Want to get practical ideas and activities that will motivate your students?

Come to the Macmillan Education Academy Day Bilbao 2024 and learn
about the latest in teaching methodology!

• Language to communicate • Teen tactics • Getting ready for C2 • The 5th skill of viewing

and so much more!

Workshops:

Rebecca Place – Turning the Bricks into the House

Let’s make grammar and vocabulary into communicative tools for young learners. 6 practical blueprints for constructing meaningful, motivating activities. In this session we will take a selection of linguistic bricks in the shape of grammar points and lexical items, and work together to build meaning. Our plans will encompass Primary classes of different shapes and sizes, and their different (architectural!) styles and tastes.

Rebecca Place

Rebecca settled in the Basque Country over 30 years ago and currently runs the national Teacher Training project for British Council Spain – and in her spare time is the new President of TESOL-SPAIN.

She has taught English on- and off-line to students aged 2 to 72, written methodology books and storybooks, travelled as a convention speaker, storyteller and examiner, and holds tight to her belief in sharing a practical outlook on life – both inside and outside the classroom.

Fiona Aish & Jo Tomlinson – Getting Students Ready for C2

Teaching students to be proficient users of English comes with specific challenges. This workshop aims to address these by identifying what it means to be C2, then outlining the skills and abilities required. Using examples from Ready for C2, we’ll show how we can help students not only prepare for the exam, but also become more autonomous users of the language.

Fiona Aish

Fiona has taught, designed and managed ELT and EAP programmes and assessments for over twenty years in the UK and other countries. Together with Jo Tomlinson, she is one of the founding partners of Target English, a consultancy providing content creation and materials in testing and academic English to language schools, universities, publishers and testing organisations.

Her titles, co-authored with Jo Tomlinson, include Listening for IELTS, Elton award winning book Collins Academic Skills Lectures, Expert IELTS 7.5 and Reading CPE. She has also co-authored with Jo Tomlinson and Ethan Mansur Macmillan Education’s Ready For C2 Proficiency.

Jo Tomlinson

Jo has taught ELT, EAP and exam preparation classes for over 20 years, both in Spain and in the UK. She has also developed online learning courses. For the last 10 years, she has run a consultancy with Fiona Aish called Target English, which specialises in test and materials development. Some of her titles as co-author with Fiona Aish include Listening for IELTS), ELTon award-winning book Collins Academic Skills- Lectures, Expert IELTS 7.5. and Reading CPE. She has also co-authored with Fiona Aish and Ethan Mansur Macmillan Education’s Ready For C2 Proficiency.

Tim Warre – Teen tactics: engaging and encouraging adolescent learners

What thoughts or emotions pop into your head when you think about teaching teenagers? Being confronted with a classroom of rowdy and hormonal 15-year-olds is enough to strike fear into the heart of even the most experienced teachers. However, they can also be some of the most rewarding experiences of a teacher’s life.

In this session we will explore practical techniques and strategies to make classes with teens more engaging and thus more effective. We will examine the characteristics of teenage students to be better able to adapt materials, activities and our classroom practice to meet their needs and play to their strengths.

You will walk away equipped with a toolbox of ready-to-use activities, from vocabulary games to project structures, and ways to adapt textbook content to resonate with your students.

Tim Warre

Tim is a teacher, teacher trainer and materials developer based in Barcelona. He currently works as an educational content creator and teacher trainer for Twenix, an online business English teaching platform based in Almería. He also teaches exam preparation classes at CIC Idiomes in Barcelona. In 2013 Tim started his lesson plan blog https://freeenglishlessonplans.com/ which he still updates regularly with freely available materials focusing mainly on exam preparation. His areas of interest include task-based language learning, the lexical approach, and habit formation and how it relates to language acquisition.

Kieran Donaghy – What about the fifth skill of viewing?

In the English language curricula of a number of countries – for example, Canada, Australia and Singapore – two new skills, viewing and visually representing, have been added to the traditional skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking. Undoubtedly, these two new skills of viewing and visually representing will be integrated into national curricula throughout the world in the near future. In this session Kieran Donaghy examines what viewing is and how we can support our teachers in helping their students become more effective viewers by exploring a number of frameworks which can be used with a variety of visual texts – photos, paintings, feature-length films, short films and videos. Teachers will go away from the session with a clear understanding of what the skill of viewing is and a number of tried and tested viewing frameworks to share with our teachers.

Kieran Donaghy

Kieran is an award-winning writer, speaker and trainer. He trains teachers at The School for Training, his specialist teacher training institute in Barcelona. He is the author of books for teachers and students of English. His publications include Film in Action (Delta Publishing), How to Write Film and Video Activities (ELT Teacher 2 Writer), The Image in ELT (ELT Council) and Macmillan English Hub (Macmillan Education).