| Course Description: | This course will present a range of innovative speaking activities that can be adapted for various needs and teaching contexts, in order to stimulate teachers to experiment with a wide range of activities to improve their learners’ speaking skills, both in traditional and online or hybrid learning contexts. Special attention will be paid to the concepts of communicability, intelligibility, and oracy (the ability to combine fluency with accuracy and to be more flexible), and the ways that learners can be empowered to use spoken language to express themselves more creatively, effectively, and confidently. The use of authentic videos of actual learners doing speaking activities will also be discussed, along with the practicalities of teaching speaking inside and outside classrooms and online with classes of all kinds, with a focus on real-world contexts and real-world students. Participants will have the opportunity to take part in practical activities using not only traditional but also digital tools. |
| Course Aim: | This course aims to highlight how, through creative and meaningful activities, learners can be motivated to produce authentic and communicative spoken discourse, even at low levels. Participants will be encouraged to rethink some of the ways that they have approached speaking in class in order to take advantage of new digital tools that are now widely available. |
| Anticipated Outcomes | The participants will be shown and have the opportunity to participate in a wide range of speaking activities, each designed to practice spoken discourse in an authentic manner (i.e., activities that have a real communicative purpose, not just a didactic end). These activities will help participants reevaluate the way they currently teach and assess and also provide them with some activities and tools that they can immediately apply to their classrooms. |
| Trainer Bio | Thomas Wulstan Christiansen is an associate professor in English Language and Translation at the University of Salento (Italy) and the Director of the University Language Centre. Of Danish-English heritage and originally from Birmingham, England, he has been based in southern Italy since he graduated in 1987. He has taught at various higher education institutions in Apulia (Italy), Poland, and the UK. He is also a language teaching and testing consultant. In this capacity, he has worked widely for prestigious international examination boards in Italy, as well as Albania and Kosovo. He has worked in specialist work groups drafting revisions to some of the most popular English-language exams in the world and has presented numerous seminars and webinars on a wide range of subjects related to testing, language teaching, exam preparation, and the applications of AI to language teaching. |