TeachingEnglish newsletter 22 January 2020

TeachingEnglish newsletter 22 January 2020 Welcome to this special edition of the TeachingEnglish newsletter. In addition to news of events, resources and development opportunities, in this issue we also feature resources of particular relevance to South Asia. If you are interested in becoming part of a teacher network in South Asia, you can find a list of associations and networks here. And to mark International Day of Education on 24 January, please join us for a special webinar, Storytelling for diverse voices, with David Heathfield and Alla Göksu. We hope you find these resources useful. The TeachingEnglish team Special announcement – EnglishAgenda and TeachingEnglish to unite to become one global website! From 1 February 2020, EnglishAgenda and TeachingEnglish will join forces to provide a single British Council online home for teachers and teacher educators. The new, unique site is an opportunity to help you develop a career path by ensuring that there is a single online space to support you in every step of your professional journey. As of 31 January 2020, EnglishAgenda will be retired, and users will automatically be redirected to the relevant section on TeachingEnglish. Read on to find out where the new content will be. Education in focus: South Asia podcast series Over nine episodes, we aim to promote a better understanding of relevant research, key challenges and innovations related to improving teaching and learning across the South Asia region. Episodes 1–3 (Features of successful education systems; Raising student learning outcomes; and Inclusive education) are available to listen to now. Find out more. 9th BELTA International Conference, 13-15 March, Dhaka The theme for the 9th BELTA conference is 'English language education for sustainable development' and the keynote speaker is Richard Smith, University of Warwick. The conference will take place at the United International University and more details can be found here.  Teaching in the low-resource classroom Throughout the world, English is often taught in ‘low-resource’ classrooms, but there are few training materials which are derived from and which reflect this reality. The materials presented here feature teachers from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan and are intended to help fill this gap.  Adapting the rhythm of your lessons to whatever may happen Sometimes your students, due to mysterious reasons, finish activities faster than you thought they would. That's great! It is because you have explained that grammatical topic incredibly well, of course; it's all your merit. But the problem is that you may not have any other activity prepared – you know, we are only human! Read Ingrid Mosquera's post to find out more about different ways of squeezing an activity out to the last drop. Making good materials for everyone, everywhere, no matter how much money they have – webinar The next IATEFL 'MaWSIG meets ...' webinar – 25 January 2020 at 13.30 UK time – welcomes Linda Ruas and Margarita Kosior of the Global Issues SIG. They will be discussing the topic of ‘Making good materials for everyone, everywhere, no matter how much money they have’. Both Linda and Margarita have been involved in projects teaching English learners and training teachers, or making materials for use in areas with limited resources, be it financial or technological, and will share ideas for creating learning materials under these constraints. You can join the webinar here, and there is no need to register. Burns Night and Scotland Robert Burns (1759–96), also known as Rabbie Burns, is famous for the poetry he wrote in the Scots language. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide on Burns Night (25 January). Find out more about Burns and Scotland here and encourage your teenage students to discover more about how Burns Night is celebrated here. Free online course – English in Early Childhood: Language Learning and Development How do very young children best learn English as an additional language while they're still learning their mother tongue? How and why do children learn best through play? What can parents and practitioners do to enable children to get the most out of a learning experience? Discover how very young children learn English as an additional language and how you can help them progress with this free online course that starts 10 February 2020.  Developing expertise through experience In December, British Council Chennai organised a panel discussion on the topic ‘How teachers become experts: Stories of continuing professional development’. Speakers reflected on the career trajectories of ELT practitioners and experts and gathered insights into the influence of personal stories in the professional development of a teacher.  The event also introduced the British Council publication Developing expertise through experience, edited by Alan Maley, and accompanying e-file Developing expertise through experience: Ideas for continuing professional development. ‌ British Council teacher community on Facebook Join the British Council teacher community on Facebook to share ideas, resources and learning opportunities. ‌ Visit our website STAY CONNECTED ‌ ‌

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TeachingEnglish newsletter 08 January 2020

