Professional Learning : Dr Gianfranco Conti

He will present two practical and motivating workshops suitable for all Language teachers. You can join us for one or both of the sessions.

Session 1: 9:00am – 12:00pm (Registration at 8:30am)

Get them Talking – Principles and techniques to speed up oral fluency.

In this workshop Dr Conti will stage a number of techniques, tasks and games, some of which he will have shown the day before (at the TOFA PL), in a sequence in which the teacher models language through listening first, then gets the students to speak in the context of easy-to-plan activities.

Session 2: 1:00pm – 4:00pm (Registration at 12:45pm)

Meaningful play: motivational games and activities and why they work

Gamifying doesn’t necessarily equate with dumbing down learning. In this workshop Dr Conti will present and demonstrate a wide range of (mostly) low-prep / high-impact games and tasks across all four language skills which can enhance retention, fluency and even metalinguistic knowledge and grammar accuracy. He will also discuss their pedagogic rationale, learning-management issues surrounding their implementations and where they should ideally occur in an instructional sequence. 

and

Teaching language through chunks– The fundamentals of Extensive Processing Instruction

As research clearly indicates, at beginner-to-intermediate levels of proficiency single-word teaching slows down processing and language learning, thereby delaying the development of L2 fluency. This is due to the limited cognitive resources of the human brain, which can only process a limited amount of units of information at any one time. Dr Conti will hence advocate and present an approach, called E.P.I. (Extensive Processing Instruction), which is based on the notion that teaching language through chunks (e.g. polywords, collocation, sentence heads and frames) is much more effective as it is more economic in terms of cognitive load.

Adopting this approach requires a radical mind-shift, both in terms of curriculum design and instructional strategies. The facilitator will walk the delegates through the main staples of this E.P.I., whilst presenting a wide range of tasks and techniques which promote the long-term retention of chunks and patterns.