Dianne Tyers has worked in the English Language Teaching field for the past twenty-five years. She has held positions as a teacher, teacher trainer, regional manager, and program developer in four different countries (Japan, Australia, the US and Canada). She owns Advance Consulting for Education, INC, an English language teacher training and curriculum development company. In addition to a Masters in Applied Linguistics from the University of Queensland, she holds an MBA from the Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario. She is currently a PhD candidate at OISE, University of Toronto. Dianne has been a keynote speaker at several English language conferences and she frequently presents at local, national and international conferences on teaching and management techniques, culture and language learning.
Debating, a formal process to follow to argue a point or position, is an effective communication task to include in speaking classes in order to give students the opportunity to work on key speaking skills. These skills include offering opinion, agreeing, disagreeing and persuading. In this session, we look at how to use debates in our speaking classes to fully exploit student experiential learning.
Management in any type of organization is a challenging endeavour. Management in an education setting that also involves individuals from a variety of cultural backgrounds is even more challenging. In this course, you will learn some simple frameworks that can help you better understand the dynamics of the personal interactions in your multicultural education organization. With this better understanding you will be able to manage those interactions more effectively and successfully. The course includes some practice using the frameworks to hypothesize what is happening in several multicultural communication management scenarios. The course concludes with a checklist of characteristics that will help you be a more effective multicultural manager.
When we teach language, we often position it as a tool for communication, which it very legitimately is. This is a positive shift from previous generations where language was seen as an academic subject – you learned it, received a grade and promptly forgot it. However, with our advanced students, we want to make sure they understand that language is much more than just a communication tool; we want them to understand the power of language. In this session, we’re going to look at the vocabulary, grammar, discourse and paralinguistic tools that can be strategically used in order to be persuasive.
In this session, we introduce different frameworks with which to analyze and understand aggressive student behaviour in the classroom. The frameworks come from a variety of academic fields including intercultural communication, education, counselling and psychology. These frameworks are applied to real life scenarios in order to develop practical classroom management strategies with which to mitigate and/or diffuse the aggression.
In this session, we introduce three different lesson patterns to use to fully exploit all of the language learning potential in a listening text. The first lesson pattern exploits the listening text for both meaning and form. The second lesson pattern exploits the content of the listening text for meaning. Finally, the third lesson pattern exploits the language of the listening text for form. With these three lesson patterns in your planning repertoire you can make strategic decisions about how to use a listening text for maximum learning effect with a specific group of students.
In this session, we look at the importance of stress in determining the intelligibility of student pronunciation. One of four main components of the suprasegmental features of pronunciation, stress is often overlooked in our teaching of pronunciation. Because English is a stress-timed language, however, stress plays an important role in English pronunciation. Interestingly, the main student challenge is not putting stress on syllables or words, but unstressing those syllables or words that should NOT be stressed, hence the concept of ‘unstress’ that we explore.
This session was developed and first presented by Silvia Rossi of Mount Royal University, Calgary, Alberta.
English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students have quite a challenge ahead of them. Not only do they need to learn the English language to quite a high level of proficiency, including complex vocabulary and complex grammar, they also need to learn different ways of thinking that will enable them to be successful in a higher education setting in an English-speaking context. In this session we will discuss the concept of critical thinking and its relationship to EAP student success, we will explore some of the cultural assumptions behind the concept, and finally, we will take a look at some possible approaches to teaching our students critical thinking.
Higher level students, particularly those who are looking to move into higher education studies at an English-speaking university, need to learn to read critically. Reading critically means not just understanding the words in the text but also being able to ‘read between the lines’ for other layers of meaning presented by the author.
The typical grammar practice activity comes right out a textbook. It is usually a fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, matching or sentence completion activity. While there is a place in our language classrooms for individual written grammar practice from a textbook, this is not the only type of grammar practice activity that we should use. If we restrict our grammar practice to textbook-based activities, our students will not have the opportunity to work on the language in a more productive, interactive and spontaneous way. In this course, we will take you through different activities that will allow you to take your grammar practice activities out of the textbook to give your students a more engaging and memorable learning experience.
Large classes are usually defined as classes with more than 30 students. Large classes can be both challenging and rewarding. With a high number of students, large classes provide plenty of opportunity for student collaboration, cooperation and self-directed learning. Language teachers can employ a variety of stimulating partner, group and class based activities to get students discussing and sharing their language skills in a setting that is both controlled and interactive. This session will review a variety of classroom management techniques and activity adaptations to maximize language learning in a large class scenario to fully exploit the teaching and learning opportunities presented by this type of class.
