CAMBRIDGE DAY 2010

CAMBRIDGE DAY 2010

Foreign Language Teachers Can Make a Difference:Leadership

Qualities vs. Management Skills

Being a language teacher is not just about teaching the present perfect passive or the future perfect progressive. One of the secrets of being an excellent teacher is to inspire our students and make a real difference to their lives by influencing them in a respectful way. In this session, we will look at the differences that makes this difference – in other words, we will define what we do and what qualities we need to develop in order to be able to create a ‘classroom culture that our students want to belong to’.



Teaching Teenagers – What On Earth Makes Them Tick?

Who would deny that success in the foreign language class depends to a large degree on meaningful tasks and the implementation of communicative teaching objectives? As teachers of teenagers, however, we often experience that the realization of such basic requirements are not enough if we really want to reach out to our students. In this session, a model will be presented that aims at the development of the students critical thinking skills and their interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences.

Beyond materials, techniques and linguistic analyses: The role

of motivation, beliefs and identity

Following on from Earl Stevick's provocative claim that in the teaching and learning of a foreign language, success depends less on materials, techniques and linguistic analysis, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom, this paper investigates the significant role that our students' beliefs play in the foreign-language learning process. It will be proposed that students’ beliefs are guiding principles for their behaviour and that those beliefs create strong perceptual filters. In order to discuss the systemic dynamics of beliefs on the outcomes of the teaching / learning process, three specific questions will be examined:

Why do beliefs have such a powerful effect on students' learning?

How are beliefs formed and maintained?

What can teachers do, in a respectful and positive way, to help students make the best use of their beliefs to further their own learning?

Examples from classroom research projects with young and adult learners will be used.



Students’ attention span? Where has it gone?

Teachers often complain about students’ lack of concentration while psychologists stress the need for learners to focus their perception and attention in order to learn effectively. In this presentation, various suggestions will be made on how teachers can help students at primary and lower secondary level to extend their attention span and achieve significantly better results in language learning.