DESCRIPTION OF THE COURSE

Assessment of English Learners

This course will guide English language teaching professionals through creating a checklist to review and develop English language tests. The course considers four main components: purpose, test features, practicality, and technical considerations. These components will be examined for the four core language skills of reading, listening, speaking, and writing. For each skill area, bottom-up and top-down features will be presented, followed by several example test excerpts. Options will be provided for participants to review a test from their own classrooms or from provided websites. Throughout the course, participants will implement strategies to share insights gained from the course with colleagues in their communities.

Techniques of Teaching Reading and Writing

This course will introduce contemporary techniques for teaching reading and writing to non- native speakers of English, with attention to the relationship between reading and writing and ways teachers can combine the two skills to best support skill development. Discussions of teaching reading will focus on techniques, materials, and tasks for promoting main idea comprehension, reading fluency, strategic reading, and vocabulary growth. Discussions of teaching writing will focus on techniques, materials, and tasks for supporting the writing process and the development of students’ writing fluency, accuracy, organization, and vocabulary for different types of writing. Participants will evaluate, select, adjust, and create materials, tasks, and lessons appropriate for their teaching settings. Strategies for sharing insights gained from the course with participants’ home teaching communities will be developed, as well as ways to share sample materials developed for the course.

Using Educational Technology in the English Language Classroom

This course is designed to help English language teaching professionals around the world acquire and maintain basic knowledge and skills in technology for professional purposes through hands-on learning.  It will help teachers integrate pedagogical knowledge and skills with technology to enhance their language teaching and learning through their reading, discussion, and creation of new learning activities. The course will help participants apply technology in record keeping, feedback, and assessment, and use technology to improve communication, collaboration, and efficiency by participating in online discussion and presentation.

Integrating Critical Thinking Skills into the Exploration of Culture in an EFL Setting

Exploration of culture in an EFL setting requires helping students engage in authentic situations to develop the ability to navigate across a variety of cultures. This intercultural ability requires language choices and awareness of oneself as a cultural being. It also requires critical thinking skills, which are themselves culturally defined. Using experiential learning as the organizational model, this course will engage participants in analyzing personal experiences, media, EFL textbooks, and classrooms to develop the capacity to think critically about the cultural assumptions and viewpoints embedded in their teaching content and process. After examining themselves as cultural beings and assessing learners’ needs and goals, participants will develop a concrete teaching lesson that reflects their view of teaching critical thinking and intercultural competence in their particular context.

Teaching Grammar Communicatively

In this practice-oriented course, participants will explore how to adapt grammar instruction to meet their students’ needs. They will also focus on integrating grammar instruction with teaching language skills, varying grammar instruction to meet the needs of large, mixed ability classes, and using available technology effectively to enhance grammar learning inside and outside the classroom. Participants will discuss different challenges their learners may have with learning grammar, and discover how they can help learners use grammar to improve fluency and accuracy.