Day 2

Today we started with our 3 day seminar on biligual teaching by Diana Hicks.

I thought this was extremely inspiring and exciting, because Diana constantly challenged our teaching methods. I'm a huge fan of oneliners and Diana started our seminar with the following:

**Intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do **

IMPORTANT POINTS FROM DAY 1

* Diana believes in the spiral-method: Offer different types of exercises on every topic you discuss in class. Giving pupils a variety of opportunities to practice gives pupils with different learning styles a chance to fully understand the topic.

* Another important issue is learning styles. Make sure you address all kinds of learners e.g. visual, words, tpr etc.

tpr: http://www.tpr-world.com/

picture dictation: http://www.virginia.edu/french/resource/teachers/tips/picture.htm

* Evaluation: Evaluate every lesson. Not only with the pupils, but also for yourself. (a good way of doing this constructively is by writing down what you do with a class for a month and tape a few lessons)

Short biography of Diana Hicks:
Diana Hicks has over 25 years' experience in English language education as a teacher, teacher trainer and writer. She is now based in the UK, where she works freelance, but she has taught at secondary and tertiary levels in Africa, Scandinavia, France and the Middle East.

She is currently doing Doctoral research in secondary level education at Bristol University and runs teacher training courses for secondary school teachers of English, as well as tutoring on British Council Summer Schools.


Part of an interview with Diana Hicks. This shows exactly how she feels about teaching:
(for the complete interview and more articles by Diana refer to : http://www.cambridge.org.br/site/articles/articles.php?id=317 )
I think we can invest in the learners, in the same way as the teachers, by offering opportunities to make the classroom process more meaningful. By meaningful, I mean creative and long term. I would like to see more students creatively involved in what happens in the language learning process - perhaps by making choices and decisions about which exercise they will do, or which part of it, who they will work with, how they will check their work, give feedback and evaluate it. This is less dramatic and chaotic than it sounds - we may, for example, have ten questions in an exercise - it is likely that answering five questions is as valuable as answering all ten. Let students choose which five they want to answer. Let them choose, also, whether they want to work alone or with a partner. These are small steps to greater involvement. In the long term students will learn skills of responsibility which moves away from the short-term investment of finishing, or not, in the case of many students, an exercise.