Workshops and presentations

Brain breaks are short, active breaks in your class, which allow your students to rest their brains. The other good thing about these short activities is that they are also in the target language, using mostly high frequent vocabulary. In this workshop, I will show you my favorite brain breaks, and we will discuss how you can implement them in your classes. 

There are lots of great stories out there, such as picture books, fairy tales and legends. Unfortunately, most of them are not written so that language learners can comprehend them. In this workshop, you will learn how to turn an existing story into a compelling, comprehensible story in your target language. You will discover how to interactively bring the story to life so that your students are on the edge of their seats!

The inimitable Martina Bex says, "reading is breathing and comprehensible texts are oxygen." If you want to read more in class, but can't bear the whines and groans (or if you agree with the kids that class reading is a form of torture), this workshop is for you! From selecting a text to gamifying it to maximizing repetitions and ensuring 100% comprehension, reading activities and the extension activities that go with it will be something that both you and your kids look forward to. You will walk out with fun reading and extension activities you can do on Monday, as well as some to tuck into your bag of tricks for later.

In this workshop, I will show you how I design my exams to make them CI-friendly, as well as other opportunities I give my students to fill the gradebook.

For many of us, CI is a game changer, a life-changer even. But it can also be exhausting. Is it possible to use CI and NOT be exhausted at the end of the day? This presentation will include both general mindsets and specific techniques to help either the experienced or novice CI teacher maintain their energy and actually have a life outside the classroom. 

OWIs are great and flexible as standalone activities. We can also use them to create characters for a TPRS story or a story-listening.

What if you could change ONE thing in your classroom that would benefit your school, your students, and YOURSELF in multiple ways that have been documented through research? You'd jump at the chance, wouldn't you? Well, that one thing is building a positive relationship with your students. Jill has almost 25 years' experience teaching, including 9 years at inner-city schools in the US. Positive teacher-student relationships helped her not only survive, but thrive in tough schools. Discover research-based benefits of positive relationships, teacher attitudes that contribute to a positive relationship, and specific actions you can take to improve your relationship with students. Yes, even THAT student. 

You are new to CI and convinced that you would like to change things around in your language classes? You received so much incredible input about this new method but don’t know where and how to start? And maybe you come from traditional teaching with a textbook and don’t want to (or can’t) abandon it completely? In this workshop I show you ways to get started, how to teach CI and work with a textbook and give you many valuable tips that make the transition easy and doable. 

For many years the teaching and practicing of grammar rules was the backbone of language methodology. It was believed that this was a necessary step, in addition to memorizing lists and lists of vocabulary, to help students get better in their native language and to be able to communicate in the new language. It only worked for the top elite of each class for either of those goals.

When teaching towards acquisition, it has been shown that when students acquire the language, they also acquire the grammar as well (and the syntax and the prosody.)  Now the teaching of grammar is done later in the progression of language classes, after much exposure to the examples of what had become known as grammar rules.  

In the end, the purpose of any grammar instruction is to help students become more comprehensible instead of only accurate.

Come see ways to accomplish this.

Story-Listening is an amazing opportunity to provide optimal input. Stories are interesting, rich and use a lot of vocabulary and expressions in context. We make them comprehensible through drawing and body language.

In order to build the mental representation of a new language in the brains of students they must receive massive quantities of input that is understood by them.  Asking interesting questions is one very important technique that keeps them engaged and gives them that quantity of input.  Come in to see how to ask interesting questions that are repetitive, interesting and comprehensible.  Before you leave, you will have opportunities to practice these techniques.

In this workshop, you will experience two different ways to do a movie talk: one high prep with screen shots and one low prep. The demo will be in French for beginners. I will also present a variety of activities to do after a movie talk and we will discuss ways to incorporate this activity in your classes.

Over the years, scientists have discovered more and more about how the brain works. How do we apply this knowledge in the language classroom? In this workshop, we will explore six essential principles that will align your teaching with how your students' brains naturally learn. Most of these principles happen to align very closely to CI principles. Let’s reach for the stars and find out which puzzle pieces can create optimal input or ‘flow’: students are so engaged that they forget they are listening to another language!