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Looking for teacher training for your staff or yourself?
Looking to network with the fastest growing PLN+ in EFL?
Looking to join with other Independent Authors & Publishers?
Get in touch. I'm available.
TALKS
BUSINESS ENGLISH:
UPSKILL or Standstill: The Need to Retool Ourselves
It is estimated that soon 87% of global business will take place in English. Yet students, although they can speak well in day-to-day conversations, still lack the professional communication skills required by employers today. More attention to empathy, reactivity, and awareness must be realized to help future employees achieve success in the English-speaking workplace. Everyone is talking about Lingua Franca, 21st Century Skills, the Soft Skills, the 4C's, and what learner's will need in the future, but where are the practical takeaways that we could and should be using right now? With AI hot on our heals, learners’ need a change in teaching tactics, focus, and outcomes that most teachers aren’t prepared for. This talk will visit the problem and predict a more constructive future.
How to Teach One-to-One: Stop planning!
Today's one to one classes are as diverse as the students themselves. The learning needs and goals of individuals differ and creating lesson plans, using stock materials, and standard coursebooks are no longer enough to meet learner's needs. This requires a distinct set of skills, best practices, and strategies to help your student achieve their full potential. Find out how no plan might be the best plan to succeed.
That’s What I Said, but Not What I Meant
Competency in intercultural communication amongst international companies, groups and organizations has been challenging as more and more diverse teams form. This talk will look at some of the basic misunderstandings that have taken place within different groups of trained, expert educators, native and non-native alike, due to our own varying cultural backgrounds and offer up better methods to avoid potentially serious errors or miscommunications through examination of our own cultural voicing.
Present Perfect(ly): Reworking Presentation Skills
Using imagery is an effective tool towards engagement, as well as to elicit production and interest. The mistakes we make though are causing our students and audience to lose focus and miss the point(s). Congesting the screen, making color, layout and content mistakes are not only failing the objective, but hindering the outcome. We are overusing technology to the point of Sensory Overload. This talk will show more effective methods for simplification and how to produce quality presentations.
Customer Service with a Smile
One of the ways of impacting customer satisfaction and experience is customer service training. This presentation will demonstrate ways of teaching exemplary customer service through stories, facts and examples worldwide. Ideas will be discussed by showing sources and resources for finding and producing materials for the BE classroom and methods which you will find useful when training people for working in customer service through looking at aspects that matter in a global service industry.
Intercultural Communication
This presentation will discuss many of the problems encountered today in communications due to differences in culture, context, base language and lack of confirmation in communications. As globalization has taken hold in every aspect of communication, the need for reflection, realignment, intention, and action is growing exponentially. Resources will be demonstrated along with ideas to correct these challenges.
To BE or not to BE, English for the workplace
Workplace English, Career English, or Business English. No matter the name, the communicative content is the same and most General English professionals are ill-prepared to take on this new challenge. This aspect of English teaching requires additional skills that, although attainable, are seldom taught in traditional EFL/ELT training. This talk will demystify the differences, offer guidance to obtaining training and help professionals onboard to the world of business English communications.
Hybrid Educating: Becoming Tomorrow’s Teacher Today
Yesterday’s English teacher is fast becoming a “Workplace Communication Trainer” requiring advanced communication skills while employing teaching, mentoring and coaching techniques. We are now offering a hybrid model of ESP and BE with a focus on Career Readiness. The steps teachers could be taking to succeed in this new field will be discussed. Additionally, competency in intercultural communication amongst international companies, groups and organizations has become a global challenge as diverse working teams form.
Classroom to Boardroom: How to Secure your Status as a BE Professional
As the market has been challenging, many talented and devoted teachers have decided to enter the world of Business English without any background, training or plan on how to make a successful go of it. Those of us who have business backgrounds, or experience teaching BE (Business English) shutter at the thought that teachers think they can just enter the market blindly. This influx of “new professionals” is extremely dangerous to those of us whom have taught, trained, coached and made a living at providing quality classes to meet the needs of today’s business professional.
Get Off My Case (studies): Demystifying Case Studies
Those new to delivering Business English classes, and even many veterans, have doubts about using Case Studies and Frameworks in class. This presentation will help demystify and simplify these essential tools, so teachers feel comfortable and confident implementing these critical aspects in their own classrooms and offer take-aways for teachers to better prepare students with accuracy, fluency and confidence.
You Have no Business teaching Business English - or do you?
Today’s Business English clients are much more demanding than in the past. Many are making more and more demands on the profile of their teachers. Must they be native speakers? Must they have a business background? Should they have business experience? Is being a good English teacher enough? The presentation will present ideas based upon years of experience dealing with this dilemma and the answers just might surprise you. It will be covering some uncommon and often overlooked aspects of Business English teaching that are should be reevaluated before ever offering to teach a business client.
Prepping Clients for Conference Calls
This presentation, based upon the 2017 short eBook by the speaker, is designed to help business English teachers, trainers and coaches help their clients prepare for and succeed in taking part in and making conference calls. The eBook link will be made available to all for free at the end of the session.
Forging Formulaic Phrases for Cultural Sensitivity: Real Takeaways for Real Skills
Everyone is talking about 21st Century Skills, the Soft Skills, the 4C's, and what learner's will need in the future, but where are the practical takeaways that we could and should be using right now? It is estimated that soon 87% of global business will take place in English. Yet students, although they can speak, still lack the professional communication skills required by employers today. More attention to empathy, reactivity, and awareness must be realized to help future employees achieve success in the English-speaking workplace. This talk will demonstrate techniques and activities to utilize with your students to improve faster recall of polite and professional discourse and more culturally sensitive phrases when dealing with clients and colleagues. These should be used with B2 to C2 students planning on entering the workplace and dealing with different cultures globally.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
ENTREPRENEURSHIP:
Social Media: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?For years now, info-gurus have been touting their best methods for building up your client list. Has it worked? Have the hours spent on social media, blogging, and teaser videos really built a steady flow of clientele? What about your ROI? With all that time and money spent, is the juice worth the squeeze? We will discuss how to organically build your teaching or coaching business in a faster, easier, and painless way without getting your hands sticky.
