Expert – Advance Consulting for Education

Yes, There ARE Patterns in English Spelling

Students and teachers alike often complain about the challenges of English spelling, given the myriad rules which seem to break other rules, which break other rules. There does not seem to be much consistency between how words are pronounced and how they are spelled. One sound can be spelled three, four or five different ways. In this informative session, we will establish that there are actually patterns in English spelling, many of which are rooted in the history of the language. We will then examine these patterns in detail as a foundation for helping to understand the rules of English spelling. Finally, we will look at various teaching strategies and activities that you can use in order to effectively teach spelling to your students.

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Using Story Writing to Teach English

Story writing allows students to personalize the language they have learned. It is motivating and interesting because students work on their productive language skills, grammar, spelling and writing in a creative way. In this interactive course, we will first review the components of an effective story. Participants will then be introduced to various story writing activities that can be used in the language classroom with different levels of students.

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Using Literature and Graded Readers to Teach Reading

Literature is a rich source of language for English language students. The universal themes, emotions and messages of great fiction writing speak to students of all ages and backgrounds. In order to make literature accessible to all levels of English language learners, major and specialty publishers have created graded readers. Graded readers are adaptations of literary works and non-fiction works that preserve the plot, characters and settings of the stories but tell them with simplified grammar and vocabulary. In this session we take you through a variety of activities to use with literature, fiction and non-fiction graded readers in order to increase the amount of extensive reading that your students do both in class and outside of class.

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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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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 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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Teaching the Academic Word List

In 2000, Averil Coxhead determined that there was a set of words that was crucial for success in an English academic context, the Academic Word List. This brought about a large change in the way vocabulary for English for Academic Purposes was viewed. In this course, we will look at what the Academic Word List is, the background to its development, why it is important for both instructors and students to be aware of it, and finally some strategies and activities to use when teaching the Academic Word List.

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Teaching Students ‘Unstress’

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.

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Experience Level: Expert