Meet our Plenary Speakers - Andrew Wright

Bio-data

Andrew Wright is an author, illustrator, teacher trainer and storyteller. As an author he has published many books including, ‘Creating Stories with Children’ and ‘Storytelling with Children’, Oxford University Press, ‘Games for Language Learning’ and ‘Five Minute Activities’, Cambridge University Press, ‘1000 Pictures for Teachers to Copy’, Longman Pearson; ‘Writing Stories’, Helbling Languages. 

He has recently published his first collection of very short stories, ‘Beggar in Bogota’, and also recently published, ‘Creativity in the Classroom: 176 practical ideas’. Both books are published by: ILI International Languages Institute, Hungary. Write to him for more information: andrew@ili.hu

As a teacher trainer he has worked in 48 countries during the last 50 years, as a storyteller and storymaker he estimates that he has worked with over 50,000 students in the last 20 years

Andrew lives in Hungary where he is managing director together with his wife, Julia Dudas of the International Languages Institute in Godollo. Andrew and Julia have two young daughters, Timea and Alexandra.

More about Andrew and his work at www.andrewarticlesandstories.wordpress.com

Plenary: Storying is central in our daily life. What about the classroom?

It has recently been estimated that about 9 million bits of information assail our senses every second!

To cope with this onslaught of infinite complexity we humans are driven to select, name and narrate. Our narrations contain the values, perceptions and behaviours which guide our daily lives. The food we eat makes our bodies and the stories we hear and tell make our minds.

Stories are often told through words. Surely stories which are so central to our daily lives should be a highroad in the language classroom?

In this plenary and in the accompanying workshop my plan is to demonstrate the ubiquity and influence of stories in our daily lives. Then, I want to make practical suggestions for how we can use stories in the classroom, much more than is normally the case. 

Workshop: Your stories for them

Stories are based on fact and on fiction and are constantly manifested on the stage of our daily life. ‘All the world’s a stage and men and women merely players.’ 

You and the students are the first source of stories always available in the language class.

In this workshop I will focus on ways of recognizing stories in your daily life. A piece of grit in an oyster may lead to a pearl. A single difficulty in your life can lead to a story. 

Then, I will focus on the craft of you telling your stories more effectively.

In passing, I will refer to the various roles that your storying can have in language teaching: fluency in the four skills, introduction and re-cycling of grammatical items, spring-board activities.

Meet our Plenary Speakers - Marjorie Rosenberg

Bio

Marjorie Rosenberg teaches general and business English at the University of Graz. She has published widely in the business English field and has authored two of the workbooks for the Cambridge University Press flagship series, Business Advantage. Marjorie has also written two books with photocopiable materials for business English instruction and wrote activities and ‘jargon busters’ for Professional English Online, the CUP website for a number of years. Her methodology book, ‘Spotlight on Learning Styles’ was published in 2013 by Delta Publishing. After serving as the Coordinator of the IATEFL Business English Special Interest Group (BESIG) and being on the IATEFL Membership Committee, she is currently the IATEFL Acting Vice President and Chair of Publications Committee and will be taking on the Presidency at the Annual IATEFL Conference in April, 2015.
More about Marjorie and her work at https://learnerasteacher.wordpress.com/ 

Marjorie is coming to our conference with the help of sponsorship from Delta Publishing.

Plenary: Getting unstuck - stretching out of our comfort zones

As our daily teaching schedule and all that involves takes up so much of our time and energy, we don’t often have the chance to thing about ‘what else’ we could be doing. We tend to stick to certain routines and sometimes don’t take advantage of possibilities to stretch ourselves or take on challenges in other areas. This talk will explore the implications of this regarding our teaching styles, methods we are accustomed to using, the types of classes we usually teach, the technology we are comfortable with and a variety of choices available to us as ELT professionals outside the classroom. Some of the reasons we keep doing what we have always done will be discussed providing a basis for us to work together and come up with ways for us to ‘get unstuck’.

Workshop 1: Spotlight on Learning Styles

Have you ever wondered what makes your students tick? Part of the secret may well be their individual learning styles. This interactive workshop will give you the chance to try out a variety of language activities from Spotlight on Learning Styles (Delta Publishing) designed for different learner types as well as discuss their adaptation to individual teaching situations.

Workshop 2: Getting Business English Learners to Speak

Most business people would agree that communication is essential in today’s business world. Therefore speaking skills are often at the top of the list for business English learners. In this interactive workshop we will explore ways to build self-confidence in learners by helping them to express themselves and get their message across.

Our 22nd Annual International Convention

TESOL Macedonia-Thrace, Northern Greece 

proudly invites you to the 22nd Annual International Convention

Plenary speakers: 

Marjorie Rosenberg, Andrew Wright, Alec Williams, and Ken Wilson

Date: 28-29 March 2015

Venue: American College of Thessaloniki (ACT)

Pie Cutting Event - Report

“It’s all your fault!“  said Little Mind. “You with all your imagination, your images, your colours, your creativity……”

“Actually”, said Big Mind, “it’s your fault, Little Mind! With you and your numbers and your rules and your do’s and don’ts and your musts and your grammar, trying to control me, to restrain me, to suffocate me, to stop me playing!!!”