Caveat Emptor: Taking free advice for freelancers can be costly.
Caveat emptor means “let the buyer beware”. This is the best free advice for any freelancer or small business owner today. Just five minutes on social media and you will be bombarded by info gurus that will tell you how to advertise, run your business, build a sales funnel, make millions etc. The problem is that most of these, and even people you know, don’t know your business. Your business needs are as different as those of your students. Discover how bad advice can be bad for business.
The False Prophets/Profits of ELT
A discussion about the latest trend in Social Media and Teacher Development; the self-acclaimed expert. Due to lack of their own students and taking advantage of teachers trying to improve, a new breed of prophet has emerged with expensive courses which are nothing short of selling snake-oil. Not only is some of this advice wrong, but much of it is actually harmful to you, your business and your reputation.
Making you Mark(eting) as a Coach
An advanced and thorough look at today's marketing options for freelancers showing the ups and downs and consequences of improper marketing techniques.
The True Track to Teacherpreneurship (part 1)
With all these “teacher trainers” in the marketplace it has become difficult to see through all the hype and to really learn credible, business-oriented ideas to grow and thrive as a teaching professional. Real techniques and best practices for your business will be discussed shedding light on how professionals can stay professional in their own businesses.
Steps to Keeping the Business Alive (part 2)
A continuation of the discussion on how to maintain a successful freelance or small business without resorting to high pressure sales tactics and false promises.
Online Student Retention
We all know it’s hard to keep students. Working online brings new challenges to retention. The average dropout rate remains steadily at 60 % despite the best efforts of many. This discussion will demonstrate proven techniques for maintaining a higher retention rate online by focusing more on the customer experience.
Teaching Online
There is no mystery to teaching online, but there are some changes that need to be made in order to better facilitate learning. This discussion will help to make for a successful transition to the online world for classroom teachers starting out on the web.
Teaching 1-2-1
One-on-one teaching, whether face-2-face or online calls for different skills that bring all new aspects to personalized teaching. Some tips, tricks and ideas for being successful at it will be discussed.
Webiquette and Webinots
Now that most of us have built an online presence, it’s time to hone the impression that your demeanor is giving off. Simple but important aspects such as sound, lighting, background and connection will be discussed.
But You’re a Teacher: How to deal with learners who want it for free
With many of us now showing our presence online in social media, a new challenge has arisen. Students insist that we should help them for free because we are teachers. Steps to avoid the awkward “I do this for a living” argument will be discussed.
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IMAGES & FILMS:
Present Perfect(ly): Reworking Presentation Skills
Using imagery is an effective tool towards engagement, as well as to elicit production and interest. The mistakes we make though are causing our students and audience to lose focus and miss the point(s). Congesting the screen, making color, layout and content mistakes are not only failing the objective, but hindering the outcome. We are overusing technology to the point of Sensory Overload. This talk will show more effective methods for simplification and how to produce quality presentations.
Lights, Camera, Production: Student-made video projects to enhance speaking skills
Just turn on any social media app these days and you will see teen-produced videos talking about everything on their minds, yet, how often do we take advantage of this for the classroom. Since 2007, I have been using student-made video projects to stimulate teenaged students to plan, script, film and present a variety of videos that have increased oral production, confidence and fluency through out-of-class assignments with varied subjects. This talk will outline the methodology, implementation and benefits. Examples will be shown.
ImageOUT: Rethinking the Image on the Screen
Screen Gemming: Rethinking the Image on the Screen
We all know that using imagery in the classroom is an effective tool towards learner engagement and production. Most of us use images daily to elicit production. The question is: are we using and presenting the image properly? Most teachers have been overloading the screen for years and not only are we not achieving the objective, we may actually be hindering the outcome that we are seeking. This talk will show simple and more effective methods for using images in the classroom by rethinking how we are producing our classroom materials.
Editing your Film Clips for Effectiveness
We are all guilty of showing video clips in the classroom that are too long. We must remember that the average learner tunes out after 30 -50 seconds. So why are we continuing to show long and drawn out, 5-minute videos and losing the attention when we could have easily cut out the useless scenes that don’t support the subject? Once we have lost the attention, we have lost the opportunity for engagement. This talk will show how and why to edit your videos into more productive and effective tools in the classroom while better delivering your point.
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AI and Technology:
The Best AI Technology for your Classroom is You
Many have been turning to technology as a learning solution for today. The fact is though, there is no recent research demonstrating that using technology equals learning or retention. Turning on tech might just be turning off learners. Working through distractions and busy work are actually making it more difficult for students to focus and learn. The need for proper training or “technogogy” is becoming stronger as we move forward.
What You Need to Know Before Bringing AI to Class
Integrating AI into the classroom presents both opportunities and risks that educators must carefully consider. While AI tools offer the potential for personalized learning experiences and increased efficiency, there are legitimate concerns that should not be overlooked.
The risks include over-reliance on AI tools which could inadvertently hinder students’ critical thinking and creativity, privacy concerns, and issues concerning the use of AI for assessment. It is crucial for educators to be aware of these potential pitfalls and to engage in ongoing professional development to ensure that AI is integrated responsibly and ethically, with a focus on enhancing the learning experiences.
Stop listening to AI “experts” and become one
By the time you attend a webinar or conference talk on the latest in AI apps for teaching, chances are it is outdated, has become "for-pay", or doesn't exist anymore. The talk challenges the reliance on AI "experts" and promotes self-education in AI. It advocates for critical thinking and hands-on experience to demystify AI, empowering individuals to innovate and make informed decisions. The focus is on fostering a proactive learning culture to navigate and shape the AI-driven future.
