engaging and fun for your students, use stories to enhance your students’ listening and speaking skills, while at the same time including activities to work on accuracy and language learning.

Simona is an English teacher at IH Milano and San Donato. She has always been passionate about stories, and after discovering storytelling, she has started experimenting with it in- and outside the class, trying to bring more creativity into language learning.

Reflections on synchronous and asynchronous learning

Teaching and learning have undergone a period of sweeping changes which was almost unthinkable in the last decade. As we are standing at the crossroads where learning can take place both synchronously and asynchronously, how can teachers best use lesson time to maximise language learning? In search of answers, I shall reflect on my personal observations and explore some implications for lesson planning and choice of activities.

Daniel went into ELT in 2019 and started teaching at IH Milan the same year. He works with Young Learners, teens, and adults across the full range of CEFR language levels. He views language as something which exists everywhere around us and lays great emphasis on developing learners’ communicative competence in his teaching. Prior to ELT, Daniel trained as a classical musician and delivered outreach workshops for a number of major performing arts in the UK.