Experienced – Page 2 – Advance Consulting for Education

Using Drama to Teach English

Drama provides us with a wonderful selection of activities and techniques to use in the English language classroom. Drama activities are interactive, creative, and just plain fun. They are effective with all personality types (both outgoing and reserved), all language ability levels, all ages and all class sizes. And best of all, you don’t have to be a drama expert to use these activities.

In this course, we take you through why drama activities are effective in the language classroom and the different types of activities that you can select from. The majority of the course, however, involves introducing you to specific drama activities to use. At the end of the course you will have a full tool box of drama activities to draw from.

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Using Drama Activities to Teach Pronunciation

There are many drama activities that actors use to warm up their voices and improve their projection, enunciation and overall vocal delivery. Many of these activities can be used with English language learners to help them improve different features of their English pronunciation, such as phoneme articulation, intonation, word stress, sentence stress, volume and pacing. They can also help our students learn how to express emotions and ideas correctly and accurately. In this session we take you through a variety of fun and effective voice activities for you to use with your students.

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Using Debates to Teach English

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.

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Understanding Nonverbal Communication

In this highly interactive course, we examine the cultural complexities of nonverbal communication. We define the purposes of nonverbal communication in social settings and the ways in which it can be misunderstood in intercultural contexts. We then discuss the significance of paralinguistics in nonverbal communication. Gestures, facial expressions, head movement, and eye contact are explored as modes of nonverbal communication that convey specific social messages. Next, cultural differences in personal space, posture, physical contact, physical appearance and displaying emotion are reviewed to further develop an understanding of the subtle dynamics of nonverbal communication.

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Understanding Different Types of Tests and Assessments

This course examines the different types of tests and assessments that you, as a teacher, might develop or that students might encounter in their path toward greater English proficiency. Due to the wide variety of different test types, it is helpful to develop a vocabulary to better understand the various characteristics of test types. This course will discuss standardized, placement, and diagnostic assessments. It will identify the difference between formative and summative tests and assessments and conclude with a discussion of dynamic assessment.

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The Realities of Multicultural Management

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.

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The Product vs Process Approach to Writing

Two of the most commonly used approaches to teaching writing are the product approach and the process approach. In this course we will define both approaches and discuss the advantages of each. We will then look at activities to use for each approach. Teachers will come away with a toolkit of writing activities that are appropriate for a wide range of student language proficiencies. The process of writing can seem like a daunting task for our students, but by taking advantage of the product and process approaches, students can learn how to break down the writing process into manageable tasks.

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The Principles of Testing and Assessment

In this course, we will explore the principles of testing and assessment in an ESL setting. We will examine the complex relationship between teaching, assessment and testing within the classroom. We will then explore the 5 principles of testing and assessment, which include validity, reliability, authenticity, practicality and washback. Finally, we will take a look at the application of the 5 principles to various assessment scenarios.

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The Power of Language Use

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.

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The Dark Side of Classroom Management – Handling Aggressive Student Behaviour

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.

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Experience Level: Experienced