English Language Teaching in the Age of AI
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance at an unprecedented pace, the landscape of English language teaching is poised for a transformative shift. This thought-provoking talk delves into the profound impact AI is having on the way we teach and learn languages.
However, we'll also examine the ethical considerations and potential biases inherent in AI systems, ensuring that we approach this technology responsibly and equitably.
Furthermore, we'll discuss the role of human teachers in this new era. While AI can augment and enhance language instruction, it cannot replicate the nuanced guidance, emotional intelligence, and cultural understanding that experienced educators bring to the classroom…yet.
Chalk and Talk vs. Skype and Swipe: The Need for Proper Training of Teaching Technologies
Many are turning to tech as a learning solution but are in fact turning off their learners through distractions and busy work and are actually making it more difficult for students to focus and learn. Proper materials production and instructional design are seriously lacking now that everyone has access to tech apps for teaching and the huge volume of “product” is making it more difficult for learners. The need for proper training or “technogogy” is becoming stronger as we move forward.
Repurposing the Tech Tools We Already Have: Low-tech - High-value vs. Hi-tech - No-value
How to make the most out of tools we already have yet don’t think to use for building learner autonomy. Recording the 1st day, Videos, Podcasting for listening skills, YouTube for training.
Has Technology TECHen Over your Class?
Just because we have technology, why must we use it? This presentation will open a discussion on the overuse, misuse and abuse of technology in the classroom which sadly, seems to be the new trend. Many are turning to tech as a learning solution but are in fact turning off their learners through distractions and busy work and are actually making it more difficult for students to focus and learn.
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General:
How to Win Teaching One-to-One
As the market changes, there is higher demand for individual classes whether in-company, face-to-face, or online. Discover all of the benefits and challenges of one-to-one teaching including successful frameworks designed for the learning outcome, tailoring your teaching approach to meet each student's needs, strategies for building rapport and trust, creating a comfortable and productive learning environment, techniques for setting goals and tracking progress, and tips for managing time and resources to maximize the impact of your sessions. The author will present ideas and hints from their new coursebook "Activities for Speaking for one-to-one and small groups" and the new handbook "ONE TO ONE: An updated and practical take on teaching one-to-one". Written by experienced educators with years of one-to-one teaching expertise, this book is full of real-world examples, frameworks, and case studies that bring the concepts to life. Join the thousands of successful language professionals teaching one-to-one today.
The Power of Intelligent Instruction
This is a comprehensive talk that delves into the transformative impact of providing better instructions for student learning and overall success. Participants will gain insight into the profound impact that clear, concise, and well-structured instructions have on student comprehension, engagement, and performance. They will explore various strategies, such as using visual aids, providing examples, and employing interactive methods, to facilitate effective instruction delivery. The presentation will emphasize the importance of modeling and will learn how to craft instructions that promote critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration among students. viewers will learn techniques for assessing the effectiveness of their instructions and receive guidance on providing constructive feedback to students, promoting continuous improvement and a growth mindset.
Future-Ready English: A Journey into Multimodal ELT Instruction
Explore the transformative potential of integrating multimodalities in the ELT classroom. This talk delves into the dynamic synergy of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic elements, fostering enhanced language acquisition. Discover innovative strategies, tools, and pedagogical approaches that engage diverse learner preferences, creating a rich and immersive learning environment and enhancing overall comprehension and retention.
EFLtalks - teachers teaching teachers
Since 2015, EFLtalks has maintained its maxim of providing free teacher development to all existing, new and future ELT teachers worldwide regardless of country, affiliations or income. We have reached over a half-million viewers with our 10-minute “teachers teaching teachers” videos in over 200 countries and with our 400 speakers, 600 videos and over 120 hours of recordings have been viewed over one million times. We hope to inspire others to join in and get involved to continue building this innovative delivery of top-quality training to the world to those in need and not able to attend conferences.
Inclusion and Diversity: The Unreal Conditional?
Inclusion and diversity are the current buzzwords that educators are talking about. Yes, in a perfect world, they are crucial to moving forward in education, equality, and for society. But are they currently achievable in the classroom, in textbooks, and in pedagogy as a whole? When we live in a world rife with inequality, prejudice, war, indifference to each other, it is difficult to imagine success in school when we don`t practice it outside of the classroom. Talking about it at conferences will not make it happen. Until we “practice what we preach” in the real world, they are just buzzwords, a pipedream, this year`s bandwagon. This talk hopes to open a genuine discussion about the reality in the political, educational, and societal world we live in and start from the top to make changes to affect real change towards true inclusion and diversity.
Reading Aloud: Focusing on Speaking, Pronunciation and Accuracy
The greatest advantage of being online is working on fine-tuning learners’ abilities. This talk will show how to use online to break fossilized habits in students’ skills of speaking, pronunciation, accuracy and by improving and building students’ confidence utilizing methods that make working online a more effective and productive tool.
Generally Speaking: 5 Sure-fire Speaking Activities
This talk will give you 5 different sure-fire tactics to use immediately to guarantee your learners will speak in class, whether online, face-2-face, one-2-one, or in groups. These activities will help relax the speaker, reinforce students’ conviction to communicate, and build confidence and self-esteem while producing meaningful and pertinent dialogues.
Twenty 3-letter words to motivate autonomy
This is a motivational talk to help teachers and coaches tackle the problem of student motivation to become autonomous.
Why aren’t they Speaking: Giving a New Voice to Adolescents
Irrelevant, outdated, unusable. These are words often voiced by teens when talking about their coursebook materials used today in the classroom. How can we help adolescents thrive in English while trying to engage them with materials that don’t touch their lives? This talk will show best practices in engagement strategies specifically designed for the adolescent to keep them interested, engaged, producing and learning language skills.
