Sarah Mercer

A critical reflection on teaching life skills in ELT

Thursday 22 September 2022 | 4:00-5:30 PM London, UK (Find your local time for this event)

Discussions have raged in education since its earliest inceptions about what purpose education should serve. In this talk, I suggest we need to engage with that same discussion about ELT. It is impossible to teach language without addressing some form of content. As such, educators must reflect critically what social and moral values their content communicates explicitly and implicitly. One set of values that is increasingly being advocated for all school subjects are global life skills. We reflect in this talk on how ELT can effectively and sustainably integrate the teaching of such skills alongside the teaching of the language.

We begin the session by discussing the aims of language education and the notion of an implicit curriculum. We critically evaluate two models of language teaching – CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and PLE (Positive Language Education) – as frameworks to guide thinking about teaching language alongside life skills. We then engage with various dilemmas facing the teaching of such skills including issues of cultural appropriacy and social criticality. Finally, we consider in detail the potential in teaching about socio-emotional competences, compassion, eco-literacy, and individual and collective wellbeing as examples of life skills which can also be utilised to address social and moral issues. To illustrate practical ideas, we draw on activities from the book Psychology in Practice.

Thomas Strasser

The sustainable use of digital technologies

Thursday 13 October 2022 | 4:00-5:30 PM London, UK (Find your local time for this event)

An interactive seminar discussing the latest approaches, concepts and taxonomies concerning the sustainable use of digital technologies in the EFL classroom. We will critically examine mainstream theories like the SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition), TPACK (Technological Pedagogical And Content Knowledge) and the Edu-Apps approach and apply these in an EFL context. What are the methodological potentials of these approaches and which technologies and emerging trends form an essential part of the modern, communicative language teaching curriculum.

The talk will start by addressing the most ‘popular’ problems, fears, and clichés in the field of technology-enhanced learning mainly from an academic perspective. Then we will de-mystify the complexity of ‘emergency remote teaching’ based on empirical data. After a theoretical overview, the fully updated Edtech toolkit will be presented and explored together with course participants helping you find your way through the digital jungle with newly gained academic expertise and practical implementation skills.

Herbert Puchta

Total Physical Response Revisited

Thursday 10 November 2022 | 4:00-5:30 PM London, UK (Find your local time for this event)

Since its initial creation by psychologist James Asher in the 1970s, the Total Physical Response (TPR) has been categorized and critiqued in the literature as an ‘alternative’, ‘designer’, ‘humanistic’ or ‘fringe’ method. These labels are often associated with doubts that TPR has a place within mainstream ELT. TPR seems to have survived nevertheless, and has become a standard feature in the methodological practice of ELT in many young learners’ classrooms. But a look at how TPR is actually used in those classrooms and their teaching materials reveals significant differences between the method initially developed by James Asher and how it is implemented.

In this Masterclass, we start out by looking at the early literature on TPR. We analyze the stages of the method as initially laid out, and we focus on the importance of Asher’s ‘Novel Command’ stage – a crucial phase of the method, and one which is, unfortunately, ignored in many classrooms. We will engage with insights from the fields of embodied cognition and neurobiology, and argue that the full TPR can offer learning experiences that go far beyond the customary repetition, imitation and drill into the realm of constructivist learning. Practical examples and new and original ideas and activities will be presented from my forthcoming book Total Physical Response (TPR) Revisited: From Action Stories to Creativity in the Young-learner Classroom.

Lindsay Clandfield

Pairwork and groupwork, then and now

Thursday 1 December 2022 | 4:00-5:30 PM London, UK (Find your local time for this event)

Pairwork and groupwork is a staple feature of English language teaching materials, so much so that we never think much about it. Open any modern coursebook and you are likely to see many instructions for activities that include some variation of the words ‘Work with a partner’. Was it always this way? There are many good reasons for pairwork and groupwork, but there are also times when perhaps it’s better to avoid. Asking learners to work together has been viewed as undesirable, problematic and even revolutionary in the past. To begin this Masterclass we will examine the rise of pairwork as a feature of communicative language teaching methodology, looking in particular at two key activity types: the jigsaw and the information gap.

Our emphasis on learners working together has also become more difficult as more and more teachers hold classes online. Originally, in the digital space pairwork and groupwork was almost impossible unless done asynchronously. It has become feasible now with the help of modern videoconferencing tools and breakout rooms, but these provide their own particular challenges. I will share some tips and techniques that still allow pair and groupwork in the live online classroom. This includes techniques such as the fishbowl and open pairwork for when you are teaching in a videoconferencing platform.

As technology and teaching circumstances change, it’s always worth re-evaluating how our methodology changes along with it. The latter part of our Masterclass will be of a more practical nature. Using material from my course Studio, I’d like to share various tips and tricks for handling pairwork in the online or face-to-face classroom and some new twists on common pairwork activities that will help all remember why two heads are, indeed, better than one.