And our Don Schofield, our excellent speaker, took us on a trip to explore our Big Mind, to help us and, through us, our learners go past the obstacle of Little Mind and enjoy our teaching and learning.

After briefly explaining to us that through creative writing learners can play with language, realize that language is not only used for academic purposes , that  it doesn’t need to make sense (especially in the early stages of writing a poem or story) and, of course, that one can use the language just to play, just to have fun . What our learners don’t realize- and they do not need to- is that they are learning how to use associative thinking- essential to all forms of creativity and the most natural form of thinking for us humans. In this way, language becomes personally relevant, motivation to use it becomes stronger, memory and imagination turn into an integral part of expression and, ultimately, we learn by genuinely enjoying ourselves using language.

Don presented two techniques in his workshop:

a)     10 Xs
Using any publication that is not too technical, bore ten holes  on a sheet of paper on which you have previously marked 10 Xs  at random points, peer through them at any page of the publication and read the words underneath (they can be nouns, verbs, etc). Then write a poem or story where the first word is in the first sentence, the second word in the second sentence and so on. Then go over what you wrote and add, subtract or change to make it more interesting. And then share!!!

b)      I am / I am not
Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle, creating two columns, Then name the two columns: The first should be positive personality traits (generous, kind, etc. The second one should be negative personality traits (stingy, cruel, etc). Then imagine, for each list, a character that fits these traits. Give your character a name, an appearance, colour of hair, body type, age, ethnicity, food, likes/dislikes, etc. Give them a personal history (where they grew up, parents, other family). Give them beliefs and opinions (political, religious, etc). What you write does not have to be logical or factual but should fit all the traits of the character you’ve created. Then imagine those two characters meeting somewhere, a restaurant, the street, as well as the time. The place can also be virtual, e.g. a social network chat. Then write a dialogue between them.
And then, naturally, share and discuss.

All we participants at Don’s workshop enjoyed it and produced some very original and interesting poems and stories. Certainly our learners will enjoy their meeting with the Big Mind and have fun using their creativity and learning through play with language.

By Georgia Psarra

A short video available at http://goo.gl/lA5Mly 

Join us at our Pie Cutting Event

Beyond Little Mind:  Learning English for Self Exploration & Creative Expression

Abstract: After identifying some essential benefits in using creative writing in the ESL classroom, the presenter will lead the audience through two writing exercises designed to introduce young writers to the associative powers of language, and to the importance of making it personally relevant.  

Meet our guest: Don Schofield

Bio:  Recently retired from his position as a dean of Perrotis College (The American Farm School), Don Schofield also served for many years as the Chair of the English Literature and Modern Languages Department of the University of La Verne, Athens Campus.  His books include Approximately Paradise (University Press of Florida, 2002); Kindled Terraces:  American Poets in Greece (Truman State University Press, 2004); The Known:  Selected Poems (of Nikos Fokas), 1981-2000 (Ypsilon Books, 2010),Before Kodachrome (FutureCycle Press, 2012) and In Lands Imagination Favors (Dos Madres Press, 2014).  A recipient of the 2010 Criticos Prize (UK), he has also received honors from, among others, the State University of New York, Anhinga Press, Southern California Anthology and Princeton University, where he was a Stanley J. Seeger Writer-in-Residence.  He has been a resident of Greece since 1980.

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Xmas Event 2014 - Report

On December 14^th, at the beautiful location of Les Lazaristes, we gathered for the traditional TESOL Macedonia Thrace Christmas event, with talks, storytelling, games, songs and lots of presents.

Our first speaker, Dr. Ziaka gave a very interesting talk on the ins and outs of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). Dr. Ziaka’s talk was definitely a crash course in CLIL, covering from the most basic questions- what is CLIL? - to the most specific ones – how do we teach it?

Probably the most important points raised were that CLIL leads to purposeful communication as it is not focused on language learning for its own sake but for that of content. Another important point noted by Dr. Ziaka was how the learners do more language without having more homework, how it raises the learners’ self-confidence and motivation. This became obvious to those attending when Dr. Ziaka showed us a video of a 9 year old learner giving a presentation, in English on solar energy, based on his own research and using his own notes. What more could a teacher want?

This was definitely a most interesting talk and hopefully a practice which will become nationwide in the near future? Fingers crossed!

After CLIL, it was time for some fun with Despoina Vardaki, Kathy Kyriakidou and Elpiniki Psomataki. 

The ladies put us in the festive spirit with a dramatized Christmas story, with games where participants could join in, songs with kinesthetic elements to get us moving and poetry. But the most beautiful part of all was seeing the children who came along, having fun with all these activities.

I’m sure those who attended left with a smile on their faces, and a little more festive than before they came!

By Natasha Loukeri