How to Survive as an Independent Author
“If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there, does it make a sound?” is an age-old question. Today, if an author writes a book and no one reads it, is it a success? With so many authors and publishers out there, these days it’s hard to stand out as an independent author. While many have the impression that they can just take a good idea and put it to pen, upload it to the internet and sit back and reap the riches, becoming a successful independent author is hard work. Writing the book is the easiest part. This talk will discuss the ups and downs to becoming an independent author and demonstrate the steps it takes to survive and hopefully thrive. We will look at: The idea, Developing, Writing, Editing, Cover design, Formatting, Where to sell it, Pricing, Marketing, Networking, Surviving and Is it for you?
Thinking Outside the Grammar Box
Too often we get focused and stuck in the coursebook grammar box and can't find our way out. This talk will offer up some proven methods for getting out and bypassing the box altogether yet still giving the students the tools and support they need to succeed.
Taking the Upper Hand Online: Focusing on Speaking, Pronunciation and Accuracy
The greatest advantage of being online is working on fine-tuning learners’ abilities. This talk will show how to use online to break fossilized habits in students’ skills of speaking, pronunciation, accuracy and by improving and building students’ confidence utilizing methods that make working online a more effective and productive tool.
Hybrid Educating: Becoming Tomorrow’s Teacher Today
Yesterday’s English teacher is fast becoming a “Workplace Communication Trainer” requiring advanced communication skills while employing teaching, mentoring and coaching techniques. We are now offering a hybrid model of ESP and BE with a focus on Career Readiness. The steps teachers could be taking to succeed in this new field will be discussed. Additionally, competency in intercultural communication amongst international companies, groups and organizations has become a global challenge as diverse working teams form.
The Good in 10-tions of Reading
This presentation will demonstrate 10 reasons that make reading so important for your students.
The Adult Voice
A discussion on the differences needed to be addressed with adult learners.
Put a Ring on It: Student Engagement
Better methods for increasing student engagement in the classroom or online.
Awakening Teens Autonomy: Why aren’t they Speaking?
A look at why teens aren’t engaged in class due to the lack of relevant subject matter, lack of intrinsic motivation and insistence on a one-size-fits-all approach.
ELF, Soft Skills and other Fake News
With everyone jumping on the bandwagon of what is “new” in teaching strategies, this discussion will visit some of the falsehoods that have been too quickly adopted, and too long supported.
Easy ESPeasy: Using Relevant Lexis to Produce Difficult Language Structures
Within One2One or large classes, authentic materials from students are underutilized. This workshop will demonstrate how students can generate useful, necessary and personalized lexis and how working with these, learn and practice more complex grammar, structure and register as well as look at the purpose and choice of wording to develop texts that are professional, sales worthy and accurate.
How to Make Study a Habit
Ideas from the author’s book on how to help students become autonomous learners.
Teacher, Trainer, Mentor, Coach
A discussion about the different techniques of helping learners and why, when, where and how to use them effectively.
CLIL vs. ELT Unmasked
A discussion of the concept of CLIL with the mixed reality of why it isn’t working in most applications. Ideas for improving and supporting CLIL in use.
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WORKSHOPS
Actions Speak Louder than Words: Making Instructions Clear and Effective
When giving instructions in class, actions speak louder than words. Simply telling students what to do may not be as effective as demonstrating the desired behavior. By modeling the expected actions, the teacher can show students the correct way to perform the task and set a clear example. This approach can help students better understand what is expected of them and reduce confusion or misunderstandings. Additionally, modeling the behavior can enhance engagement and motivation, as students are more likely to follow through with the task when they see their teacher modeling the behavior themselves. Overall, actions can be a powerful tool for effective communication and instruction in the classroom.
How to Win Teaching One-to-One
As the market changes, there is higher demand for individual classes whether in-company, face-to-face, or online. Discover all of the benefits and challenges of one-to-one teaching including successful frameworks designed for the learning outcome, tailoring your teaching approach to meet each student's needs, strategies for building rapport and trust, creating a comfortable and productive learning environment, techniques for setting goals and tracking progress, and tips for managing time and resources to maximize the impact of your sessions. The author will present ideas and hints from their new coursebook "Activities for Speaking for one-to-one and small groups" and the new handbook "ONE TO ONE: An updated and practical take on teaching one-to-one". Written by experienced educators with years of one-to-one teaching expertise, this book is full of real-world examples, frameworks, and case studies that bring the concepts to life. Join the thousands of successful language professionals teaching one-to-one today.
Social Media: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
For years now, info-gurus have been touting their best methods for building up your client list. Has it worked? Have the hours spent on social media, blogging, and teaser videos really built a steady flow of clientele? What about your ROI? With all that time and money spent, is the juice worth the squeeze? In this hands-on workshop I will show you how to organically build your coaching business in a faster, easier, and painless way without getting your hands sticky.
Problem Solving: The frameworks for successful outcomes
This 10-hour, interactive workshop covers all from the basics to advanced level problem solving. It is designed for incompany groups and can be delivered in shorter time periods.
Storybuilding: Designing Image Clusters to Trigger and Motivate Presentation Skills
This hands-on workshop will illustrate how to design and utilize collections of images to incite students to creatively produce their own stories using target vocabulary, grammar or structures. By using images to stimulate, trigger and unlock their imagination, students, alone or together in groups, will build their own verbal script in a captivating, entertaining and cooperative process.
How to survive as an Independent Author & Publisher
This 2-hour workshop covers the basics for becoming a self-publisher.