TeachingEnglish newsletter 08 January 2020 Welcome to the first edition of the TeachingEnglish newsletter for 2020! To start off the year, we have news of an exciting upcoming webinar, TWO special lesson plans to kick off the year with primary learners and ONE for adults, two calls for proposals, a great blog post and we announce the winner of our blog of the month award for November 2019. We hope you find these resources, events and opportunities useful, and we wish you all a very happy new year and new decade. The TeachingEnglish team Storytelling for diverse voices – webinar Join us on 24 January 2020 at 12.00 p.m. UK time for our webinar, 'Storytelling for diverse voices', with David Heathfield and Alla Göksu. In this inclusive workshop, you will respond creatively to a folk story, share stories you know, learn about the impact storytelling can have on school students from diverse cultural and social backgrounds with different abilities and dispositions towards learning, and more. Find out more and register for the webinar here. An English action plan A lot of people make resolutions at the beginning of a new year, and January is a good time for language learners to think about what they can do to maximise their learning in the year ahead. The lesson starts with a brainstorming activity, then learners are guided to notice how language practice can be divided into distinct skills and given an opportunity to come up with creative ideas for practising English. The lesson finishes with learners making their own action plan for the year ahead. Read more. Dictionary Research Awards: Call for proposals The Hornby Trust announces a call for proposals under the A.S. Hornby Dictionary Research Awards initiative (ASHDRA) for 2020. Each award will be for a research project of up to two years. The maximum amount for any one award will be £15,000 disbursed over one or two years. You may apply for the full amount of £15,000 or for a smaller amount, depending on the scale of your activity. The deadline for proposals is 17 April 2020. Find out more. Featured blog of the month award for November 2019 Our featured blog of the month award for November 2019 goes to Marek at TEFL Equity Advocates and his post, 'How to write materials and lesson plans for teaching English as a lingua franca'. Shortlisted posts include Cristina Cabal's 'The 5 Seconds Game to Revise Vocabulary' – a lovely activity idea for reviewing vocabulary at the beginning of a lesson – and Gianfranco's top tips on how to help learners develop their spoken fluency, 'On fluency and spontaneity: beyond "practice makes perfect".' Calendar-based activities This lesson is based around the calendar and helping students to use dates. Using a downloadable calendar for 2020 and the suggested fun activities, learners can revise the words for days and months, learn the ordinal numbers we use for the date, identify dates and write the date. Read more. Teachers and teacher educators: Education and professional development for early language learning This is the third call for the international conference, Teachers and teacher educators: Education and professional development for early language learning, at Nova University Lisbon from 12 to 14 November 2020. The purpose of this conference is to focus on the education and professional development of teachers and teacher educators to foster multilingual spaces in the early years of formal education, and to provide a platform to further cement the relevance of learning from and with different contexts. The deadline for receipt of proposals is 28 February 2020. Find out more. Think like a teenager – 10 methods to motivate teenage learners Teenagers can be notoriously difficult to motivate. Yes, that's true. Instead of playing the blame-game and figuring out who is to blame for their lack of engagement, we should try to observe the world from their perspective. Quite a lot of research and academic articles point out that for our students to be engaged in learning, we need to appear engaged as well. To put it simply, positive energy is contagious, and if you are excited about teaching with a certain method, the students will share your excitement as well. In this post, Milica Vukadin shares methods she uses to motivate her teenage students. Chinese New Year The Chinese New Year is one of the many colourful events celebrated in our multicultural calendar, and this year it is 25 January. Each year in the Chinese calendar is named after an animal, and in this lesson primary learners will listen to the story of how the order of the animals was decided. They will join in with the story and retell it, then do some follow-up work practising saying years, using 'will' for future predictions or making a craft. See lesson plan. ‌ TeachingEnglish training Every month we offer a 50% discount on one of our three-hour self-access training modules. Find out which modules are half price this month. British Council teacher community on Facebook Join the British Council teacher community on Facebook to share ideas, resources and learning opportunities. ‌ Visit our website STAY CONNECTED ‌ ‌

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