April 2008 Tim Herdon
We’re delighted to report that the workshop held on Saturday 5th April was a great success with over 100 old and new members attending.
The seminar, held at the premises of LAL Malta, was hosted by MATEFL in association with Oxford University Press, represented by Books Plus and was led by guest speaker, Tim Herdon.
Tim Herdon is a teacher, teacher trainer and has authored EFL teacher training materials. He has taught English in England, Spain and Japan, working in both the private and public education. More recently, he has worked on CLIL training projects in both England and Spain. As a teacher trainer, Tim has extensive experience in delivering talks to primary, secondary and language school teachers on a wide range of topics.
Tim kept everyone interested and amused throughout the morning and everyone present greatly enjoyed both session and took home some very useful ideas. The drama session in particular proved to be dynamic and a lot of fun and had everyone literally jumping out of their seats
.
The sessions were as follows:
First Session:
Stimulating activities to develop learners’ writing skills
Writing is often seen by both students and teachers as a solitary, unenjoyable but necessary part of language learning. This talk will focus on approaches and activities that take the opposite view: writing can be enormously enjoyable and rewarding, involving a high level of interaction and participation. There will be a number of practical activities focusing on process writing and cooperative writing in the classroom that involve minimal preparation and will significantly change your students’ perceptions about writing.
Second Session:
Drama activities in the classroom
Teachers sometimes exclude themselves (and their students) from activities involving drama because they see it as an activity that requires specialist skills, or feel it has a high risk element that can make it fall flat on its face. The idea of this talk is to show that drama can be also be a more low key activity that is straightforward to set up and manage. Done well, drama is excellent for a wide range of communication skills, can help develop specific language areas and at the same time generates a lot of energy and humour.
The seminar, held at the premises of LAL Malta, was hosted by MATEFL in association with Oxford University Press, represented by Books Plus and was led by guest speaker, Tim Herdon.
Tim Herdon is a teacher, teacher trainer and has authored EFL teacher training materials. He has taught English in England, Spain and Japan, working in both the private and public education. More recently, he has worked on CLIL training projects in both England and Spain. As a teacher trainer, Tim has extensive experience in delivering talks to primary, secondary and language school teachers on a wide range of topics.
Tim kept everyone interested and amused throughout the morning and everyone present greatly enjoyed both session and took home some very useful ideas. The drama session in particular proved to be dynamic and a lot of fun and had everyone literally jumping out of their seats
.
The sessions were as follows:
First Session:
Stimulating activities to develop learners’ writing skills
Writing is often seen by both students and teachers as a solitary, unenjoyable but necessary part of language learning. This talk will focus on approaches and activities that take the opposite view: writing can be enormously enjoyable and rewarding, involving a high level of interaction and participation. There will be a number of practical activities focusing on process writing and cooperative writing in the classroom that involve minimal preparation and will significantly change your students’ perceptions about writing.
Second Session:
Drama activities in the classroom
Teachers sometimes exclude themselves (and their students) from activities involving drama because they see it as an activity that requires specialist skills, or feel it has a high risk element that can make it fall flat on its face. The idea of this talk is to show that drama can be also be a more low key activity that is straightforward to set up and manage. Done well, drama is excellent for a wide range of communication skills, can help develop specific language areas and at the same time generates a lot of energy and humour.