PARSNIPit 1: Tastefully Discussing Religion in the Classroom
PARSNIPit 2: Tastefully Discussing Suicide in the Classroom
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EFLtalks LIVE
Let us provide the entertainment with EFLtalks LIVE, an exciting live show produced on your stage by EFLtalkers with 5 in 5 LIVE.
BUSINESS ENGLISH:
UPSKILL or Standstill: The Need to Retool Ourselves
It is estimated that soon 87% of global business will take place in English. Yet students, although they can speak well in day-to-day conversations, still lack the professional communication skills required by employers today. More attention to empathy, reactivity, and awareness must be realized to help future employees achieve success in the English-speaking workplace. Everyone is talking about Lingua Franca, 21st Century Skills, the Soft Skills, the 4C's, and what learner's will need in the future, but where are the practical takeaways that we could and should be using right now? With AI hot on our heals, learners’ need a change in teaching tactics, focus, and outcomes that most teachers aren’t prepared for. This talk will visit the problem and predict a more constructive future.
How to Teach One-to-One: Stop planning!
Today's one to one classes are as diverse as the students themselves. The learning needs and goals of individuals differ and creating lesson plans, using stock materials, and standard coursebooks are no longer enough to meet learner's needs. This requires a distinct set of skills, best practices, and strategies to help your student achieve their full potential. Find out how no plan might be the best plan to succeed.
That’s What I Said, but Not What I Meant
Competency in intercultural communication amongst international companies, groups and organizations has been challenging as more and more diverse teams form. This talk will look at some of the basic misunderstandings that have taken place within different groups of trained, expert educators, native and non-native alike, due to our own varying cultural backgrounds and offer up better methods to avoid potentially serious errors or miscommunications through examination of our own cultural voicing.
Present Perfect(ly): Reworking Presentation Skills
Using imagery is an effective tool towards engagement, as well as to elicit production and interest. The mistakes we make though are causing our students and audience to lose focus and miss the point(s). Congesting the screen, making color, layout and content mistakes are not only failing the objective, but hindering the outcome. We are overusing technology to the point of Sensory Overload. This talk will show more effective methods for simplification and how to produce quality presentations.
Customer Service with a Smile
One of the ways of impacting customer satisfaction and experience is customer service training. This presentation will demonstrate ways of teaching exemplary customer service through stories, facts and examples worldwide. Ideas will be discussed by showing sources and resources for finding and producing materials for the BE classroom and methods which you will find useful when training people for working in customer service through looking at aspects that matter in a global service industry.
Intercultural Communication
This presentation will discuss many of the problems encountered today in communications due to differences in culture, context, base language and lack of confirmation in communications. As globalization has taken hold in every aspect of communication, the need for reflection, realignment, intention, and action is growing exponentially. Resources will be demonstrated along with ideas to correct these challenges.
To BE or not to BE, English for the workplace
Workplace English, Career English, or Business English. No matter the name, the communicative content is the same and most General English professionals are ill-prepared to take on this new challenge. This aspect of English teaching requires additional skills that, although attainable, are seldom taught in traditional EFL/ELT training. This talk will demystify the differences, offer guidance to obtaining training and help professionals onboard to the world of business English communications.
Hybrid Educating: Becoming Tomorrow’s Teacher Today
Yesterday’s English teacher is fast becoming a “Workplace Communication Trainer” requiring advanced communication skills while employing teaching, mentoring and coaching techniques. We are now offering a hybrid model of ESP and BE with a focus on Career Readiness. The steps teachers could be taking to succeed in this new field will be discussed. Additionally, competency in intercultural communication amongst international companies, groups and organizations has become a global challenge as diverse working teams form.
Classroom to Boardroom: How to Secure your Status as a BE Professional
As the market has been challenging, many talented and devoted teachers have decided to enter the world of Business English without any background, training or plan on how to make a successful go of it. Those of us who have business backgrounds, or experience teaching BE (Business English) shutter at the thought that teachers think they can just enter the market blindly. This influx of “new professionals” is extremely dangerous to those of us whom have taught, trained, coached and made a living at providing quality classes to meet the needs of today’s business professional.
Get Off My Case (studies): Demystifying Case Studies
Those new to delivering Business English classes, and even many veterans, have doubts about using Case Studies and Frameworks in class. This presentation will help demystify and simplify these essential tools, so teachers feel comfortable and confident implementing these critical aspects in their own classrooms and offer take-aways for teachers to better prepare students with accuracy, fluency and confidence.
You Have no Business teaching Business English - or do you?
Today’s Business English clients are much more demanding than in the past. Many are making more and more demands on the profile of their teachers. Must they be native speakers? Must they have a business background? Should they have business experience? Is being a good English teacher enough? The presentation will present ideas based upon years of experience dealing with this dilemma and the answers just might surprise you. It will be covering some uncommon and often overlooked aspects of Business English teaching that are should be reevaluated before ever offering to teach a business client.
Prepping Clients for Conference Calls
This presentation, based upon the 2017 short eBook by the speaker, is designed to help business English teachers, trainers and coaches help their clients prepare for and succeed in taking part in and making conference calls. The eBook link will be made available to all for free at the end of the session.
Forging Formulaic Phrases for Cultural Sensitivity: Real Takeaways for Real Skills
Everyone is talking about 21st Century Skills, the Soft Skills, the 4C's, and what learner's will need in the future, but where are the practical takeaways that we could and should be using right now? It is estimated that soon 87% of global business will take place in English. Yet students, although they can speak, still lack the professional communication skills required by employers today. More attention to empathy, reactivity, and awareness must be realized to help future employees achieve success in the English-speaking workplace. This talk will demonstrate techniques and activities to utilize with your students to improve faster recall of polite and professional discourse and more culturally sensitive phrases when dealing with clients and colleagues. These should be used with B2 to C2 students planning on entering the workplace and dealing with different cultures globally.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
ENTREPRENEURSHIP:
Social Media: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?For years now, info-gurus have been touting their best methods for building up your client list. Has it worked? Have the hours spent on social media, blogging, and teaser videos really built a steady flow of clientele? What about your ROI? With all that time and money spent, is the juice worth the squeeze? We will discuss how to organically build your teaching or coaching business in a faster, easier, and painless way without getting your hands sticky.
