Creating a Sustainable Language Instruction Culture: Supporting subject-teachers to teach with language levels in mind.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
As the number of English medium International Schools increases across the globe, institutions and pedagogical leadership teams are seeking effective ways to help students acquire the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the classroom and beyond. English tends to be the lingua franca most international schools, and the belief that “all teachers are language teachers” is present as a reminder for educators to support students who are not able to speak, write, or access the language at a native-like level. However, not all teachers are trained to be language teachers.
Subject teachers need to be supported to design learning scenarios with students’ language levels in mind. What is more, educators need to be supported to understand the role of language in the learning that occurs in their subjects. Likewise, teachers need to be supported to design language-rich learning scenarios that focus on empowering students to develop their linguistic competencies and to use the language they know to engage in thinking, researching, and collaborating in the learning process. Most importantly, teachers must not be guided to design language activities that may cause their students to feel that the sophistication and depth of conceptual understandings and subject-specific knowledge is being diluted.
J. Rafael Angel, polyglot and EFL expert, offers a unique and updated sheltered-language instruction approach that empowers teachers to become sensitized about language levels and that inspires them to transform their approaches to teaching and assessment in order to generate experiences in which students are able to use their language to demonstrate what they are able to do with what they know.
In this workshop, participants will inquire into the following questions:
• How can we support content-based subject teachers to teach with students’ language levels in mind?
• How can content-based subject teachers modify their resources and the learning experiences they design in order to meet students’ need?
• How can considering macro and micro process while designing learning resources and experiences support language teachers (mother tongue and foreign language) to teach with language levels in mind?
• How can teachers guide students to understand the linguistic competencies demands for each lesson? (What do we want them to communicate and how)
• How can teachers whose students’ mother tongue is not English capitalize on students’ cognitive and developmental skills rather than spending time making up for their weaknesses?
In this workshop, participants will become acquainted with and will develop a bank of strategies to differentiate instruction and assessment with language levels in mind.
SESSION BREAKDOWN
Sessions are customized depending on group composition, location & needs of organizing school or organisation.
if you would like to organize this workshop at your school or organisation.
WORKSHOP LEADER
J. Rafael Angel started teaching in his native home country, Mexico, in 2000 and has been teaching in International Baccalaureate (IB) Schools since 2005. He has taught Spanish Language & Literature, and Language Acquisition Spanish, English and French as an additional Language in Mexico, the United States, Argentina, Jordan, India, China, the U.A.E and Belgium. His involvement with the IB covers areas such as design and standardization of the Teacher Support Materials, collaboration in the MYP Language Acquisition Curriculum Review team, leading workshops and contributing to multiple projects. He is a Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction (CBCI) certified independent trainer, a Sheltered Language Support Trainer, and currently serves as Pedagogical Director at Bogaerts International School - North Campus in Brussels, Belgium. He is the author of 'From inception to fruition: Concept Based Language teaching and learning, which is available in English, Spanish and will soon be translated in Korean and other languages. His articles on Approaches to Teaching and Learning skills in virtual environments have been published in the International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning in 2013 and 2015. He holds a BA in Foreign Language teaching and Learning from the University of Guadalajara; and an MA in Education with a focus on Approaches to Teaching and Learning from the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM). Rafael has also worked alongside Dr Lynn Erickson, Dr Lois Lanning and Rachel French in the CBCI Institute as a World Language Specialist.