Materials Adaptation & Design (or…. Breathing creativity and communication into your materials)

Wednesday, January 11, 2023 – 12:00pm

Presented by Marisa Constantinides

Most teachers have to use coursebooks, often coursebooks they were not involved in selecting. Whether they have positive feelings about their assigned coursebooks or not, “it is a truth universally acknowledged” that all coursebooks need positive intervention from the teacher, for practical and pedagogic reasons. In this presentation, I would like to share ideas about how to apply principles of communicative materials design to materials adaptation, turn meaningless exercises into meaningful and creative activities, and consider how these adaptations can be tailored to mixed-level teaching.

CLIL and learning technologies in the “new normal”

Sunday, January 15, 2023 – 5:00pm

Presented by Letizia Cinganotto

Starting from a brief overview of the latest research trends in the field of learning technologies for CLIL, the webinar will highlight some examples of webtools and platforms to enhance CLIL activities in the so-called “new normal”, referred to the post-pandemic era.

Think globally, act locally: materials adaptation

Sunday, January 22, 2023 – 12:00pm

 

Presented by Alan Pulverness

As every teacher knows, there is no such thing as the perfect coursebook. Published materials are always written for idealised teaching situations and always require some degree of adaptation to meet the needs of particular learners in particular classrooms. Indeed, we could say that that teachers are always the co-writers of the materials they use. In this webinar we will look at the partnership between teachers and materials. We will ask what teachers can reasonably expect from materials and what they should expect to provide themselves. How can they make the most of what is on the page? What changes can they make? What can they add and what can they remove? And in the last resort, what can they substitute? We will consider the range of interventions that teachers can make in order to modify, simplify or complexify coursebook materials. And we will look at ways in which teachers can intervene to localise and personalize their textbooks.

Using CLIL in the language classroom

Wednesday, January 25, 2023 – 4:00pm

Presented by Tom Rickman

We are probably all familiar by now with CLIL used in secondary and tertiary education to teach academic subjects through English .Elements of CLIL have long been integrated into materials for YLs and even very young learners But what about a class of adults following  a normal language curriculum . ? .

This session will explore how learning can be enriched and communication and understanding between students enhanced by introducing ESP type activities into the standard course syllabus of an adult language class. These activities would be taken from some of the professional and academic fields represented in the learning group . It would also involve strands  of flipped learning and mini presentations given by learnership themselves