Caveat Emptor: Taking free advice for freelancers can be costly.
Caveat emptor means “let the buyer beware”. This is the best free advice for any freelancer or small business owner today. Just five minutes on social media and you will be bombarded by info gurus that will tell you how to advertise, run your business, build a sales funnel, make millions etc. The problem is that most of these, and even people you know, don’t know your business. Your business needs are as different as those of your students. Discover how bad advice can be bad for business.
The False Prophets/Profits of ELT
A discussion about the latest trend in Social Media and Teacher Development; the self-acclaimed expert. Due to lack of their own students and taking advantage of teachers trying to improve, a new breed of prophet has emerged with expensive courses which are nothing short of selling snake-oil. Not only is some of this advice wrong, but much of it is actually harmful to you, your business and your reputation.
Making you Mark(eting) as a Coach
An advanced and thorough look at today's marketing options for freelancers showing the ups and downs and consequences of improper marketing techniques.
The True Track to Teacherpreneurship (part 1)
With all these “teacher trainers” in the marketplace it has become difficult to see through all the hype and to really learn credible, business-oriented ideas to grow and thrive as a teaching professional. Real techniques and best practices for your business will be discussed shedding light on how professionals can stay professional in their own businesses.
Steps to Keeping the Business Alive (part 2)
A continuation of the discussion on how to maintain a successful freelance or small business without resorting to high pressure sales tactics and false promises.
Online Student Retention
We all know it’s hard to keep students. Working online brings new challenges to retention. The average dropout rate remains steadily at 60 % despite the best efforts of many. This discussion will demonstrate proven techniques for maintaining a higher retention rate online by focusing more on the customer experience.
Teaching Online
There is no mystery to teaching online, but there are some changes that need to be made in order to better facilitate learning. This discussion will help to make for a successful transition to the online world for classroom teachers starting out on the web.
Teaching 1-2-1
One-on-one teaching, whether face-2-face or online calls for different skills that bring all new aspects to personalized teaching. Some tips, tricks and ideas for being successful at it will be discussed.
Webiquette and Webinots
Now that most of us have built an online presence, it’s time to hone the impression that your demeanor is giving off. Simple but important aspects such as sound, lighting, background and connection will be discussed.
But You’re a Teacher: How to deal with learners who want it for free
With many of us now showing our presence online in social media, a new challenge has arisen. Students insist that we should help them for free because we are teachers. Steps to avoid the awkward “I do this for a living” argument will be discussed.
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IMAGES & FILMS:
Present Perfect(ly): Reworking Presentation Skills
Using imagery is an effective tool towards engagement, as well as to elicit production and interest. The mistakes we make though are causing our students and audience to lose focus and miss the point(s). Congesting the screen, making color, layout and content mistakes are not only failing the objective, but hindering the outcome. We are overusing technology to the point of Sensory Overload. This talk will show more effective methods for simplification and how to produce quality presentations.
Lights, Camera, Production: Student-made video projects to enhance speaking skills
Just turn on any social media app these days and you will see teen-produced videos talking about everything on their minds, yet, how often do we take advantage of this for the classroom. Since 2007, I have been using student-made video projects to stimulate teenaged students to plan, script, film and present a variety of videos that have increased oral production, confidence and fluency through out-of-class assignments with varied subjects. This talk will outline the methodology, implementation and benefits. Examples will be shown.
ImageOUT: Rethinking the Image on the Screen
Screen Gemming: Rethinking the Image on the Screen
We all know that using imagery in the classroom is an effective tool towards learner engagement and production. Most of us use images daily to elicit production. The question is: are we using and presenting the image properly? Most teachers have been overloading the screen for years and not only are we not achieving the objective, we may actually be hindering the outcome that we are seeking. This talk will show simple and more effective methods for using images in the classroom by rethinking how we are producing our classroom materials.
Editing your Film Clips for Effectiveness
We are all guilty of showing video clips in the classroom that are too long. We must remember that the average learner tunes out after 30 -50 seconds. So why are we continuing to show long and drawn out, 5-minute videos and losing the attention when we could have easily cut out the useless scenes that don’t support the subject? Once we have lost the attention, we have lost the opportunity for engagement. This talk will show how and why to edit your videos into more productive and effective tools in the classroom while better delivering your point.
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AI and Technology:
The Best AI Technology for your Classroom is You
Many have been turning to technology as a learning solution for today. The fact is though, there is no recent research demonstrating that using technology equals learning or retention. Turning on tech might just be turning off learners. Working through distractions and busy work are actually making it more difficult for students to focus and learn. The need for proper training or “technogogy” is becoming stronger as we move forward.
What You Need to Know Before Bringing AI to Class
Integrating AI into the classroom presents both opportunities and risks that educators must carefully consider. While AI tools offer the potential for personalized learning experiences and increased efficiency, there are legitimate concerns that should not be overlooked.
The risks include over-reliance on AI tools which could inadvertently hinder students’ critical thinking and creativity, privacy concerns, and issues concerning the use of AI for assessment. It is crucial for educators to be aware of these potential pitfalls and to engage in ongoing professional development to ensure that AI is integrated responsibly and ethically, with a focus on enhancing the learning experiences.
Stop listening to AI “experts” and become one
By the time you attend a webinar or conference talk on the latest in AI apps for teaching, chances are it is outdated, has become "for-pay", or doesn't exist anymore. The talk challenges the reliance on AI "experts" and promotes self-education in AI. It advocates for critical thinking and hands-on experience to demystify AI, empowering individuals to innovate and make informed decisions. The focus is on fostering a proactive learning culture to navigate and shape the AI-driven future.
