Hugh Dellar is a teacher and teacher trainer at the University of Westminster and the co-author of the General English series, INNOVATIONS. His main interests revolve around teaching natural useful language. He previously taught in Indonesia and has given papers, workshops and teacher training courses all over the world.
Hugh Dellar led a very successful seminar/workshop at the University Residence in Lija on Saturday 4th March 2006. This event was sponsored by British Council Malta, University Residence and Books Plus.
There were two workshops which were as follows:
New routes to fluency: phrasebooks, coursebooks and teaching Spoken English. In this talk, we considered the reasons why students choose to come to language classes to learn English and explored the implications this has for the kinds of materials we use in our classrooms. Hugh outlined the ways in which he feels traditional coursebooks have all too often failed to help our students achieve fluency in spoken English and then moved on to consider some surprising new routes to fluency and ways in which we can help our learners explore these avenues. We all left more linguistically aware and more able to engage in student-focused classes.
Five Golden Rules The Lexical Approach has been with us for over a decade now, but the ideas that inform it have been slow to trickle down into our classrooms. To counter this, Hugh suggested Five Golden Rules which he believes lead to better - and more lexical - teaching:
Use Lexical Material
Foster Linguistic Awareness
Don’t correct! Expand
Explain, Exemplify and (get students to) Expand upon new language