Schedule, Teachers' Day 2017

Research suggests that students learn best when they are engaged in their learning process. True engagement increases students' attention, focus and motivation. It also positively affects their achievements. There seem to be a number of principles, methods and techniques that can facilitate students' engagement both emotionally and cognitively: Active participation, competence and mastery orientation, meaningful and challenging tasks, autonomy support as well as cooperative and collaborative learning are among the most important keywords. The presentation will look at how to get students involved both from a theoretical and a practical viewpoint.

Ways of helping pupils in the Sekundarstufe II become more proficient and have fun at the same time

Students in years 10 and upwards have a good general command of English but they now need to concentrate on extending their general and thematic vocabulary. This talk, including practical tips and materials, will focus on helping students to

• “notice” new words and chunks in authentic texts, audio and video
• independently decide which words are worth learning
• find ways to learn vocabulary that work
• revisit and recycle words and chunks so that they become part of their active vocabulary.

In the Britain and US of the 1960s, the cool cats of counter-culture rebelled against centralised authority with ideas of freedom and freedom of expression. In the 1990s, in the face of increasing top-down pressure from the film studios to conform to their big-budget expectations, Danish film-makers created the Dogme movement focusing on story and interaction between characters to better engage the audience. Both movements were attempts to take back control, with the power and influence coming from the people, from the bottom up. In the same vein, the English language teaching Dogme movement empowers learners and teachers to decide what to learn and how, not just what the globalised publishing industry imposes through their coursebooks.

In this practical workshop we will explore what it means for lessons to be materials-light, conversation-driven and focusing on language as it emerges from learners’ interactions and tasks. We will demonstrate how to start employing these principles in your teaching, with practical ideas for activities, tasks and staging. We will investigate the practicalities of an essentially unpredictable classroom and a post-scripted negotiated syllabus. We will discuss Dogme's relationship with other approaches such as Task-Based Learning. Importantly, though, we will also not reject the coursebook, but rather use all these principles to exploit materials for all their benefits.

'Too long, didn't read' seems to be a widespread phenomenon among pupils; 'they don't like reading' is an often heard complaint by teachers. In this workshop I will present and try out activities and strategies which will

• explore the pupils' reading habits
• give them a more (inter-)active role during the pre-, while- and post-reading phase
• include trailers for books as well as audio-books

and thus, hopefully

• motivate reluctant readers for longer (fictional) texts and therefore
• make reading a lively component of regular school life.

Motivating pupils to speak English in the classroom is a challenge teachers face every day. Equipping yourself with a variety of techniques and methods is absolutely necessary in order to give pupils different opportunities and situations in which to speak English with each other.

It is difficult to give pupils a reason to communicate in English but with cooperative learning techniques which allow pupils to communicate at their level and in a variety of situations the teacher can motivate and engage the pupils.

In this workshop we will look at a number of different techniques ranging from the very basic ones to more complex arrangements. We will also attempt to recreate a cooperative learning classroom based on favoured methods from Spencer Kagan und Norman and Cathy Green.

Many may remember speaking in a foreign language in their school days as merely being oral repetition of grammar structures, reciting language that was designed with little regard for communicative relevance or true meaning. Things of course have changed, and the classroom of today is much more closely geared towards preparing learners to communicate for real in English, be it for business, travel or leisure purposes. This session will consider how we can target this aim by looking at how we can foster students’ motivation to communicate through the use of meaningful and engaging approaches and materials in the classroom. This “hands-on” workshop will be packed with highly practical ideas and will aim to equip participants with a number high quality activities ready to use in the classroom on Monday.

The key to successful learning is motivation. As Shakespeare said, ‘no profit grows where is no pleasure taken’. Introducing drama activities into the English language is a sure-fire way to get students motivated. Drama is also a guaranteed method of improving fluency, communication and pronunciation. Nobody would dispute the fact that effective communication involves going beyond language competence, including the use of gesture, body posture, intonation and other prosodic features, and that drama is ideal for developing these.

So why do many teachers shy away from using drama activities? This session will ease the many concerns we can understandably have before launching into a new style of methodology. It will cover the how and when to introduce drama into your classrooms so that learning becomes a truly memorable experience.