English Language Teaching in the Age of AI
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance at an unprecedented pace, the landscape of English language teaching is poised for a transformative shift. This thought-provoking talk delves into the profound impact AI is having on the way we teach and learn languages.
However, we'll also examine the ethical considerations and potential biases inherent in AI systems, ensuring that we approach this technology responsibly and equitably.
Furthermore, we'll discuss the role of human teachers in this new era. While AI can augment and enhance language instruction, it cannot replicate the nuanced guidance, emotional intelligence, and cultural understanding that experienced educators bring to the classroom…yet.
Chalk and Talk vs. Skype and Swipe: The Need for Proper Training of Teaching Technologies
Many are turning to tech as a learning solution but are in fact turning off their learners through distractions and busy work and are actually making it more difficult for students to focus and learn. Proper materials production and instructional design are seriously lacking now that everyone has access to tech apps for teaching and the huge volume of “product” is making it more difficult for learners. The need for proper training or “technogogy” is becoming stronger as we move forward.
Repurposing the Tech Tools We Already Have: Low-tech - High-value vs. Hi-tech - No-value
How to make the most out of tools we already have yet don’t think to use for building learner autonomy. Recording the 1st day, Videos, Podcasting for listening skills, YouTube for training.
Has Technology TECHen Over your Class?
Just because we have technology, why must we use it? This presentation will open a discussion on the overuse, misuse and abuse of technology in the classroom which sadly, seems to be the new trend. Many are turning to tech as a learning solution but are in fact turning off their learners through distractions and busy work and are actually making it more difficult for students to focus and learn.
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General:
How to Win Teaching One-to-One
As the market changes, there is higher demand for individual classes whether in-company, face-to-face, or online. Discover all of the benefits and challenges of one-to-one teaching including successful frameworks designed for the learning outcome, tailoring your teaching approach to meet each student's needs, strategies for building rapport and trust, creating a comfortable and productive learning environment, techniques for setting goals and tracking progress, and tips for managing time and resources to maximize the impact of your sessions. The author will present ideas and hints from their new coursebook "Activities for Speaking for one-to-one and small groups" and the new handbook "ONE TO ONE: An updated and practical take on teaching one-to-one". Written by experienced educators with years of one-to-one teaching expertise, this book is full of real-world examples, frameworks, and case studies that bring the concepts to life. Join the thousands of successful language professionals teaching one-to-one today.
The Power of Intelligent Instruction
This is a comprehensive talk that delves into the transformative impact of providing better instructions for student learning and overall success. Participants will gain insight into the profound impact that clear, concise, and well-structured instructions have on student comprehension, engagement, and performance. They will explore various strategies, such as using visual aids, providing examples, and employing interactive methods, to facilitate effective instruction delivery. The presentation will emphasize the importance of modeling and will learn how to craft instructions that promote critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration among students. viewers will learn techniques for assessing the effectiveness of their instructions and receive guidance on providing constructive feedback to students, promoting continuous improvement and a growth mindset.
Future-Ready English: A Journey into Multimodal ELT Instruction
Explore the transformative potential of integrating multimodalities in the ELT classroom. This talk delves into the dynamic synergy of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic elements, fostering enhanced language acquisition. Discover innovative strategies, tools, and pedagogical approaches that engage diverse learner preferences, creating a rich and immersive learning environment and enhancing overall comprehension and retention.
EFLtalks - teachers teaching teachers
Since 2015, EFLtalks has maintained its maxim of providing free teacher development to all existing, new and future ELT teachers worldwide regardless of country, affiliations or income. We have reached over a half-million viewers with our 10-minute “teachers teaching teachers” videos in over 200 countries and with our 400 speakers, 600 videos and over 120 hours of recordings have been viewed over one million times. We hope to inspire others to join in and get involved to continue building this innovative delivery of top-quality training to the world to those in need and not able to attend conferences.
Inclusion and Diversity: The Unreal Conditional?
Inclusion and diversity are the current buzzwords that educators are talking about. Yes, in a perfect world, they are crucial to moving forward in education, equality, and for society. But are they currently achievable in the classroom, in textbooks, and in pedagogy as a whole? When we live in a world rife with inequality, prejudice, war, indifference to each other, it is difficult to imagine success in school when we don`t practice it outside of the classroom. Talking about it at conferences will not make it happen. Until we “practice what we preach” in the real world, they are just buzzwords, a pipedream, this year`s bandwagon. This talk hopes to open a genuine discussion about the reality in the political, educational, and societal world we live in and start from the top to make changes to affect real change towards true inclusion and diversity.
Reading Aloud: Focusing on Speaking, Pronunciation and Accuracy
The greatest advantage of being online is working on fine-tuning learners’ abilities. This talk will show how to use online to break fossilized habits in students’ skills of speaking, pronunciation, accuracy and by improving and building students’ confidence utilizing methods that make working online a more effective and productive tool.
Generally Speaking: 5 Sure-fire Speaking Activities
This talk will give you 5 different sure-fire tactics to use immediately to guarantee your learners will speak in class, whether online, face-2-face, one-2-one, or in groups. These activities will help relax the speaker, reinforce students’ conviction to communicate, and build confidence and self-esteem while producing meaningful and pertinent dialogues.
Twenty 3-letter words to motivate autonomy
This is a motivational talk to help teachers and coaches tackle the problem of student motivation to become autonomous.
Why aren’t they Speaking: Giving a New Voice to Adolescents
Irrelevant, outdated, unusable. These are words often voiced by teens when talking about their coursebook materials used today in the classroom. How can we help adolescents thrive in English while trying to engage them with materials that don’t touch their lives? This talk will show best practices in engagement strategies specifically designed for the adolescent to keep them interested, engaged, producing and learning language skills.
