Schedule

This is a follow-up workshop to the Keynote talk. In this workshop participants will try out a range of speaking activities, look at how they integrate other skills (including thinking skills) as well as have a go at designing their own activity. The workshop will be hands-on and practical while trying to underpin everything with sound pedagogy. Participants should leave with some ready-to-use activities as well as an understanding of how to design their own appropriate speaking tasks.

Using cooperative learning techniques to enhance communication in the classroom has proven to be very successful. Pupils also need a motivating and meaningful task to perform which enables them to use their communication skills. In task-based instruction, basic pair work and group work are often used to increase student interaction and collaboration. The focus is on the pupils completing the task and using the language as a real means of interaction and sharing. However, they still need structure and instruction. In this workshop more structured cooperative learning formats will be presented and tried out while caryying out a meaningful and motivating task. (Sponsored by Cornelsen)

In this workshop the concept of scaffolding (i.e. providing support) is outlined in the context of what we know about learning a language and which consequences this implies in a differentiated classroom. Various practical activities that combine work on content and language will be demonstrated and tried out. The aim is to help learners individually cope with authentic, meaningful and challenging tasks and allow them to act and interact more and more autonomously in English. (Sponsored by BMS)

“Weitaus die meisten Sprachkontakte basieren auf gesprochener Sprache, daher ist die Einübung mündlicher Kompetenzen im fremdsprachlichen Unterricht eine wichtige Voraussetzung für das erfolgreiche fremdsprachliche Handeln.” (Lehrplan Englisch, Gymnasium Sek I, S. 25)

Following this call to promote speaking skills, this workshop will focus on how to integrate and organize speaking tests in the EFL classroom. I will provide examples of monologic and dialogic speaking tasks, oral language assessment to measure students’ speaking performance as well as other tips and materials to prepare students for oral exams. To make sure NOT everybody’s talking, I will also introduce some creative activities and tasks to keep the rest of the class busy while conducting speaking tests.

This workshop takes the form of a lesson for adults attending Teachers’ Day (very advanced learners of English), but the approach can also be used with younger learners and learners at lower levels of ability. With the help of readily-available materials, I hope to demonstrate how learners can be motivated to perform a series of challenging, interrelated tasks which involve viewing, listening, speaking and writing, and how such an integrated approach can lead to more successful outcomes.

This workshop will focus on speaking skills and how they can be taught in the EFL classroom. Taking “Task-Based Language Teaching” (TBLL) as the basic framework of teaching we will have a look at various models of task-based teaching which are informed by the idea that teaching languages works best when learners are confronted with complex real-world problems. If it is true that learning benefits from dealing with complexity, then teaching isolated skills seems of limited value for the EFL classroom and more integrated approaches are called for instead. Particularly interesting for the concept of integrated teaching is the “komplexe Kompetenzaufgabe” (HALLET 2011), which suggests that teaching speaking (or any other skill) cannot be conceived of in isolated terms but needs to take into account social and cultural contexts as well as other skills. The purpose of this workshop will be to introduce teachers to this concept and its implication and to practice designing complex tasks according to the model set out by HALLET. (Sponsored by Klett)

In our workshop we illustrate and discuss the use of English as a spoken world language in an intercultural and applied teaching context. We present an integrated speaking approach with hands-on activities which enhance students’ language use in Anglophone and (inter)cultural settings. Through an intercomprehension angle, we also demonstrate how French and other Romance languages can serve as facilitators in learning English. Based on the Web as a Corpus approach (Hundt et al. 2007; Diemer 2009), Google Trends, memes, blogs, ads, and online corpora are introduced as teaching resources for the intercultural EFL classroom, with a particular focus on speaking skills and language variation (Brunner & Diemer 2014). The use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) as a means of successful communication in an international context is illustrated with regard to its relevance for the classroom setting. ELF resources, such as CASE (Diemer et al. forthcoming), provide real-life examples as basis for classroom discussions and applied topics such as linguistic and cultural mediation. We also aim to provide a first impression of the Awakening to Languages approach (Candelier et al. 2012). We will also investigate how mixing languages can lead to the construction of multilingual identities in English- and French-based dialects and creoles, as well as bilingual settings, enriching the intercultural EFL classroom.With our approach we aim to provide teachers with various possibilities of motivating students to speak while at the same time making them aware of the interplay of languages and contributing to their intercultural sensitization.