Pre-conference Workshops

Pre Conference Workshops will be held on Friday 1 October 2010

TESOLANZ/CLANZ member rate $95.00

Non-member rate $120.00

(This fee includes one workshop and afternoon tea)

Session one: Friday 1.00 – 2.30pm: Merrill Swain

Session two: Friday 3.00 – 4.30pm: David Nunan or Jill & Charlie Hadfield

Jill and Charlie Hadfield

Jill and Charlie Hadfield are pre-conference workshop presenters and have worked as teachers and teacher trainers in Britain, France, China, Tibet and Madagascar and run short courses and seminars for teachers in many other parts of the world. Charlie now teaches at ELA, Auckland University, and Jill at Unitec New Zealand. Between them they have written over thirty books, including the Longman Communication Games series, five books in the Oxford Basics series and Classroom Dynamics and a course for primary children: Excellent! published by Longman. Two teacher education books were published in 2008: Top Tools for Language Teachers (Pearson) and An Introduction to Teaching English (OUP). Jill’s new book on motivation, co authored with Zoltan Dornyei, is due in 2010.

Teaching Grammar Creatively
This practical workshop will focus on techniques and activities for practising grammar structures in speaking and writing. Grammar practice activities are too often decontextualised and uncommunicative, relying either on mechanical repetition or on intellectual analysis of grammatical structures. The focus in this workshop will be on activities that practise grammar in a different way: exploring activities that establish a context for grammar, provide opportunities for meaningful communication, and draw on students’ creativity and sense of play. Engaging students in this way, we would argue, provides a more profound learning experience than either rote-learning or intellectual analysis.

David Nunan
Empowerment through action research
I have been an enthusiastic practitioner of and advocate for action research for many years. I believe that AR is one of the most effective ways through which teachers can take greater control of their own teaching and their own ongoing professional development. While taking part in action research involves teachers in additional work, it also gives them greater power over their professional workplace, and is the ideal mechanism for professional growth and development. Involving learners as collaborators in action research (doing research with them rather than on them) can also contribute to the growth of learner autonomy and give learners greater power over their own learning.

In this workshop, participants will work through the steps involved in planning and implementing classroom-based action research. Following an initial input and discussion session, the bulk of the workshop will be given over to a small group task in which participants will work collaboratively to create an action research plan.

Merrill Swain
Humour in the ESL Classroom
OISE/UT
During this workshop, we will explore the use of humour in the language classroom. The literature on humour discusses three types: universal or reality-based humour; culture-based humour; and linguistic or word-based humour. We will focus on the third type which includes riddles and puns. We will look at examples of students’ languaging (collaborative dialogue and private speech) in which learners use language to solve the linguistically and cognitively complex problems evoked by riddles and puns. The students’ languaging is a source of second language learning.

Pauline Gibbons: Building Bridges to Text Workshop – please note, this workshop has been cancelled.

Past Conferences