How to Survive as an Independent Author
“If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there, does it make a sound?” is an age-old question. Today, if an author writes a book and no one reads it, is it a success? With so many authors and publishers out there, these days it’s hard to stand out as an independent author. While many have the impression that they can just take a good idea and put it to pen, upload it to the internet and sit back and reap the riches, becoming a successful independent author is hard work. Writing the book is the easiest part. This talk will discuss the ups and downs to becoming an independent author and demonstrate the steps it takes to survive and hopefully thrive. We will look at: The idea, Developing, Writing, Editing, Cover design, Formatting, Where to sell it, Pricing, Marketing, Networking, Surviving and Is it for you?
Thinking Outside the Grammar Box
Too often we get focused and stuck in the coursebook grammar box and can't find our way out. This talk will offer up some proven methods for getting out and bypassing the box altogether yet still giving the students the tools and support they need to succeed.
Taking the Upper Hand Online: Focusing on Speaking, Pronunciation and Accuracy
The greatest advantage of being online is working on fine-tuning learners’ abilities. This talk will show how to use online to break fossilized habits in students’ skills of speaking, pronunciation, accuracy and by improving and building students’ confidence utilizing methods that make working online a more effective and productive tool.
Hybrid Educating: Becoming Tomorrow’s Teacher Today
Yesterday’s English teacher is fast becoming a “Workplace Communication Trainer” requiring advanced communication skills while employing teaching, mentoring and coaching techniques. We are now offering a hybrid model of ESP and BE with a focus on Career Readiness. The steps teachers could be taking to succeed in this new field will be discussed. Additionally, competency in intercultural communication amongst international companies, groups and organizations has become a global challenge as diverse working teams form.
The Good in 10-tions of Reading
This presentation will demonstrate 10 reasons that make reading so important for your students.
The Adult Voice
A discussion on the differences needed to be addressed with adult learners.
Put a Ring on It: Student Engagement
Better methods for increasing student engagement in the classroom or online.
Awakening Teens Autonomy: Why aren’t they Speaking?
A look at why teens aren’t engaged in class due to the lack of relevant subject matter, lack of intrinsic motivation and insistence on a one-size-fits-all approach.
ELF, Soft Skills and other Fake News
With everyone jumping on the bandwagon of what is “new” in teaching strategies, this discussion will visit some of the falsehoods that have been too quickly adopted, and too long supported.
Easy ESPeasy: Using Relevant Lexis to Produce Difficult Language Structures
Within One2One or large classes, authentic materials from students are underutilized. This workshop will demonstrate how students can generate useful, necessary and personalized lexis and how working with these, learn and practice more complex grammar, structure and register as well as look at the purpose and choice of wording to develop texts that are professional, sales worthy and accurate.
How to Make Study a Habit
Ideas from the author’s book on how to help students become autonomous learners.
Teacher, Trainer, Mentor, Coach
A discussion about the different techniques of helping learners and why, when, where and how to use them effectively.
CLIL vs. ELT Unmasked
A discussion of the concept of CLIL with the mixed reality of why it isn’t working in most applications. Ideas for improving and supporting CLIL in use.
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WORKSHOPS
Actions Speak Louder than Words: Making Instructions Clear and Effective
When giving instructions in class, actions speak louder than words. Simply telling students what to do may not be as effective as demonstrating the desired behavior. By modeling the expected actions, the teacher can show students the correct way to perform the task and set a clear example. This approach can help students better understand what is expected of them and reduce confusion or misunderstandings. Additionally, modeling the behavior can enhance engagement and motivation, as students are more likely to follow through with the task when they see their teacher modeling the behavior themselves. Overall, actions can be a powerful tool for effective communication and instruction in the classroom.
How to Win Teaching One-to-One
As the market changes, there is higher demand for individual classes whether in-company, face-to-face, or online. Discover all of the benefits and challenges of one-to-one teaching including successful frameworks designed for the learning outcome, tailoring your teaching approach to meet each student's needs, strategies for building rapport and trust, creating a comfortable and productive learning environment, techniques for setting goals and tracking progress, and tips for managing time and resources to maximize the impact of your sessions. The author will present ideas and hints from their new coursebook "Activities for Speaking for one-to-one and small groups" and the new handbook "ONE TO ONE: An updated and practical take on teaching one-to-one". Written by experienced educators with years of one-to-one teaching expertise, this book is full of real-world examples, frameworks, and case studies that bring the concepts to life. Join the thousands of successful language professionals teaching one-to-one today.
Social Media: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
For years now, info-gurus have been touting their best methods for building up your client list. Has it worked? Have the hours spent on social media, blogging, and teaser videos really built a steady flow of clientele? What about your ROI? With all that time and money spent, is the juice worth the squeeze? In this hands-on workshop I will show you how to organically build your coaching business in a faster, easier, and painless way without getting your hands sticky.
Problem Solving: The frameworks for successful outcomes
This 10-hour, interactive workshop covers all from the basics to advanced level problem solving. It is designed for incompany groups and can be delivered in shorter time periods.
Storybuilding: Designing Image Clusters to Trigger and Motivate Presentation Skills
This hands-on workshop will illustrate how to design and utilize collections of images to incite students to creatively produce their own stories using target vocabulary, grammar or structures. By using images to stimulate, trigger and unlock their imagination, students, alone or together in groups, will build their own verbal script in a captivating, entertaining and cooperative process.
How to survive as an Independent Author & Publisher
This 2-hour workshop covers the basics for becoming a self-publisher.
PARSNIPit 1: Tastefully Discussing Religion in the Classroom
PARSNIPit 2: Tastefully Discussing Suicide in the Classroom
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EFLtalks LIVE
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