Sessions

Mining Classroom Materials

Most textbooks contain more materials and activities than can be completed during the time available. Teachers therefore have to select what content to deal with and ignore. In this presentation, we will present criteria for the effective use of textbooks including to what extent the content integrates the four skills and grammar/vocabulary, and how accessible the meanings in the language are. Pages from a widely used secondary school textbook are applied throughout the presentation.

Suggestions for Language Teacher Education

To grow, teachers and teacher educators need to engage in mentoring conversations and foster meaningful relationships. In this workshop, we will introduce a process in which, in conversation, we reached a shared and collaborative understanding of key elements in language teacher education. One suggestion born out of the conversation, for example, is that we teachers attend to minute details in changes to practice in our classrooms. We welcome other suggestions from the participants.

Building Communities With Preservice Teachers

This presentation will report on an action research project that was undertaken in university-level English teaching license courses. The research was triggered by five premises for community building by John F. Fanselow. One premise, for example, suggests that teachers and their students make small changes in their lessons in order to enrich classroom experience. Findings indicate that the preservice teacher participants experienced diversified feelings and emotions toward the collaborative approaches employed in the courses.