English Workshop: Listening skill

It was great to see so many keen teachers at the first session of the English Workshop: Developing and Activating skills in English at the CEP in Córdoba, and pleased to find some faces from last year's course, too!

As always, time just flew by and we'd only just scratched the surface of so many interesting and important issues. With this in mind it'd be great to use the blog of this course as a place to sound off anything we haven't had time to deal with in depth during the session and an opportunity to get things off our chests...Who knows, they may just be a solution for a tricky situation around the corner.

Something that kept on cropping up again and again was the problem of large classes and the difficulties of teaching language (and not only language!) with sometimes 30 or more students who aren't always motivated. Motivation is of course central to creating a positive learning environment and it is part of our responsibility as teachers to get and maintain our students motivated. But what do we do with those that just don't want to be motivated? Do we persevere, perhaps at the cost of the rest of the class? Do we crack on without them? How do you find the right balance? It'd be great to hear your thoughts on that, so over to you...

Neda and me are looking forward to seeing you at the next session: Tomorrow Thursday, 7 Feb, at 17:30  we´ll be looking at "Reading". We´ll cover:

• Motivation and creation of reading habits.
• Differences and similarities between first and second language reading 
• Processes and strategies for 2L reading
• Extensive and Intensive Reading

Neda suggests that, If you want to get in the mood for Thursday, you could start by thinking about your favourite folk tales or traditional stories!

Finally, please don´t forget our fantastic course blog!! I see that some of you have already made some wonderful contributions, so don´t be shy, share your thoughts and ideas!

This is the presentation on Listening / Language and Music (24th January).

To see all the posts on  this course, click on the label English Workshop.