Weekend Workshops

Workshop Information

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• Ten ways to get your students to DO something

  English language materials are bursting with good content and ideas for skills exploitation. To get the best out of them, you need to engage your students’ interest. This isn’t always easy, especially if you're at the end of a long, hard week and/or they ‘aren’t in the mood’.

  At times like this, you need to challenge them, make them curious and encourage them to be imaginative. Sometimes you simply have to find out what they’re good at or even give them responsibility for what happens in the class.

  In this talk, I will suggest ten ways that you can engage their interest and access their knowledge. Maybe you can show them talents they never knew they had. It’s all there, waiting to be exploited.

  Remember, in a class of 30 students, there are 32 sources of information – you, the book and the students themselves.

• Speaker: Ken Wilson

  Ken Wilson is a prolific author of ELT materials with more than thirty titles to his name, including a dozen series of coursebooks. His first English teaching work was at the Instituto Británico in Seville, Spain, after which he worked in London as a teacher, teacher trainer and radio broadcaster. His first ELT publication was a collection of songs called Mister Monday, which was released when he was 23, making him at the time the youngest-ever published ELT author. Since then, he has written and recorded more than 150 ELT songs, published as separate albums or as integral parts of course material. Since 1990, Ken has concentrated on writing coursebooks. Most of them have been written for specific regions of the world, including China, the Middle East, Spain and Central Europe. His most recently-published coursebook is Smart Choice (OUP). In addition to print materials, Ken has written more than a hundred radio and TV programmes for BBC English, including fifty radio scripts for the Follow Me series, thirty Look Ahead TV scripts and a series of plays called Drama First. For a number of years, he also worked for the BBC World Service Spanish and Latin American sections, reporting in Spanish on cultural events in Britain. He has worked as a writer or adviser on ELT television projects in several countries, including Germany, Poland, Portugal and the Netherlands. He wrote and presented a series of drama training programmes for Polish TV, which was broadcast in 1997 and several times subsequently. In 2005, he wrote a book to accompany a TV sitcom called Extr@ English, the first ELT TV programme to be commissioned by British TV company Channel 4.

• Date

  This workshop will take place on Sunday, 1 April 2012 at 16.00 (CET). You can check your local time by clicking here: Local time

• How to join the workshop

  The event takes place in the IATEFL online conference room. Please use the link below to enter the room. Before entering the room you will be prompted to "Enter as a guest". Please use this model to enter your name:

  Mike Hogan (Germany)

  This will make it easier for Ken to identify you and answer your questions. Click on this link to enter:

  Workshop with Ken

  Once in the room, you will be able to communicate with other attendees and the speaker using the text chat window at the bottom of the screen.

• BESIG Online Team (BOT)

  Members of the BESIG Online Team (BOT) - Carl Dowse, Mike Hogan and Mercedes Viola, Anne Hodgson, Claire Hart and Andi White - will be present to moderate the event.

  Click here for any further information you may need concerning the event or if you would like to provide feedback or suggestions.