Онлайн-марафон 2023
для преподавателей английского от международного центра

Anna Kashcheeva

General Methodology

Making Use of Authentic Materials

In this 90-minute webinar, we will focus on the concept of authenticity and explore some ways of exploiting real-life texts. We’ll brush up and work out some principles of task design so that you can create your own materials based on authentic texts. By the end of the session, we’ll have created a list of practical ideas and discussed what contributes to successful language learning experience. I hope some of the activities you’ll want to use on Monday morning.

Olga Connolly

General Methodology

Upgrading students' language during feedback on speaking

When students speak, they produce all sorts of language - perfect, almost perfect or not good at all. This language emerges in the stream of unplanned speech. We will examine and practise giving feedback that doesn't only correct but also helps students reach a higher level of production.

Olga Connolly

Teacher Training

Ensuring teacher development and motivation when giving feedback on teachers’ lessons.

Lesson observations are often considered as important elements of teacher training courses and professional development programs in language schools. Feedback on these can inspire teachers to make useful changes in their practice, but can also demotivate them, especially if the feedback is too focused on evaluation. It doesn’t depend so much on the quality of lessons, but much more on the observer’s skills of running feedback. In this session we will look at different ways of giving effective motivational feedback to teachers by choosing the right format, tone and type of interaction.

Anastasia Dereviankina

Teacher Training

The importance of developing soft skills for EFL teachers

Imagine a highly qualified teacher with 10+ years of experience who surprisingly receivesa message that some students preferred a less qualified teacher to him or her. What if it happens again and again?
How often do we consider developing our soft skills as teachers (as well as perfecting our drilling techniques or sharpening concept checking questions)? How often do managers talk about a lack of soft skills with teachers?From my experience, hardly ever. And yet, they could be crucial in teaching and learning success.
We will look at how, why and what soft skills in teaching are developed at BKC Moscow.

Heather Belgorodtseva

General Methodology

Modern English teaching trends in modern coursebooks

Communicative language teaching has come a long way. At its heart, it is still an approach where the ultimate goal is to help our students communicate effectively. But there is now a lot of choice about how to go about meeting that objective.

This variety of choice is reflected in the decisions coursebook writers have made about the materials and activities they include in their books.

During the webinar, we will focus on what modern teaching trends look like when expressed in published materials. Hopefully, this will help us to get the most out of them, select the best ones for our context, or even design our own.

Anastasia Dereviankina

General Methodology

The importance of soft skills for students
In language teaching we often focus on language hard skills. Grammar, grammatical accuracy, having a wide vocabulary, getting the spelling right, being able to pronounce ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’ differently, and so on.

But then we have soft skills - the ability to relate to and interact successfully with other people. Aren’t they also necessary for successful communication?

In this session we will talk more about what these soft skills are, why they are necessary for language learning, how a lack of them can impact successful language acquisition, and how we can help students get better at them.

Irina Senatorova

Teaching YL and Teens

Catering to students’ learning styles

Helping students to process information most effectively is one of
the key skills of a teacher. Understanding which learning styles our
students have will definitely help us to achieve this goal.

In this session we will focus on different learning styles both we and our
students have, discuss ways to find out the strongest learning
style, ways to adapt coursebook material in order to cater to these
different learning styles and analyse a demo lesson. You will also get
some useful tips by sharing your experience.

Yulia Kovaleva

Teaching YL and Teens

5-point checklist when planning student centered lesson for teenagers

One of the main criteria for measuring the success of a lesson when we talk about the communicative approach is student centeredness.

Often, when preparing for our lessons, we feel overwhelmed with the amount of advice and opinion about how to go about this. Does ‘student-centred’ mean more pairwork? More guided discovery? Lots of speaking? Throwing away the coursebook completely?

In this session, we will look at a checklist which will give 5 clear guidelines not only on how to implement a student-centered approach in one lesson, but how to keep this pattern from lesson to lesson.

Natalia Borisova

Assessment/Exams

5 ways to maintain motivation while preparing for exams

Exam classes are notoriously known for fluctuation in students' motivation. While having a goal helps students to start strongly, the often long period of study, sometimes with not clear rates of improvement, and the effort and high stakes involved all make it hard tro remain positive and focused at all times - and yet self belief, and the drive to keep on working hard is also important for exam success.

To help teachers with this, the methodological literature of ESL teaching offers strategies and techniques to tackle the issue. In the session we will speak about five highly effective ways of sustaining our students' inspiration for learning, which is based on the latest publications in the field of the study of motivation in second language learning.

Anna Kuliashova

Assessment/Exams

5 Essential Strategies to Teach Inferences in Exam Classes

This session will focus on understanding inferences, mainly in an exam context, although it will be useful for General English teachers too since making correct logical conclusions based on the text is a crucial skill for students to acquire, and not easy!

While reading and listening (even in L1), we interpret information on multiple levels, a substantial number of which are not on the surface. In order to fully comprehend the author’s ideas, we should be able to identify his or her attitude and opinion, which are usually not stated directly. Developed inference skills enable us to do that and a prerequisite for higher-order thinking. Without these skills, students cannot be considered proficient language speakers; therefore, testing inference understanding is included in all language exams to this or that extent.

During the session we will look at how inferences are included in exam tasks and work out 5 essential strategies to deal with Inference questions successfully. The strategies will be illustrated with examples from common English exams on different levels: starting from lower level ones (YL, A1-B1) to Cambridge C1-C2, EGE, and academic exams (IELTS/TOEFL/GRE/GMAT/SAT). Participants will learn how to identify inferences in various tasks (mainly in Reading and Listening), differentiate them from more familiar Factual Questions and help students overcome the most common difficulties with ease.

Claire Barnes

Teaching online

Making better use of online tools and apps for teaching

Three years on, and most teachers have gained some experience teaching online. More and more students around the world are discovering the benefits of learning online. As teachers we must continue to rise to the challenge.

By using the features of tools like Zoom more effectively and combining them with other external apps, teachers can create an enhanced learning experience for their students. Integrating external apps can help to bring your lessons to life and keep your students engaged and motivated. So why not attend this session to experience and discuss further how to take advantage of these powerful tools and take your online teaching to the next level?

Daria Rzhanezkaya

Teaching online

Do you speak digital? New literacies in the classroom

Digital literacies have become an integral part of school curriculums everywhere in the world. Students today are being asked not only to search for information, but to actively create content and collaborate with others online.

How can we foster our students’ digital skills in the classroom? We begin with a lesson plan.

In this session, we’re going to discuss both simple activities you can integrate into your regular classes as well as project-based lessons explicitly dedicated to developing digital skills. Join us to find out how to engage and educate digital citizens of tomorrow.

Daniel Saraiva

Teaching YL and Teens

Scaffolding activities for Young Learners

Just like the temporary support that surrounds a building under construction, scaffolding in ESL is extremely important. It provides our students with the necessary help that they need while their language system is being built.

Furthermore, scaffolding enables students to perform in a task at a level that is currently beyond their present abilities, thus giving our learners a sense of real accomplishment and satisfaction and pushing their learning even further.

Scaffolding is even more crucial with Young Learners as it deals with their cognitive abilities which are being formed, social skills and all the other YL characteristics. Not to mention that it reduces their stress and increases their motivation to keep on learning.

Join this session so that we can see how we can scaffold different types of activities to better cater to our students' needs.

Anka Zapart

Teaching YL and Teens

Kids can speak! Maximising production in primary and pre-primary classes

Yes, it is true, our primary and pre-primary students can be only 4
or 5 or 7 years old and yes, it is true, they are, most of the time,
still in the huge grey zone called pre-A1. And yes, it is true, their
contact with English is limited to those few academic hours in our
classroom, with the addition of some songs or videos on youtube. All
that does not mean that their language interaction should be limited to
memorising vocabulary and communication on the one-word level.

Absolutely not. Kids can speak! Even on the pre-A1 level. We just need
to help them. In this session, I would like to
share with you My Professional Passion and My Professional Obsession
#1: maximising production and how to go about it in class.

Heather Belgorodtseva

General Methodology

Bottom up. Making listening comprehensible

Listening, students tell us, is hard. The speakers are talking too fast! They seem to run their words together! This one is mumbling, and that one has an accent I am not used to! I thought the man was talking about work, but it turns out he was talking about his sister - what did I miss?

In this session we will look at some of the root causes of statements like these, which is a failure of bottom up processing skills. What is bottom up processing? This session will answer that. We will also discuss how standard skills lessons may not be adressing this area enough. And of course we will experience practical example for working on this area to improve students ability to listen not just to the text in front of them, but in general.

Irina Grekova

General Methodology

Flipped speaking lessons, using authentic materials

Of all the four skills, speaking is the most important and challenging one and central to a lot of courses we teach. However, in coursebooks, classroom activities that focus only on developing the ability of students to express themselves through speech are rare and non-systematic. Why is that the case? In comparison with reading, listening or writing, speaking lessons are the most challenging to plan and teach.

In this session, we’ll talk about one of the optional ways of planning speaking lessons, i.e. a flipped-format speaking lessons. We’ll discuss their advantages and possible drawbacks, the structure of a flipped speaking class and the requirements for the authentic texts that we might use for such lessons. We’ll also analyse a particular type of corrective feedback, and discuss its teaching benefits.

Olga Fomina

ESP

Adapting lessons and courses for different companies, types of business and specific student goals

This session is for the teachers who work or are planning to work as teachers of English as freelancers or within a company, and who need to tailor their courses to the needs or requirements of a particular student or group of students. We will cover different adaptation techniques and look at various real life cases from BKC-IH In Company department. Participants will get to participate in devising a specially adapted program for different areas, levels and companies.

Anna Kuliashova

ESP


Using Artificial Intelligence in Assessment

Hardly anyone would argue that ubiquitous digital technologies are actively used in education and enhance modern learning environments. We share materials through Miro and Jamboard, make trivia games on Quizzes, not to mention having lessons via Zoom or Teams. However, when it comes to assessment, there is still a lot of debate on how accurately and reliably e-raters assess student performance. At the same time, their role in lesson organization is increasing, which makes it an interesting topic to research.

During the session we will consider the usage of artificial intelligence programs in language performance assessment and how such technologies can be implemented in class. We will talk about their advantages and disadvantages as well as the ways they can be adapted to different

courses, be it exam or General English classes. In particular, we will discuss automated scoring in speaking and writing, which is currently one of the most debatable topics in ELT.